A Day in Mexico City's Zhongguancun

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.