Three Winter Trips Away From Here

by Rudolfo Carrillo

One of the things I'd do in the eighties and nineties was to make sure not to be around Burque during the last week of the year. Places I went in the winter to avoid La Natividad in town included exotic locations in the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. But I had the best time in Mexico and made use of a variety of land routes and methods to check the place out. Sometimes I would drive and go as far as I could get, on a quest for an authentic holiday experience. Back then, that vaguely translated into looking for a party. The outcomes of all those trips varied from rousing to precarious. You can try going there if you like. After I got sick eating a cut of Argentinian beef in a seaside restaurant in Puerto Vallarta during the summer of 2001, I gave the country up for good. I heard it got dangerous after that, but has calmed down some these days. 

***
I took a short flight to Juarez on Boxing Day. Phil Collins was piping through all the headphones and it was one of those older jets, like a 727 or something. I grabbed my bags and walked over to the train station. I ended up on a commuter train to Chihuahua and stayed at a rundown hotel near downtown. The cabbie whistled and laughed when he dropped me off.

The next morning some dude was standing in the alley boiling ears of corn to sell later and I bought a hotdog wrapped in bacon from a street vendor. I found out from standing around the train station minding my own business that there was a train to the coast. It went through the mountains, and supposedly was an engineering wonder. It was cool alright, with a old fashioned observation car, but the electricity onboard was fucked up, so there was no hot food or lighted toilets for 12 hours.

On the other side of the mountains was a jagged and lush jungle with fruit trees and birds that were brightly festooned. The town of Los Mochis wasn't really memorable but there was a town further out where Chinese merchant ships docked and the sailors wandered drunkenly through town with red stars on their hats and hookers on their arms. I lost my glasses in the surf out by Topolobampo, but they mysteriously drifted back up and into my hands when the tide came back. I stayed at a hotel called the Santa Ana and ate scrambled eggs and corn tortillas in the restaurant next door.

***
Another time I drove a smashed up Datsun B210 down to the Sea of Cortes. I started out on Stanford Street and Lead Avenue. I took the freeway down to Las Cruces and crossed over in El Paso, headed straight for the mountains. This was back when you got a sticker for your front window when you made the border. About half an hour into the ride west I came to the conclusion that the sticker was a probably a good idea. The two lane road was twisty and the trucks coming the other way were constant. The sticky tag would probably survive a cascading trip down the mountain side, hooked to some window or its remnants.

Along the way there was a mining town all painted and lit up for Christmas with big colorful electric lights while the copper smelter down the road fumed and roared along though the night as we passed. A military patrol stopped the car in a town with a peculiar English name, but other than a brief and cautiously friendly question and answer session with ten heavily armed individuals on a dark road in a foreign country, and suicidal truckers pouring through the gates of hell and headed in the opposite direction I was driving, the ride was uneventful.

I checked into the Holiday Inn Hermosillo about one in the morning. They had a decent breakfast buffet with atole and everything, so I hung for a while and then headed for San Carlos. There was a Pemex station about half way.  After that the sea crept up and met the desert. I thought about how that scene might be what Mars looked like a million years ago, except without the half finished and long ago abandoned condos and occasional oyster shacks that dotted the horizon. Somehow I got sunburned on that trip and had to eat lobster, too.

***
Near the end of 1998 I rented a blue Dodge Neon in Chula Vista and decided to drive as far down the Pacific coast as a week would permit. Tijuana felt chaotic so I blew the place off after stopping at a pharmacy to pick up something to calm my gut. The pharmacist was friendly but kept wagging his tongue around a gap he had between his two front teeth. I stopped in Ensenda and got a stamp for my passport. There was a cruise ship parked in the harbor with lots of big sea birds swooping around the fancy boat. Passengers in white cotton disembarked and I put the car into second and zoomed south.

That night I stayed at a little ranch by the sea. It was off the main road, a crowded dusty thing crowded with wooden shacks and cinderblock businesses. They had been set up for continuous business; they were on the only way in and out of the peninsula. I got the name of the place from a Lonely Planet guide on Baja California. There were little huts made from stone and a lagoon with a couple of seals floating around in it.

Mostly the beaches on the west side were empty. I found a small dead whale walking around one day. There were a couple of hotels on the beach but they were empty. I wondered though one that was painted yellow and orange with buildings meant to resemble aztec temples. I finally ran into a bellhop. He had a thin mustache and was balding but just smiled and reached out to shake my hand when I asked about accommodations. I finally decided to stay at another hotel a few hundred meters further along the coast. The rooms were dark, cavernous, and air conditioned. The owners had a pet pig that walked around at night. Everything was painted pink and blue. There was a restaurant with decent enchiladas and a band that played tourist favorites like Jesusita en Chihuahua.

When the road got bad after a couple of days, I turned back. I stayed at a ridiculously baroque hotel in downtown Ensenada, but got another hankering for salt water and decided to cross the peninsula. There was a party town called San Felipe on the other side of the peninsula and I got there just in time for New Year's eve. I sat around in a bar looking at all the other humansm, ate flautas and washed them down with Tecate. The sea was really still, just ripples crossing its width, some boat shadows too. The moon was nearly full and was in the middle of the sky when 1999 was announced over the loudspeakers.

Continue Reading..

