Friendly Mexicans

So far, everyone in Mexico has been exceptionally friendly (except, I suppose, for the border official who gave us the run around and didn’t want to give us a six month visa). We’ve run into a couple of other travelers who, when they heard we came south through Matamoros, have asked whether things really are as violent in northern Mexico as everyone always hears. For our part, at least, we never had a problem and never even felt uncomfortable. About the only problem we’ve had is the occasional local who’s had a bit too much to drink and is aggressively friendly while trying to practice his English – which isn’t a problem, per se, it just takes awhile sometimes to say goodbye and get away without being rude.

We’ve also had some great encounters. Last weekend some of the Mexican guests at out hotel were having a barbeque, and forced upon us a few beers and plates of carne asada. Delicious, and the first really spicy salsa we’ve had so far in Mexico (of course it was the homemade salsa that turned out to be atomic; everything we’ve gotten at restaurants and street stalls has been pleasantly zippy but not bad). We would have been in heaven if we hadn’t just gotten back from eating, and so we wound up overfull and a bit tipsy. Still, there are worse fates to be had.

But my favorite example happened yesterday. We walked up to the ghost town, Ciudad Fantasma, to poke around the ruins there. On our way back down, we heard sheep and goats and stopped to watch a guy climbing around on a slope herding his small flock. He saw us and we waved to him. He then came literally running down the mountain, motioning for us to wait. Ducking into his house, he came back with a book of figures from 1826, apparently records of the silver mine’s production for that year. He also brought out three pieces of stone that glistened in the sunlight, covered in crystals of what I’m assuming is fool’s gold but might actually have a bit of actual silver in it. We admired the rocks (and our fingers got all sparkly from the crystals, which amused me) and tried to hand them back and continue home, but he wanted us to keep them. They would be a treasure for any rock collector, but we really can’t afford to be carrying around a couple of extra pounds of stone in our packs. We took the smallest piece and eventually convinced him that was all we wanted; he seemed a bit disappointed we didn’t like the other two, but eventually got the idea after we did a bit of improvisational theatre about how it would be too heavy to take all of them. We said gracias, all shook hands, and Petra and I trudged off home looking at our new shiny rock.

View from our hotel (Real de Catorce)

We would love to post more pictures, but unfortunately the internet connection is toooo slow; we will add more as soon as we can - this place totally deserves it.

Travel-Trivia: Real de Catorce

Drinking Water Task
Filling the water bottles is definitely a task for two. We have noticed that from a certain size of bottles upwards the prize stays nearly the same (around 16 pesos); the bigger the better. And with Simeon and his water intake it becomes a task. The 20l bottle needs to be placed on a chair, one pouring and the other one catching the drops into our carry-around-bottles. At least the water puddle dries up very quickly - we are after all in the desert.

Mopping Men
Did I think Mexico could be a rather grungy place? Oh no; not where we have been so far. You can eat of the floors, which seem to be the center of the cleanliness. Hours are spent on re-cleaning the floor. It helps that the men here know how to use a mop properly themselves – all duties so far seem to be shared; except for cleaning the car: every day I see at least one man cleaning a car, not only Sundays (preferred car wash day in Germany).

Where To Keep Your Dog
Where do you keep your dog? On the roof of course! It is a bit haunting to me, hearing a dog bark just on top of my head – even if I might be at a safer distance to the dog than otherwise. There are not that many dogs just hanging around in the streets and I would say that the few are in general very well behaved; like the one that just sat patiently; waiting for the leftover chicken skin.

Yesterday we got drunk – if you don’t eat it works even better or faster or more.

Real de Catorce

We’ve been in the small but beautiful town of Real de Catorce for about a week now. An old silver mining town that went bust about 100 years ago I think, it now has has a small population living among stretches of ruins. It’s absolutely spectacular…but hard walking. Real is nestled on the side of a mountain about 8000 ft (2700 meters) up, and the side streets that run up and down the face sometimes have a 60 degree slope. The roads are also made wholly out of small cobblestones, so footing can be treacherous. The first couple of days we were here we didn’t do much, just took some small walks in town and tried to get used to climbing up and down a mountain at this altitude.

