ROAD TO HUAJIMIC
Background — From the travel journal Hiatus of Abe Franklin. At this point, his travelling companion is Nick the Brit, an avowed world traveller. Abe quotes prices in Mexican pesos with an exchange rate of $3,000 pesos to $1US (2,000 to $1AU). The narrative begins in Jala, Nayarit, Mexico.
This morning again, before daylight, we were woke by fireworks and a marching band. It was not a national holiday. Later when we asked José, he laughed but didn't explain. He had quite a way of laughing but not explaining.
We waited in the shade of a large oak tree with José. We were trying to catch a ride out of town, and he was waiting for the mayor to take him to a nearby mesa-top village for an inaugural basketball game. I asked again about brujos in nearby villages. José finally said, “There are people who practice black magic in Jomulco.” I wondered what kind of things they do, and he shrugged. I asked if children or pets sometimes disappear or if mutilated cattle are found. He only laughed.
Nick took José's address in Mexico City and promised to visit him there in a couple of weeks. About that time, we caught a ride with a man going as far as Ahuacatlán.
Hitchhiking to Mojarras was crazy. The highway was two-lane, wide enough to be comfortable for bikes, but most of the traffic was semis, busses, and fruit trucks loaded with sugarcane. I am talking about the main highway between Mazatlán and Guadalajara. We rode in the bed of pickup trucks in a roaring wind, bouncing and shuddering over hills and around curves. Here and there, demolished vehicles littered the roadside.
The last people to pick us up were going to Cologna Moderna, and the obligatory English speaker, Carlos, jumped into the back with us. We wanted to go to San José de Mojarras, on the way to Huajimic, but Carlos told us how bad the road was to Huajimic and prevailed on us to go to a rodeo in Cologna Moderna instead. We sailed right through Mojarras without stopping.
Carlos is an American citizen, visiting family in Santa Maria for a couple of weeks. He had been in an auto accident on the main highway, two weeks previously, in which four of seven people died. He couldn't stop talking and laughing incredulously about it.
The rodeo is a major regional event. An uncemented rock wall, five and a half feet tall and two and a half feet thick, defined the arena. About 800 people sat and stood on this wall and on the bed of fruit trucks parked around the ring.
Young men took turns swigging tequila from a large plastic jug and risking their lives on normally passive, Brahman bulls, made angry by lashing and electrical shocks. One guy was thrown and stomped with full force in the abdomen and chest. People were giving him mouth-to-mouth and CPR. Someone ran over with the Tequila jug, and the band played on.
My appearance was a source of amusement for little kids who would run up to me, stare with a finger in their mouth, and run away laughing. [ed. note — Abe is a towhead with tangled locks hanging to his shoulders. In addition, he would appear curiously tall and Anglo.] After much joviality, forced drinks of Tequila, and strong encouragement for Nick and me to ride a bull, the rodeo began to break up and migrate to the plaza.
We left because our hosts were getting drunk, we didn't know them very well, and our packs were still in the back of their truck. Looking after our stuff was a good enough excuse to avoid trouble and we had big plans for the next day, our all-important journey to Huajimic. They did come up with a half-baked plan for us to spend the night at Carlos' house in Santa Maria to avoid our leaving just then. We could have put our packs in a safe place and partied into the night. It would have been great — this is the real Mexico that we have stumbled onto. But we hitched a ride to Mojarras, while the night was still young, to be in position for an early start tomorrow to Huajimic.
There is always something exciting going on. Many weekend nights, there is dancing and a band at the plaza. There are numerous religious and national holidays. There are funerals, weddings, birthdays, regional holidays, inaugural sports events, major sports events, ordinary events, parades, and celebrations whose purpose is unknown. Typically, these wind up with a dance at the plaza. If you go out in public, you will be invited to anything going on within a 10-mile radius. A great portion of highway traffic, other than busses and freight, is people heading to these events. If you are hitchhiking, you are likely to be invited, and it may, in fact, be inconvenient not to go along.
Traveling from point A to point B, you will miss opportunities by turning down invitations. To successfully reject an invitation, you must justify to your host how your goal is more important than the celebration — impossible from his point of view unless your destination is of recognized value to him. So, you might decide to attend the fiesta. Once again, we discover that it is best to travel in Mexico without a time restraint. Once you find that your time is limited, it is time to go home.
