Guanajuato: Everything old is new again

We boarded the first-class bus for Guanajato in a burst of bad spirits, both of us exhausted from the start. I was recovering from a long-standing cold and the previous day sick in bed; The Husband battling a difficult uni course in a foreign language and dwindling funds. After half-heartedly squabbling over tacos about each other’s attitudes, we walked around central Guadalajara awhile with five days’ worth of luggage, searching for the bus stop to take us to the central bus station. Eventually, I collapsed on a red plastic stool outside a foul-smelling tacqueria while The Husband asked for directions. He emerged triumphant, bearing a scrap of paper with a bus route number scribbled on it. After a pair of burly moustachioed locals at the bus stop advised us on the quickest route, we finally found ourselves on the way to the bus station, aboard one of the scrappier buses – cracked windows, hard plastic seats. Every time the bus stopped (and even when it didn’t), us passengers were thrown about like pinballs in an arcade game, clanking against each other and the sides of the bus. Watching a months-old baby in his mother’s arms in the seat in front of us, I couldn’t help but wince as his tiny head wobbled about on his neck, his eyes and mouth wide.

I dozed for most of the five-hour journey to Guanajauto, my I-Pod headphones firmly clamped to my head, turned to full volume. Every time I pressed pause to speak to The Husband, loud Spanish-language conversation filled the bus – the dubbed soundtrack to the on-board DVDs (X Files episodes and In My Shoes). The Husband woke me when the latter movie began.
‘It’s In My Shoes!’ he said. ‘You like that.’
‘Oooh good.’ I shed my headphones and sat up straight, craning to see. ‘Is it in English?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
I leant back in my chair, wrapped my scarf closer around my shoulders and closed my eyes.
‘I wish I didn’t know it was on then.’
(I SAID I was feeling grumpy.)

Our introduction to Guanajuato itself was vaguely surreal, and very Mexican. At the bus station, we collected our bags, used the pay toilets, and piled onto another bus, which would take us to ‘El Centro’ (the town centre). My sports bag sat rudely in the narrow aisle, where boarding passengers – and the conductor, a teenager in a soccer t-shirt and jeans - were forced to step over it. The bus sat by the side of the road for ten minutes or so, slowly filling with people. As it began to move down the highway, past sprawling shopping malls and neon-lit Oxxos and 7-11s, the conductor walked the aisle to collect our fares. It occured to me that, until now, we’d had no idea what the service cost. Of course, it wasn’t much – only a few pesos each. As I stared past The Husband, through the window to the increasingly rural-looking landscape of vast dark mountains, I felt a warm weight land on my right side. It was a young boy, approximately ten years old, leaning back against my seat to stand comfortably in the aisle. As I glanced over my shoulder to see what he was up to, he erupted into loud song, clicking a hand-held wooden instrument not-quite in time with his warbling voice. Meanwhile, we drew under a stone archway and into a vast slate-grey tunnel, snaking behind a long serpent of traffic.
‘There are lots of tunnels ahead’ joked The Husband. ‘So don’t get scared.’
‘As if I’d get scared!’



Nonetheless, as the bus crawled peripatically through the tunnel – for ten minutes, twenty minutes, more – past parked cars on one side and dusty roadworks on the other, never breaking through to the open air, I began to feel claustrophobic. Above our heads and to our sides, a great net of chickenwire held the ancient rock tight. The small boy mercifully stopped his singing, the bus fell quiet, and he moved up and down the aisle to collect his dues. The Husband dug out a few pesos for him, following the lead of a tall Mexican teenager dressed in the style popularised by LA gangs and copied the world over – a baseball cap and loose LA Raiders tee over baggy-crotched jeans. At the next stop, the boy disappeared off the bus and into the tunnel, his work complete.
‘Is this the only way into the city?’ I asked The Husband, staring disbelievably at the single lane of choked traffic.
‘Yup.’
Eventually, he peered at a sign by the side of the tunnel and nudged me.
‘This is our stop.’

We emerged, slightly dusty, and crossed the tunnel to climb a set of stone stairs to street level … where we materialised in an eighteenth-century European village. Or, so it seemed to my disoriented eyes.

We stand on a narrow footpath at the edge of a cobble-stoned street, thick with expensive-looking cars. On either side of us rises up tall painted buildings – maroon, ochre, rose-pink, sea-green – adorned with cast-iron balconies hung with potted geraniums. Just as the cobbled streets are incongruously packed with cars, the old-fashioned buildings house internet cafes, farmacias, hotels and bars. Snatches of Latin guitar music, interspersed with Western pop songs, drift from open windows and doorways.

It’s not far to the hostel we’ve researched. Beyond the charming painted doorway lies a neat front desk and steel flat-screen computers under an ‘INTERNET’ sign. The hip young thing behind the counter, dressed in jeans and a surf-brand t-shirt, greets us with a nod. The Husband asks for a room, in Spanish.
‘Sure, we have a room’ he replies, in perfect, American-accented English, looking up from the desk. ‘Just hold on a sec and I’ll show you.’ He leans in close to his work again; painstakingly applying Liquid Paper to a canary yellow reservation card. He leads us upstairs, through a squat lounge room where a young girl watches television to an empty dorm room lined with bunks. A wooden locker sits in the corner.
‘Looks fine.’ I am tired and want to rest.
‘Tell you what’ he says. ‘I can give you this room to yourselves for 120 pesos .’
The Husband and I exchange looks. Downstairs, he told us that he’d need to open up the room if anyone else turned up, but that it was highly unlikely. (It was after 10pm.) ‘How many nights do you need it for again?’ he asks.
It turns out that he has a full booking tomorrow night, and won’t be able to give us a bed after tonight. We trudge downstairs, our tails between our legs.

We check out the two places he suggests. One, across the road, turns out to be a cramped dorm room at the back of a restaurant. No common room, no kitchenette, and more expensive than our cheap and cheerful hostel. We leave. The restaurant smells good, and I am tempted to sit down, bags and all, and eat. (I don’t, of course.) The next place has an okay room, with a lumpy couch and a seventies-era television set, but it’s expensive. We sit under a tree in a plaza and read our Lonely Planet by the light of a cast-iron street lamp.



Casa Bertha is up a steep hill, through another plaza, where a lone guitar player in Spanish costume rests by a fountain, and up another steep, hairpin-bended cobbled road. The Husband raps on the door.
‘Oh NO, we’re too LATE’ I moan.
A little old woman opens the door and peers out at us. She has a room. Two, in fact. We follow her past a home study-like office where an old man, presumably her husband, sits behind a computer, past a dining room set with a table and chairs, to a narrow hallway housing dorm room. They’re okay, but expensive for what they are.
‘Let’s go back and stay in the hostel dorm for tonight’ I suggest, and The Husband agrees.
‘I have a rooftop terrace’ says the woman. When we don’t respond, she says: ‘I have one other room.’
Wearily, we agree to see it. We follow her up what seems like several flights of black-and-white iron stairs until we reach the rooftop terrace. A long table set with white plastic chairs and a laminex tablecloth looks out over the town. The lights of hundreds of tiered houses twinkle below. Potted plants line the silent terrace, including cacti and the ubiquitous geraniums. We pass through a neat communal kitchen and the woman opens one door, then another, leading to a spacious, orange-painted room. A couch covered with a Mexican-style woven rug sits beside a chest of drawers and a double bed covered in a cheerful rd-and-white striped bedspread. Above it, an open window, and above that, an iron cross mounted on a polished wood board. There is a television opposite the bed, a double bunk bed, and a single bed around an L-shaped corner. Behind the single bed: a separate toilet and bathroom in toothpaste-white tile. We take it, after bargaining the woman down to the same rate as for the rooms we refused.



Next stop: dinner. The Husband takes me to a cafe he frequented on his last trip here, only a few streets away. Down on the street, it is cooler than upstairs in our decidedly warm room, and I shiver a little in my t-shirt. The café is at the top of a steep set of stairs. It is joined to the stairs by a narrow balcony garlanded with fairy lights, which bridges the street below. Terracotta pots planted with flowers line the balcony railings. Acoustic guitar music floats from the open doorway, accompanied by an earnest voice belting out an Oasis track (Champagne Supernova) in American-accented English. We order and The Husband dashes back to the hotel for our jackets as I await our food. The Husband’s beer arrives. I sample it tentatively, as the singer shifts into Lullaby by The Cure. He does it little justice, his voice trembling on the high notes. Well-dressed hip young things move in and out of the café while I wait. Most of them are noticeably European; even the Mexicans look more Spanish than anything. Lots of blonde hair and English conversations. I see girls in precisely uneven haircuts and artful up-dos, leggings and fashionable boots, edgy retro gear. For the first time since I’ve been in Mexico, I feel self-consciously daggy in my nondescript travelling gear – slightly too-big jeans, peeling-apart sandals and a six-year-old t-shirt with a concertina neckband.

We are in university student territory.



