Llama for Lunch Page 3

  The trees along the line were a type of pine unfamiliar to me. The flourishing green crops were soya beans, a dwarf kind of maize that is used as cattle food, and a corn with a kernel-like wheat that is also used as animal feed.

  In Little Rock someone hurled a huge pile of Sunday papers under my door. They contained a staggering amount of advertising pamphlets, confirming that this is a society inclining to the materialistic.

  This train had one superior feature – electronic press buttons that opened doors between carriages, no struggling with a heavy door on a rocking train. But otherwise it was not a patch on Australian long-distance trains that run dead on time, are superbly well organised and have marvellous, willing service. Lazy Boy treated me like a nuisance.

  It was Sunday in America. All the little towns of twostoreyed houses that we passed through had masses of cars outside their churches. We travelled further south until we were deep in Texas, where the country became less green and a lot like Australia in places. By dinner time that evening we were running three hours late, but it didn’t matter to me as I had a long wait scheduled between the train’s arrival and the departure of my bus. I ate an enormous tender steak then, returning to my compartment, saw that someone had interfered with my case, which I had left on the spare seat. A small purse had been left outside it. There was no way that I had done that. Nothing had been taken – the purse had been empty – but it made me feel peculiar. Earlier I had seen Lazy Boy acting suspiciously in another compartment and, as all the passengers from down this end of the carriage had been at dinner together, he seemed the prime suspect.

  I slept a little as it got dark and at half past one in the morning we arrived in San Antonio. The airconditioning on the train had been too cold and it was lovely to step down into the balmy fresh air. I was told that the four o’clock connecting bus to Laredo would come to the railway station door to collect me. In the waiting room I tried to sleep but it was a small crowded room and the carved polished wooden benches, although mighty attractive, were hard on the rear end and not conducive to a snooze. I read my book and talked to a hugely fat but agreeable woman.

  I finished my book. I asked the station master about the bus a couple of times and was told that, yes, it was on time. Far be it from me to nag, but at five I finally said, ‘Has the bus forgotten me?’ And it was decided that it must have. The station master, a handsome, friendly, Mexican-looking man – almost all the locals here looked Mexican and were pleasant – tried to phone the bus depot but got no answer. He then gave me a voucher and sent me off in a taxi. The ease with which he made this arrangement left me thinking he’d probably had plenty of practice at it.

  By the time I arrived at the bus station a faint pink glow of dawn was in the sky. The next bus to Laredo left in ten minutes. It was a Greyhound and supposedly a good bus but the seats were uncomfortable and the airconditioning freezing. Halfway into the two-hour trip we stopped for a feed at McDonald’s. I slept a little and then we were in Laredo where, to my surprise, everyone spoke Spanish. The taxi driver greeted me with ‘Buenos Dias’. No one understood me when I spoke English.

  I wanted to leave my big bag in storage at the bus station but the change machine didn’t work. An affable chap who was washing the windows helped me get the bag in the box and minded it while I went to get change from the desk. A taxi took me a long way out of town to Motel Six, where I had booked a room. This district, just off the busy freeway, was a desolate place surrounded by a concrete jungle. By now the temperature was over one hundred degrees but I had a comfortable room so I took to my bed.

  A good five-hour sleep later I went in search of dinner. I had used the phone in my room to ring a few travel agents and ask about the train to Mexico. No luck, it doesn’t run any more. If I had known this beforehand I would have taken a bus direct to Mexico from the Laredo bus station.

  In the diner next to the motel I ordered a dish of chicken breasts and vegetables that sounded delicious. But everything came fried and oozing fat. The huge chicken pieces were coated with thick slabs of breadcrumbs and the veggies were hidden in deep balls of batter. A large potato was piled high with cream and margarine and the whole mess was accompanied by a mountainous pile of heavily buttered French toast. At least it was filling.

  At eight in the evening it was still a hundred degrees of very dry heat, no inducement for a walk. I went back to my room to watch television. There were about seventy channels. I was amazed by the advertisements permitted – cigarettes, medicines, divorce and anti-cancer drugs. Eating, getting un-married and taking medicine seemed to be generally very popular. I went to sleep watching the television and slept soundly for another eight hours.

