Mexico

Our first stop in Mexico was a city called Cancún. In our admittedly uninformed view at the time, the city seemed to have two distinct halves: downtown and the strip of hotels along the coast. Downtown looked to us like a small county town in China, with none of the presence of a major city. We thought it looked shabby and dirty. The hotel strip, by contrast, was prosperous and polished. Cancún was a resort destination, and most tourists headed straight for the seaside hotel zone, so its prosperity made sense. Still, the contrast was so extreme that we jokingly wondered whether the coast had somehow become American territory.

On our first day, we went downtown to get SIM cards. It was not merely run-down; to us, it looked spectacularly run-down. We also needed cash and tried to find a bank using the map on a phone, without a proper map of our own. The navigation was clearly wrong. We joked that the place must have been demolished and rebuilt so many times that the map had given up. Eventually we wandered into a strange alley, surrounded by miscellaneous clutter and dogs that would not stop barking. The noise was driving us mad.

One of my companions announced that this place was hopeless and that, the next time we played Civilization, Mexico would have to be the first civilization eliminated. Thus was composed the following deeply undistinguished verse:

Downtown Cancún on our first day, Into a ragged backstreet we strayed. While roadside dogs barked without cessation, Mexico goes first in our next game of Civilization.

Over the next few days, we rented a car and visited several ancient sites, collecting still more reasons for our entirely in-game policy of eliminating Mexico first.

At the time, we managed to rent a car in Mexico using US driver’s licenses. Only two of the four of us had them, so in theory only two of us could drive. In practice, the other licensed driver had not driven once since passing his test. He was technically licensed, but that qualification was practically useless behind the wheel. So I did all the driving. We covered more than two hundred kilometers round trip each day. The car handled it fine; the driver was the part being steadily worn out.

The day before Chichén Itzá, we played beach soccer with some local Mexicans. I injured a toe and started walking with a limp. I later discovered that driving did not really require much use of my toes.

Then we identified a potential flaw in the plan. What if I fell while limping, collided with the other licensed driver, caused him to twist his ankle, and got knocked down again as he fell? Both available drivers could simultaneously become “unfit for driving.” How would everyone get back then?

We therefore walked very carefully around the Maya sites, keenly aware that any further incident might compromise the expedition’s remaining driving capacity.

On the supposed day of the apocalypse, we went to Chichén Itzá. Yes, the famous Maya site that popular culture had forcibly attached to the 2012 “Maya apocalypse” rumor.

On the way there, we did something completely ridiculous. A sign beside an overpass indicated a left turn, so as soon as we saw a ramp turning left, we took it. Only once we were on it did we realize we had turned too early. More to the point, we were driving the wrong way up the ramp.

The good news was that ours was the only car on the entire ramp. The bad news was that we were already on it.

The ramp was too narrow to turn around, so we had to put the car in reverse and back all the way down. Without encountering a single other vehicle, we somehow managed the remarkable feat of driving the wrong way up a ramp and then reversing back out of it.

Looking back, I have to admit that getting home in one piece owed at least something to luck.

And what did we do there, on that particular day? We played cards. One friend wandered around with his wallet-destroying DSLR habit, while the remaining three of us sat together and played Dou Dizhu, a Chinese card game, for an entire hour. We were mildly uneasy. We did not seriously expect the whole world to end that day. But this one site? That seemed marginally more plausible. What if the rumor had accidentally stumbled onto the correct fate of this particular place?

Eventually, a group of tourists joined hands around the enormous pyramid and began walking in a circle. That finally persuaded us to put down the cards and observe this mysterious gathering. They appeared to be praying as they circled the pyramid, chanting something we could not make out. In my head, the subtitles read: “Party wipe, please.”

The biggest mishap of the trip came on the drive back to our hotel from Chichén Itzá. Between the four of us, we had exactly one working SIM card, bought on our trip downtown a few days earlier. We were using that phone to navigate. The guy with the phone was also playing music on it. Eventually, the battery died.

We were still dozens of kilometers from the hotel, in the middle of nowhere. That gave us quite a scare. None of us remembered the way back. Now what?

Our solution was to head for the Hotel Zone (Zona Hotelera) along the coast. It was a big enough destination to appear on plenty of road signs. The signs were in Spanish, but those two words looked close enough to English that even we could recognize them. We would concentrate on reaching the Hotel Zone first, then follow the coastal road and check the hotels one by one. There was only one road, after all.

It worked. We took several wrong turns, but the Hotel Zone was such a prominent destination that almost wherever we ended up, another sign would point us back toward it. Eventually, we reached the strip and found our hotel.

What an ordeal.

During those days in Cancún, we also visited an island. We could have taken our rental car across on the ferry, but that was clearly too expensive. Instead, we left the car behind, took the boat over, and rented a tiny vehicle on the island. It looked something like an electric cart.

That was not the interesting part. Renting it required a driver’s license, so we naturally assumed driving it did too. Yet the thing moved so slowly that it barely seemed faster than running, and operating it required almost no skill. One of our classmates who did not have a license wanted to try, so we let them take the wheel.

Then a police car appeared directly ahead of us. The driver panicked immediately and asked, “What do we do? What do we do?” We told them to keep driving normally. If the police stopped us, we would deal with it then. So they carried on, the police paid no attention to us, and the two vehicles passed each other without incident.