The Husband arrives back before the food appears. And before I entirely freeze to death in the suddenly crisp mountain air. The food (pasta for me, chicken and rice for The Husband) is cheap and good, though not as good as I’d get at home. The streets below pulse with Friday night energy – and with young people.

As for us – thirty-one and approaching thirty – we go back to our hard-won hotel and sleep.

Missing my boy: kidwatching in Mexico

I’m missing my boy. I talked to him on Skype the other day, for the first time since I left him at Melbourne airport.
‘I miss your house’ he said.
‘Really?!’
‘Yeah, DON’T TELL DAD, but the Exoforce [Lego] is much better at your house.’
‘Oh. That’s nice. Okay, I won’t.’

The good news is that he is doing just fine without me. He is doing well at school – his teacher says that he has tested the boundaries a bit but there are NO SERIOUS PROBLEMS. This is an achievement. It’s the first time since he’s entered institutionalised care that a teacher or carer has begun the year with ‘no serious problems’. He won a Best Listener award in assembly last week. Two children in the whole school get one of these awards each Friday. My child, the dreamer, is not generally known for his listening skills. When he was four, his teacher insisted we have his hearing tested, despite my reservations that this was the source of his problems. (His hearing, of course, was excellent. It’s his ability/willingness to concentrate on the world outside his own head that has always been a source of classroom consternation.) So, Best Listener is quite something.

He has two regular playdates a week at friends’ houses (though, reading between the lines, one of the parents in question is not exactly loving it). His father has always been good at enthusiastically grasping any offer of childcare, to the extent that he once employed a semi-retarded woman he met in a playground as F’s weekly babysitter. (‘I make sure she comes at bedtime, when all she has to do is sit there and see to him if he gets up,’ he explained when I stumbled upon the arrangement and complained. For the record, he fired her soon afterwards for stealing.)

ANYWAY, F is doing well. In my absence, he has formed a lunchtime football team, started music lessons and lost his first tooth (sniff!), which he accidentally swallowed.

**

In his absence, I find myself mooning fondly at small children on the street, noticing their eccentricities or typical childhood mannerisms.

The day before I was due to speak to F on Skype, I was walking through a small plaza in my neighbourhood, an oversized traffic roundabout with a fountain, when a small boy came tottering towards me, arms outstretched. He was wailing: ‘Ma-miii, Ma-miii’. I glanced over to see a woman with two other small children smiling over at me, and presumed she was his mother. I figured he had walked the wrong way around the roundabout and gotten lost. I smiled at the boy over my shoulder. He continued to toddle my way, still wailing plaintively for his mother. I gave him a little wave, as the woman said something to me in Spanish. I smiled and waved at her, too. As we crossed the road, The Husband told me what she had said.
‘He thought you were his mother.’
‘WHAT?! But his mother was there.’
‘No, she was his carer, I think. She told you that he thought you were his mother. That’s why he was following you.’
I burst into tears, right there by the side of the main road, in the midst of the traffic and the shops and restaurants of Chapalita. The idea that the little boy had thought that his mother was walking away from him, while he stretched his arms out to her and pleaded, haunted me for the rest of the day - and part of the next. I guess it epitomised my worst fears about leaving my own son on the other side of the world, where I can’t reach him.

I was surprised, too. From what I’d seen of the children bagging groceries beside their mothers at supermarkets and sleeping in bassinets among clothes racks, I had developed the romantic view that in Mexico, children come to work with their parents. This, I thought, was a society where children are welcome, seen as an inevitable part of life, not lifestyle impediments. Why, I’d castigated myself, did I think that I couldn’t have my child at work with me? That, I’d decided, was one area where Australia could learn from Mexico.

While I’m sure that’s true to some extent, on reflection, I don’t suppose women on the production lines (which employ mostly women) are allowed to bring their children to work. And I don’t think that professional women would bring children to law firms or newspaper offices or hospitals.

I noticed a grandmother walking a toddler in a stroller the next day, on the same street where the child had mistaken me for its mother. There goes my idyllic fantasy.

**

Perhaps it’s when women (or families) own their own businesses that the child/work combination works?

In a tourist shop in Melaque, babies slept in bassinets among the racks. I saw one baby asleep by a table stacked with t-shirts as I stepped carefully around it, but was surprised by another at my feet as I approached the back wall to finger the fabric of a hanging dress. I gave a start, grateful I hadn’t stepped on the small figure. When I returned to buy the dress the next day, the young mother held one of the babies at her shoulder, wrapped in a blanket. Once again, it slept peacefully. The fabric of her t-shirt was visibly damp around the breasts. I asked The Husband to ask how old the baby was. Just a few weeks. I couldn’t help an admiring double-take at the mother as I took my plastic bag and left. The second baby was nowhere to be seen. Most likely, it belonged to someone else.

Buying a newspaper on the way back to the hotel after an evening in the town plaza, I stepped over pre-schoolers on the pavement, playing with an elderly man, possibly their grandfather. Behind the counter, a pony-tailed young woman watched in admiration as a small girl in a pretty dress teetered towards the doorway on oversized party heels.
‘That’s my daughter’ she told us (in Spanish). ‘Look at her.’
We duly admired her as she joined the young throng on the pavement.
‘She’s three.’ She shook her head and laughed fondly.
‘Bonita’ I managed. (Beautiful)

A five-year-old girl, solemn beneath her black braids, delivered my Coca Cola Light with my dinner at the Melaque beachside restaurant beside our hotel. When I thanked her (equally solemnly), she shot me the shy smile of a child, even as she uttered the practised riposte of her profession, obviously imitating her parents: ‘de nada’ (‘it’s nothing’). The next morning, as we ate hotcakes under umbrellas on the sand, I watched the same girl delivering cutlery to the couple a few tables away. She took pride in helping, in doing such a grown-up thing. And later she was in her bathers, playing in the sand at the foot of the restaurant. It wasn’t a particularly busy place. Her work seemed to be as much about making her a part of the family business (and perhaps occupying her time) as anything.

Down the sands at Barra de Navidad, The Husband and I were luxuriating on the fringes of a restaurant that boasted ‘THE BEST SUNSET ON THE BEACH’. Sucked in by the sign, we were stretched out in the ebbing sun, sipping sangria and Mexican beer, watching the light change over the water. At Barra, Melaque’s slightly busier neighbour, the beach vendors stop by more frequently – sometimes every few minutes – with their hammocks, jewellery and temporary tattoos. The instinctual reaction is to wave them off like insects, with a polite but firm ‘no gracias’. A woman in the unofficial uniform of her counterparts - a modest, brightly coloured traditional dress with a frilled apron in a contrasting colour over it – lopes by under the weight of a large cardboard folder hung with beaded jewellery. She thrusts it hopefully under our umbrella.
‘No, gracias.’
Behind her, comes a girl of about ten or twelve, in a similar dress. A long black braid hangs down her back. She shows us her armfuls of painted ceramic knick-knacks. This time, it’s hard to say no, but we repeat ourselves.

Next, without much hope but obviously duty-bound to try, an even smaller girl. She wears a mini-backpack over her pink t-shirt and shorts. Twin braids hang over her shoulders, over tiny pierced ears. Her face is solemn, unsmiling, as she tentatively pushes her wares, a painted ceramic fish in each hand, towards us. She and I look at each other. The Husband looks at me, waiting. I finger one of the fish.
‘Quanta questa?’ (How much?)
She tells me, still solemn. Her mother appears over her shoulder, turning back from her path down the beach. She unzips the backpack and lays out an array of ceramic shapes on the table. They are salt-and-pepper shakers. The sister stands quietly to my right side, looking out to sea.
‘I think my mother would like one of these’ I tell The Husband. He agrees.
‘How old are you?’ he asks the girl (in Spanish). She is four.
‘Gracias’ I say, as I count the money into her tiny hand.
‘De nada’ she whispers, as The Husband talks to the mother in Spanish about where they are from. Like most of the indigenous people working the beach, they are here from Guerrero, a poorer state in the south of the country. Acapulco, one of the glitziest resorts in Mexico, is located there, and we have wondered why they travel here instead. Now, The Husband asks her. Too much competition in Acapulco. They will return to Guerrero in Holy Week (Easter).

I want to give the girls something, not just a tip but something for them. As The Husband talks, I rifle through my bag and find a small hoard of wrapped sweets, collected from various hotels. Hurriedly, before they move on, I separate out two sweets and hold them out to the four-year-old. A smile appears as she takes them and murmurs ‘gracias’. I need to tap the older girl on the shoulder to get her attention, but she, too is pleased. I know it’s not much, and they could probably get sweets themselves, but it’s a gesture. I don’t know how to talk to them, or to tell their mother that her girls are lovely, so I hope the sweets say it for me, at least a little.
‘Adios, mi amigos’ (Goodbye, friends) waves the mother as she moves on to the next table of tourists, who I see pause to ponder her jewellery.

‘I couldn’t say no to that face,’ I whisper across the table.
‘I know’ says The Husband.

I wonder how long the girls have wandered up and down the beach in the hot sun, and if they long to play in the water like the holidaying children in bathers and towels, or calmly accept their lot - as my own child certainly would not.

