Llama for Lunch Read online

  I bought a ticket for this bus – which left in two days time – using only Spanish. Every day I had been doing my lessons on the tape recorder and now they were paying off. But Spanish was a puzzlement at times. They don’t pronounce ‘h’, so why do they have it at all? Get rid of it altogether, I say. Then they pronounce ‘h’ for ‘j’. I give up. As my vocabulary improved I realised that I had been calling churches ciesa – cheese. And one day, after she had been missing for a while, I tried to ask the girl at reception if she’d had the day off. She looked at me as if I was a bit odd. No wonder. I later found that, in my lovely Spanish, I had asked her if she’d had a wash yesterday.

  In the bus back to the hotel an old, darkskinned Indian woman sat down next to me. She crossed herself at every church and there were a lot of churches in this town. If I hadn’t known what she was doing I might have thought she had St Vitus Dance. I wondered why such a poor country spent so much money on churches. Mexican Christianity is a religion of earthy reality incorporating many old pagan beliefs, such as placing eagle feathers on statues of Christ in holy week. This is a means of communicating with the sun god: the eagle ascends closest to heaven.

  When I had been at my hotel for nearly a week, I had risen so far in the management’s estimation that I received a bath mat. Having qualified as fit to be entrusted with this precious article I wondered what I’d get the next week if I passed inspection again. Unfortunately I didn’t find out, as I left after ten days.

  At the tourist bureau in the town square I confessed my worries about my lack of the necessary permit to be in Mexico. I had read in the guide book that I needed a tourist card to get out again and that I should have obtained one of these when I crossed the border.

  The girl in the office said, ‘I’ll take you to see someone.’

  I thought, Oh Lord, here we go, down to the police station, but instead she took me upstairs where I spoke with the most beautiful woman. She could have been any age, but was probably between thirty and forty, and had sleek black hair that was combed straight back into a large bun from a lovely oval face with honeyed skin and regular features. She wore a pant suit of fine beige wool – they make very fine wool in this district – with a top like a loose buttonless jumper over slacks, and her shoulders were draped with a pretty red and blue paisley shawl. This exquisite woman was so kind to me. In her faultless English she said, ‘Of course you realise that you are an illegal immigrant!’ Having heard how border officials feel about us illegals – very recently two of these unfortunates had died due to their brutality – I was thrilled to find that I was now in the same category. I would not only be trying to enter the USA illicitly, but also exit Mexico unlawfully. I asked her what they would do to me. She replied, ‘You can get another card from the police but they will fine you.’

  ‘What if I get to the border?’

  ‘You may get across without problems or you may be fined.’

  She rang someone. Terrific. Now they will probably have a dragnet out for me. At first she was going to send me to the police, but then she rang someone else and after a long conversation she said, ‘You can try going back the way you came and maybe no one will notice. But if they do then you will be fined.’ Giving me her card she said, ‘If you have any problems ring me.’

  It wasn’t the fine I was worried about, but the stories I had heard of people being put in gaol and having to sell their houses to get out. I decided that the less said the better – I wasn’t confessing to any Mexican policeman that I was an illegal. I’m a gambler. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, is my motto. I had enough to worry about. Highwaymen, bandits and all those crosses on the side of the road were quite sufficient.

  While at the tourist bureau I thought I’d check out the stories I’d heard about robbers and buses. I asked the young man in the office if it was true that banditos sometimes held up the bus I was taking to the north. ‘Oh, yes.’ He couldn’t agree with me more, but he didn’t know how often. He phoned a friend, but neither of them could give me an answer, so I decided just to take my chances. He did offer to come to the bus station with me to ask there. This was most obliging of him, but I declined. He then wanted to ask at the police station but I declined this even more emphatically. I was an illegal immigrant.

