el crispito

The problem is that the bus stops at many bus terminals in many cities on the route, and usually the bus terminals are not located near the major roads. Diverting to reach a station within a city often adds over an hour to the trip as opposed to just driving straight through, because the bus has to wind its way around a circuitous maze of narrow streets at very slow speeds. One solution to this, if you are interested in taking the bus from the states to one of the cities deep within the Republic, is to plan your trip in stages, and go from one town to another, spending the night in hotels along the way and checking out what these other cities have to offer. We considered doing this, but decided not to, as it’s already taken us too damned long to get to Guadalajara as it is.

We did learn an important lesson: while seemingly all first-class buses have air conditioning, very few have heaters. This was not a problem in our trip last year, but this year, in crossing the Sonora desert at night, the temperatures on the bus got downright chilly. We started to be concerned about this just before the bus departed, when the bus driver asked me where my coat was. When I responded that I didn't have one, he warned me that I was going to freeze. I thought that this was a joke until around 2 AM, when I had to pull my arms inside my t-shirt to stay warm. But I was rather lucky. Being a fat guy, I have a lot of padding to keep me warm. Shawn, however, was shaking all night long and had to huddle up against me as best he could in a bus seat to stay warm. The poor kid was still shaking so hard the next morning when we made a brief stop at a station in Santa Ana that his spoon could not make it from the plate to his mouth without losing most of the granola that was on it. We later noticed that some buses at the terminals, but not many, list among their amenities calificación (heating). So if you ever make the trip by bus through the desert at night, remember to bring along a very warm coat. Or you could gain a lot of weight, but it's probably just easier to do the former.

We had been concerned that perhaps customs or security would go through our bags and find that we'd exceeded the officially allowed number of certain things – we have more than 5 DVDs and probably more than 20 CDs along with us, as well as electronics equipment that would be valued over $50 – but we also knew that last time we entered the country, we did not have to worry about that at all. Last time, at the bus terminal in Ciudad Juárez, we went through a gate before the bus platform marked aduana (customs), and as each person went through, a uniformed guard pushed a button that displayed either a red or green light on a device that looked like a traffic light. If it was green, you passed through without stopping. If it was red, they went through your bags. We both got green lights and didn't worry. But this time, we were afraid we would have to go through that and have our stuff discovered.
In Tijuana, the official customs is located at the border. You walk through a turnstile and down a strip of wide sidewalk that goes by the immigration administration office, then the immigration "storefront" for people who need to get tourist visas, then a currency exchange and finally a little archway where on occasion a customs officer stands and watches people go by. I suspect that if there were a flagrant violation of customs or immigration policies going on while the customs official was standing there (if someone with a gun walked by, for example), they would be stopped. However, we walked by with our four suitcases and two backpacks without even a glance in our direction.

This demonstrates a very important aspect of travel in Latin America: while there are certainly cases where innocent travelers are set up by authorities, usually to extort cash from them, if one does not cause trouble that has to be dealt with, minor breaches of the law, like bringing in more than 200 cigarettes, are tolerated. Is it consistent enough to be able to rely on this? No, probably not. Yet we were prepared to deal with it if necessary, either by returning to San Diego and setting up other arrangements or by simply abandoning things.

Things within the bus were not that exciting. The videos they played were the typical Hollywood fare: The In-Laws, The Patriot and Hitch. I always hope that the novelty of two gringos traveling by bus will spur the other riders to ask what in the hell two white guys think they're doing there and this will lead to an interesting exchange of cultural tidbits, but that didn't happen. And why should it? For us, the experience is new, exciting and exotic. For Mexicans, they get plenty of the United States pushed down their throats all the time. It's the ever-present stronger, better-dressed and more popular big brother. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that we might be able to show them that even though that brother is often a jerk, he can be rather charming at times.