Sorry for the Group Email

Travel karma’s a funny thing. You might, for instance, travel a flawless four hundred miles along pristine, flat, empty highway, getting an even 36mpg and listening to an abundant selection of podcasts. Then, to atone, karma will throw you the bendiest of curveballs, and you’ll spend another three hours driving less than fifty miles, as you drive in decreasingly-sized circles towards your objective hotel.

If you think at this point that you’re lost and reading the Mexico City post again, you’re not. We did it twice. The first half of our journey to Oaxaca – in terms of time, at least – was a breeze. The highway was so new it wasn’t on our map. It was all but deserted and we could have driven much faster than the posted maximums.

The first sign that things were going to go wrong should have been in the Lonely Planet. We were aiming to stay at an out-of-the-way place called La Villada, which was vaguely pointed to north of the city, off the map. “La Villada”, it said, a lonely arrow pointing uselessly off the top of the page.

The problem with Oaxaca is that there’s quite a lot to the north. Small villages, mountain ranges, hills and a maze of small single-lane back streets which run into each other like the cracks in crazy paving. You could get very, very lost there.

And we did. We spent fruitless hours searching for La Villada. We pointlessly asked people as they walked down the street if they knew where it was, then nodded as they explained in precise, detailed, useless Spanish exactly where we needed to go. We picked up, at one point, the word “church”, in Spanish, in the midst of a two-minute description of our geographical shortcomings. Another woman generously drew us a map and gave us another detailed description of what was next. Also we were saying it wrong: as we would later learn, a double ‘l’ in Spanish is pronounced at least as a “yuh”, if not as a full-throated “zh”

We drove for three hours in the afternoon heat, our car groaning its way up hills and over speed bumps as the oil temperature needle gradually nudged higher and higher and the petrol level steadily dipped.

We were, eventually (and not, I have to say, without due regard for our perseverance), ready to concede defeat, and drive into the town centre to stay at a hotel. Then, at the last second, we saw a sign. “LA VILLADA”, it said.

We tore up the hill and took the only empty room at Oaxaca’s most beautiful hotel. La Villada looks out over the hills of Oaxaca state, and as the sun turned the opposing mountains a deep shade of red, we had to reflect that it had been worth the drive. Almost.

Oaxaca has a lot to offer tourists: colonial architecture, artesian markets selling everything from rugs to leather bags to fried grasshoppers. (No, I didn’t, since you ask.) But for us, it offered the opportunity to learn Spanish. At Amigos del Sol in Oaxaca you can, for a paltry US$7 an hour, learn Spanish from professional teachers. We signed up, keen to be out of a world we could barely understand.

In the preceding week we had been pulled over at a police checkpoint. Not for anything in particular, you understand, but simply to have a look around, in case we were toting around a ton of cocaine or something. We stopped and I handed my license out of the window. The police chief said something.

I grinned and nodded like an idiot.

He said something else.

At this point things become uncomfortable. What if he decided – as we certainly appeared – that we were being obstructive or wilfully obtuse? What if he took this to mean that we were certainly carrying enough cocaine to kill a camel and wrenched us out of the car before taking it to pieces?

In the end the one policeman on duty who did speak English came and explained. We needed to get out of the car, he said, and pop open the boot while we were at it.

Ah-ha.

Since then we’d been acutely aware of the need to speak much, much better Spanish, if only to be able to appease roadside policemen and get more reliable vegetarian food in restaurants.

The language school in Oaxaca was perfect. Our teachers were pros and the classes tiny: for the first week we were the only two students in every class. The second week we were joined by one more. We picked up vocabulary and learned the dispiriting fact, as we came to the end of our second week, that there are nineteen tenses in Spanish, of which we had barely mastered two. Each tense comes with different verb conjugations and these – this is the really depressing news – vary within the tense depending on the verb. “To go,” for instance, is irregular, which means it really behaves how it wants depending on the tense. Regular verbs, of which there aren’t many, or certainly not enough, are more reliable but still change depending on whether you’re talking about something you were doing but aren’t any more, or were doing but continued for a bit, or were doing and then stopped but might start again and so on. We were, at the very least, understanding more when people spoke to us, as long as they spoke very, very slowly and, ideally, used expansive hand gestures.

La Villada turned into a kind of temporary home for us. We stayed there for three entire weeks, as long as we’d stayed in a single hotel anywhere on the trip. We became friends with the family that owned it, ate pancakes every morning, and learned the striking fact that the entire hotel complex had been scrubland when they’d bought it, and that, furthermore, they’d even made the bricks themselves, using compacted dirt and a powerful-looking machine.

***

“Is that a real spider?”

This is not a question you ever want to hear. It means several things. Firstly, it means there is something that looks sufficiently like a real spider to beg the question. Secondly, it means the spider, real or fake, is sufficiently large, or otherwise arresting, to warrant mentioning. Thirdly, it either means there is a giant spider in the room, or that someone you know thinks it would be funny to get you to think there was.

The answer to Mendy’s question was yes. Actually, it was an emphatic, emphasised-with-swearing yes. Crouched malevolently in the corner of the room was a very large spider. Its size increased with successive tellings, but in reality it was, edge to edge of its furry, fat legs, about four inches wide.

We dumped one of our medical kits on the bed and attempted to catch it in the plastic box.

I don’t much like how spiders move, to tell you the truth. But when you can virtually hear their legs scratching along the ground as they try, crab-like, to avoid being caught; when they move each of their eight legs independently like a tiny corpse-like hand drumming its fingers on a table, they really do freak me out.

Our squeaks of consternation attracted the attention of the hotel owner, a cheerful soul in his sixties who took, by the end of our trip, to singing us Mexican lovesongs and transcribing them. He seized the box from us and promptly nabbed the spider.

“Tarantula,” he said. Urgh, we thought.

The next sentence was along the lines of, “Cuando es freo, buscanden por lugares tepia,”. Or, “when it’s cold, they look for warm places.”

It was quite cold that night. Our room was quite warm. He left with his trophy furiously trying to get out of its plastic jail, as we feverishly shook out each of our sheets, towels and hiking boots, in the – ultimately, thankfully – groundless fear that there might be more tarantulas waiting inside.

The next morning the owner was beaming. “Tengo un pequeño regallo,”.

A little gift?

The tarantula, alas, had not made it through the night. He handed us a jar that used to hold baby food. The label had been peeled off and it was full of alcohol of the sort used to sterilise hospital equipment.

Oh, and the tarantula was inside.

It was a little smaller, now that its legs had been bent slightly so the jar could accommodate it, but there was no doubting its furriness or the stubby fatness of its thorax. It was the first souvenir we had received since we arrived in Mexico.

Dave can only apologise for not having pictures of the ex-spider. It’s in the jar in the back of our car. And, I apologise for potentially putting very bad Spanish in the mouth of a bilingual Mexican.