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Border Control Blimp

I preparing for this trip, one of my interests was in finding more about illegal immigrants to the US from Mexico, particularly in talking to people that have crossed, or tried to cross.

I didn’t have to look far. It seems every other male over the age of twenty has crossed, or tried to cross, at some point in their life. People often greet me and ask “Donde Vienes?” - “Where are you from?” When they hear that I’m from Colorado, a not uncommon response is, “Oh, really? I worked in Aurora.” Or Golden. Or Denver. Or Phoneix. Or Kansas City. Most, if not all, were relatively open about the fact that they did so without papers.

It’s also interesting to hear where people worked. Burger King, Old Chicago Pizza, and at one of the large casinos in Colorado. I somehow had this image that most would be working in typical under the table manual labor sorts of positions to avoid the necessity of papers, such as landscaping, construction, and such. Nope. It seems that a lack of papers isn’t a big deal as far as big corporations are concerned.

I’ve been meaning to ask how much people are being paid. I’m curious to see if it’s comparable to those with papers, or even if it’s above minimum wage.

Trough

Last night, walking around Zargoza, two men in a pickup truck who spoke a little bit of english stopped and talked to me. They were enjoying th eevening in what appears to be true Mexican style - cruising up and down the main streets, along with the rest of the town, at slightly over walking pace, an open beer in their laps. They said that last weekend, they’d tried to cross the border near Deming together.

They said that they were carrying some food and a gallon of water apiece, for what amounted to a 36 mile, 2 day walk across the desert. They said they slept during the day, and walked at night, presumably both to beat the heat, and the border patrol.

Most of the way there, a border patrol caught them. People say, when you get caught, they throw you in a jail cell for a day or two, until they can get a big enough group together, and then they put them all on a bus, and ship them back to their home town. One person I talked to said that if you wanted to try again and were smart, you just said you were from Chihuahua, which is one of the border states. This way, it was a shorter trip back to the border. Other than the cost of another bus ride, and the time, food, and water involved, there seems to be little penalty in trying as many times as is necessary to cross.

I spoke with a hotel owner who said that it’s not common for people from all over the world, but particularly Central and South America, to come to Chihuahua to try and cross the border. It’s possible to arrange a “package deal” for entry to the US from as far down as the Guatamala border. Your transport, food, accomodations, guides, and the necessary bribes will all be arranged for you. The cost is steep, however - somewhere in the range of $3000-5000 per person if you want passage from the Guatamala border.

It is not uncommon for people to sell their homes, their farms, and their vehicles, all for money to pay the fee. If they are caught at the border and sent back, they come back home with absolutely nothing - nowhere to live, no way to get food or earn money.

It seems the guides that arrange these “packages” are the ones who make out the best in the whole operation. The hotel owner said it wasn’t uncommon for two men to show up and rent rooms for one hundred people at a time, and going out and buying food for the same number. He said more than once, the mexican immigration police have showed up at the hotel, and demanded to see everyone’s papers. They would gather them all out in the courtyard behind the hotel. Once they’d established the size of the group, they’d demand a bribe - usually on the order of $100 per immigrant. He said the money, despite being an enormous sum, especially by Mexican standards, would quickly appear from nowhere, and the immigration police would be sent on their way.

In all the conversation I’ve had, the biggest thing that stuck out to me, is that many of the people that have gone to the US to work illegally, are not outcasts from their community. Rather, they are upstanding, well respected citizens, often land owners. And they come to the US to work washing dishes at Old Chicago Pizza, or flip burgers at Burger King. What a crazy world we live in.

Chilli fields near Buenaventura

When I was preparing for my trip, I have to say, I definitely had some preconceived notions about what it was going to be like, particularly, what sort of people I might meet. These preconceived notions weren’t necessarily concious, or intentional. But I definitely was expecting people to be pretty rough and tough, and have to really watch my back and my things, and be prepared for trouble. I think I had somehow thought that people would be mean, or aggressive towards me.

So far, I’ve seen nothing but the exact opposite. Everywhere I go, people are extremely friendly and welcoming. Even the gruffest of the gruff looking men in town will give me a wave, or a “good afternoon” when I pass by. Many people are curious as to where I’m from, and where I’m going. As my Spanish is still pretty horrific, I’m not big on the conversation front, but those who do speak some english are quick to strike up an easy conversation.

It’s interesting though. People here are very reserved. I haven’t experienced much of the unabashed, forward curiosity that I had when I was in Asia. People might go as far as to smile or wave, but unless I engage them, they’re just as happy to let me go about my business.

I went to a roadside grill that was serving tacos and quesedillas and hamburguesas for dinner tonight, and sat at the counter next to a man, and what I guessed was his daughter. We talked for a bit in Spanish, and then they started asking me questions in English. We must have talked for at least a half an hour. It seems to be that way wherever I go.

