Llama for Lunch (5 page)
Next morning, when I tried to wash my hair, I found that the hotel’s accoutrements did not run to hot water. I had to brave a cold shower. But my room did have good air conditioning and that was important in the heat.
I ate dinner at a cafe on the main drag. It must have catered to tourist tastes as I had the blandest enchaladas fobbed off on me as Mexican tucker. The meal’s one redeeming feature was that it was cheap. The next day I found a local cafe and ordered one dish. It came complete with bean soup, salad and many side dishes but the food was still uninspiring.
At the station I found that a bus left for Monterrey, three hours south, almost immediately, but the bus to San Miguel de Allende, on the central plateau of Mexico, which I had chosen as my destination, did not leave until six in the evening. I took the Monterrey bus thinking that I would find another from there to San Miguel. I was most impressed by the Mexican bus. It had decent leg room and comfortable seats but it came complete with the obligatory screaming video. I inserted my ever-ready ear plugs and could still hear comfortably. The film was a dreadful James Bond but the subtitles helped me learn some Spanish. Everyone working for the bus line was polite. They found the bus for you, gave you a seat number and stowed your bags. There was even a toilet on the bus, albeit a cantankerous one. From the outside the door wouldn’t open without a strenuous wrestle, and once inside it wouldn’t shut.
We hadn’t gone far into Mexico before we were stopped at a check-point. A soldierly type climbed onto the bus and videotaped us all, while others searched the baggage compartment under the bus. We were stopped and checked several more times along the way. Later, in San Miguel, I learned that highwaymen and bandits rob buses in the remote areas of the north. I was glad that I found this out after I had survived the trip through the most isolated part of Mexico unscathed.
On leaving Nuevo Laredo I had thought that I was now going to see the Mexico of legend, but the country didn’t look particularly exotic. It was early summer and the sparse bushy scrub of the northern desert was still quite green although there were no trees. There was little sign of habitation, though a few cows appeared now and then as we drove further south, indicating that a ranch was out there somewhere. Later we progressed to clumps of trees, not pines and fir as in the USA but scrubby bush trees.
We came upon infrequent buildings that were square and flat-roofed with lean-to verandahs tacked on to their fronts. Some of these houses were crazily warped and their tin roofs rusted and sagging. In this ‘great wasteland of the north’ villages were few and far between along the road, although I saw one tiny place that consisted of a small congregation of primitive dwellings and a dog so skinny that its legs splayed out as though they didn’t have the strength to hold it up.
Apart from the cows and the dog I saw only an occasional lone eagle, hawk or buzzard. Grazing animals had pushed the native mountain lions, deer and coyotes into isolated areas. Still common are armadillos, snakes and rabbits but I saw none. I read that the tropical forests of the south and east continue to harbour howler monkeys, jaguars, tapirs, anteaters, toucans, and reptiles such as boa constrictors, while iguanas and other lizards are found in warm parts.
Then we were driving through desert where prickly pear and cacti shaped like strange, long toilet brushes poked up into the sky. Most of the world’s fifteen hundred species of cactus are found in Mexico. The sides of the road were dotted with shrines made of wood, cast iron, concrete and metal that commemorated road accident victims. Each time relatives or friends visit the site they leave a pebble or stone and cairns are created. A grim warning for the traveller.
Monterrey bus station is enormous. I encountered six waiting rooms in front of the various bus starting gates and several garishly decorated religious shrines where nervous passengers could seek fortitude. The entrance to the toilets was lit up like a nightclub by a big neon sign under which a woman guard was stationed. You put a coin in a box and she moved a turnstile to admit you. When I first saw this alluringlooking place on the far wall of the station I thought it must be something interesting, like a casino.
Sitting in the adjacent waiting room listening to the sound of constantly dropping coins, I decided that the toilets were doing a roaring trade. But it was worth the point two of a peseta you paid to get admitted. The walls were tiled all the way up to the ceiling but the doors didn’t lock and reached only to your shoulders – just high enough to cover your personals and the business end of you. Toilet paper was not provided in the stalls. This ensured that you didn’t play with it or, worse, put it in your pocket. A big communal roll of paper hung on the wall by the entrance door and as you came in you were permitted, under the eagle eye of the attendant, to take some. Later I found some places that didn’t even allow you this liberty but doled you out a ration. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until it was too late to go back for some.
I had thought I would find a bus to San Miguel de Allende leaving fairly soon but there wasn’t one until nine that night so I had a long wait. Depositing my bags in the cloak room I went into the VIP lounge. I had a first-class ticket so I figured I was entitled to use these facilities, but I was soon disabused of that notion. A guard woman very nicely asked to see my ticket and then directed me back out with the common herd. I was curious to find out who these VIPs were who rode on buses – the lounge was huge but it was empty.
I spent the day hanging about the waiting rooms, trying them all in turn, alternately reading or knitting and watching the people. Many Mexican men are extraordinarily handsome in their ten-gallon hats, cowboy boots and silver-buckled belts. Some are very dark-skinned. I had noticed the change in people’s looks as soon as I had arrived in San Antonio and from there on it seemed every man wore a ten-gallon hat. I did not see one sombrero in Mexico, just ten-gallon white-straw or black-felt cowboy hats. Had they seen too many Western movies? At one stage a forty-year-old man sat next to me engrossed in a comic book.
I had expected a bit of spitting but it was the nose-blowing with the fingers onto the shiny terrazzo floor that I found offputting. I filled in an hour having lunch in the expensive restaurant, which was baking hot. Conversely, it had been freezing in the VIP lounge so I’m glad I didn’t stay there – sour grapes!