**

Sunday is family day in Guadalajara. Children and parents throng in the vast paved plazas of the city. Ice cream shops are crowded with customers as we pass. An animal market - rows of caged birds (mostly pigeons) - is lined with curious small faces. That particular plaza is usually thick with (free flying) pigeons, but not today.
‘Do you think they captured the pigeons who are usually here and they’re in the cages?’ I ask The Husband.
‘Oh, probably.’ He is joking. So am I; I think.



You can’t walk far in the centre of Guadalajara without coming across a fountain. It’s strange that a city with no public swimming pools (or none that I can find) is so obsessed with fountains. Maybe it’s the lack of places to swim that accounts for the absolute fascination of the children here with the fountains.

Or maybe not. I recall always wanting to immerse myself in the (now defunct) fountain in front of the South Australian Museum as a child. In fact, until it disappeared, really. And F, aged four, once broke away from me in Rundle Mall to climb into the fountain there. I was so sympathetic to his motivations that all I could do was laugh, I’m afraid. (In between half-heartedly telling him off.) The Husband quite rightly told ME off for my lack of parental composure.



It’s not just the small children who like the fountains, either. Couples walk around the edges hand-in-hand. During the week, uniformed schoolgirls stage squealing water fights. Today, teenage girls in tight t-shirts above inches of exposed tummy do the same.
We walk around the city all day, from late morning to nightfall. We pass many, many fountains. At each one, children (mostly small) splash at the edges, or stand awestruck in the spray. In the shallower fountains, they wade triumphantly through the chlorinated water in their good Sunday clothes - parents permitting. Those who are not allowed in sit longingly at the edges. One small girl in a frilly, starchy floral dress perches mournfully at the far corner of a fountain that leads down into a narrow hallway of water where children noisily indulge themselves, her expression constrained.

As evening falls, we sit in a busy plaza lined with benches to drink bottled water and ponder our next move. An enormous fountain lies a few metres away. I sit with my camera trained on it, my lens zoomed in close, and contentedly take snaps of the action. The highlight is an older boy playfully pretending to hurl in his brother. Until a father and son walk by, and the father turns his son upside down, dashes back to the fountain, and dips him carefully into the water, just wetting his hair. The son is laughing admiringly up at his dad as they pass back in our direction.

The girls in particular are dressed in their best for the day. My head swivels to follow one junior primary school aged girl in a puffy dress sporting the biggest bow I have seen in my life at the back of her waist. Another similarly aged girl prances proudly beneath a tree for the camera lens of her adoring father, daintily pinching the hems of her green satin dress at either side. Other young girls wear denim mini-skirts and high knee-moccasin boots. Their hips and ponytails swing together as they walk, mini fashionistas in the making. One such girl, in a snug red t-shirt and knee-length denim skirt, walks in front of us awhile. Emblazoned across the tight-fitting behind of her dress is the slogan ‘SEXY’. She must be about eight years old.



**

On my first day in Guadalajara (over two weeks ago now), a uniformed schoolgirl approached our café table in the plaza and plonked a small illustrated card on our napkin holder with practised efficiency. I watched in bemusement as she moved on to the next table and did the same. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I peered at my card. It had a pretty, beribboned dog on it.
‘What is she doing?’ I hissed at The Husband. ‘Does she want money?’
‘I don’t know.’
The Husband had already filled me in on how to deal with the plentiful beggars and street vendors dealing in knick-knacks - ‘no necessito’ (not necessary) being more effective than ‘no gracias’. He had warned me that parents often recruit their children to help them.

But everything about this girl screamed good care and perfectly adequate wealth. Her uniform was spotless and neat. Her glossy hair literally shone in the sunlight. And her light skin, hazel eyes and pale amber locks bespoke privilege in a country where poverty and skin colour are more often related than not. The girl appeared back at the table while The Husband was in the toilet. She said something incomprehensible in Spanish and gestured at the card. It was obvious she wanted money, after all.
‘No necessito.’
She scooped up the card and disappeared, without so much as a wasted look.

Half an hour later, I spotted the girl again. She was sitting in another plaza, at the edge of a fountain, gleefully tucking into an elaborate ice cream sundae.

Sick (and sooky) in paradise

The morning of our much-awaited wedding anniversary trip to the beach, I almost don’t make it out of bed. I’m in the second stages of a Very Bad Cold, and I don’t so much awaken from a night’s sleep as surface to consciousness for the millionth time since I went to bed. My nose is both blocked and streaming, my throat feels like sandpaper, my head aches and my ears are thick with fluid.

‘Do you want to go?’ asks The Husband, once his screaming air-raid siren of an alarm is switched off. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go tomorrow?’
‘I’m sure.’
There is no way I’m having one less day at the beach, no matter how much I’d love to stay in bed.

I drag myself in and out of the shower. No time or energy to wash my hair – which I will later regret, because I’ve forgotten to pack shampoo and conditioner. Clothes thrown on, hat and sunglasses donned, enormous knapsack with laptop, 700 page book and notebook shouldered – and we’re out the door. Every part of me labours under the twin strains of the bag and the very act of walking. I sneeze and blow my nose into scraps of toilet paper as we walk to nearby Plaza del Sol and the bus stop for our ride to the terminal.

Ten minutes later, just as I’m starting to whinge, we’re at the appointed spot by the side of the road. The Husband flags down the approaching bus, which lurches to a halt long enough for us to clamber aboard, then continues its hurtling journey along the neat bitumen roads of Guadalajara. I squint into darkness, through my sunglasses, past the broad brim of my hat, and try to shove my ten pesos at the moustachioed driver, who steadfastly ignores me until the first stomach-churning stop, when I am thrown backwards.

The Husband, more street-smart than me (as ever) is waiting at the back of the bus. I notice as I sit down that the windows are tinted nearly black, explaining my blindness.
‘The drivers on this line are crazy’ says The Husband. ‘Lots of people are killed on these buses each year.’
‘Passengers?’
‘Pedestrians.’
I am strangely comforted by his qualifier. The bus is packed with passengers, even though it’s 7.30am on a Saturday. Maybe these are weekday city workers going home to their rural families?

The air at the bus terminal is choked with fumes, much more so than our temporary home in Chapalita. The clear blue sky is crisscrossed with dappled rays of light, illuminating the haze that blankets the crisp air. This is pollution, not moisture.

The terminal itself is airport-glossy, all smooth tiled floors and mall-style souvenir shops. The pay toilets, however, remind me that we’re in the third world, with their ubiquitous bins for toilet paper and signs about not flushing, accompanied by the unmistakable stink of shit.

After a side-trip to an adjacent hotel for a buffet breakfast, it’s time to board the bus. We’re handed small plastic bags of food as we hand over our tickets, dispensed by a uniformed woman behind a plastic cart, arranged with a selection of drinks – bottled water, lemonade, Coke. I choose water. Once on the bus, cushioned in our generous seats, we look through the bags and find a ham sandwich and packaged biscuits in each one. Not bad for a 250 peso bus trip (around $US25). We roll out of the bus terminal, passing rows and rows of empty buses on the way.
‘The hard part is over’ I say to The Husband. ‘We’re nearly there.’

Five hours later, we arrive in San Patricio Melaque, both of us sick and exhausted from the long effort not to vomit. I’d been excited by the opportunity to finally visit the mountains that form the backdrop to Guadalajra, but hadn’t imagined that the winding mountain roads would make me so ill.

The scenery is breathtaking. Fields of corn, wheat and agave (the plant that tequila is made from), mountainsides covered with squat, hardy bushes, tall, finger-like cacti, picturesque ruins and crumbling, brightly painted rural shacks. Dirt roads barely carved out of the landscape, lined with huts beneath thatched-palm rooves. The occasional sprawling adobe farmhouse among the cornfields. Children bouncing on a trampoline amidst the cactus. Mustachioed, leathery men in white cowboy hats and jeans, Mexicans dressed in the garb of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.

Every tiny town, every clump of dusty houses, supports a tacqueria selling beer and street vendors selling vegetables and snacks. In some towns, tractors and utes chug along the road, young men standing in the back in groups or sitting atop piles of produce. Bus shelters with buckled corrugated iron rooves sit lonely by the roadside. Everywhere, all along the journey, small fires crackle in the fields; sometimes visible by flame, mostly only by billowing columns of smoke. Once, I feel a quick flash of heat on my left side and glance down to see orange flames teasing the side of the bus, inexplicably leaping from the roadside.



‘We’re here!’
I’ve nodded off, briefly nausea-free, when The Husband wakes me for our stop. I grab my hat from the overhead locker and spill hurriedly into the street, my sandals scuffling in the dust. I have landed beside a row of taco vendors beneath a blue plastic Pepsi shelter. At the end of the street, a line of dark little stores, brightly hung with inflatable crocodiles, fluorescent floatie rings, floral boardshorts and fish-strewn beach towels. To the far left, the mountains. Across the road, a tired-looking bus office. I expected to be greeted by the water, but so far the shops are the only sign that we have reached our beachside destination.