Today the town apparently is sustained mostly by tourism. This is helped a lot by the writings of Carlos Casteneda and the fact that Real is purported to have the best peyote in the world; the Huichol Indians make a yearly pilgrimage to their sacred mountain nearby to harvest the cactus, and they believe the mountain gives the peyote extra potency. Of course, the cactus cannot be found here in the mountains but in the desert surrounding them. Apparently, the true heyday of peyote tourism is over though. If you read online you’ll see all sorts of things about how you’ll be routinely accosted by locals offering to drive you down to the desert so you can harvest your own trip, but in almost a week of staying here no one has offered us such a deal (although I’m pretty sure we could have found someone who was willing had we been really interested). Still, you can find all sorts of peyote knick knacks in the boutique stores and from street vendors here (along with small cosmically painted mushroom-shaped pipes, which I think are pretty cute).

To get here we had to drive through a tunnel, which was scarcely lit and too small for the bus to get through. So we had to transfer to the back of a pick-up truck. It was a fascinating ride and made you feel like entering another world on the other side. There is also a chapel in the middle of the tunnel, just a set of ornate doors set into one side of the wall half way through. Just seems like a particularly weird place to put a church.

Looking for a room the first night we came across the Hotel “El Real” which has spectacular rooms but unfortunately was too pricey for us. But they had a great map of Real de Catorce and Dawn (the receptionist there) is very friendly, always ready to give you good tips on possible walks, view points, etc. We’ve stopped by there any time we have a question, and they’ve been great telling us about the area, when busses run, or anything else happening in town. Anyhow, Dawn sent us to the Hotel “San Juan”, where we spent our first night (120 pesos/night; small dark room with bathroom, but clean and kind of pretty).

But it was cold! Even though temps were in the low 70s (low 20s Celsius) during the day we could never seem to get warm, and at night we were chilled to the bone. So the next day we wandered around looking for another place to stay, and eventually decided to make an incredibly rare upgrade. Since then, we’ve been staying at the Hotel El Rincon del Pintor where we have a room that opens onto an upstairs patio with an amazing view of the town’s church (which I’ve heard called one of the prettiest in northern Mexico) and a set of ruins called Ciudad Phantasmo (“Ghost Town”). The view sold us, and after a bit of hard bargaining we took the room for a week at 150 pesos a night. We don’t upgrade often, but this time we’re happy we did; the view is worth the price difference alone, and the family that runs the hotel is warm and friendly and has been happy to help with anything we ask. Leonardo, the owner, is also an artist and we spent one great afternoon in his art studio looking over his work, mostly landscapes of town down in a variety of media. Great pictures.

We have gotten out and done a couple of hikes around town, with spectacular views almost everywhere you go. Apparently we even saw the sacred mountain of the Huichol, although we didn’t know it when we were looking. I also sat on an unobserved cactus leaf that had fallen off and was lying on the ground – exciting, but not a lot of fun. Fortunately, Petra was there to pull the thorns out of my ass.

The town is almost shut down during the week (including most of the restaurants, unfortunately), as most of the tourists come in over the weekend. From Friday through Sunday though, it’s a giant street bizarre, lots of t-shirt and trinkets stores sprinkled with some nicer boutiques that sell jewelry and art, and some good restaurants that inexplicably seem to specialize in Italian food. Everything is a little more expensive than usual though, which really isn’t surprising for a small mountainous tourist town where everything has to be shipped up from Matehuala. There is a small “supermarket” in town which we’ve made good use of considering we don’t have a kitchen, and have been enjoying a lot of home-made guacamole and continuing with our daily bananas.