  As the dentist had taken every cracker I had, it was now necessary to repair again to the bank. The cash distribution system was quite cute. A small room with a glass surround covered by grilles protruded from the side of the building and you entered it and locked yourself in. To my dismay the machine refused to give me any money on my Visa card. Already paranoid about being an illegal immigrant, now I had to contend with being a penniless one. That would make me a vagrant as well. I was much relieved when the next morning the machine condescended to give me some money. It even asked me if I preferred pesos or dollars.

  On my last day, as I passed the police station I thought I might ask them about the chances of my bus being held up by bandits. But smack in the middle of the entrance, where you almost had to touch him to go past on the tiny footpath, was a fellow with a huge submachine gun. That put me right off and I kept on walking.

  While I was preparing for the overnight bus ride out of Mexico, a marathon for a non-bus-lover, I started to feel squirmy in the tummy. This progressed to squirty. I was in trouble – just when I had to spend thirty hours on a bus. Nice. I cemented my internal workings with Lomotil – I hoped – and bought a bottle of tequila for sedation. It cost seven pesos, just one dollar forty cents. The nice shopkeeper put my Coke and other snacks in a plastic bag, but the tequila he wrapped in brown paper.

  4 Tequila sunrise

  On a lovely morning I ate my farewell Mexican breakfast of omelette, coffee, juice and toast under the vine-clad pergola of a nearby restaurant. Then I checked out of my room and took what I meant to be a short cut to a craft shop I had heard about – but you guessed it, it turned out to be another of my long cuts. I ended up on the edge of town, where I found a street market and an old bloke selling gem stones. They were most probably almost all cut glass but the opal was genuine. After some solid bargaining, I bought a pretty opal egg for fifteen dollars in order to rid myself of my remaining pesos.

  Never having managed even a whiff of the craft shop, I returned to the hotel and stationed myself in the portico on a long polished wooden seat to read and watch the comings and goings until it was time to take a taxi to the bus station. As I disengaged from the taxi, three diminutive and exceedingly grimy urchins rushed up wanting to carry my bags. They were in no way big enough for this task but, as I still had some Mexican coins to unburden myself of, I let them ‘help’ me inside.

  After a while I asked someone to watch my luggage while I patronised the wonderful green and pink loo, inside which I was accosted by a maiden in distress: a large-ish Mexican girl wearing a trendy outfit of black skin-tight pants topped by a vest. It didn’t take long to work out her problem. The zipper of her pants had seized up at the top and she had an urgent need to get it down. After struggling with the recalcitrant zipper for some time I told her, in pantomime, that it was hopeless. ‘Shall I cut it?’ I asked. ‘Yes yes yes!’ I cut as neatly as I could, then went back to my bag and returned with a large safety pin. The girl at the turnstile, a witness to the drama unfolding, refrained from charging me more coins to re-enter and, after some tugging and pulling, I secured my new friend back in her pants. She covered the damage with her jacket and went on her way relieved. Giving away a precious safety pin was my good deed for the day. They say a good nurse always has a safety pin and a pair of scissors and I never go anywhere without mine.

  The next entertainment in the bus station was the entry of a pair of Americans. One was a very large, blind man sporting a big black leather hat and a black cape that made him look like an overweight Zorro. Attached to a female helper, he tapped along with a white cane. The helper was also very large, as well as far advanced in age. The blind man was about fifty; she could have been a hundred. If she wa
s the helper then Lord help him.

  I wondered what they might be doing on a bus in the middle of Mexico. The helper seemed to have no idea what was going on. She tried to get into the disabled persons’ toilet but it was locked. This threw her completely. So she went back to the desk and they showed her where to go. The regular toilet was next to the disabled one but she had failed to see it – and he was the blind one. She then made an attempt to get into the regular toilet but couldn’t work out what to do with the coin machine or the turnstile. The desk staff rescued her again. This pair of innocents abroad were obviously leaving Mexico, so I pondered what she had been doing all the time she had been there. Later she fronted the desk again and they tried to explain something else to her. She called the blind man to her aid and the poor fellow got up and tried to walk towards her voice, but went in the wrong direction, tripping over bags. She didn’t have the nous to go and get him.