Heavy bags aloft, we trail listlessly past the row of mostly identical shops, interspersed with hotels and bungalows, Lonely Planet guidebook in hand. Glimpses of pools or poolside furniture tempt me. At the end of the road, we turn right towards the water and enter our first choice of accommodation, a complex of bungalows boasting an outdoor pool and a beachfront terrace. A squat, withered old man speaking broken English in response to The Husband’s broken Spanish shows us to the bungalow we MIGHT be able to get, if the scheduled guests don’t arrive to claim it soon.

We enter into a cupboard-sized kitchen area and stand looking at two worn double beds and a built-in wardrobe below a peeling ceiling fan. My heart sinks. In my fantasy for this trip, we find picturesque decay (or luxury, of course), not a seventies-era motel room. I don’t know why I was expecting that.
‘Where’s the pool?’ I ask, and The Husband translates into Spanish. Our guide emits a big belly laugh and shakes his head.
‘What do I need a pool for, when I got this?’ he gestures at the thatched-palm roof of the terrace, where deeply tanned bathers are gazing relaxedly on a glittering expanse of ocean, rocky islands carpeted in bush on the near horizon. Sailing boats bob in the far distance. It is, I have to admit, spectacular. Steps lead from the terrace onto the sand.
‘This is pretty good’ mutters The Husband.
‘I don’t know’ I pout. ‘The Lonely Planet said there was a pool. Not that it matters, I guess. And every other bungalow has a private terrace, but ours doesn’t.’
Our guide is calling the owner on his mobile to check if the room is available. I stand alone in the bungalow, frowning up at the black mould behind the ceiling fan. The man reappears, downcast. It seems that the booked guests are coming after all. The Husband is disappointed; I am secretly pleased.

We drag our feet back in the direction we came, the blue sky and hot sun savage overhead. I sniffle and sneeze as we go. We stop at another Lonely Planet listing, a hotel boasting ‘one of the best outdoor pools in the neighbourhood’. I can tell The Husband wants to please me, or at least to remove my scowl. The pool, an oblong of shining aqua in a tiled recess behind a dim bar room, is visible from the street. We follow the hotel clerk up stairways and along balconies, until finally we reach the proposed room. As badly decorated at the first, though slightly less shabby, it boasts multiple double beds, a cupboard and an okay bathroom. None of the seclusion of option one.
‘How much?’ asks The Husband.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I’d have to ask the owner.’
After much prodding, the clerk finally suggests 1000 pesos a night (equivalent US$100). The last place was 28 pesos a night.
‘Usually five people would stay in this room’ he explains, in slightly accusing tones. It’s a long and grumpy walk back to the street.

‘Where next?’ asks The Husband.
‘Let’s just go where your friends stayed.’ I am past caring. In my eyes, this trip is already somewhat ruined. This dusty strip of souvenir shops is not my idea of a romantic holiday.

We end up at the furthest hotel from the bus station, and the main drag (at least, the furthest listed in the Lonely Planet). It’s not on the beachfront, which doesn’t please me. Lobsterlike North American retirees spilling out of their bathing suits parade around the lobby and up and down the stairs, shouting to each other. The place is cheerful and clean though, fitted out in white and nautical blue, with plastic chairs and tables arranged invitingly along the balconies. Beach towels hang from the railings. I glimpse the ocean. We take the room.

The Husband and I lie on the double beds, side by side. We are each sprawled across our own bed, beneath matching painted headboards featuring lighthouses and seagulls. I blow my nose several times and try to ignore my now hopelessly blocked ears, made worse by the journey through high altitudes.



After ten minutes or so, we emerge in our bathers and shorts (actually, The Husband has brought no bathers to Mexico, so he’ll swim in his cut-off cargos) and head for the water. The beach is only a few steps away. I’m already feeling much better about things; more so when we hit the sand. The waves literally glitter in the sun, and gold flecks in the sand sparkle beneath our feet when we near the water. It looks like the fools’ gold I used to dig for in the playground as a kid. Restaurants with the ubiquitous palm-fringed rooves line the sand, set above the beach with steps leading down to tables topped with multi-coloured umbrellas. The mountains we have recently left are on the right; the left coast of the beach stretches to a far away ending: the twin resort town of Barra de Navidad, five kilometres away. The islands visible from the other end of the beach loom larger here, and the small boats are almost close enough to swim to. (In fact, we do see someone to swim to one.) More motorboats are lined up on the sand nearby.



We walk along the beach, past the vast ruins of the Casa de Grande, a hotel demolished by tidal waves resulting from an earthquake in 1995. We pass a row of beachfront restaurants and hotels and climb the hill past our original bungalows back to town. I now agree with The Husband that they were a good deal, and winsomely recall the beachfront terrace.
‘Will one be free tomorrow, perhaps?’ we ask the caretaker, who stands sentry at the gate, where he greets us as we pass.
‘Sure, sure’ he says. ‘I’m waiting for the owner to come now about the other place. He should be here.’
‘That’s a pity. So, we’ll come in the morning?’
‘Sure. Come at 9.’
I look at The Husband and shake my head.
‘Can we come at 12? We want to sleep in the morning.’
‘The owner should be here.’ He is distracted and not really listening. We say goodbye and move on to the main street, as he mumbles that he will see us at 9 tomorrow.



Back at the souvenir shops, free to browse now we’re not weighed down by our bags, we realise we need beach towels before we can swim. We find several Barbie and Disney Princess towels embroidered with ‘Melaque’, then eventually find plain coloured towels and marine designs. The woman who runs the shop eagerly pulls them down one by one and unfolds them for our viewing pleasure. I am horrified by one, which depicts a blue sea swarming with sharks. Like the others, it proudly bears the name ‘Melaque’. I choose fish instead.
‘Do you think there are sharks here?’ I whisper. The Husband laughs in response.

It is late when we finally swim, but worth it. I swim with my sunglasses on – partly because I was neck-deep in water before I remembered, partly because I need to keep my throbbing ear above water.



We eat at the nearest beachside restaurant, La Sirena. Its logo is Ariel the mermaid – the Disney character. Disney, Coke, Pepsi: all ever-present in Mexico. The Husband has steak, salad and rice with tortillas; I eat ceviche (diced fish with salsa). It’s good, but not great.

Back to the hotel to change. I lie in bed after a lukewarm shower, staring at the television, too exhausted to move. The Husband watches soccer beside me. I would stay here all night, nursing my cold and my ear and sleeping, but The Husband is keen to see the plaza, which his friends have told him ‘comes alive at night’. I should tell him how I’m feeling, but don’t.

In town, the shops are still open, children sitting in the footpath playing under the eye of their parents, babies sleeping in bassinets among racks of clothing. Now I can hardly hear from my right ear, and it’s throwing me off balance. I stumble from gutters and miss stairs on my way up or down. I beg The Husband to take me to a pharmacy to get something to fix it. Of course, most of the farmacias here, as in the US, are also supermarkets. Most of them stock more in the way of ice cream and groceries than medicines. Finally, we find a farmacia with a wall of medicines and The Husband explains what we want, in Spanish. It takes a while, and a willingness to persist on the part of the kindly pharmacist, but eventually he produces ear drops.



Plaza at night: photo by The Husband

We eat at a bar overlooking the plaza, its balcony garlanded with fairy lights. The Husband photographs the plaza below while I take my ear drops into the bathroom and shut the propped-open door behind me. When I return to the table, I drink my Sangria with my head tilted at right angles. On the street, the plaza is illuminated with lights, particularly the dolphin fountain at the centre. Families, couples and gangs of children congregate in groups; talking, laughing and eating. Taco stands have sprung up. A green-haired clown wanders the crowd. A small girl fondles a balloon animal. I go back to the bathroom to prod at my stubborn ear (now whistling like a seashell), falling off a step as I go. The bar staff must think I’m on drugs.



Small girl in plaza: photo by The Husband

At the hotel, as we climb the stairs to our room, we pass a white-haired, brown-skinned couple huddled on the stairs of the laundry room, giggling over open beer bottles like teenagers. Directly outside our window, a gaggle of similarly bronzed and leathered retirees are whooping it up at one of the tables. Their booming conversation is impossible to ignore as we try to sleep. Soon, we find ourselves hooked on listening, as someone called Fred regales a Doris and her husband about his yachting adventures in ‘Oss-straylia’ and New Zealand.
‘Ohhhh, it’s my DREAM to go to Osstraylia’ squeals Doris.
‘It’s wonderful, but I really loved New Zealand. You can go deer shooting there. They got too many of them. Killing the motorists.’
‘It’s the same in Canada. Moose kill more motorists than ANY OTHER CAUSE.’
When it’s finally time to part company, Fred asks the couple for their names again.
‘I always forget names’ he bellows.
‘Oh, it’s impossible to remember everyone in a place like this. Still, we’ll see you tomorrow, I guess.’
‘When you’re a MUSICIAN, you forget everyone. But they all remember you. They come up and talk to you and you think “who are YOU?” It’s just terrible.’