Speaking of shipping…I would hate to be one of the drivers of the delivery trucks or the occasional dump trucks we’ve seen trundling through town. The streets are narrow and, as mentioned, very steep, and driving anything around (let alone some sort of monstrous truck) would be real white-knuckle excitement. Horse and donkeys are definitely better suited to the terrain, and of course are used a lot by the locals and are rented out for day trips to the tourists. You just have to watch out not to step in dung while walking around, which fortunately isn’t usually a problem.

One other thing: about half the mountain peaks surrounding Real have crosses erected at their summits. I find it a quiet and pleasant display.

Final Thoughts on Matehuala

The Rubber Band Technique
Right now I am craving for a hot fresh soy milk, from a market in Thailand – delicious, especially if you ask for less sugar. Today is the first time we bought a fluid in a plastic bag here, but they seem to use a different rubber band technique to keep the bag closed than in Thailand (both ways seal the bag, nothing escapes). It was freshly pressed orange juice, lots of vitamins but a bit sour. I tried several times to learn the Thai rubber band technique – it is so handy; if I only could remember…

Smells
Walking: All of a sudden there is an overwhelming flowery sweet smell in the air, it must come from behind that wall – maybe a great courtyard? A lot of times we follow the smells: good food, gardens or forests, the ocean (I loved the days where I could smell the sea in London; sea breezes are just special) - of course we try to avoid the stinkies.

How To Start The Day
The guy cleaning the rooms has chosen the breakfast music of the day: classical – sounds familiar? When I started helping out at the Mut Mee Guesthouse in Nongkhai, Thailand, there was an unwritten rule: start the day with some culture, classical music waving through the garden while the sun still tries to warm up the air, rising it to a the scorching heat (with all the concrete in town to help it along). It was amazing how I could feel the air getting cooler every single step approaching the garden from the Soi leading to the Mekong River. What a difference a few plants can make.

Pretty Frames Are The Decoration Of The Day

In our room in Matehuala I liked particularly “the mirror that has seen better times before” without the glass it is just a pretty frame. I could still make out that it must have been a mirror – just about. And the room actually had a window to the little courtyard and a door that you could just leave open as a big window. I could just not appreciate enough the fact that natural light was getting into our room. When I looked out the window I saw the top of the tree that is dominating the courtyard - like the hotel has been built around the tree. I always liked a pretty view and green is one of my favorites. I could hear the wind in the leaves, birds and a distant chatter of people.
Some of the roads there curve just to avoid taking down a tree in the middle of the city and a little cement-fence is built around it to protect it getting hit by cars.

US Health Care Reform Passes

So it looks like healthcare reform has finally passed in the US. It really is a major achievement for the Obama administration, and although I admit to not following all the specifics of the bill by most rational accounts it does sound like a positive move forward overall from our current health care system.

And yet, as with every other legislative "victory" for Obama (I can think of one other -- the bank bailouts) I find myself less than enthused. This too seems not based on Democratic principles (the fairly clear Roosevelt/Johnson legacy of ensuring a social safety net
for citizens) but instead upon Republican ones (an Eisenhower/Nixon/current Republican idea that health care should be overseen by for-profit companies whose single goal -- make money --
directly conflict with a goal of ensuring real health care for average Americans; if you have to pay for medical procedures, you're not earning as much as you could have). It took 3/4 of a year to get it done, during which time Obama once again did everything he could to get Republicans on-board by watering down his proposal even when the Republicans flat out told him there was nothing he proposed that they would vote for, and the Dems allowed every interest group and
nutball from their caucus to bring things to a halt until their demands were met. White House messaging and efforts to educate the public about the bill were poor and often confused, and usually over-shadowed by Ben Nelson or Bart Stupak or Joe Lieberman saying how
horrible some part of the bill was. Finally, the bill doesn't mandate health care for Americans, but rather that Americans purchase private health insurance (with government subsidies, if necessary). This just seems that this will increase insurance company profits (now,
everyone has to buy instead of just those who could afford it before), in part directly from the Treasury. This seems like much more generous a hand-out to insurance interests than those fuckers deserve.