  Finally they sat down behind me and I was forced to listen to one of the most inane conversations I have ever heard.

  ‘You can have fruit if you can peel it.’

  ‘You are supposed to peel it?’

  ‘Yes you can have fruit if you peel it.’

  ‘Well we did peel the fruit.’

  ‘Yes you are supposed to peel the fruit.’

  When they got on the bus she bumbled around and couldn’t find their seat numbers until I helped them. It was pathetic. I don’t know how they got home. Strangely I later came across two other blind people travelling on buses, a young black girl who was totally with it and an American man, with his dog.

  The bus left San Miguel with only five people aboard. Great, I thought. But a couple of stops later it filled up. This bus was not the White Star line on which I had come to Mexico and that travelled pretty much direct. This bus stopped at every excuse – and each time the driver would say, ‘Five minutes,’ but it would be twenty or more. A woman who spoke a little English sat next to me and we stumbled through a conversation.

  When night came I managed to sleep, thanks to my tequila. It was so awful I mixed it with a carton of chocolate milk to disguise the taste. My neighbour told me I had slept well and, having woken up with my mouth wide open and snoring, I had to agree.

  Countless stops and starts later we arrived at Monterrey bus station in the early morning. I knew this place well from my time spent there before. Breakfast was a burrito, a hot edible full of ham and other goodies and very tasty. I was having a little gastro trouble but it wasn’t serious. Then we were heading for the border crossing which, due to my illegal status, I was dreading.

  Crossing the border took three hours. We were stopped and inspected at several check points coming up to the border and once there we had to get off the bus outdoors under a tin roof and go through immigration procedures. This was where I needed my missing tourist card. Passengers with those highly delectable objects went quickly through a mobile baggage X-ray apparatus that was mounted on the back of a truck, and then got back in the bus. But I had to get in line with the Mexicans who needed entry permits for the USA. One at a time, passengers were allowed into the tiny airconditioned hut that served as the office. There was only one official to process the long line and it was very hot waiting outside. Several times I tried to sneak one of the white entry cards that they all seemed to have and a pile of which sat in a box near the door, but each time I was defeated. It turned out that I had to have a green card anyway. We were there for ages and somehow I ended up last in the line.

  When the officer finally looked in my passport he said, ‘You don’t have an original entry stamp for the United States.’ This was an unexpected blow. Then I remembered that at Chicago airport I’d had trouble because the airline had given me the wrong form for immigration. I said that I thought that my passport had been stamped anyway. Terrific.

  The officer said, ‘No. There is no stamp to say you have been legally admitted to the USA.’

  Really terrific. He made a couple of phone calls, went through my passport again and made more calls. By this time I was in a state. Now I was an illegal alien of both countries. Fortunately no one had mentioned the Mexican permit I was deficient in. After a long time another man came in – he seemed American, whereas the other was a hybrid Spanish type. This latest person took my passport and after several efforts found the elusive stamp. It was small and very faint but it was there! What a relief. The officer filled out a green card for me, I signed it, they took six dollars from me – the price the Mexicans paid – and away I went rejoicing. I actually saved nineteen dollars, the price I should have paid for the tourist card on the way in. Not to mention the thousands of dollars fine I had been sure would be my fate. But there are better ways to save a few dollars.

  The last one back on the bus, I sank relieved into my seat. My neighbour then told me that ‘the chauffeur’ had wanted to take the bus and leave me. I said, ‘He couldn’t do that, my luggage is on the bus.’ She replied that he had said I could come on the next bus. I was stunned to think he really was going to leave me out there in no-man’s land. She told me that he said, ‘The bus will go without the foreign woman.’ But the entire bus load of passengers had stood up and said, ‘No no no!’ So he waited. I was immensely grateful.

