Tijuana Gringo |
Michael Thomas |
Saturnday, 6 January 2001 |
ONE RIDE from out in front of Kiko's restaurant and RV camp, ONE RIDE ALL THE WAY TO Ensenada! Thank you, LORD!
And what a ride... the man drives back and forth between Ensenada and La Paz on business every few weeks, and knows the road very, very well. He was speeding along across the valleys and a hundred kilometers an hour and then perfectly slowing down for the twisting, winding slopes up the mountainsides....
Guerrero Negro to Ensenada in like eight hours. He refused to let me buy gas, but then agreed that I could pay for our lunch in Cataviña. Like Agustín, however, he had some rather bitter things to say about country people. Well... well I won't say any more.
As far as the perfect ride could be, I could hardly have wished for any more.
He dropped me at the bus station in Ensenada, where I bought a ticket and within half an hour was onboard a short bus trip into Tijuana. Got home around eight p.m.
*wow*
And I got my wish to see all the parts of the road I hadn't seen when I rode down through the night. Hee hee we passed dozens of busses he went so fast. Man to think we drove through the length of the state, almost five hundred miles in eight hours. What a change, too, from the desert of Vizcaino through the mountains and deserts of Chapala and Cataviña to the coasts of the land where I grew up with its eucalyptus and canyon oaks. With my own eyes I saw what Francisco Xavier Clavijero wrote in his HISTORIA De La Antigua o Baja California published in Italy 1789 some decades after he and the other Jesuits were expelled from all of New Spain [I translate from Chapter One]:
The border between the United States and the Republic of Mexico reaches the Pacific Ocean at 32 degrees and 30 minutes north latitude. Tijuana lives in that zone of change from desert to temperate. This is more than metaphor.The appearance of California is, generally speaking, disagreeable and horrid, and its land is burned, arrid, overwhelmingly rocky and sandy, lacking water and covered with spiny plants where it is capable of producing vegetation, and where not, with immense mountains of stones and sand... but from the parallel of 27 degrees forward the wind is more benign. Around 30 degrees cold begins to be felt, and it sometimes snows; but the land, although less burnt and stony, is unto 32 degrees very arrid and sterile. In this last parallel the aspect of nature changes, and a countryside is seen with abundant water and more adorned with vegetation.
[For the full text in Spanish of Chapter I plus the gringo's translation, here.]
If you study the globe, you will find everywhere the realm of desert exists between the tropics and the temperates. As if the world can be sliced into four sets of ribbons, a peeled apple of (from the poles) arctic, temperate, desert and tropic.
Welcome to our home, my brothers and sisters. I write to you from the edge of reality. Between the mountains and the sea, between the deserts and the forests, between the hi-tech super-rich industrialized world and the strange and wonderful primordial-colonial-antiquity-modernidad, Mexico.