  I had heard that it could be a two-hour hassle to cross the border to Mexico but it was actually a breeze. In the morning at the Laredo bus station everyone treated me kindly again. This certainly seemed to be a friendly kind of town. I needed seven dollars in quarters to liberate my suitcase. Buses from Laredo run frequently to Nuevo Laredo just across the border and I only had an hour to wait for the next one. In the functional – well, uncomfortable – waiting room an old man peddling tacos for a dollar came up to my perch. That was breakfast.

  In the fullness of time the bus arrived but the driver warned me not to get on it. He said it smelled very bad. I put my head in the door to perform the sniff test. It sure didn’t smell like violets but I’m not as fussy as some folk; years of bedpans have seen to that. I think an inconsiderate person had left a baby’s nappy in a rubbish bag. The driver said he’d take anyone who was game. One Mexican woman and I decided to brave it rather than wait. Once again everyone spoke Spanish and expected me to do so too.

  We headed off. It is just a five-minute ride across the Rio Grande, which isn’t all that grande but forms part of the 3326-kilometre Mexico–USA border. On the bridge long double lines of cars waited to cross from Mexico but there was no one waiting on our side. Once over the bridge I had to go through customs, but there seemed to be no immigration officials. I stepped off the bus, said that I was carrying nothing prohibited, walked through a shed, pressed a button that said ‘passe’, identified my bags and got back on the bus. No one looked at my passport.

  Now I was in Mexico, a large country of almost two million square kilometres that borders Guatemala and Belize in the south and the USA in the north. It has coasts on both the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico and two north–south mountain ranges that frame a broad group of plateaux varying in altitude from 1000 to 2300 metres. In the original land grab from the Indians, the area that is now Texas was part of Mexico, but in 1836 the territory seceded from Mexico to become an independent republic. From 1839 to 1841 an area of the Rio Grande valley of Mexico also declared itself separate and independent, proclaiming the Republic of Rio Grande with Laredo as its capital. The US annexation of Texas in 1845 precipitated a war with Mexico which the US won in 1847. After this the Rio Grande was established as part of the border and the Mexicans built the town of Nuevo Laredo, on their side of the river.

  Mexico’s civilization began long before that. The first people came down through America from Siberia across the land bridge that existed 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. By the time of Christ the great city of Teotihuacan was being built. It incorporated the Pyramid of the Sun, still the third-biggest pyramid in the world, and the Pyramid of the Moon, which is only slightly smaller. The Mayan culture flourished from 250 AD to 900 AD. The Mayans had a system of writing and calendars that accurately recorded earthly and heavenly events. Religion played a major role in early Mexican cultures but their gods were cruel, demanding frequent human sacrifices, usually by beheading or being thrown into a well, and blood-letting from ears, tongues and penises.

  The Toltecs, who became a power around the thirteenth century AD in central Mexico, worshipped a feathered serpent called Quetzalcoatl until he was displaced by Tezcatlipoca – ‘Smoking Mirror’ – the god of warriors who demanded a regular diet of warm and often still-beating hearts. Wars wer
e fought to obtain a steady supply of these organs from captured enemy soldiers.

  By 1426 the Aztecs had become the most powerful people in the valley. They were also warlike and sacrificed prisoners, believing that this was necessary to keep the sun rising every day. In four days in 1487, twenty thousand prisoners were slain to dedicate a temple.

  I found an intriguing description of a ball game that all early pre-hispanic Mexican cultures seemed to play. After the game one or more players would be sacrificed. No one knows whether winners or losers were chosen for this grisly end but I can’t see it catching on in Australian Rules.

  Nearly three thousand years worth of Mexican culture was destroyed in two years by the Spanish after their invasion in 1519. They annihilated the civilisation and reduced the native peoples to slaves or second-class citizens. In Mexico the Spanish leader Cortes is considered the villain of the piece. By 1821, when the fight for independence from Spain was successful, the population of Mexico consisted of native Indians and Mestizoes – a mixture of Indians, Spanish immigrants and African slaves. Now Mexico is a federal republic and, although it had been an almost entirely agricultural economy before 1910, it is one of Latin America’s most industrialised countries. Ninety per cent of the eighty-one million population is Catholic. The missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries won the local people over by grafting Catholicism onto the Indian religions, and witchcraft and magic still survive.