Sixteen Years from Albuquerque

By Rudolfo Carrillo

I had to get up very early for the flight from Kathmandu to Jomsom. That was just fine. There was a dog barking nearby all night before I left. The mutt was making a ruckus somewhere down by the alley that connected Baluwatar to the main road into Thamel. Its lonesome howling made for a fitful sleep whose own flight into the breaking dawn I gratefully obliged with a cup of instant coffee laced with powdered milk.

The week before, I gathered all sorts of camping gear together; a sleeping bag, flashlights, a first aid kit, and a shovel. I used Nepali Rupees to buy the gear in Tridevi Marg, a gaudy tourist district on the other end of the alley of mournful barking.

Palm trees lined the main avenue into town, which was adjacent to that rough road. They were usually filled with huge fruit bats. The bats had faces that looked just like little brown foxes.

The money I told you about earlier had pictures of the King of Nepal or his father printed on the bills. They both looked just like Peter Sellers.

In the early morning light, I hauled the whole lot of ramshackle equipment down to the auto-rickshaw that was waiting for me, buzzing and vibrating in neutral. The operator peered through his sunglasses, smoking a thin cigarette while I descended from the third floor of my luxurious accommodation.

At the airport, which was also named for the King that looked like a character from I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, I bought a Coca-Cola and wondered out loud about the fancy helicopters that were busy whisking away some of the other tourists and pilgrims and curious adventurers.

It turned out those whirlygigs were army surplus, mostly reliable, but relatively slow and loud. Some of them were still outfitted for military travel. They had tiny, steel, form-fitting buckets for seats. There were ragged rubber straps to hold on to, while in flight. Apparently, these factors made for a rough experience, for a flight into a place were one would be better occupied considering nature in its most majestic complexity and not retching or wishing for other forms of gastronomic relief amidst the din of two fifteen-hundred horsepower General Electric CT58-140 turbo shaft power plants.

It happened that missing out on the helicopter ride worked out just fine. The plane I took to get to the Mustang Province was a modern turboprop whose pilot zipped us up through the increasingly, forebodingly deep Kali Gandaki Valley with a sort of magical confidence that, in reality, just meant he relished his avionic duty. The pilot knew the mountains' twists and turns as if those grandiose topographies belonged to his favorite lover.

At nine-thousand feet, the lush Himalayan flora, first tropical, then alpine, gave way to a wide valley surrounded by vast arid reaches. Up here was a spot by the river, almost a plateau, with an airstrip and helipad. The whole affair looked damned sketchy because it was on such a small plot of land whose boundaries dropped off precipitously into a rugged abyss. The mountains seemed to crowd in on all sides and everything looked waxen from the air, but we lit on the packed earth tarmac as if dropped gently out of heaven by the hand of Hanuman himself.

We came to a stop and the aeroplane started unloading. I shook the pilot’s hand and winked at him as I exited into the autumn wind.

Jomsom was cold and blustery that day. About a dozen townfolk came out to meet the arriving flight. Some of them were kids who wanted a look at the flying machine itself, to marvel at its bravery and perfection. Others were adults looking for work as porters and guides. Most of the passengers, excepting me, engaged the latter and began glorious discussions about their plans to conquer the Himalayas or to find the truth at the edge of the Tibetan plateau.

I just kept on walking. During the flight out, I had decided I was going to take a trek without porters or guides. The trip inside and back out would be between fifty and seventy miles, depending on the routes I chose along the way. Somehow, I would end up near a place called Birethanti in two weeks. There was a paved road there where bus supposedly stopped by every couple of days, pausing momentarily on its crawl through the mountains and valleys, back to Kathmandu.

One of the porters ran after me as I approached town. He came off as friendly and guessed out loud and in good English that I was American, British or Israeli. He decided I couldn't be Canadian or German because of my long dark hair. I told him thanks and said I would be okay without him. That's when he stopped in his tracks and yelled back to his comrades, "Indiana Jones!” They all pointed at me and laughed. One of them rolled on the ground, then got up, danced around the others and lit a joint.

By then, I had crossed into the village of Jomsom, a dusty rock and adobe town replete with buckwheat, lentil and marijuana fields, apple orchards and plenty of huge furry yaks. Besides the sky machines, the only other motorized vehicles I saw for the next fourteen days were the small, Chinese-made utility tractors the farmers used to drag around bags of grain, their kinfolk and to till their smallish portions of land.

I ended up at a building in the middle of the main road. It was called the Moonlight Lodge. I could have stayed in a place down by the river that advertised itself as the location where Jimi Hendrix had once taken refuge from fame and celebrity. But I chose Moonlight instead, urged myself towards its threshold because they had a placard out front that said the kitchen served the best Mexican food in Mustang.

The tortillas were coarse and grainy. They were filled with lentils and it was all covered in greasy yellow yak cheese, which sorta tasted like Swiss, but with a heavy, rustic tang. There was no chile anywhere within 1000 miles of the Moonlight Lodge.

For toilets, they had rooms with singular and dark holes in the ground. The beds were made from wooden planks, so the sleeping bags came in very handy. I stayed up that night and plotted my journey using an old oilskin map and a US Army surplus compass.

Outside, a band was playing disjointed, droning tunes while the Milky Way hovered brightly overhead, forming an arc that began somewhere in the Annapurna range and ended just over the horizon, in the direction of Albuquerque.

Continue Reading..