After our time in Oceanside Jozza and I arrived in Tijuana full of hope, of better times to come. Armed with Joel’s 1973 Mexican Lonely Planet and all the Spanish that you can pick up from a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon, we headed south.
About twelve hours into our first twenty-four hour bus ride we pulled to halt at a military checkpoint. It was about 2am and the nice man with an M16 made us have a go on the traffic light machine. It was great; I got the green light meaning that I got to keep going. Joel got the red light, so he got a full cavity search.
We got to Los Mochis and had a bit of a look around. Local’s friendly, beer not as cheap as you would think. Took the Copper Canyon railway to Creel. Where we held an international language convention with three nature love’n Germans, a couple of French girls, a homeless hippy from Brazil, a fucking nutcase from Slovenia and the two boys from the bush. As you would suspect English won out.
In Creel we had out first Tequila in a Mexican redneck bar, tried to impress the locals by doing them as Stuntman shots, a sniff of the salt, the shot, and a squirt of lemon juice in the eye later and we were looked at like fucking loco Gringo’s.
From Creel we embarked on a 30hr train/bus trip to Puerto Vallarto, Joel had a great time playing pirates while I slept. There we raced other buses on cobblestone streets, paid too much for beer and did some snorkelling. By this time my Spanish was picking up, I could now say ‘No, Gracis’ instead of ‘No’, much to the delight of the locals.
Headed from here to Zihuatenjo, which is a cool little fishing village, great markets and beaches, not an international tourist mecca yet. There we met some Canandian hippies. They were in perfect harmony with nature and their spiritual inner selves despite the fact that Ron still drove some Toyota sportscar that got half a mile to the gallon.
After a couple of days there we headed for the boarder and onto Guatemala. Our Mexican adventure was over. The country hadn’t seen such good times since the ’68 Olympics. The best thing about Mexico is that no matter where you go or what you do, two Mexican dudes with kick arse moustaches wearing white cowboy hats will be sitting on a rock or a roof watching your every move.