The Open Road Calls

At the moment of writing this (which is not the moment of posting it, as the following description will probably make clear), I sit in the back of a small Sedan on the highway. My rideshare companions are in the front two seats: a 30-year-old Mexican guy (Fabian) who is helping his dad (David) move from Mexico City to Cancun. My only companion in the backseat is their cat, Clara, who has no idea that she will soon be let out in a new house in a tropical beach town, with new animals and smells and litterboxes to mark as her territory. No, Clara knows none of this, so for the first several hours of our trip (starting at 5 this morning) Clara meowed incessantly and stared ruefully up at me through her cage door, obviously believing I was the catnapper.

At one point Fabian’s dad let her wander around the car to shut her up, but this backfired when he had to put her back. He spent several hilariously awkward minutes wrestling with the clasps on the janky travel kennel, always thwarted by a leg or a well-placed paw.

“Do you need help?” Fabian asked, trying to glance back and also concentrate on driving.

“I don’t need any help! Just drive!” said David, who obviously needed help. It was a battle of man versus cat; proud Mexican pater familias versus cat-er familias. Cat was winning.

A few hours ago, thank God, Fabian had the brilliant idea of putting a blanket over Clara’s cage. Thus the conniving and ingenious Clara has been convinced that it she isn’t in mortal danger anymore but that it is, in fact, naptime. So the only sounds accompanying me in the backseat are Van Halen blasting on the radio, and the rush of the crickets that rises ongoing from the jungle.

It’s just approaching dusk, and both back windows are open so the wind will gnaw through the thick humidity. We are somewhere in the state of Tabasco, which is not where the sauce comes from (it’s from Louisiana). A beetle just landed on my computer screen, and is scuttling around upon the white background of Microsoft Word in strangely cute silhouette. The country outside is dotted with little ranches and meadows and houses and comedores, all very pastoral. In the spaces between, towering thickets of twisty trees and waxy pendulous leaves cling to the edges of slow brown creeks or swampy pools covered with water-lilies. If I stick my head outside the window, I can smell something far off that could be cocoa stewing on a wood fire.

Over the last three weeks, since I drove down my parents’ driveway in Northern California, I have traveled about 3,500 miles – the furthest I have ever traveled without setting foot in a plane. The journey has followed a pretty weird hurry-up-and-wait rhythm. Right now, I’m exhausted from taking an all-day-and-overnight bus from Mazatlan to Mexico City, which arrived this morning.

I didn’t so much as pass go or collect 200 pesos before I had rendez-voused with Fabian and was watching the sleeping streetlit avenues of Mexico City trawl past from the window of their car, as we fled from the morning traffic. By the time the sun rose we had left the city. Now as we inch deeper into the wilderness of the Yucatan Peninsula, the plan is to drive all night until we reach Cancun, making this my second consecutive night in a car.

On the other hand, the first leg of my trip was extremely leisurely – lingering here, couchsurfing there – (though I can’t say I got any more sleep during Carnaval in Mazatlán than I did on the bus). It’s been truly magical watching the climate change as I made my way slowly south, bit by bit, proving to myself that places which almost seem behind a mystical curtain are indeed on this same earth.

So where to start?

I guess I should start at the beginning.

First, a word about hitchhiking. I hitchhiked almost all the way through Baja California, and though it was successful, it was definitely one of the more challenging hitchhiking journeys I’ve been on. For starters, it gave me a weird feeling sometimes. From a certain perspective hitchhiking is a form of begging, and after a few days I started to feel crass begging for charity from people who obviously have less than me. The sour looks and aversions of eye contact eventually erode you psychologically, and they made me start to ruminate: Why didn’t I just drive my car? Why didn’t I just pay for a bus?

But for me, it’s really not about begging. So let me set down a little manifesto about why I hitchhike. You know when you’re a kid and you think you have the answers to all life’s problems? Like when you hear about world thirst for the first time and say, “Well why can’t we just drink the sea?” Or you see a homeless person and you say, “Why can’t everyone just give him their leftovers?” And when you start to grasp all the petty little reasons why not, it’s just this crushing awakening to how stupid and confusing and wasteful the world is? To me, the idea of how difficult and expensive travel is is one of those little frustrations: Why must I pay so much for a plane ticket when the plane is going anyway?

For me, to hitchhike is to give a great big middle finger to all those little assumptions that clutter up the world and make childlike logic impossible. It is to say, All these cars are going where I’m going and they’re empty, and you know what, there is something I can do about that. It is to say, F**k you, world – there is enough water on the planet, we can drink the sea. It is a triumph of childlike wonder, and it is a call that there is enough energy already being expended on the planet to make things happen.

The other thing that was challenging about Baja, though, is that it was so damn empty. There were just never that many people passing by one spot, and as a result wait times were long – sometimes an hour or more. It definitely became frustrating after a few days, not being picked up by car after car in the middle of nowhere, when people knew perfectly well that no one else was coming.