This all leads to the big question though - why do Americans have such negative stereotypes about Mexicans? Where do these stereotypes come from? Some Mexicans I have talked to here have said they think it might be because only the nasty element of Mexico tries to cross the border to the US, and these are the mexicans that Americans are exposed to.

I’m not sure that’s the answer, but I don’t have a better one.

I apologize for the lack of posts recently. As of last Thursday, I’m on a bicycle trip to Mexico for six weeks, returning in early August. I’m maintaining a seperate blog for the trip, over at Mexican Trip Blog . I’m carrying a digital camera and laptop this time around, so hopefully it’ll be just that much more fun to read (as well as make).

Also, I am checking email, but sometimes only every few days when I’m between larger cities. Email me, and I’ll get back to you when I can.

A bus-come-restaurant in a market in Ascencion

A short day today to Nuevo Cases Grandes. I camped last night halfway between Janos and Cases Grandes. I was a bit nervous to camp at first, particularly so close to such a busy thoroughfare, but it turned out to be pretty much idea, other than a bit on the dusty side. I found a particularlly inviting patch of tall mesquite where I thought I would be well hidden from the rode, unhooked the bottom barbed wire from a fence post, and slid my bike under. My mad barbed wire skillz I picked up on the station in Australia have finally come in handy.

Camp

The kitchen

Dinner

I walked out a ways from the road until I found a nice open spot, and set up camp, cooking a dinner of pasta, fresh tomatoes and onions, and a can of tuna, under a beautiful sunset. During the night, I was woken several times by what sounded like rather large packs of coyotes, but never had any trouble. As far as people goes, I don’t think anyone even knew I was there, nor have I felt threatened int he slightest since I’ve been here (excluding the border town, which are always dodgy, everywhere you go).

This morning, I woke up to a breakfast of corn tortillas (all my fruit had gone sour in a single day), and hit the road. The semis were in full force going both directions, with no shoulder, and a raised road, which was intense. A couple times I full out failed out down the embankment when two semis passed me at the same time, horns blaring. Definitely enough to shake you up at times.

Along the way I stopped for more tortillas, and had a big man in a cowboy hat and boots driving a few head of cattle come up to me, curious to find out where I was from and where I was going. Sometimes it seems as if every man over the age of 15 is wearing a cowboy hat, a checkered shirt, jeans, and boots. I definitely stand out in my bike helmet and shorts.

Cases Grandes is bigger than I expected. I rode into town, looking for a hotel, and immediately ruled out the few along the main street as far out of my price range. I was just starting to home in on one that looked more reasonable, when a guy on a bicycle made a beeline across a busy street, flagging me down in english. He was also very into bicycle touring and travelling, and was eager to see my bike, and show me his. His english was quite good, and he seemed pretty trustworthy, so I asked if he knew where a good hotel that was cheap was. We ended up at the one I was headed for.

Tony showing off his trick riding

The hotel owner spoke english quite well also, and said that a lot of foreign bicyclists pass through this way, and stay at his hotel. So I must be in the right place:) We talked with him for a while, hearing several hysterical stories of japanese motorcyclists who had stayed at the hotel, and then Tony, my new friend and self-appointed tour guide of Cases Grandes, and I went off to grab some lunch, as I was starved. He took me to an awesome chicken place, and I had a gigantic plate of roasted chicken with mole sauc, for a bit under $2.50. I can’t remember the last time I’ve had chicken that juicy. Then it was off to his relative’s bike shop to get a spoke replaced my rear wheel trued (I had a pannier wing into it on my first day and a spoke was bent and my field truing wasn’t perfect). His extended family owns two bicycle shops in town, and everyone in the family either rides or works at one of the shops.

Making bee food

Then it was off to his fathers house, to meet the family. His mom made me a homemade burrito and a glass of mango juice, and we sat and talked with his father and brother for a while, with Tony translating. Later, I met another brother that keeps bees, who was in the process of making food for his hives. He showed me his honey extractor, and I told him about my grandfather and his amateur beekeeping. He laughed really hard when I told him the story about my grandmother’s firned, who, on seeing their honey extractor on the kitchen table (it’s about the size of a chopped down 55-gallon drum), said “My Alice, what do you need all that coffee for?”

Hector and his lab

Then it was off to where he works, to meet his boss, and see the soil analysis lab where he works. Hector, his boss, spoke perfect English, with almost no accent, and gave me lots of advice on where to go and what to watch out for. He showed me his two computers, an ancient orginal IBM PC with a monochrome 9 pin monitor, and a brand new athlon, with a nice flatscreen monitor. When he heard I was a programmer, he tried to enlist my help in transferring a program from one computer to the other, but alas, we couldn’t get the old computer to boot.

We also talked a bit about philosphy and religion. Both Tony and Hector are Mormons, as is a lot of the area. Cases grandes is one of the first areas in Mexico that the Mormons colonized. Hector said he’s 4 generations Mormon. When were done, Hector admitted it was hard to preach in english.

