The Central American Dream

Sometimes, before going to bed and trying to see these images clearly, all the stories start to get mixed.

Yeah, a dark, dark night after an absinthe open bar in NOLA, climbing a wall to get to the dock on the Mississippi River and the the water, so loud, keeping us away from the big, luminous building on the other side.
The weeks and the days and the hours... How long ago did that happen?

I went swimming in Lake Atitlán yesterday. Guatemala.
Floating there, on the water, watching beautiful green volcanoes all around, I just thought of all the water I had seen and fought this year.
It's rainy season in Central America.
It rains every day. Usually, once it starts raining, it won't stop.

We got to Guatemala a few days ago and we have just been walking around coffee plantations, picking avocados up from the floor and hiding from the rain.

After leaving Veracruz a few weeks ago, I hitchhiked alone to Mexico City. One of the easiest days of hitchhiking of history. I didn't even have to ask for any rides, I would just be walking a few meters from one spot to another and a car would pull over and take me exactly where I needed to go. I even got free breakfast and some cake, while I kept approaching the hell that I had escaped from back in June.

It was really nice to see some friends and I really loved being around a lot of different people for a couple of days. In Mexico City I met with my friend Ben, who I met in Memphis back in February or March while I was hitching across the USA. He left Memphis a couple of weeks ago to come to Latin America and he will travel all the way South to the end of the world.

Who would have thought that summer was going to be so wet and cold in Mexico?
How can someone be ready for that?

Ben had never hitchhiked before. We left Mexico City a week ago and it took us three days and a half to get to San Lucas Tolimán, where I happily reunited with Jenny.
And here I am again, with a hitchhiking gang of American kids who are running away from the American dream. I'm La Coyota! Translating and following the routes of the map. Next destination: Nicaragua.

Central America seems like quite the dream to me: getting the last ride of the day in La Ventosa right when the sun is setting and riding on the back of a pick-up, seeing the sky turn from blue to orange to fire to dark. And then the stars that start coming out, little by little, and half a moon illuminating everything.

We woke up in the morning in a gas station in Tapanatepec, and walked a few blocks down looking for a speed bum and some shade and, oh surprise! In the other side of the street, guess what? A bunch of big mango trees with huge fruits hanging from their branches!
I ran there to discover the sticky, orange and sweet smell of the dirt under the trees: mangoes rotting all around!!! I tried to find one that wasn't half eaten by the bugs and an old lady came out of the house and saw me.
"Do you want some mangoes, güera?"
I nodded enthusiastically. She went into the house and came back with two big bags full of mangoes! I took only one bag because I didn't want to carry them both.
We gave most of the away. They weren't bad, but they were very fibrous and too much mango might just ruin the strong love I have for that fruit.

And that's how it goes...

And of course I realize I romanticize all these stories a lot. We also have to walk on the heath or the rain carrying heavy back-packs and sometimes we are sticky and dirty and hungry and bored and so, so tired of waiting. But somehow in my memory it all ends up being a lot of fun...
A couple of days ago Jenny and I ran out to the streets of San Lucas while the rain was falling furiously on us. My mom always told me about the rain: you get wet and then you get dry and what? what's the big deal?
It was true!
I had my rain jacket on and Guatemalan money is made out of plastic, so I took my glasses off and I ran, embracing the blurry lights that shone all over the night. Getting wet was nothing! We got totally soaked! Laughing and yelling and yes! The rain is not so bad!

We are heading out tomorrow towards El Salvador and it's exciting to be traveling with friends again!
The three of us will be going to Vipassana in two weeks near Granada, and then going to Costa Rica to renew Jenny's visa.

The rest... We will see about that.

From Turist to Vagabound

"this is what it means to be an adventurer in our day: to give up creature comforts of the mind, to realize possibilities of imagination. Because everything around us says no you cannot do this, you cannot live without that, nothing is useful unless it's in service to money, to gain, to stability. The adventurer gives in to tides of chaos, trusts the world to support her- and in doing so turns her back on the fear and obedience she has been taught. She rejects the indoctrination of impossibility."

-- Off the map
Crimethinc

I traveled through Mexico a fair amount since I started traveling back in October.

It's a great place to travel!

However, I never traveled hitchhiking alone until this past month, after Jenny stayed in the Mesoamerican Permaculture Institute in Guatemala and I came back to Veracruz alone.

Every time I had been in the South of Mexico, people would always yell stuff at me in English, and I always assumed they were just talking to me in English because I was with foreigners.

This time around I got an awesome ride with one of those guys with a bike-cart right at the Guatemalan-Mexican border, in Tecún-Umán, where there is a long bridge. From the bridge you can actually see people crossing in shafts and big black rubber tires, something like what I imagined illegal immigrants would cross the USA border back up North. I never saw anyone crossing the Rio Bravo though, I imagine they would be more discreet.

This bike-cart guy took me for maybe just 5 minutes to the other side of the bridge and told me what he really wanted to do was to go to the USA. He said he wanted to travel. He was quite amazed at finding out that I had gotten there all the way from Mexico City just by hitchhiking, and he laughed a lot.

After I crossed the border a bunch of people started yelling at me in English again! I merrily yelled back at them in Spanish: "¡Soy Mexicana!"