We'll just have to wait to see how much of a positive impact is made by the bill.

Simply expanding Medicare to cover all people, however, should have been the way to go. If I recall my figures correctly, private insurance companies spend 15-25% of their budget on paperwork and overhead; Medicare spends only 3% according to Physicians for a
National Health Program(http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-faq#bureaucracy). (I had remembered the numbers being 40% and 5% respectively, but the percentage difference is about the same.) So the private sector is a) less efficient and b) provides crappier
coverage than the public sector equivalent. In exchange for a slight tax increase, workers could have saved the hundreds of dollars a month that usually comes out of their paychecks to purchase their employee-based insurance. Everyone in America would have had actual
health COVERAGE, instead of most people (I think something like 30 million still aren't covered under the Obama plan) simply having health INSURANCE. If you've ever fought with your insurance company to get them to pay a claim, you will have noted how at times these
are notably different things.

But a Democratic President with overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress never even considered it. Obama rejected a proud Democratic history of having created (regardless of what Republicans might say) the two most popular government programs --
Social Security and Medicare -- in an idle search for a single Republican senator's vote in support of a bill based on Republican principles. The search was in vain, as the Republicans told him it would be from the very start.

Still, kudos to Nancy Pelosi for pulling the House into order and ensuring concessions from the Senate in a reconciliation bill. And to Obama, for seeing it through to the end even after health care reform had been (convincingly) announced to be dead more than once. On the
other hand, Harry Reid continues to be absolutgely useless. He's unable to control his own caucus, unable or unwilling to use available procedures to shut down Republicans, and seems to have no strategic vision for the party at all. It completely baffles me how
he has remained Majority Leader for almost a decade. I have to admit that I'm looking forward to his re-election defeat this fall (if the polls are in anyway accurate), even if that means a decrease in the Dem majority. It should be noted, though, that health care reform
only passed once Dems LOST their 60 vote majority in the Senate, at which point Reid (once again) through up his arms and insisted their was nothing he could do. Again, kudos to Pelosi for making it happen.

So...how much is this going to help or hurt Dem election chances in the fall?

Gum

Interestingly, chewing gum is especially easy to get in Mexico. It's one of the little things I notice while traveling; I like to chew a lot of gum since I tend to suffer from dry mouth. Packs of gum are stuffed into pinatas with other candy, and so can be found in any of the numerous dulcerias, or sweet shops. You can also buy it in bulk (say, 10 packs a time, which is convient and cheaper if you tend to go through it quickly) with all sorts of exotic flavors since you need a lot of it to stuff into your Disney princess pinata. (I seem to remember seeing a bunch done up as Snow White or Belle from Beauty and the Beast, which seemed to me a bit -- unfortunate.)

Anyhow, the dulcieras are everywhere and I can only posit a massive pinata demand here in Mexico. In Matamoros there was one intersection that had a dulcieria directly across the street from another, and which was then next door to another dulceria. Nor was that particularly surprising; they've been plentiful wherever we've traveled so far in Mexico.

Buying a box of ten packs of gum runs a little less than 50 pesos, or a little less than 5 pesos a pack. Picking up a single pack in a street store or 7/11 runs 10 pesos a pack, and we always look for ways to reduce our expenses. A nice option here in Mexico, whereas in other coutries it can be really hard to find chewing gum.

Mata to Mate

We crossed into Matamoros and stayed for about a week. 250 pesos the first night, 190 at a different hotel right on the small pedestrian walk, both with tv and bath. I found it surprisingly difficult to communicate the first few days, but quickly got down the difference between taco, gordita, tortas, and churros. Also found a fruit stand with bananas for 10 pesos a kilo, and we’ve been eating a lot of them sense: cheap, nutritious, and strong enough to travel for a day.

