Weblog: Mexico: Busses, boats, and airports

Making my way by busses and ferries from the ranch to Mexico City.

I worked on the cob house until Monday. Pretty-much all the detail work was done, a bit of plaster prep left to do, and plastering was going on all over the house. Lots of family members were helping out to do the plastering. I took a bunch of final pictures, including pictures of many of the details, on Sunday afternoon.

On Monday morning I headed to La Paz by bus. I waited by the side of the road for the first bus (which comes sometime between 7 and 8am), but it was full. I got on the one a couple of hours later, though. I walked from the La Paz bus terminal to the marina with my very heavy pack (I'm never travelling with this much stuff again), where I was hoping to be able to hitch a ride on a yacht to the mainland. My uncle and aunt Bob and Corrie Klardie had been at this marina while they were sailing in this area, and had told me to look up T'n Honey, the boat of a couple of their friends that might be here. I did indeed find them and had a nice hour-long conversation, mostly him talking about various problems their trimaran has had. It did come out that it was late in the season for catching rides and I'd be unlikely to get one quickly, so I decided to take the ferry to Mazatlan instead. At this point it would be too late to catch today's ferry, so I walked to the good old Pension California and checked in there, then went to the Sematur office to book a ticket on the next day's ferry. After I checked my e-mail and bought food for the ferry trip, I headed back to the Pension and wound up talking to Carl, a Swedish guy staying there who was also taking the next day's ferry, for most of the evening.

In the morning it occurred to me that I should probably buy a bus ticket to Pichilingue, a nearby town where the ferry terminal is, so I walked to the downtown bus terminal. Despite the fact that Carl had bought his ticket the day before, they wouldn't sell me one for the noon bus, saying come back later. I took it easy for the rest of the morning, then collected my stuff from the Pension and met up with Carl there to walk to the bus. A short but interesting bus ride through the industrial port areas of La Paz, and we were at the ferry terminal. We had 2.5 hours before the ferry left, so I made a couple of phone calls and waited around. For some reason, everybody had to go through customs to board the ferry even though it was going from one part of the country to another, but we were just waved through. Once on the ferry we found our seats (they are assigned) and stowed our bags after taking out everything we would need for the trip. I seem to have a pavlovian reaction to ferries caused by BC Ferries, and as soon as we got going I was craving a "sunshine breakfast" and that awful hot chocolate they have that always burns my tongue. The ferry is fairly big (a bit smaller than "spirit" BC Ferries vessel) and divided into several classes. We were in the lowest class, "Salon", which just gets you a chair. Higher classes get cabins. The upper deck has a bar with a dance floor and cafeteria that sells overpriced food that's all a uniform shade of brown. There was another deck above that has a restaurant and some semi-classy decor, but the restaurant was closed. Around 8pm so I put down my thermarest and sleeping bag at a fairly dark and quiet spot on the deck, in a little nook behind the exhaust. Unfortunately what I hadn't noticed until I put the stuff down was that the deck was wet and greasy. My stuff was already covered in goo, so there was little point in moving. I woke up around dawn after a bad sleep and headed back inside, and sat around in the now-closed bar and ate some breakfast. Pretty soon land appeared outside and Mazatlan came into view. Altogether, the trip went by pretty fast considering it lasted 18 hours.

By this point, Carl had decided that he too would go to Mexico City on his way to Oaxaca, so we started walking through town to the bus terminal. The ferry arrived at the southern part of town, so we walked north and were soon in the old centre, which is very pleasant and pretty and not at all what I expected from a resort town. Once through that, though, we hit the ugly hotel strip that lines the beaches north of the centre. We reached the bus terminal at about 10:45am and got tickets for the 11am bus, so that was perfect timing. The bus was nice, with lots of legroom, and it showed a funny old Mexican western on the TV. The scenery was beautiful as well. Going out of Mazatlan, we were in a much more fertile area than the Baja Peninsula, which was refreshing. As we got into the state of Nayarit, it got incrudibly beautiful with hills and views over wide valleys, and bright pink flowers lining the road along with an occasional bright yellow flowering tree. Getting closer to Guadalajara, there were fields of blue agave, which is where tequila comes from. It was getting dark as we pulled into Guadalajara. The bus was fairly empty so I was able to take two seats and stretch out my legs into the isle, and I got one of the better sleeps I've had on a bus (still not too good). The bus ride was supposed to be 19 hours, which would have put is in Mexico City around dawn, but we got there way early at 3am (4 Mexico City time, but it took us a while to realize we'd changed time zones) to a very cold morning.

We waited in the bus station until 5:30 (actually 6:30) and then cought the metro to the Zocalo, and checked into the same hostel I've been in the other two times I've been in the city. They provided a free breakfast, which was the first real food I'd had in a couple of days and I just about ate two of everything available. My plan for the day was to see as much art as I could near to the historical centre of town. Carl wanted to see some of that and also the anthropological museum, so we took the metro to Bosque de Chapultepec, a large wooded park area that houses several museums. First we visited the Museo de Arte Moderno, which I'd seen before but wanted to return to because of the Remedios Varo (one of my favorite painters) paintings there. It also had a memorial exhibition for an artist who's name I forgot to write down but really enjoyed (I'll find out later who he was), which unfortunately was still in the process of being set up and mostly closed. After the museum both of us realized we were too tired to really take anything in, and I realized I'd left my guidebook at the hostel, so we walked back to the Zocalo along Paseo de Reforma (one of Mexico's main boulevards) and through Zona Rosa. There was a book of all of Remedios Varo's paintings I'd wanted to buy at the museum, but I didn't have enough cash on me, so I took the metro back and bought the book, then checked out some markets on the way home. It seems like every time I'm in Mexico City, half the streets are torn open for some kind of roadwork, and this time it was the road going to the hostel that was torn up. While checking my e-mail there, there was a loud bang outside and then some very loud and bad electrical noises, and a fire in the street. The lights flickered a bit and the fire kept going for a good 10 minutes. Mayb something had shorted out due to the rain that started in the late afternoon. What surprised me was that this happened right next to the national palace, but nobody showed to look at it, especially considering there had been a massive bomb attack in Madrid on the same day day.

I had planned to spend Friday in San Angel and Coyoacan checking out Diego Rivery and Frida Kahlo's houses and wandering around, but it turns out that most of the wedding guests are arriving a day earlier than expected, so instead I'm sitting at the Mexico City airport waiting for them to arrive. I'll be heading to Puebla today and hopefully having lots of fun with my friends.

Side note: After reading my previous log, I realized that I'd neglected to mention how instrumental Kup was in saving Annie Basura. She was the one who made everything happen, which is why the dog was named in her honour. Annie is now safely with Alexis in western Pennsylvania, and having some trouble adjusting to the concept of stairs, among other things.

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Posted on Fri, 12 Mar 2020 at Mexico City, DF, MX (altitude 2224m) (map/google earth)

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