  In Nuevo Laredo my financial expenditure took a turn for the better. Taxis had no meters but travelling quite a distance to find a hotel cost only five dollars. My first choice of hotel was full but the taxi driver took me elsewhere. At the Fiesta Hotel the receptionist said, ‘Ah, Australian! Crocodile Dundee!’ It seemed everyone who had heard of Australia associated us with crocodiles. The night before the TV in Laredo kept advertising that ‘Croc week is coming’. The show they were referring to was that Australian fellow who overacts with a lot of snakes and crocodiles.

  The receptionist also told me that the train I had hoped to take from here into Mexico was no more. ‘There was a train but not now,’ he said. It had stopped running the previous week. The story of my life!

  But all was not lost – the receptionist said that there were many buses going south during the day. All I would need to do was go to the station and wait for one.

  My room was a few steps off the main street, up and down which I walked several times looking for it before I realised that this narrow path lined both sides with small grotty-ish shops was indeed it. Although unimpressive it stretches for two kilometres in one direction – south. In front of the shops lots of makeshift stalls sold tourist trash, as well as some decent handicrafts, while posters on the walls advertised bull fights. I had expected downtown to be big and elaborate like Laredo across the river, but this was a totally different world. Still, it was pleasant enough, and no one hassled me to buy his wares.

  My hotel room was Spanish in style and had a huge bed, much black iron-work placed against white-washed brick walls, a white tiled floor and heavy, black, wooden doors. I knew I was back in the Third World when the first room I was taken to had no light bulbs. We moved on to another. This room had only a couple of missing bulbs but the showerhead sat on the floor. The mattress on the bed was almost as old as I am and sagged nearly as much.

  Next morning, when I tried to wash my hair, I found that the hotel’s accoutrements did not run to hot water. I had to brave a cold shower. But my room did have good air conditioning and that was important in the heat.

  I ate dinner at a cafe on the main drag. It must have catered to tourist tastes as I had the blandest enchaladas fobbed off on me as Mexican tucker. The meal’s one redeeming feature was that it was cheap. The next day I found a local cafe and ordered one dish. It came complete with bean soup, salad and many side dishes but the food was still uninspiring.

  At the station I found that a bus left for Monterrey, three hours south, almost immediately, but the bus to San Miguel de Allende, on the central plateau of Mexico, which I had chosen as my destination, did not leave until six in the evening. I took the Monterrey bus thinking that I would find another from there to San Miguel. I was most impressed by the Mexican bus. It had decent leg room and comfortable seats but it came complete with the obligatory screaming video. I inserted my ever-ready ear plugs and could still hear comfortably. The film was a dreadful James Bond but the subtitles helped me learn some Spanish. Everyone working for the bus line was polite. They found the bus for you, gave you a seat number and stowed your bags. There was even a toilet on the bus, albeit a cantankerous one. From the outside the door wouldn’t open without a strenuous wrestle, and once inside it wouldn’t shut.

  We hadn’t gone far into Mexico before we were stopped at a checkpoint. A soldierly type climbed onto the bus and videotaped us all, while others searched the baggage compartment under the bus. We were stopped and checked several more times along the way. Later, in San Miguel, I learned that highwaymen and bandits rob buses in the remote areas of the north. I was glad that I found this out after I had survived the trip through the most isolated part of Mexico unscathed.

  On leaving Nuevo Laredo I had thought that I was now going to see the Mexico of legend, but the country didn’t look particularly exotic. It was early summer and the sparse bushy scrub of the northern desert was still quite green although there were no trees. There was little sign of habitation, though a few cows appeared now and then as we drove further south, indicating that a ranch was out there somewhere. Later we progressed to clumps of trees, not pines and fir as in the USA but scrubby bush trees.

