Sorry for the Group Email

Nogales, Arizona, is a strange town, even by American standards. Its dust and many of its people are imported from Mexico, and about two kilometres from the border the signs become bilingual, giving distances in both miles and kilometres. The border itself isn’t particularly busy: when we crossed it was mostly Mexicans, going home for Christmas, SUVs and pickups sagging under the weight of assorted family members and gifts.

The American side of things was easy: who are the Americans to care who’s leaving, anyway? It was so easy it was suspicious, actually, so we stopped to see if the American border guards would cancel my tourist visa and remove it from my passport. This was, I was rather flatly told, not something the border guards did. I accepted this rather reluctantly, in the manner of someone who knows a minor convenience now will amount to an enormous problem later on.

The Mexican side of things is more complicated. To take a car further than the official “No Hassle Zone”, which extends about 100km into Mexico, you need to prove you own it, plus proof you can drive, plus registration and ideally, your title. You also need copies of everything you use. In the end, for those taking notes, we used our car registration, our passports and drivers licences. The cost of importing a car into Mexico, at least in December 2008, was US$27, and then US$17 each for our tourist cards.

(The amounts in Pesos are P$399.76 and P$237 respectively. You can pay with a Visa card, although our UK chip-and-pin cards didn’t work. We used an American card. Also, if you pay with a card for your car permit, the card has to be in the exact name of the person who owns the car.

You also need to pay a bond for your car: essentially a guarantee that you’ll take the car out of Mexico at some point. You can pay this in cash, or let the Mexicans put a hold on your credit card until you officially remove your car. Paying in cash, to us, sounds like a colossal pain in the arse. Seven-day permits, apparently, are free, although we didn’t notice any signs to this effect at the border.

A note to Americans heading south: if your registration is handwritten, like our Illinois registration is, expect problems. Either bring your title, which should solve everything, or buy a temporary registration in Arizona. US$5 gets you three days’ of temporary registration, and Mexican officials, for some reason, seemed ok with it. Ideally, you’ll also brush up on your Spanish.)

As we left the border crossing, every horror story I’d ever heard about Mexico muscled its way to the front of my mind. Every tale of mechanical failure, horrific crash and roadside bandits kept cropping up.

“Ah, yes,” I would think. “When the banditos attack, they’ll probably be coming from behind that rock.” Or, “I wonder if it’s really true that you go to prison if you have any kind of car crash in Mexico?”

The latter, not to alarm you or anything, actually is true, at least for those without insurance. If you head to Mexico with only your American insurance – even if that policy covers you in Mexico – you’re as good as uninsured to a Mexican policeman. So, if you crash into anything, you’re going to prison until things are sorted out. Luckily, we had spent the preceding day with a charming woman who worked for Sanborn’s, an American company that specialises in Mexican car insurance for Americans. For US$281 we got a six-month policy that not only covered us for the obvious – crashing, vandalism, theft, that kind of thing – but also for acts of plain stupidity: running out of fuel or needing oil on the road. We were covered for all kinds of mechanical failure, as well as the costs associated with taking the car to be fixed somewhere. And, should the car fail totally, we were insured for everything after the first thousand dollars and then we’d be flown back home.

Still, we didn’t crash. At least not that first day. We drove a conservative sixty-five miles per hour, passed by a constant stream of articulated lorries and American RVs.

Paul Theroux – and it’s at this point I wish I was researching things a little better because I could give you the actual quote – once said something to the effect that the best travel writing comes from the worse trips. It’s certainly true that the next few weeks passed in a cheerful succession of sunny campsites, cheap motels and sandy beaches. We stayed in small seaside towns where nothing much happened except for sunbathing and enchiladas.

A funny thing happened while we were in Phoenix, Arizona. We stopped for petrol, and I paid an Indian chap behind the counter. He looked curious when he heard my accent.

“Where are you from?”

“England, actually,”

He regarded me wistfully for a moment. “I go to bed dreaming about the curry houses in England.”

He was right. But a close second to Indian food is Mexican food. In the States Mexican food tends to be a once-a-week kind of deal: drowning in cheddar and sour cream. It’s delicious but if you had it every night of the week you’d be dead in a month. In Mexico the food is earthier, less fatty, tastier and spicier. If I could somehow arrange to eat an English breakfast in the morning, a Mexican lunch and an Indian dinner every day for the rest of my life, I’d be a happy man, palate-wise. I’d also be fat. Very fat, probably.

And then, with very little warning, it was Christmas. Strangely, Christmas in Mexico looks a lot like Christmas in the United States, right down to the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, presumably sweating like shit in his big red coat, fluffy white beard, and 35-degree weather. Commercial symbolism trumps aesthetic practicality.

Christmas was rather odd. Christmas, for me, is the time when the family gets together, drinks excessively, watches whatever happens to be on the TV, and generally gets along. We sit by the fire and toss whatever happens to be to hand – wrapping paper, bits of food, the weakest of the group – in to keep it going.

It’s a good time. So it was more than a little sad to be away from it.

To compensate, we moved out of our tent temporarily and into the most stylishly-faded hotel in Acapulco. There didn’t seem to be much to recommend Acapulco, from what we saw of it: eight lanes of solid traffic in the outskirts, a beachfront of toweringly monstrous resort hotels, and very little of the charming, colonial architecture we saw in Mazatlan, which is a few hours up the coast and was beguilingly, calmly, wonderful.

Los Flamingoes, our stylish hotel, however, isn’t in Acapulco. It’s high on the cliffs about a mile out of town, and for a few days we didn’t leave the hotel. We stayed behind the gates, swam in the pool, and ate in the restaurant.

Los Flamingoes is quite famous: it was owned by John Wayne in the fifties, and almost invariably when a movie is filmed in Acapulco – and that’s a lot of movies – everyone goes to stay there. There are pictures of Hollywood’s glitterati on the walls, and tour groups go to Los Flamingoes just to have a look around. It was unspeakably cool to be a guest there, while sweaty Americans tumbled out of a succession of mini-vans, poked around the pool for a few moments, and then got driven somewhere else. God knows why, of course: Los Flamingoes is almost certainly cheaper than the downtown Holiday Inn. And Tarzan stayed there.

Dave hasn’t been writing for a bit. I’ve been taking pictures full-steam ahead though, so why not enjoy the Mexican set on Flickr?