Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Incidents of travel (II) Shortly after we left Ciudad Victoria the next morning we passed a roadside monument indicating that we had crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Sanborn's itinerary advised us to “stop and take pictures if you like,” but we didn't. Our immediate destination was Ciudad Valles, 148 miles to the south, a forgettable agricultural town at the intersection of the main road between Tampico on the Gulf Coast and San Luis Potosí in central Mexico. My friend had relatives who owned a ranch in the vicinity, and the plan was to meet up with a family friend — he may have been called don Tomás — who would give us detailed directions. But don Tomás wasn't in at the restaurant he owned in Valles, and after some phone calls and a couple of bottles of sidral we discovered that due to ongoing unrest in the area relating to land reform my friend's family were staying elsewhere. We were not expected in Mexico City, where my friend had other family connections, for several more days, so with time on our hands we decided to head for Potosí and work our way southeast to the capital from there. I don't remember Potosí very well; it was a substantial and historic city, the center of a rich silver mining region and also a major hub of the national railway system, but we didn't explore it much. We probably stayed in the Hotel Progreso, which my guide book describes as “a fine old mansion converted to a hotel.” I don't know where we ate dinner but I do remember breakfast the next morning quite distinctly — huevos rancheros in a coffee shop frequented by students. We quickly moved on, taking Highway 57 south for a couple of hours before detouring west to San Miguel de Allende. San Miguel was a middle-sized town long popular with American expatriates and artists, though I don't know if we noticed any. Nor do I recall if we spent the night there. I do remember eating lunch in a little eatery off the main square, trying not to think too much about the dog sleeping next to the pile of plucked chickens on the floor; I remember strolling quiet back streets admiring some of the ornate doors San Miguel is famous for; and I remember the stands of vegetables in the outdoor market, shaded against the sun by canvas or sheets. I have a photograph of bookstalls under a portico attached to the cathedral or a municipal building; the same photograph has captured a soccer ball poised in mid air under the hand of a small boy, a woman leaning against a column, and another woman in a red skirt, just coming into view. There are lanterns hanging from the ceiling of the portico. A parade came through town while we were there — some saint's day, I imagine — and a convoy of floats on pickup trucks passed by us, each with a different theme: cavernícolas (cavemen), the rock group KISS, and so forth. That evening or the next day we continued on to Guanajuato, an hour or so further west. This was a small city of some 80,000 people, nestled in a cleft between rocky hills. In my guidebook there is a schematic map, which resembles a section of DNA gone awry: beneath the tangled streets of the town proper there is a serpentine subterranean highway that runs from one end of town to the other, “with no signs and practically no exits.” For the newly arrived, Guanajuato was a maze of plazas and steep back streets, but it was attractive and appeared to be both prosperous and culturally alive; there was a university and several first-rate bookstores. I remember going into a bodega and being delighted to encounter brands of soda on the shelves that I had not seen at home for years, if ever: Fanta in various flavors, and Wink (a grapefruit soda). More consequentially, the city had witnessed some of the most dramatic stages of the Mexican War of Independence, and among the notable sights in town were several statues commemmorating the events. We stayed on the outskirts of town, in a quiet, green neighborhood, probably in the Motel de las Embajadoras, which I remember as a series of cabins around a central garden or patio. There was a pitcher of water in our room, which we assumed to be safe, and it may well have been a glass or two of this liquid that led to our undoing. The notorious turista struck my friend first. In the hotel office I obtained directions to a nearby drugstore, where, following the advice of my guide book, I requested neomycin and Kaopectate. Neither of these were familiar to the druggist, at least under those names, but they did have something called Kaomycin; this sounded close enough, so I took it, along with some aspirins — sold in individual wrapped tablets, not by the bottle. I brought these back to the room. My friend was uncomfortable but stable, so I left him to recover and went out to explore. I caught a bus and rode it to the north end of town, making my obligatory visit to Guanajuato's most famous attraction, its collection of mummies, naturally preserved by some peculiarity of the soil, which were and presumably still are on public display in varying states of decay and undress, giving a measure of involuntary posterity to individuals whose activities and characters when they were alive would doubtless have long since been forgotten. After this ghoulish spectacle I managed to made it back to the hotel before the same dog that had bitten my friend seized me firmly in its jaws. We spent the next 48 hours in shifting states of delirium, agony, and prostration, taking turns in the bathroom and emerging into the open air only to let the hotel staff know that we would be staying on. They offered us sympathy, and chamomile tea. (To be continued) January 29, 2008 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me