  In Texas we stopped at a roadhouse. This place had really dreadful food – fried, heavily crumbed and greasy, or dried up as though it had been waiting for an owner for hours. The staff spoke only Spanish and had trouble understanding me when I asked for chicken. I received two lumps of foul – fowl – oleaginous chicken coated with something even I couldn’t eat. I pulled it off, chucked a lot of chilli on what was inside to kill the bugs and ate it. The chicken was accompanied by a lump of some sort of fried suet that was supremely awful.

  I had intended to take the train from San Antonio to Miami but when I rang the train booking number from the bus station I discovered that this was not to be. There was no train for three days and it did not go direct. You need to change trains in Orlando, Florida, which means staying overnight. At that rate I wouldn’t get to Miami in time to catch the Atlanta, the ship on which I had booked a passage to Peru.

  There was nothing for it but a Greyhound bus. The Mexican bus lines only came as far as here. At the Greyhound station a pleasant black American lady told me that there was a bus leaving in an hour that was going all the way to Miami. It would take sixty hours. Two more nights on a bus! I’ll never make it, I thought. But there was no other option. Although I could have done the trip in stages, I decided to get it over with in one fell swoop.

  I didn’t have long to wait in the dreary bus station, thank goodness. It was vastly inferior to the Mexican ones. The bus was too. No arm rests between the daggy seats, very cramped leg room and no seat numbers allocated. You just got on and fought for a position. Being a good fighter I got a decent seat but before long I had someone sitting next to me: a small Hispanic fellow who didn’t say two words to me – mainly because he couldn’t, I guess – even though we spent the night together! By this time I was not the best in the abdominal department and decided to eat nothing and drink only lemonade. I didn’t really feel like eating. It’s usually time to call the ambulance when I lose my appetite and by the next morning, though I didn’t feel in the least ill, even the thought of food turned me off. I no longer needed tequila to sleep a lot. All that day I couldn’t wake up. After the Hispanic gent got off in the morning I was alone on the seat so I lay down. I don’t think I missed much. I had imagined that Texas ranches would look like Australian back country but they were different – very green, with lots of trees.

  On and on we went, stopping many times. In the evening the bus became crowded again and now I shared my seat with a very, very large American man. He wasn’t fat, just big with hair everywhere possible, and he wore a big bushy coat. We struck up a conversation during which he told me how he had worked in the Caribbean as a construction manager.

  Another night passed. The bus ride wasn’t the nightmare I had expected but I
hadn’t been prepared for it. I had no toothbrush, nothing to wash with and no change of clothes. I became grottier and grottier.

  Every time the bus stopped, which was often, the passengers poured off, only to return with armfuls of chips and boxes of take-away contained in masses of disposable packaging. Food was served in a box and a plastic bag and there were styrofoam cups in horrendous numbers. I saw one woman buy armfuls of chips, dips in plastic tubs and soft drinks to the value of twenty-seven dollars. That’s fifty-four Australian! No wonder the kids here are fat. It’s really sad to see a sixyear-old with an enormous stomach sticking out in front like a dreadful old man with a beer gut so big he can hardly walk.

  All the next day we travelled down through Florida, finally arriving in Miami West at a quarter past four in the morning. No one had told me that this bus terminus was a long way from Miami Beach where I planned to stay. By now it was forty-eight hours since I had eaten. I was okay but felt washed out. I waited in the dismal bus station until half past five and then rang the youth hostel. They said I could have a room right then although check-in time wasn’t normally until two. The taxi across town and over the causeway to the beach cost fifty dollars, but I was glad just to find a place to lie down that wasn’t moving.

  At the hostel I found that there were no private rooms available, and settled for a four-bed dormitory. Creeping up the stairs I snuck in, collapsed on a bed and was immediately out like a light.

  I spent most of the day sleeping or lying about lethargically. Around mid-morning I felt hungry and forced myself to get up. I was still in a grubby state, having slept in my clothes, but, more in need of food than cleaning, I went to the cafe downstairs and had eggs and hash fries. This was a mistake. Lesson learned! I resumed a fluids-only regime.