We almost miss them after they’ve retreated to their rooms. But not quite.

Home for a while: Guadalajara

My first view of Guadalajara, from the air, is promising. A blanket of twinkling lights spread below gently curving mountains, dark against the darker night sky. As I walk into the airport, I am further reassured. Comparing this to Tijuana is like comparing Melbourne airport to Hobart’s. Gleaming airport shops and modern buildings greet me. I could be back in Australia, if not for the Spanish signage and the incomprehensible stream of language rolling from the loudspeakers.

I don’t care about interesting and authentic right now. I am perfectly satisfied with comfortable and familiar.

It’s easy to follow the signs, with their universal symbols and arrows accompanying the (Spanish) words for ‘baggage claim’. I quickly spot my bag, too, and stand waiting for The Husband. I’m surprised he isn’t there to meet me as I came off the plane, but more surprised that he isn’t here. In Melbourne, he traditionally meets me at baggage claim. My seat-mate from the plane materialises, similarly surprised that her brother isn’t here to meet her. She’s from San Diego, but lived here until she was nineteen. Her California accent and flawless English mark her out as thoroughly American now, though the fierce pride in her voice when she tells me that I will love it here belongs to a local.

A few minutes after she disappears to find her brother, I follow in her wake to the airport exit. There stands a line of hopeful-looking people – The Husband among them, a long-stemmed red rose in his hand. His worried look turns to a grin when he spots me.
‘Where have you been?’
‘Where have YOU been?’
It turns out that non-passengers are not allowed past this point. The Husband takes my sports bag and offers to take the others. I assure him that I’m fine. We walk together to the exit, holding each other tight and shooting each other fleeting looks, as if neither of us can believe we’re both here.

The Husband has enlisted the aid of a staff member from the hotel where we are staying, who is waiting for us in a van outside. He shakes my hand and greets me in English. Relieved, I return his greeting gratefully as we collapse into the back seat. All of my adventures of the day spill from me in an unending stream. The Husband is appropriately interested and horrified, gradually less so. I take the hint.

The Husband’s description of his arrival in Guadalajara to the sight of abandoned car shells and decrepit housing by the roadside is still with me. But, even as I strain to see it, I don’t really notice anything like that. What I see are the first-world roads and billboards, the evidence that this is not like Tijuana – at least, what I saw of it.

As we approach our destination, our driver tells us that he has seen a documentary on Australia recently. It was wonderful, he says. He can't remember the name of it or what it was about, but it was a tribute to a national hero of ours who had died; a great man. He thinks hard and eventually the name comes to him: Steve Irwin!
'It was a sad day for Australia, no?' he says. 'He was very very famous. A national hero.'
'Yes, after he died' The Husband wrly responds.

We are staying in a hotel tonight; moving to our own place tomorrow. The hotel is on a busy thoroughfare in the centre of downtown. The tall buildings on either side of us are old and run-down, but serviceable. Restaurants and eateries line the roadside, hotels visible above them. We are next-door to a grey-looking mall. Our friendly hotel staffer opens the barred gate to the hotel and buzzes us in. We climb a narrow stairway to another barred gate, which clicks open as The Husband pushes it. The lobby is really something. Yellow and white diamond tiles at our feet, ornate light settings hanging from the high ceiling, vast potted palms, ornate decorations. A large painting of lilies on a black canvas hangs at the end of the lobby. The front desk is worn and simple; the internet tables by the doorway accompanied by a handwritten sign about rates and usage: bastardised English in green texta. It’s obvious that this was once a grand old building; the lobby retains the last vestiges of those days.

The Husband flings open the wooden double doors to our room. Inside, it’s more 1970s motel room than anything. Twin double beds with shabby flowered bedspreads, an old TV set, a long table under a mirror. And another set of wooden double doors, which open onto a balcony over looking the street. We watch the traffic together awhile.
‘Do you want a shower before you go out?’ The Husband asks.
‘Oh, GOD yes. I’d LOVE one.’

The bathroom reveals the age of the building: literally. A sign next to the toilet horrifies me. ‘This building is 130 years old and has narrow pipes. Please do not put toilet paper in the toilet, but in the basket provided.’ This explains the oh-so-faint stench in here. Worse, my longed-for shower is somewhat of an anti-climax. The water runs cold for approximately twenty minutes, in a half-hearted trickle from the shower head. I dance impatiently, slowly freezing, while I wait. When the hot water comes it is lukewarm at best. I endure it for a few minutes. (And did I mention that the toilet is practically IN the shower?)

Dinner is at a restaurant that, The Husband later tells me, caters to tourists. It is quaintly charming. The stone walls are hung with sepia-toned framed photographs of the old city. Mariachis wander the restaurant, singing and playing. More than once, we are approached by vendors with armfuls of flowers for sale.
‘Ni necessito’ says The Husband to each in turn. (Not necessary)
He says his Spanish is bad, but it sounds pretty good to me. He converses with waiters with ease, discussing the menu and ordering on my behalf. I am unadventurous and eat chicken enchiladas, which are good, and drink sangria, also good. The bill comes to the equivalent of about $20. Cheap, but not as cheap as I expected. The Husband reminds me that the point is that you CAN live very cheaply if you want to. Eating from street vendors, for example. Oh well.



We wander the streets a little on our return to the hotel. The magnificent old buildings are lit up, casting the stone in a golden glow. The plaza is bustling – with children as well as adults, even though it’s nearing midnight by now. Apparently, this is common. The atmosphere is cheerful, festive even. The streets feel perfectly safe. Tony tells me that crime is not a problem here, that I should feel safe. And relax my iron grip on my satchel.

My stomach pleasantly full (though starting to ache a little), I stroll back to the hotel with my husband - in the city that will be our home for the next six weeks or so.

Crossing the border: San Diego to Tijuana on foot

Wednesday morning. I wake early. There is no alarm clock in my room, no wake-up call (it’s a hostel, after all), but I have fallen asleep willing myself to wake up at 7.30am. As a precaution, I left the curtains half-open, hoping the sunlight would wake me. It does – at 6.30am. I lie half awake and half gloriously asleep until 7am, when the fact that I’m freezing cold gets me out of bed.

I’m planning on a leisurely pancake breakfast, with a coffee (milk this time – I forgot I needed to buy it myself yesterday) and my 'LA Times'. After my shower, I wander back into my room. Outside, the sun casts a pale golden glow over the skyline – palm trees, a church spire, rooves, a blossoming fruit tree. I trot happily downstairs for breakfast, hoping to find a staff member to offer advice about getting to Tijuana.

A couple of travellers are up already, chatting over hot drinks in the kitchen with the staff member who cleans and prepares the pancake mix in the mornings. A middle-aged bottle blonde with a cheery, down-to-earth manner, she is pulling the iron griddles from the cupboard and talking about how she hates holidays. She describes the Thanksgiving she and her sister spent in an LA hostel.
‘We called my family in Seattle and said: “hey, we’re eating hotdogs on Venice Beach”,’ she laughs.
I pour myself a percolater coffee and sit with my paper spread across one of the tables. I read stories about Iraq, a political scandal, the LA mayor’s new strategy on gangs, and a pay rise for California teachers. As two Americans from northern climes chat about the amazing weather here, I ask the staff member about Tijuana. She tells me the bus to catch downtown, where I can get the Blue Line trolley to San Ysidro, USA then the bus to Tijuana, Mexico.

I decide to skip the pancakes. My mind is buzzing with all I have to do. I go upstairs to my room and turn on my computer. I get an error message about Windows not starting. I try again, not too worried. Same message. Feeling panic slowly rise from my stomach into my throat, I play with my settings a little. Nothing. I swear aloud, tears now gathering. This is all I need. My ticket and airline information is in that computer.

I grab my bag and storm out to the balcony, where a bare-chested, sixtysomething is sunbaking on one of the couches, absorbed in his book.

Downstairs in the computer room, I check my email, sure that I’ll find an email from The Husband with my e-ticket (which I requested last night) or even my booking number. Nothing. Panic takes over. Even The Husband’s mobile phone number is on my computer. Suddenly, I don’t know how I’ll get there. Or if I’ll make my flight. I type out a hysterical email to The Husband, explaining my predicament and begging him to phone me at the hostel. I don’t know if he’ll get the email in time. I burst into tears and sit sniffling for a few moments before returning to my room to dig out my computer – to try again.

I bring it downstairs. No logic to that thought whatsoever, but I’m desperate. I also have the faint hope that a computer expert will be sitting at the table and offer: ‘Hey, I KNOW what that is. You just do this – and look – fine!’

Of course, there is no expert, and the computer doesn’t work.

I give up and lock it away. My head start on the morning is fast disappearing, if not gone. I empty my immaculately packed sportsbag and find the number for the last place The Husband was staying. Maybe they’ll know how to reach him.

At the payphone outside the hostel’s front door, my coins click uselessly into the change slot and a recorded message plays through the receiver, suggesting I speak to the operator. I assume it’s another basic American thing I’m doing wrong – but no, the phone is actually broken.