  We came upon infrequent buildings that were square and flat-roofed with lean-to verandahs tacked on to their fronts. Some of these houses were crazily warped and their tin roofs rusted and sagging. In this ‘great wasteland of the north’ villages were few and far between along the road, although I saw one tiny place that consisted of a small congregation of primitive dwellings and a dog so skinny that its legs splayed out as though they didn’t have the strength to hold it up.

  Apart from the cows and the dog I saw only an occasional lone eagle, hawk or buzzard. Grazing animals had pushed the native mountain lions, deer and coyotes into isolated areas. Still common are armadillos, snakes and rabbits but I saw none. I read that the tropical forests of the south and east continue to harbour howler monkeys, jaguars, tapirs, anteaters, toucans, and reptiles such as boa constrictors, while iguanas and other lizards are found in warm parts.

  Then we were driving through desert where prickly pear and cacti shaped like strange, long toilet brushes poked up into the sky. Most of the world’s fifteen hundred species of cactus are found in Mexico. The sides of the road were dotted with shrines made of wood, cast iron, concrete and metal that commemorated road accident victims. Each time relatives or friends visit the site they leave a pebble or stone and cairns are created. A grim warning for the traveller.

  Monterrey bus station is enormous. I encountered six waiting rooms in front of the various bus starting gates and several garishly decorated religious shrines where nervous passengers could seek fortitude. The entrance to the toilets was lit up like a nightclub by a big neon sign under which a woman guard was stationed. You put a coin in a box and she moved a turnstile to admit you. When I first saw this alluringlooking place on the far wall of the station I thought it must be something interesting, like a casino.

  Sitting in the adjacent waiting room listening to the sound of constantly dropping coins, I decided that the toilets were doing a roaring trade. But it was worth the point two of a peseta you paid to get admitted. The walls were tiled all the way up to the ceiling but the doors didn’t lock and reached only to your shoulders – just high enough to cover your personals and the business end of you. Toilet paper was not provided in the stalls. This ensured that you didn’t play with it or, worse, put it in your pocket. A big communal roll of paper hung on the wall by the entrance door and as you came in you were permitted, under the eagle
eye of the attendant, to take some. Later I found some places that didn’t even allow you this liberty but doled you out a ration. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until it was too late to go back for some.

  I had thought I would find a bus to San Miguel de Allende leaving fairly soon but there wasn’t one until nine that night so I had a long wait. Depositing my bags in the cloak room I went into the VIP lounge. I had a first-class ticket so I figured I was entitled to use these facilities, but I was soon disabused of that notion. A guard woman very nicely asked to see my ticket and then directed me back out with the common herd. I was curious to find out who these VIPs were who rode on buses – the lounge was huge but it was empty.

  I spent the day hanging about the waiting rooms, trying them all in turn, alternately reading or knitting and watching the people. Many Mexican men are extraordinarily handsome in their ten-gallon hats, cowboy boots and silver-buckled belts. Some are very darkskinned. I had noticed the change in people’s looks as soon as I had arrived in San Antonio and from there on it seemed every man wore a ten-gallon hat. I did not see one sombrero in Mexico, just ten-gallon white-straw or black-felt cowboy hats. Had they seen too many Western movies? At one stage a forty-year-old man sat next to me engrossed in a comic book.

  I had expected a bit of spitting but it was the nose-blowing with the fingers onto the shiny terrazzo floor that I found offputting. I filled in an hour having lunch in the expensive restaurant, which was baking hot. Conversely, it had been freezing in the VIP lounge so I’m glad I didn’t stay there – sour grapes!

  In the evening I saw a bus pulling in that I thought was the one I wanted. I confirmed this with a gorgeous Mexican man who appeared to have something to do with the staff, and he helped me take my bags to the departure point. I went off to buy a bottle of water and when I returned another man was standing guard over my bags. He proceeded to give me, I think, a lecture along the lines of: ‘You shouldn’t have left them.’ I thought it was kind of him to care. I had been warned that Mexico was the land of machismo and a violent country where you must take all precautions against theft. And that pocket-picking and purse-snatching was common – not to mention highway robbery on buses and trains, especially at night in the north. And Mexico City was reputed to be so bad I had decided not to go there.