We needed to rest up after a bit of an ordeal at the border. We took a bus from Houston that was supposed to take us into Matamoros. The bus did not stop at the US side of the border, though; it just rolled on through to Mexican customs, so apparently you usually don’t need to get stamped out of the US. But Petra did need an actual stamp since she was from Germany and was only allowed to stay in the US for 90 days. So the computer needed to record her as leaving (as we were, on her 90th day exactly) or else it would be a hassle for her to ever return. So we were a bit confused when we rolled straight into Mexican customs. We had to leap out of the bus, grab our bags out on the border bridge, and ultimately hike the mile back to the US border just so Petra could hand her passport to the completely disinterested border guard. Then hike the mile back to the Mexican border, still with our backpacks; crossing the Rio Grande several times this way - was smaller than expected. (We’re really not set up for long distanced travel. We try to travel as light as we can, but after taking all the things we really need and/or want, we’re still weighed down enough that long distances are no fun.)

Then the Mexican border guard was especially unhelpful, and at first was only going to give us a 30 transit visa. Petra argued with him for at least an hour, until we finally got a 180 day tourist visa. We have to pay a tourist fee when we leave (about 220 pesos), and supposedly when we cross into Guatemala there may also be a 550 or so peso fee for making a transit through Mexico. I don’t think this is right, though (or that we can talk our way around it), and so after a lot of weighing the pros and cons were really happy we took the 180 visa. Anyhow, needless hassle at the border and an expensive taxi ride into town that should rather have already been on the bus.

Matamoros was nice and quiet enough, but we expected it would be cheaper further into Mexico. So we headed down to Ciudad Victoria…and were disappointed. The cheapest room we could find was at the Hotel de Escandon for 270 pesos -- a big disappointment. But the room was huge! Tv, bath, and three beds that would sleep five people. We kept asking for something smaller, but they wouldn’t show us anything else.

We did ultimately find a cheaper room at the Hotel Mexico around the corner. Small and not nice, no tv and an unpleasant smelling bath for 100 pesos a night, and we might have been able to bargain her down if we stayed a couple of days. But instead we poured over our map looking at possible travel routes, and decided to leave.

Matehuala looks like a short distance from Victoria on the map, but the road heads north and then dips back, which means changing buses. So we went up to Linares and then transferred for Matehuala, making for a longer travel day than we had thought. It was already dark when we arrived, and for the first time we got hassled by what I figure were touts at the bus station. We had a cheap hotel we had written down and asked to go there, and the taxi driver said no, no – it was a bad neighborhood of town known for prostitutes and drug violence. He wanted to take us to the Casa Blanca instead, which he assured us would be nice but for about as much as we were paying in Victoria. For a moment we were nearly swayed, but eventually and with much difficulty convinced him we wanted to go to our place instead – a hotel from a guidebook we saw online, and so which should not generally be too dangerous.

Our instincts were right – Casa de Huespedes “El Jacalito” was a lovely place with a vibrant orange courtyard shaded by two large trees. Not exactly a Mut Mee garden, but it was nice enough to sit in and the people who ran it were friendly. Bargained for a few nights stay and got a double (no tv, shared bathroom) for 90 pesos a night. So we stayed about a week. Matehuala is not a terribly exciting city, but we found some hippie kids twirling batons and poi for tips, there were a couple of cheap taco places, and a surprisingly good pizza place we had to try out. Nice to save up a bit of money (relatively) and really get back into our traveling habits.

A Stroll With Obstacles (Matehuala, Mexico)

Narrow spaces! Let me tell you about narrow spaces: you got to pay attention or you turn the next corner in the street and run into the next lamp post or other weird obstacle - like in a cartoon.

And high borders between the sidewalk and the road: if you hit that with your car (even an SUV), it’s not just meaning a flat tire, the whole front gets crushed. Climbing that down and up, every time you cross the street: it’s a full workout ;). In the US people actually did ask us repeatedly how we keep in shape...

We usually walk everywhere, unless we go for a special target or - for whatever reason - get too tired or lost; especially if we get distracted and just follow the music, but usually we are at least pretty good at retracing our steps.