Now, I give in to panic and drama. I throw myself onto my lower bunk bed and sob. Through the still half-open curtains, the white-haired man reads on. I gather myself: the worst thing that can happen is that I stay here longer and have to buy a new plane ticket.

Downstairs, I check my email. There is one from The Husband, telling me the name of the airline and assuring me all I need is my passport. As I’m reading it, a voice calls: ‘is there a Joanne here?’
I desperately wipe a fresh flow of tears from my eyes and fling open the door.
‘It’s me.’
The girl frowns a little as she hands me the phone.
‘You can’t be long. This is my only line.’
‘Okay.’

Door shut behind me, I retreat into the computer room, into a corner beyond the window.
‘[The Husband!]'
At the sound of his voice in reply, I start to really cry: gasping, noisy sobs that stick in my throat. He reassures me calmly and deliberately. Eventually, I calm down again, close my email, and return the phone to the office, explaining what has happened. The girl’s face softens as I speak. Sympathy replaces annoyance.
‘Oh, that’s terrible. And no, that’s fine.’

Back in my room, I repack my bags, resisting the urge to dash my laptop on the stairs and leave the fragments behind. I’m in no state to board a bus right away, and besides, there’s no time for mistakes. I AM in the state to make mistakes. The hostel calls me a cab.

My driver is an asshole. Again. I tell him I want the Blue Trolley Line in Old Town and he snaps ‘I don’t know the Blue Trolley’.
‘Do you know how to get to Old Town?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know how to get to the trolley line there?’
‘Of course I know the trolley line. I don’t know the BLUE LINE Trolley because I’ve never caught a trolley in my life.’
Good for you, I think. At least the cab is exactly $10, the estimated fare according to the hostel.

The trolley line is at the fringes of Old Town. I am disappointed. I’d hoped to snap a few quick photos, but there is nothing much to photograph. Still, even the Spanish-style tourist office and the teetering row of palm trees along the road are quite interesting.

A middle-aged American with a badge identifying him as an information officer approaches as I fumble with the ticket machine. He tells me where to go, when my trolley will come, what direction it will go, and he even works the machine for me, chatting about Melbourne, Sydney and the Gold Coast all the while.

I sit on the bench, backpack on my back, satchel at my front, sports bag at my feet. I feel that it will all be okay from here on. I will get off at San Ysidro, wander around, take photos, see the fence that separates Mexico and the US, and buy plug adapters for The Husband. Then I will catch the bus over the border to Tijuana. I estimate I’ll have an hour, maybe a little less, to play with.

The trolley arrives and a young Mexican confirms that it’s going to San Ysidro as he climbs on. I gratefully plonk myself in the first available seat, and turn to see a bedraggled old man staring at me. Opposite, a tracksuited teenager does the same. I move.

Now, I’m seated opposite a surly-looking, pimpled college kid, hunched into a grey hoodie. His jeans-clad knees are splayed as far as they’ll go in either direction. He glances at me disinterestedly, then returns his gaze to the window. He doesn’t readjust his knees, which are taking up all the available room. My legs sit in the aisle as a result, resting on my sportsbag.

Behind me, on either side of the trolley, sit two white-haired men, both with wire-framed glasses, white trousers, straw hats and white sneakers. They talk in booming voices about the sights of San Diego.
‘What’s that?’ asks the one directly behind me, pointing at the harbour as we pass.
‘That’s the Pacific Ocean’ says the other, in disbelieving tones.
‘Oh. Well, we have water like that in Oregon, too, but it’s not on the ocean.’
‘Oh, right.’

A couple with backpacks and cameras ask the man not from Oregon about how to get to Balboa Park. He vaguely knows, and tells them which bus to take. The couple wonder aloud how to find it.
‘It’s on Broadway’ puts in the Mexican teenager sitting on the other side of them. ‘I’m getting off at the stop you need. I’ll take you there.’
‘Thanks so much’ smiles the woman. ‘We’re so grateful.’

Downtown. The trio disembark. The college kid talks on his mobile. He says ‘dude’ a lot and talks about skipping classes and exams and drinking. Now, we’re in the industrial part of town.
‘What up?’ he starts another call. Oregon talks about Tijuana behind me. He says he’s going to a dentist there who’s much cheaper than at home.

The housing starts to get shabbier, graffiti gradually takes over the fences along the tracks. The signs at the stations are suddenly bilingual. We pass a temporary home by the tracks. A one-man tent, what looks like a mattress and an American flag. Parts of the fences here are peeling away.

The next station swarms with uniformed police. They stand around talking earnestly, looking alert.
‘What are all the cops doing here?’ asks Oregon. I don’t hear the reply, though I try to.

We pass a high school painted in bright colours, Mexican style. Hills packed with residences – and the occasional palm – rise up above the trackside fibro housing. Freight carriages queue by my side of the trolley. The hillsides become more sparse. A sign with a real estate company logo declares: ‘acres developing’. On the other side of the tracks: a 99 cent department store, vast motels, and a Burger King. Mounted below the larger Burger King sign, a smaller one reads ‘BREKAFAST’.

We are in San Ysidro. The trolley stops. There is no shopping strip, apart from a tacqueria-style café, a worn tourist information office and a money-changer’s. This is it. The end of the US.

An enormous cement bridge, multi-storied and lined with thick iron bars, rises before me. I expected the trolley to keep going to Tijuana, but it doesn’t. A uniformed border policeman stands guard over the entrance to the bridge. I ask him where I get my tourist card for Mexico. (You need one if you’re going for more than 72 hours.)
‘You need to walk over the bridge to Mexico and come back for it.’
‘Oh.’

Shouldering my sports bag, nearly twenty kilograms heavy, I begin to climb the bridge, which is busy with pedestrian traffic. Some look like tourists and US daytrippers, some don’t. I reach the top, shoulder burning, and look down on San Ysidro. The border police, the gaudy shops and cheap motels, the trolley line. The hills in the distance. I want to take a photo, but it’s illegal. I’d probably be too intimidated, anyway.

I am more tense than I have ever been in my life. The police presence – almost one at every bend in the bridge, the myth of Tijuana as den of vice (reinforced by laminated wanted posters along the bridge), the bars, the security cameras. It’s all designed to be threatening, and it is.

I pause over the highway. Columns of cars queue to be checked through the border. This, at least, is how it looks on the screen.

It’s another ten minutes or so of torture before I reach the border point. A plaque informs me that I have reached the Mexico/US border. Revolving studded steel gates are before me – two sets of them. A Tijuana tourist information centre, red-brick, modern and inviting, sits amongst rows of grey cement buildings.

Every step into the building is agony for my shoulders and back. My new shoes rub; I feel a blister forming. Panic and adrenaline flood my system again. The uniformed woman behind the gleaming, brochure-lined counter greets me in Spanish.
‘Hi’ I lamely reply, my racing mind unable to find the Spanish even for this. ‘Where do I get my tourist visa? I’m going to Guadalajara.’
‘Over there at the window’ she smiles. in perfect English.
‘Gracias’ I manage.

Two men loll at the counter of the window, the furthest building in the row – in the opposite direction of where I am ultimately headed.
‘I need a tourist visa’ I say, appearing at the open doorway.
‘You don’t need one.’
‘I’m going to Guadalajara.’
The men look at me with disinterest.
‘How are you getting there?’
‘Plane.’
‘You can get one at the airport.’

I can’t believe it. I’m only here, at this border crossing, because the official Tijuana website said I needed to get a tourist visa at San Ysidro. Otherwise, I could have caught a Greyhound from downtown to Tijuana airport for $12.

I walk back past the tourist office, to the second set of heavy metal gates, and push through them to Tijuana. Yellow taxis and uniformed drivers swarm to the left side of the entrance. To the right, loud signs and brightly painted shopfronts signal the start of the tourist district. A uniformed man reaches for my bag as I stand, dumbly watching the scene.
‘You want a taxi?’
‘Yes. Si.’
I let him take it, and follow. He hands my bag to another uniformed man at the kerbside, who hauls it into his cab with one deft movement. As the the first man disappears, I wonder if I was supposed to tip him. If so, how much? It’s too late anyway.
‘Welcome to Tijuana!’ says my driver as I climb into the back seat. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘The airport, please.’
‘Ah. Where are you going?’
‘Guadlajara.’
‘Ahhhhh, Guadlajara. Muchos buenes.’
The streets fly by my window. Bemused, I am unable to take much in. It’s a blur of now entirely Mexican faces and bodies, pastel painted houses, shabby and crumbling at the edges, street vendors. At the traffic lights, a woman goes from car to car , carrying pink candied hearts the size of dinner plates, tied with ribbons and garnished with flowers.
‘No, gracias’ the driver says politely as she pauses at our open windows. Valentine’s day. In all the stress of getting here, I completely forgot. I am no longer fixed on reuniting with my husband right now. I am fixed on reaching my safety net, my security blanket abroad, who also happens to be my husband.