Just as we were congratulating ourselves on our luck, we noticed another vehicle nearby. A father was holding a child who looked about five or six years old and letting the child steer. The kid’s entire upper body hardly seemed larger than the steering wheel, but there he was, turning it back and forth.

At that point, we were speechless. If the police were not worried about that, they certainly were not going to worry about us.

During our time in Cancún, we also had our first experience of watching a movie dubbed in Spanish: Life of Pi. Spanish voices, English subtitles—the result was thoroughly disorienting. The movie was already abstract enough; our viewing experience made it even more so. By the end, Life of Pi had become something closer to Life of Why Is Any of This Happening?

After a few comfortable days at a Cancún resort, it was time to take a bus toward Mexico City.

That winter, we made our way to Mexico City. Getting there was an ordeal in itself.

We started in Cancún and traveled all the way to Mexico City by long-distance bus. In Cancún, one of our friends went to buy the tickets, managing to get his not particularly fluent English across to someone whose English was no more fluent, and somehow came back with tickets.

After that, we essentially stopped hearing English. Once we left the well-known tourist area around Cancún, almost no one we encountered along the way could communicate with us in English.

The first bus left Cancún for some city in southeastern Mexico whose name began with O. I have no idea which city it was. Too much time has passed, and I was not the one who planned the itinerary. All I remember is that one of my companions had found this classic route in Lonely Planet.

What I remember much more clearly is that this bus had a very distinctive smell.

The ride lasted about twenty hours. By the time we bought our tickets, only seats in the last few rows were left, so that was what we took. We had not yet grasped the consequences. Once aboard, we discovered a restroom at the back of the bus. A restroom on a long-distance bus was nothing unusual. The important detail was that its door would not close properly. That was manageable while someone was inside; they could hold the door shut. The real problem was that it would not stay closed when no one was using it either. The last five rows or so spent the entire trip steeped in a powerful smell of urine and feces.

We sat on that bus for twenty hours, from five in the evening until the following afternoon. I did not dare use the restroom; its condition was deeply questionable. I did not dare get off at a stop to find one either, because the bus might leave and I would simply be gone. I was young, and apparently a young body could endure an astonishing amount. Somehow I survived all those hours without a bathroom break.

By the time we got off, I felt as though the smell had soaked all the way through me. We reached a small hotel—or guesthouse, if you prefer; the distinction hardly mattered. I took off my clothes and gave them a cautious sniff. Yes, the smell had indeed soaked in. I took a shower and threw the clothes away.

The owner of the guesthouse spoke no English at all, and Chinese was obviously out of the question. Every conversation was conducted through gestures and guesswork. The menu at mealtimes was equally unreadable. Our strategy was to recognize a few Spanish words—or rather, two concepts: chicken and beef. We searched the menu for anything that seemed related and ordered more or less at random.

We later wandered around the city. To me, it looked like a small highland town, not all that different from some of the small county towns I had seen in China.

Then we continued by bus. Having learned from the first trip, we decisively bought seats near the front. Perhaps a little too near the front. We were in the first row, almost shoulder to shoulder with the driver. The smell was gone, but now the lights at the front nearly blinded us. The bus left at night and arrived in the morning, and my one clear memory of that night is how incredibly bright those lights were. Once again, we barely slept. Young bodies really were remarkably resilient.

This time we arrived in another city whose name began with O. It was much larger, though not especially interesting to us. We stayed for two days and moved on.

Once again, we boarded a long-distance bus. At least the final leg was not quite as long. After several days in transit and more hours on buses than I could count, we finally reached Mexico City.

The moment we stepped off the bus, a taxi driver delivered a memorable warning: he said the north was full of drug traffickers and that we absolutely should not go there. We took this to heart and quietly stayed around the central part of the city, afraid to venture too far north. Later, we came to think that by “the north,” he may not have meant northern Mexico City at all, but northern Mexico more generally, near the US border. He was probably trying to warn us about drug-related problems in that region. The parts of Mexico City we actually visited, however, felt perfectly fine to us.

We went straight to what we had been told was “the largest church in Latin America.” It certainly was large, though churches were not especially meaningful to me. The friend carrying a DSLR, on the other hand, went into overdrive and photographed everything in sight.

Then we explored Mexico City. Wait… was this Beijing?

To my eyes, the buildings in Mexico City’s central business district looked uncannily like Beijing. According to one of my companions at the time, tall buildings in American cities did not seem to be scattered around this way and were usually concentrated in particular districts. The spacing, the height, the overall appearance—it all looked like Beijing to me. Honestly, if the signs on the buildings had not been in Spanish, I could have looked up and convinced myself that I was standing in Zhongguancun.

The final question was how to get back to the United States. Everyone had had enough of Mexican long-distance buses: they were slow, they swayed all over the road, and they smelled terrible. The bus back to Cancún would take more than twenty-four hours. Absolutely not. Anyone else was welcome to ride it, but I was done. Our round-trip flights were booked through Cancún, so we still had to leave from there. We therefore bought plane tickets from Mexico City to Cancún.

What seems slightly astonishing in retrospect is that one of my companions handled everything along the way, from hotel reservations to plane tickets, on a phone. This was 2012, when booking an entire trip by phone was nowhere near as convenient or routine as it is today. Pulling it off throughout the journey was no small feat. And somehow, in the end, we successfully made it back to the United States.

Outside Cancún, the internet at every hotel we stayed in was dreadful. All I can say is that the person booking everything must have had an excellent mobile signal.