I kept thinking about this one time I was hitchhiking in Texas and I ended up having to spend the night in Houston:
I had an awesome day working at a dry cleaning with a Mexican guy who gave me a ride. I wanted to help him around for a little while, so we went around to different dry cleaning places, picking up the dirty laundry and delivering the clean clothes. He said he was teaching me how to work, so if I wanted to stay there and work, I could. He told me about having archived the American dream because he now had a smart phone and if I were just staying a little longer, he would show me his house and introduce me to his wife and daughters, so I could see how happy he was.

He seemed authentically happy...

I got the last ride of the day from a 20-something-year-old with a huge beard who talked about the Illuminati all the way to Houston and who kindly dropped me off right at Downtown.

I had never been there before. I didn't know anyone there and I really had no plan. I was optimistically trying to make it all the way to New Orleans from Austin in one day. And I really didn't believe I was going to make it, but I decided I could figure out what to do once I actually had to figure it out. I was at least hoping to make it past Houston thought. But I spent too much time doing the dry cleaning thing.

In a restaurant someone helped me find a cheap hostel in the area and I started to walk over there.

I didn't know exactly where I was going, but I had drawn a little map in my notebook.

When I was crossing the street some homeless woman walked over to me and said, 

"Hey, I was going to ask you for some change, but then I realized you're also in the street."

I didn't know what to say, so I nodded.

"There is a good bridge you can sleep under right over there. It's warm there."

I thanked her and kept walking towards the hostel.

I got there. The night was something like... 18 dollars. I had five.

The manager was a really sweet woman who gave me a hitchhiker's discount and let me stay there five bucks.

It was cool. It was the one and only time I stayed in a hostel.

Now I can say that I did it. Ha.

The next morning when I was walking towards the bus that would take me to the highway, another homeless man talked to me: he wanted to know if I had gotten anything to eat because they were giving out some food at a church.

I had packed a lot of food from the hostel, so I thanked him and walked away.

So now I'm traveling in the South of Mexico I find it funny that people see me as a tourist, when in the USA so many people saw me as a homeless, and I look pretty much the same when I travel here than when I travel there...

Except that I carry less cardboad around when I'm in Mexico, because it's easier to get rides just with your thumb...

Now, this past weekend my friend Lizzette and I went to Coatzacoalcos. She works with Central American immigrants and they have some program they do to feed people under a bridge, near the train tracks.

I had such a great time!

The idea was already cool because just feeding people in the street reminds me of Food Not Bombs. My friend actually made an awesome short film about some women who feed immigrants in some small town in Veracruz, the same state I'm in right now.

It's just 5 minutes! Check it out if you get a chance:

Anyways... I had an incredible time talking to the immigrants on Sunday!
Most of them were from Honduras and they were quite young. I was surprised to see many of them had light green eyes and dirty blond hair.
They told me that region is very mixed with Europeans.
They were eating their tortas, laughing around and telling stories. I saw only two girls.
There was this one guy who talked to me the most. He was from Honduras and he had all these crazy stories! He said he had been in the USA before, that he had worked in Wisconsin. He said because of the job he got there, someone connected him for another job painting walls of boats in Dubai. So he went! He worked illegally there, and also in France, before going back to Honduras. Now he wanted to go back to the USA and see what else could happen.
I know, I know... a lot of this stories are probably not true, but I just thought it was awesome to hear some crazy traveling stories from this guy!
There was a loud noise and then all the immigrants got excited!
The train was coming!
"La Bestia!" yelled one of them!
"Show her!" the others yelled at him.
He then ran wildly behind the train and jumped in!
He got off again and ran back to us, laughing.
I was so impressed!!! Holy shit! I see horrible pictures in the newspapers all the time of the bodies they find under the train tracks!
And these guys...
I had a great time with them!
I know that they have to go through a lot of shit to get to the USA, but at least in that moment they seemed pretty fearless and adventurous and awesome!

And hey, they were blond. Why was I the tourist!?

AWAY!

My dear friends, acquaintances, family, strangers and all.

I have tried having a blog a couple of times in the past, and it never worked.
A couple of things have lead me to try again, and hopefully, this time around I will actually post stuff.

I deleted my facebook back on October 2011.
I also quit my job and started hitchhiking.
It took me until July 2012 to actually grow the balls to finally get rid of most of my stuff, send the rest to my mom's place, leave my apartment and move out of Mexico City.
But I did it.
And here I am now. Free. At least I feel pretty free right now.

So, my facebookless-self thought, that if any of you think of me some day and wonder where I am or what I am doing, you can look up this site and know that I'm still alive. That I haven't gotten killed or kidnapped or any of those things people talk about when they talk about hitchhiking.

Right now I'm in Acayucan, Veracruz, editing a documentary (not my own). I will be done with it some time in August (hopefully!) and I will start traveling again.

I left Mexico City with my friend Jenny a couple of days before the elections and we hitched to Chiapas and then Guatemala. If you want to get a little idea of what I was up to for those days, you can watch this little video I made about the trip.

I will post more about the trip and the stuff it has made me think about once I figure out how to upload photos.


 

AWAY! Two girls hitchhiking to Guatemala. from Marissa Rivera Bolaños on Vimeo.