Tonight in Mojarras, I am reviewing my plans. I would like to spend a few more days in San Blas before returning to the border early in December. Until I actually make the trip to Huajimic, I will not know if it were worth missing tonight's party in Cologna Moderna.
Our lodging in Mojarras is overpriced, $15,000 bargained down from $20,000, but it sure is interesting. The bath takes the form of a 55-gallon barrel with a plastic pail to pour water over oneself. The toilet is porcelain but is located in a shack next to the pigpen and bath barrel. The man who owns the place, about 70 years old and nearly blind, led me to the bathroom in the dark, clutching my arm from behind. As we entered our room for the first time, a woman was leaving through the back door with an overnight bag. We suspect she was ousted in favor of the paying customers. Mind you, this is not a hotel but where we were led after explaining to the grocery-store guy that we needed a place to camp.
23 November
The old man knocked to wake us after we had woken. He and his son then watched us pack with some amazement at the extent of our material wealth. Our sleeping bags, bright colored and compacted to about a fifth their apparent volume, were particularly interesting. The son recognized my Levi jeans and said, “¡Levis, Bueno!”
We said thank you and adiós, walked to a logical place to catch the bus, and began searching for some frijoles and tortillas. Everyone was already up, just after sunrise on a Saturday, and the morning was grand.
We were stared at in a way that made us uncomfortable — this “outsider” effect was worse here than in Jala and would be worse still in Huajimic later on. It was not so bad at the rodeo because we had guides.
This brings me to two important assets for traveling into the backcountry anywhere; know the language and have a guide. One is sufficient for successful and enjoyable travel, both are best. Other aids to getting along are the adoption of humble dress and avoidance of displaying technological devices such as watches and cameras. Backpacks are bad enough, but lose their techno-sheen with one good exposure to dirt.
Everyone, standing around on the street, was quiet. Some smiled and spoke among themselves about us. One man behind us said, “Money, money.” Kids stared with round white eyes and with a finger up their nose. Some groups whispered together and then ran away.
I approached a man and said awkwardly, “¿Donde es un restaurante para desayuno?”
“¿¡Mande!?” the doomed fellow said, probably thinking, “Why me?” I repeated the question. So frequently, we are not understood the first time. We try so hard to master the pronunciation and to use the right gender and word order. When we have to use verbs, we attempt to use the correct conjugation. But the person is so surprised that we would speak to him at all and so unaccustomed to hearing Spanish as a foreign language that he forgets to listen. Afterward, he often makes fun of us but doesn't correct us.
Anyway, we were led across the street to the dining room of a woman who was probably a widow, earning some extra pesos by cooking. It was more of a religious shrine than a restaurant. We had frijoles and a beany, porky, adobada-type substance and coffee.
When the bus came, we missed it. We were worried but were assured that the bus would return. It drove on every street in town honking its horn and picking people up with their Coca-Cola, crates of tomatoes, and bags of onions. When it passed down our street again, we could have squeezed in, but Nick wanted to ride on top with the produce and an Indian-looking fellow. We were afforded the most wonderful panoramic view, unobstructed by opaque dust-caked windows.
The distance from Mojarras to Huajimic is 85 km and the trip took six hours. Sometimes butterflies flew faster than the bus, but we still had to hold onto the cargo rack as the bus rocked back and forth over rocks and through ruts. We had to make ourselves flat at times to avoid lacerations by tree branches.
Just before the main ascent into the mountains, the bus descended into the V-shaped gorge of the Rio Grande de Santiago. Although there is a bridge nearing completion, the method of crossing, at this time, is to load all of the people and onions into a cable cart. The cart rolls across the river to the middle. Two men, operating levers on the cart, laboriously crank it the rest of the way.
Some brave souls, we included, walked across the river on the incomplete bridge. We didn't realize when we started that we would have to walk across the last half on two-inch metal beams, two foot apart, with a ball-breaking lattice and raging white water below. It was scary. I experienced some vertigo looking down and loss of balance looking up. My backpack didn't help the situation.
On the other side, we met another bus and completed the slowest and steepest part of the journey, leading to a wide, fertile valley. Its hills and slopes are generally free of rocks and gentle enough to be cultivated with machinery. A small stream threads its way through the valley, and innumerable small ones empty from their gorges on the east slope. It is farmed only minimally, mostly with corn. Most of the land was pasture for Brahman cattle.
The route that the road takes does not seem logical — I presume because of steep cliffs or dramatic narrowing just over the horizon on either end of the valley.
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