New leg of the journey

It is an interesting experience to spend so much time with oneself. I’m not good at quieting my mind and just being, but that’s part of the role of this trip. Yesterday, I spent nearly 10 hours in transit, from taxis to bus stops, buses going in the opposite direction than I needed to go so that I could catch the correct bus going the right way, retracing those steps (and traffic jams) I had just passed, and then careening over two-lane mountain roads to finally arrive in Mazatlan at 8:30 at night (discovering later that I had also crossed a time zone and it was actually 7:30).

But long travel days are good for thinking, staring out the window, daydreaming, speculating. I passed so many tiny pueblos, and seeing the architecture and patterns of these little towns and villages in Mexico always discourages me: They contain a taco stand or small restaurant with a few plastic chairs, right out on the sidewalk; if large enough a Pemex station (national gas company) or an Oxxo (like a 7-11); and always various structures mid-construction or mid-decay. Buildings go up and fall down here with regularity, and the result is that the entire country has a feel of being about to spring into action or about to fall into ruin. And everywhere, there is garbage, piles of broken bricks and building refuse, rusted car parts, stray dogs, graffiti.

Yesterday we did pass through some landscape that I have rarely seen in the parts of Mexico I have traveled so far: beautiful rolling hills covered with grasses, farmland with neat rows of crops, a river or two. It was while we were still in Nayarit state, before we had arrived in the larger city of Tepic. Later, when we crossed the border into Sinaloa state, the bus was boarded by agriculture checkpoint workers and some other group, not police, and I’m not sure what they wanted. They boarded, asked where we were going, took a quick look around, and left. A little later, on the opposite side of the road, we saw a massive police checkpoint, with armed and even masked police officers carrying automatic weapons. One often sees large groups of police in Mexico, in the cities and the country, so it was not surprising to me. But it is still unsettling to see uniformed masked men with military-grade weapons pointed at what seem to be average citizens.

We arrived in Mazatlan after dark, so I have barely seen anything of this city. I want to walk around the old town and perhaps even take a tour of some colonial cities nearby dating to the 1600s. Mazatlan’s “old” town dates only to the 19th century, and this city’s history has largely been only as a tourist destination. It is considered a place where Mexicans go on vacation, and it is much easier to speak and be spoken to in Spanish by the hotel staff than it was in Puerto Vallarta.

A new leg of my journey begins! I am not in my slice of heaven at Playa Escondida. I have just finished reading a travel memoir by Mary Morris, Nothing to Declare, who wrote of traveling alone through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua in the 1970s. Many of her observations resonated with me, but after a travel day like yesterday, I sought out this one:

“Women who travel as I travel are dreamers. Our lives seem to be lives of endless possibility. Like readers of romances we think that anything can happen to us at any time. We forget that this is not our real life---our life of domestic details, work pressures, attempts and failures at human relations. We keep moving. From anecdote to anecdote, from hope to hope. Around the next bend something new will befall us. Nostalgia has no place for the woman traveling alone. Our motion is forward, whether by train or daydream.”