We made a bunch more stops all over town, saying hello to various friends of Tony, and checking out the nice new homes in the rich part of town, before I finally begged off at my hotel, so I could take a nap, do laundry, and catch up on email.

I just finished setting up the blog. It was one of the things I meant to do before I left, that just never quite happend. I’ll be back posting a few entries I’ve written over the past few days. I’m currently in Janos, planning on riding for Nuevo Casas Grandes tomorrow morning.

A copperware shop at the crossroads on the way to Ascencion

A quick note, as I need to hit the road. Last night was my first night in Mexico. The ride has been hot, long, and very boring thus far. I did a total of about 107 km yesterday, from Columbus to Ascencion. The sun is really intense, and I’m struggling to stay hydrated and not get sunburned. My body isn’t yet used to the amount of water I need to drink (about a liter an hour when I’m riding), and it’s hard to force it down.

On the bright side, the people have been remarkably friendly and welcoming so far, and while being occaisonally intimated by the newness of everything, I haven’t felt at all unsafe so far. Last night I stayed in a nice hotel in Ascencion for a very reasonable price.

Riding into Ascencion was pretty wild, as the highway goes right down the main street of town, which is quite long and exteremely busy. It seems everyone in town was slowly cruising the main street, and I drew far more attention, yells, waves, and wistles than I perhaps might have liked. It all seemed to be friendly and because they probably don’t see many foreigners come through on bikes, but jstill a bit unnerving and overwhelming, particularlly given my meager grasp on Spanish at the moment.

Today I ride for either Janos(30km), or Nuevo Casas Grandes(90+km), depending on how things go. I’m getting a really late start, and am pretty tired and sunburned, so that might factor into things.

Today is my second day on the road, and the first day on the bike. It’s good to be on the road finally, after so much planning and preparing. It seems that regardless of how much time one has to prepare for a trip, the number of things that need to get done seem to expand to overflow that time. I was due to leave Colorado on Wednesday, but delayed my departure by a day, as the new digital camera I had ordered didn’t ship the day it was promised to.

It was good to have the extra day though, as it was spent hurridly running last minute errands, re-engineering my panniers, customizing foam for the inside of the pelican case I’m carrying my laptop in, and fabricating water bottles out of duct tape, webbing, and cheap keychain caribiners.

My kilo of water

Only after I was putting the finishing touches on the water bottles did I realize that they look suspiciously like stereotypical bales of marijuana wrapped in duct tape. Ah well. Crossing the border tomorrow morning will prove interesting.

Yesterday involved a 15 hour greyhound bus trip from Denver, CO to Las Cruces, NM. I have always held that any trip on Greyhound is in and of itself an adventure, and this trip wasn’t any exception. The adventures started at the Denver station, where the ticket agent insisted that I box my bicycle. With a half hour to go before the bus left, I tore out my tools, removing pedals, wheels, lowering my seat, and turning my headset sideways, and barely managing to fit it all in the box. In the end, the box was probably all for the best, as it got removed and shifted around more than I had anticipated. And after all, it’s probably best to at least start the trip with a fully working bicycle.

I’ve decided there are two things that make even the shortest Greyhound trip into an adventure of epic proportions. The first is practiced air of slight incompetance given off by nearly every greyhound employee, which, to the untrained eye, makes it appear that it is each employee’s first day on the job. I used to think that greyhound just made a habit of hiring really dumb people, but have since changed my opinion. Instead, it is a mixture of extreme indifference, poor procedures, and inadequate training.

When I got my ticket in Denver, I had to pay for the ticket, the box, and the shipping fee. No worries, out came the credit card. If only it was that simple. 15 minutes and three seperate transactions later, some of which _had_ to be cash, I stood at the counter in front of line of people which was quickly increasing in length and level of frustration, while the ticket agent (who was very nice I might add), went in the back to make a photocopy, so that I had some sort of proof I’d just paid $10 for the cardboard box. Apparently, it is beyond the Greyhound computer system’s ability to print customer recipets for boxes. It completely boggles the mind…

The second thing that makes Greyhound journeys so unique, is the people one encounters along the way. Greyhound seems to attract all sorts of people that I’d never get a chance to meet any other way - an anthropolical slice of American society. On the way to Colorado Springs I talked with Joe, a 19 year-old motorcross racer from Venice Beach touring with the kawasaki race team. He “had all his shit stolen in Minessota”, and with a lack of cash or credit cards, was relegated to riding Greyhound instead of flying to Colorado Springs for his next race, that afternoon. We talked most of the way from Denver to Colorado Springs, with the conversation ranging from smoking to fireworks, but mostly centered around motorbikes and trucks.