We follow a sign for the airport and swing onto a wide bitumen highway, bordered on both sides by fibro walls, or long fences covered with street art. The painted scenes change as we go by. Much of it seems to commemorate suffering, though it’s hard to judge. Some of it is not hard to judge at all, of course.

A long stretch of white crosses along the fence, followed with ’11 muertas este ano’. What does this mean? Dead how? Crossing the border? Then, a black slash of graffiti, the only I notice: ‘YANKEES DIE!’ It feels like a slap or a rebuke, even though I’m not American. I can feel the hatred behind it, both from the vigor with which it slashes across the wall and its context in this slideshow of murals.

My driver chats amiably in English, sprinkled with the odd Spanish phrase.
‘You don’t speak Spanish?’ he asks, and clicks his tongue when I confirm his suspicion. ‘You visit Mexico, you should speak Spanish.’
‘I’ll learn’ I say. ‘Yes, I know.’
I do wish I’d perused that phrasebook a bit more fervently, at the least. What have I been doing for the past few days? Living for the moment, not thinking much about this day, except as an abstract idea.

The driver asks about my husband, my family. He asks if I have children. When I tell him about Felix, he asks wonderingly, ‘so where is your child?’ There is no way I’m going into the split parenting arrangement here and now, particularly as I’m not sure what his reaction would be. So, for the second time in my life, I fudge the truth to a taxi driver to avoid explaining.
‘He’s with family.’
‘Your mother?’
‘Yes.’ Now I’ve actually lied.
‘Aaaah.’ He seems satisfied and makes a gesture as if to say, ‘what would we do without our mothers?!’

We pull up at the airport amidst a phalanx of identical yellow taxis. The driver opens the back door and removes my sports bag for me, handing it over as I emerge. I look into my purse and discover, to my horror, no money. No notes, anyway.
‘Can you take a card/’ I ask, knowing he probably can’t but not knowing what else to say.
‘No.’ He looks pissed off, justifiably.
‘Can I get money inside?’
He takes my bag back from me.
‘We’ll find out.’
I scurry along behind him as he sweeps into the airport with the air of a man for whom time is money. I vaguely glimpse the border fence, which lies opposite the airport, recede over my shoulder.

The driver asks an airport staffer where the ATMs are and he points and says something in Spanish. The driver tanslates, then tells me he’ll wait outside with my bag. I’m in no position to protest.

I literally run to the ATMs and am relieved to discover that they are bilingual. I can only take out volumes of 100. I am amazed and annoyed. I take out $100. I buy a roll of sweets, the cheapest thing I see, at the closest shop I see. As I approach the entrance again, running, I realise my mistake. I am holding seventy-five pesos, not seventy-five dollars. (And no, the sweets didn’t cost $25.) I have something like seven dollars fifty – not enough to pay the driver for my fare, let alone the big tip that is both expected and deserved.

Back to the ATMs. How do pesos translate? I can’t afford to make a mistake. I withdraw the maximum amount, then change the pesos into US dollars in order to make an informed decision about the tip. I get $135. A man chatting to the money-changer raises his eyebrows.
‘Ooooooh’ he drawls, smiling at me with raised eyebrows. He makes a motion as if to grab for the money, then says something in Spanish and laughs uproariously. His friend the money changer joins him.
‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ he says as he counts the notes into my hand. ‘BA-BY!’

I ignore them both and sprint to the outside doors, where I see my driver standing at his cab, my bag at his feet. He doesn’t look furious, but he doesn’t look happy. The fare is $15. I give him $25 and thank him breathlessly.
‘Thank YOU, thank you. Have a nice stay!’ He is perfectly genial now, delighted with the result. I am relieved.

At the AVICSA ticket window: another obstacle. The staffer nods at my passport, then asks for my booking number. I don’t have it, of course. She looks me up.
‘Did you have a ticket for yesterday?’
‘WHAT? I’M BOOKED FOR YESTERDAY?’
‘It was cancelled, yes?’
‘Oh, yes. And booked for today. Guadalajara. 2pm.’
‘Hmmmm.’ She frowns at her screen. ‘You booked it?’
‘My husband did.’
It seems that I’m not in the system at all. Until …
‘You sometimes use another name?’
‘No.’
‘Because there is something here …’
She shows me the ticket, the only one they have for my surname. The name is utterly unrecognisable as my own.
‘That must be me, somehow.’
It is. After much more talk, and me providing The Husband’s email address, which he booked the ticket with, it is confirmed and they let me on to the next stage, which goes smoothly.

Except when I ask for my tourist visa (which my ticket attendant told me to get when checking in). The attendant shakes her head, points at my paperwork, hands it back and waves me on to Gate One.

My head is still thick with the rush of it all and the series of close calls in the past twelve hours. I sit by Gate One awhile, looking out the window at the Tijuana hills. The landscape is so similar to San Diego, but everything else is so different. I am one of very, very few Anglo tourists, but the people seems friendly and smile at me as I pass or sit nearby. An explosive sneeze escapes me and a leathery Mexican in a cowboy hat and jeans nods to me.
‘Bless you!’ he calls.
‘Gracias.’ I think I’m going to be okay.

**

Two hours later, my plane is due for boarding, according to the board, but nothing is happening. I keep writing at the kiosk table I have staked out as my own. At fifteen minutes to take-off, I get up and join the clusters of people gathering, but not yet queuing.
‘Excuse me, where are you going?’ asks a man with a young family. I tell him and he thanks me. He’s a local, and he’s having trouble figuring out who’s waiting for what where. His wife smailes at me and I nod back. A woman walks past trailing luggage on wheels, her toddler trundling behind, resplendent in a Disneyland hooded sweatshirt and Winnie the Pooh sneakers. He leaps onto her suitcase and clings tight, riding it through the airport.
‘WHEEEEEE!’ he squeals.
The woman with the family catches my eye and we both smile fondly after him.

1.50pm. Still no news, no sign of boarding. I show my ticket at the AVISA counter and ask about my flight. The attendant frowns at it and looks at me sceptically.
‘Where is your boarding pass?’
‘This.’
‘No, your boarding pass.’ She shows me an example. I don’t have one.
‘Did you check your luggage in?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you don’t have one?’
I rifle madly through my satchel, emptying each of its six zipped pockets one by one. Nothing.
‘You need one to get on the plane.’
And I’m panicking again, hot tears springing from my still-aching eyes, despite my best efforts. I am going to miss my flight for sure now.

She confers with colleagues, after checking my passport. I can’t stop crying, though the idea of humiliating myself like this is making me cry even more.
‘We’ll get you another boarding pass. Just show ID when you board.’
‘And I won’t miss my plane/’
‘No. You won’t. It’s running twenty minutes late anyway.’
I hover at the counter, just in case I misheard and they’re brining me another hardcopy ticket. I dig my sunglasses from my satchel to hide my crying, but tears still escape down my cheeks and I feel my lips trembling. I am a fool, a simpleton, I know nothing about how to get on in the world – and I’m thirty-one years old. Now this is what’s really upsetting me, that and panic about how I will go from here on. Losing my language has left me near helpless, and so panicked I can’t think straight. Did I have a boarding pass and somehow lose it?

The woman from earlier taps me on the shoulder. She and her husband shoot me kindly smiles.
‘You’re going to Guadalajara, right? They’re lining up over there now.’
‘Gracias’ I sniff, truly grateful, not just for the tip, but for the sentiment. As I dare to look around a little, I note more sympathetic faces.

The rest goes without a hitch and I board the plane gratefully. Once seated, my circulation returns to normal and I can breathe easily again, though the nausea in the pit of my stomach remains.

Surely it will get easier from here? At least The Husband will be with me from now on. Still, I realise that travelling the cheap way, the hard way, through Tijuana, was one of the stupidest ideas I can remember having. I’m not as brave as I think I am. In hindsight, I would gladly have paid the extra $100 to save myself the experience.

San Diego by day

I awaken to sunlight streaming through a gap in the curtains. After a rather tricky shower (changing in the shower cubicle, shoving my clothes outside onto the tiles, then reaching out to grab them back and get dressed), I go downstairs to enjoy my free pancake breakfast.

The kitchen is busy, but not crowded. I talk to a fellow traveller, a Greek-American from Arizona, as I make my hotcakes on a griddle over the stove. We sit together at the common room table and idly chat. He has trouble understanding me because of my accent, asking me to repeat myself several times, even acting out what I’m saying once or twice.
‘You don’t seem to have any trouble understanding us’ he says.
I tell him that I’ve grown up with American accents, as have the rest of the world. On television and cinema screens. His name is Vangeli.
‘That must be pretty common in Australia’ he says. ‘You have such a large Greek population.’
Melbourne has the second-largest of any city in the world, outside Greece, but I’ve never heard the name. He thinks my name is odd.
‘Jo? Really?’
I wonder how on earth I will go in Mexico, where people literally speak another language.