In the evening I saw a bus pulling in that I thought was the one I wanted. I confirmed this with a gorgeous Mexican man who appeared to have something to do with the staff, and he helped me take my bags to the departure point. I went off to buy a bottle of water and when I returned another man was standing guard over my bags. He proceeded to give me, I think, a lecture along the lines of: ‘You shouldn’t have left them.’ I thought it was kind of him to care. I had been warned that Mexico was the land of machismo and a violent country where you must take all precautions against theft. And that pocket-picking and purse-snatching was common – not to mention highway robbery on buses and trains, especially at night in the north. And Mexico City was reputed to be so bad I had decided not to go there.
The extremely comfortable, but extremely cold bus was almost empty. One other woman, six men and I made up the complement of passengers. After an hour and a half’s travel we stopped for thirty minutes and continued to do so regularly for the rest of the way, probably because we had only one driver, who was closeted like a jet pilot in a curtained cabin at the front of the bus. Noise emanating from in there sounded very much like a television. Was he absorbed in his favourite soap opera? Asleep? Dead? You’d never know. Our driver had to contend with tremendous winds, rain and wet roads coming up into the mountains. We were catching the edge of a hurricane that was causing havoc further south and was spreading across the country.
The first stop we made was at a shop that was really just a cement-floored shed with a few metal racks scattered with a meagre supply of goods. I tried to buy some provisions but the stock leaned heavily to biscuits and drinks and all I got were some ghastly sweet wafers. Back on the bus I slept off and on and it didn’t seem very long before it was a quarter to five in the morning. I snoozed again and then it was seven o’clock and getting light. There were, thank goodness, no videos on this bus.
Approaching San Miguel de Allende the bus stopped in out-back country at a run-down farm house where an old man in a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots got off. The beginnings of the town were very ordinary looking; shabby ramshackle little square boxes of houses with flat roofs. The bus station was small but pleasing with its religious shrine and a lavatory entrance once again lit up something gorgeous – green on one side for males, pink on the other for females and in between colourful pastoral scenes painted on the walls and flowers, albeit plastic, everywhere.
I taxied to the youth hostel where the taxi driver asked me for fifty pesos. I said, ‘No. Twenty five.’
‘Si,’ he said and smiled.
The hostel was a quaint place that fronted right onto the old cobblestone street. At first glance these streets look as though they contain nothing except decrepit walls, then you notice that there are gates in the wall. The hostel’s gate had an open grille above it and a plaque in the wall that declared its identity. A big piece of wood hung down on a rope and you pulled this to ring a bell and summon help. I pulled the rope and inside the gate discovered a lovely courtyard filled with plants and flowers.
But I soon learned that this was not the place for me. According to the guide book the hostel had single as well as double rooms. The proprietress denied this. She had one double, which she refused to let to a single. That book has a lot to answer for. But the woman was very helpful and directed me elsewhere. The San Bernado Hotel where I eventually came to roost, was the first hotel so far since I’d left home that hadn’t insisted on the money up front. I didn’t have enough Mexican pesos to pay but I was assured that this was okay. I wrapped myself in a thick Mexican blanket, fell on the bed and slept for four hours.
When I woke I got smartened up and went to look at the town. San Miguel de Allende is a colonial town of old buildings and cobbled streets in a beautiful hillside setting that affords splendid vistas of plains and mountains in Guanajuanto state. The entire town has been declared a national monument to protect it.
There had been irrigation-based agriculture here since 200 BC. After the Spanish invasion, a barefoot Franciscan friar called Fray Juan de San Miguel started a mission here in 1542. Later a Spanish garrison was established to protect the road from the south to the mines of Guanajuanto, which for two centuries produced up to forty per cent of the world’s silver as well as gold, iron, lead, zinc and tin and are still important sources of silver and gold. Ranchers and cropgrowers followed the road and San Miguel grew into a thriving commercial centre where the silver barons built sumptuous homes and lived opulently on slave labour.
San Miguel was also the home of the Mexican revolution. Ignacio Allende, who was born here in 1779, organised the uprising for independence. He was executed in 1811 before independence was gained, but in 1826 the town was re-named San Miguel de Allende in his honour.
In 1938 the Escuola De Bellas Artes was built and in the forties painting classes at the school attracted artists from all over Mexico, the United States and other countries. This high, unpolluted place has a superb light. Writers and other arty types gravitated in the painters’ wake and from the 1950s the Instituto Allende’s Spanish courses have attracted foreign students. But I didn’t see many foreigners – they don’t come south until it is winter up north.
The San Bernado Hotel (everything possible here was San something) was a joy. An unprepossessing walled exterior presented to the street, but once inside the immense, carved, creaking wooden doors I found a tiled foyer that opened onto a delightful courtyard filled with pots, plants, creepers and a life-sized whimsical statue of a musician complete with guitar. A red-flowered tachoma vine with a trunk like a tree wound up three storeys to cover the flat roof top and pergola. On one side of the courtyard was an extremely high wall covered with creeping vines. A fountain with a pool at its feet was set in the wall. On the other side were guest rooms that opened onto the courtyard on the ground floor or the verandah on the floor above. The courtyard and balconies were surrounded by brick arches in which stood pedestals and embossed earthernware pots that overflowed with bright red and pink geraniums, impatiens and bougainvilleas.
The floor of my second-storey room was tiled, as were half the walls, and inset in the floor tiles, as well as in the roof of the bathroom, were thick, old embossed glass bricks, twelve inches square. You walked on them as well as using them as skylights. On my balcony I had a comfortable chair covered with leather, and an iron garden seat. From the balcony two tiled steps led up to my wooden door with its glass insets, either side of which were wooden framed windows with iron grilles. Inside, my room had fine old carved furniture, a big comfortable bed, reasonable lights and, in the bathroom, the weirdest window– it had an open hole in its centre. At night I stuck a carrier bag over it to keep out the cold.