On the way to Albaquerque, I eavesdropped on a converstation between a 30-year-old trucker, and a contruction worker who couldn’t have been more than 20, and desperately tried to ignore the mexican in front of me who was desperate to pick a fight with whoever would listen to him long enough to get mad, from me, to the Indians wearing turbans a few rows up, and finally, to the bus driver, who, fortunately for my friend, couldn’t hear him.

Today, I shared the brief hour on the bus from Las Cruces with a mexican-american boy name Junior, who was 16, and couldn’t wait to graduate high school so he could join the Air Force. We talked a lot about the military, his special operations aspirations, and the apparent love of his life, his 89 Honda CRX, which he’d modified to drag race himself.

Partway between Las Cruces and Deming, we had to stop at a border patrol checkpoint, and a border patrolman came onboard to check identification. I had been warned this would happen by the guy at the front desk of the hotel last night. When I expressed amazement, he said “Man, we’re only like, an hour from the border”. Apparently, there are checkpoints in nearly every direction from Las Cruces.

The bus pulled up in Deming in a dusty parking lot, outside a tiny one room bus station. I dumped my enormous mound of gear uncerimoniously in the dust near two decript coke machines, and began the process of assembling my bike, as the bus pulled away. It was only then, with the sun beating down on me, that I realized how hot it was. But hey, it’s a dry heat, so it’s ok, right? Breathing was like sucking on a hair dryer.

I finally go the bike together, and my various water containers filled, and as I started loading gear on the bike, I promptly realized that the kickstand I’d bought is going to be nearly entirely useless. With all of my gear loaded, there’s enough weight on the back of the bicycle, that it does a backflip as soon as you let go. Bugger.

I bid goodbye to the lone stationmaster (it somehow seems vaguely inappropriate to call any greyhound employee a “stationmaster”), as well as the two vagrants loitering inside and their overgrown chiuahua. I hit the road for the mecca of southwest life, the pinnacle of new mexican life and society, and sacred keeper of all things useful - Walmart.

Given my extreme distaste for large corporations, specifically Walmart, it’s been a long while since I’m stepped foot into one of the friendly supercenters. I was amazed. The Walmarts here are amazing! You can get anything. As the guy at the hotel front desk last night put it, where else can you do your grocery shopping and browse for clothes while you wait for your car to be lubed, all without leaving airconditioning?

This morning I came to the front desk with a burning problem (he got to know me quite well despite my short stay). I had left the keys to my bike lock in Denver, and didn’t want to buy a new cable. So I asked the Robert at the front desk if he knew of a hardware store within walking distance. Nope, no dice. “What about a Kmart or something?” “Oh yeah, there’s a walmart supercenter next door” Smack! Sure enough, literally next door was a walmart, with just about everything one could dream of, and more. I got someone in hardware to get the maintenance guy to cut my lock off, and bought a new lock, a pair of shorts, and groceries, all in one go. Everyone working there was friendly, knowledgable, and the sotre was in immaculate shape.

As Robert explained, when the Walmart came to town, all the small stores had to close, so for instance, all the guys that were working at the local hardware stores now work at Walmart. So they have a lot of experienced people.

A huge snowstorm has hit Colorado, cancelling my flight from LA to Denver. So close yet so far away…

Fortunately I have a place to stay at my grandparents (even though they left for Nashville today). Frontier airlines is saying they’ll resume service at 3:30pm today, which raises my hopes I’ll make it home sometime this afternoon or tonight. I’ve made it this far, I’m pretty anxious to get all the way home and see my folks.

Ah well… It’s always an adventure.

Just wanted to post a quick note saying I’ve arrived safe and sound in Los Angeles. The whole journey was nearly completely uneventful, save for tight security procautions at US Immigration, and a grilling by customs (though they didn’t search me or my gear).

The reality of being back in the US hasn’t really hit home yet. More later.

Just wanted to jot down a quick note saying that I got back to Bangkok from my meditation retreat today, and I leave for Los Angeles tomorrow evening. I spend a day with my grandparents, and then fly on the 19th the last leg of my journey to Denver, and home to Boulder.

The retreat was really good, but really hard. It was far harder than I expected, and was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done. Definitely one of the hardest things I’ve done on this trip. At the same time, or rather perhaps because it was hard, I think I got a lot out of it. It’s hard to say at this point, as I haven’t really had enough time to think about it yet.

As I wasn’t allowed to journal during the course, I haven’t really written that much yet, but I do want to get some of my thoughts down in the next day or so, and I’ll post them when I do, and have the time to type them up.

It’s hard to think I’ll be home in a few days. It’s even hard to think I’ll be back in the states in about 24 hours. It’s certainly been an amazing trip, and I haven’t really even begun to think of it as a whole, and assess it in that way. It’s simply been my life for the past 16 months. I’m hoping over the next few weeks and perhaps months, I can get a bit better grasp on it, and make sense of it all.