ABOVE: Encinitas beach

Vangeli is going to Ocean Beach nearby, to a café with wireless, and asks if I want to come. My plans include exploring the beach, so I accept. (And yes, in case anyone is wondering, I talk about my husband a lot, and it turns out that he is pining for a girl back home.) The Pacific is a pulsing ocean here, with dark waves and yawning stretches of beach. I see no surfers today, though the water invites surfing. The bordering communities of Ocean Beach and Mission Beach are sleepy seaside suburbs, with cafes and pubs and hamburger shops and quirky clothes stores. The style is laid-back California cool. In the café where we stop, a selection of herbal teas is lined up along the deliberately worn wooden counter in egg-sized porcelain dishes. Vangeli leans in to sample each one, inhaling deeply, before choosing one.





ABOVE: Mission Beach

He embraces this place, where he desperately hopes to move from his desert home, with the fervour of a convert. His feelings for his home country, the USA, are similar, resembling the zeal of a born-again Christian – he moved here fourteen years ago. We talk about my impressions of the country, and his own first impressions. He is bemused by the idea that Americans don’t have a good sense of humour – particularly irony, and surprised when I mention Australia’s fine tradition of anti-Americanism (he ASKED, people!)
‘It’s because of the war, right?’
I tell him that the war hasn’t helped, in some circles, but that it pre-dates the war. Australia is on side, I tell him. We’re the deputy sheriff of our region, representing the United States! He was not aware of this.
‘Who is your Prime Minister?’ he asks. I tell him. ‘Ohhhh yes. He was here a while ago.’
Our anti-Americanism is more to do with cultural imperialism and PERCIEVED arrogance, I say.
Vangeli, like most Americans (according to him), was initially in support of the war, because of 9/11 and the potential threat of attack by Saddam Hussein, with his connections to al Qaeda. But now, he is against it. It was not done properly, he says. The US should have enlisted the help of other Arab states in the region.
‘But I don’t think they agreed with the war.’
‘They would have wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Saudi Arabia would have paid for it if we’d asked.’
This is the problem. The war is bleeding the US government coffers dry. The first war was justified because the US didn’t pay for it.

On immigration, this recent arrival is in harmony with John Howard’s thinking. He believes that people should integrate, frowning on the multitude of communities mushrooming across the country. He particularly disapproves of the cultures ‘down there’, said with a nod down the coast towards Tijuana. They don’t seem to have made any progress. They don’t have a work ethic.
‘Until recently, Tijuana dumped its sewage in the sea, and it would end up over here’ he says. ‘I think we put pressure on them and they’ve stopped, now.’

Is the US, partial desert California in particular, concerned with running out of drinking water? He shrugs.
‘I guess we’ll just build a plant to convert sea water into drinking water. They do it all over the world.’
He is matter of fact; unemotional about the issue that is currently so fraught in Australia.

I should mention here that Vangeli has a PhD in Urban Planning, with a history of very good jobs in the field, particularly in community and city planning. He is smarter than your average American (or Australian, for that matter).

We pick each other’s brains on America and Australia and impressions.

‘I don’t see any of the really fat people everyone talks about’ I laugh. ‘In Australia, we hear that there are a lot really obese people here.’
‘Oh, they’re here’ he says, serious all of a sudden. ‘There are some VERY FAT people here. But we’re at the beach. Everyone wants to look good, here.’
We’re also in a very affluent area.



ABOVE: More Encinitas beach

I see far less of San Diego than I want to. I see some spectacular beaches, where I walk on the sand and scramble over rocks, peering into rockpools and meeting octopuses, crabs and tiny fish. I see seagulls hopping across the rocks and pelicans soaring over my head. I see swaying palm trees many times higher than the buildings they frame – everywhere I go.



ABOVE: La Jolla, San Diego's most affluent area. Also a location filimg spot for 'Veronica Mars', for the interested ...

But I don’t see Old Town, the original San Diego, preserved for modern-day use as a tourist attraction, housing restaurants, museums and gift shops. I don’t see the famous Gaslamp district, home of San Diego nightlife, except fleetingly. And I don’t see Balboa Park or San Diego Zoo or downtown.

But San Diego does give good beach. And this is my most relaxing stop so far.

Breaking a leg in San Diego

You know how they say that a bad dress rehearsal signifies a good opening night? I wonder if that applies to first impressions of a city.

The Greyhound rolls into its San Diego terminal past a cacophony of neon lit billboards advertising the services of bail bondsman; a series of slogans along the lines of: ‘We’ll get you out sooner!’ I’ve heard (and noticed) that the greyhound terminals are always in the worst part of town, but this is ridiculous. It’s the first time I’ve seen such a targeted display of advertising to criminals.

My cab driver has never heard of Point Loma, let alone my hostel, but although I seem to have lost my instructions on how to get there, he tells me not to worry. He radios through a request to head office, and I hear a detailed stream of street-by-street instructions come back to him. I settle back in the cab and relax, peering curiously at my surrounds beyond the window. Despite the thriving business for bail bondsman, the San Diego I see is seemingly squeaky clean. Palm trees and attractive middle-class houses navigated by modest but well-to-do shopping strips.

The driver gets horrendously lost, and tells me to write down the number on the meter as my final charge, telling me what a nice guy he is for not charging me for his mistake. Tired and disoriented, keen to reach the hostel before the front desk closes at 10pm, I agree and thank him. I empty each of my bags, one by one, looking for my instructions, which I distinctly remember stashing in ‘a safe place’. My safe places often work out like this – so safe even I don’t know where they are. No luck. I switch on my laptop, though I know the battery is near dead, and manage to pull the street address out of it just before the screen collapses into silence. The driver stops at the 7/11 and asks a young guy in the car next to us where we find Udall Street. He tells him. We get to Udall, a tiny street about ten houses long. No hostel.
‘There must be another Udall’ I say.
‘You must have the wrong address’ the driver tells me. I assure him I don’t. It was cut and pasted from the hostel website. I suggest he consult the street directory.

Pissed off, haranguing me about how much trouble he will be in, how much this is costing him, and how I will pay him for this, he cruises around, stopping at traffic lights and asking fellow motorists where the hostel is. Halfway to the wrong hostel, I manage to convince him to return to Udall Street. He asks a couple of residents carrying six packs from their cars about the hostel. They tell him they’ve lived on the street for years, and it’s not there.
‘Well, right’ the driver says. ‘I’m going to have to take you back to the terminal. And when we get there, we’ll take the number you wrote down, and split the difference.’ I look at the meter. It’s at around $40 - and climbing. The hostel staff have told me the ride should cost $10. (The number I wrote down was $24.) I beg the driver to look at a street directory. He does, but shakes his head over it. I ask to see it, but it’s not organised the same as the Melways and UBD at home. I squint at it, and manage to find another Udall, but can’t work out where we are in relation to it. Neither can he.
‘Ten years, I been driving a cab here and I never got lost’ he mumbles. ‘What have you done to me?’
Given his inability to read a map, and that it took him an hour and much pleading before he even looked at the street directory, I find this hard to believe, but don’t say so. The driver pulls in at Domino’s Pizza. He tells me that he will ask these guys, and if they don’t know how to get there, we’re going back to downtown and the Greyhound terminal.

Someday soon I will need to order a Domino’s pizza or ten in gratitude, because the staff know where the hostel is, and give the driver detailed instructions.
‘It exists?’ I ask them from the taxi window. They confirm that it does. ‘You’ve seen it?’ Yes. ‘And you know how to get there?’
‘Don’t worry’ says one of the uniformed teenagers, shooting me a sympathetic smile, but talking to me in low tones, as if I’m a slightly hysterical crazy woman (which I am by now). ‘He knows to get there now. He’ll take you there.’

I pay the driver $37. He tells me what a good guy he is for not charging me more. I am shaking as I gather my bags. I guess I was more scared than I thought at the very near prospect of being stranded at the station, among all those bail bondsman billboards. And I am barely containing my rage.
‘What’s wrong?’ he laughs. ‘You seem a bit nervous.’
‘I’m fine.’

The hostel is worth the trouble. Dress rehearsal over, the main event opens with much-deserved internal applause. The red-painted two-storey stucco is set back from the road, set against tall trees and shrubbery, with a picnic-style benches and table in the inviting front yard. The front door is lit, as if waiting for me. A pleasant-looking college student with a hastily tied-back ponytail and a nose ring is sitting at the front window, and lets me in. She listens to my horror cab story with sympathy as she arranges my room. I’ve booked a private, but she tells me that there’s an empty dorm I can have to myself for less than half the price. I gratefully accept. There is a common room with dining tables, a chess set, magazines and a bookshelf. Location maps, bus schedules and tourist brochures line the walls, accompanied by handwritten notes on the best places to go and how to get there. I am assigned a drawer in the kitchen, where I can get tea and coffee any time and free pancakes in the morning. A few backpackers sit huddled over laptops or sipping drinks. This is one million times better than the Renoir. And much cheaper. After checking my emails and venting about my cab ride to Tony, I go to bed in my cheerfully painted dorm room - to the sound of absolute silence.