You probably never wanted to know how to politely interact with hitchhikers, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Honestly, my favorite reaction from passersby is the simple lack of eye contact, because it doesn’t call me to expend any energy interacting, accepting your apology, waving, etc. My least favorite by far is when people (especially young people) (WHO HAVE ROOM IN THE CAR) wave, grin, give a hang-loose sign, or God forbid, return the thumbs-up. This is pretty much the same as going into a small, struggling, family-run corner store and yelling, “I just love you guys! You guys are so great! I’m so glad this exists! Keep doing what you’re doing!!” And then running out again without buying anything. Without fail, anyone over 30 that picks me up talks about the good old days when hitchhikers were commonplace and you could hitch anywhere. I’m only 22, but the word on the street is that hitchhiking is getting harder and harder; and as such, fewer people hitchhike. If you think it’s cool that there are still hitchhikers in the world… pick them up. Otherwise there won’t be any anymore. Period. End rant.

Nonetheless, things went pretty well. For the first two days I got a lot of very short rides from local families and one bored delivery guy – sometimes in the open beds of pickup trucks, which was my favorite. On my third morning I had a particularly long and bleak wait time, until I was finally picked up by a camper van with Montana plates. The drivers were named Bob and Billie, and they were my guardian angels. First of all, they were driving a huge distance, through some of the most remote parts of Baja. Second, they were a ton of fun to talk to – hip Jack Kerouac folk from the old beat generation, who had lost none of their values. In fact, I have never found anyone that age who shared so close to the same values as me. It was remarkable. (Case in point, they pick up hitchhikers.)

The third reason they were amazing is simply that we enjoyed the same activity while driving: commenting on the changing flora and fauna. So we marveled as we crawled south and the desert slowly grew lusher, the brown weeds sown in one at a time with weird fuzzy boojum trees like something from Dr. Seuss, then tall slender cacti, and then gnarled little scrub oaks clinging to the mountainsides. Baja California is a stark and gorgeous land. When we crossed the border into the state of Baja California Sur, we crossed an hour forward into mountain time, or “hora de Guadalajara” going by the Mexican system which names time zones after cities. Bob said it was because before the road was paved in the 90s, it was far easier from southern Baja to reach the mainland than to reach the northern cities like Tijuana and Ensenada. The road was pretty nice, but there were still a whole lot of llanterias along the roadside, hinting at its days as a car-smashing journey.

Traveling alone is so funny: you’re incredibly lonely, except when you’re not. Friends can be found in unlikely places. There was Billie and Bob on the road, and then in La Paz there was an incredibly chill house of marine biology students. Hanging out with them was so like hanging out with Santa Cruz friends – jam sessions on the roof, bonfires on the beach, the search for the best manta ray tacos – that it was almost surreal that we were speaking Spanish the whole time. The biggest shoutout ever goes to Vinnie, Rebecca and the Marixas. I think I’ll be back in La Paz just to visit them.

And then on the boat the weird encounters continued: I ran into a fellow UCSC student with whom I have mutual friends, and together we made friends with three guys from the North on a massive bike tour together, and with a Mazatleco named Brandon going home. The six of us formed a sort of crew and hung out in Mazatlán for a few days, seeing two sides of the city: an extremely gringoey hostel, and Brandon’s world of favorite hot-dog stands and hikes to secret lookout points. Honestly, to me they didn’t seem very different. The Mazatlán I saw everywhere – and the one Brandon showed us – was a relaxed and liberal beach city, like many in California. Just with better street food, greener cliffs, crazier traffic and a starker, hazier subtropical light.

I think Mazatlán is MexicoLite in a different way than Baja, which is also MexicoLite. Baja rolls out the red carpet of English for its massive expat and tourist community, but the place itself is still very poor, rural and traditional. Mazatlán does not seem to be owned by foreigners, or cater to them too much – but it’s rich and modern to the point where it feels fairly globalized. The culture shock there is only a little zap.

So we fast-forward. Through the bus ride, further southward through the end of the desert: a mountainous, subtropical scrubland, like something from the north of India. Through the car ride, which had some minor incidents (a flat tire) but has generally been good, but long. Two interesting things about road-tripping in Mexico: Not only is shitty highway a serious danger to your car that you must consider, the toll stations all have randomly different prices, and David and Fabian would judge the coming highway based on the price. Whenever we were driving on a road full of potholes, they’d either say “No wonder, it was so cheap this time”, or “Can you believe we paid 150 pesos for this!?”. This is also how I was first introduced to the Mexican love for complaining about the government. But that’s an observation that I’ll expand on as it unfolds. The Mexican government, and people’s relationship with it, is obviously no small beast to snoop about nor to write about.

And I’ll sign off for now. I think with this part of the journey, I’m done with my addiction to following the open road. Like my many red and irritated mosquito bites, it has been scratched to oblivion and no longer wants any scratching. And I’m satisfied, but ready to rest my head somewhere that is not a moving vehicle. Next reporting from the shores of the Caribbean!