Mexico City
May 1st 1995
It was my thirty-sixth birthday. Normally when you enter a country, the form you have to fill in asks for your date of birth. Mexico's asked for your age. This was a bit confusing at the end of a long and tiring flight, when i was filling out the form before midnight, to be handed in after midnight, and it was my birthday the next day!
Customs clearance in Mexico was conducted by a bizarre system in which you pressed a button and either a green light or a red light came on. The green meant you passed freely and red meant you got searched. This was supposed to be random, but any fool knew there was really someone out of sight watching you and operating a switch. I don't know if this was some form of psychological trap or if it was just a product of mexican people's dislike of being seen to impose their will on other people.
Anyway, without intending to, i managed to avoid the red light and what would have been the second customs hassle in a few hours, by approaching the officer on duty to ask about some food stuff i was carrying. When i eventually pressed the button, the light was mercifully green.
Naturally, my birthday's marked by a public holiday in Mexico, as in all the civilized countries of the world. But this promised to make things a bit more awkward for the first time visitor to the world's largest city.
I got through customs at about half past one in the morning. Mexico's something like sixteen hours behind Malaysia, so this meant the flight from Kuala Lumpur had taken more than twenty four hours, which seemed incredible, as that's about the same time as from Sydney to London. However, it's obviously a very long way - right the way around the rim of the pacific, perhaps half the total circumference. This also meant i'd been travelling for thirty hours since leaving Penang.
Naturally, i was feeling pretty buggered, but i'd decided i didn't want to spend any time in Mexico city at this point - i'd wait till i was a bit more familiar with the country before tackling that. So i reckoned it wasn't worth going into the city to find a hotel just to get a couple of hours sleep, with all the hassle i thought that would involve. So i hung around the airport till morning.
In fact, i realised later it would have been a lot less hassle than i'd imagined, Mexico's a very friendly city and easier to deal with than a lot of capital cities i've been to.
At about six o'clock, i discovered the metro wasn't going to open till seven as it was a public holiday. But i also found out that the bus station i wanted was within walking distance. I bought a map from one of the shops in the airport and set off on foot.
Mexico City to Zipolite
TAPO - Terminal de Autobuses de Pasajeros del Oriente - the bus station that served routes to the east of Mexico city, was a big circular building with a domed roof. This housed the ticket offices and all the other things you find in a bus station. The buses parked all the way round the outside and pedestrian access was through a tunnel. Although it wasn't a very tall building, about two storeys, it stood out above its surroundings as you approached it, looking like a flying saucer that had just landed. It was also reminiscent of some of the round buildings in London, like Chalk Farm tram shed and the entrances to the foot tunnel between the Isle Of Dogs and Greenwich.
Anyway, i got the seven o'clock bus from there to Oaxaca, which was about nine hours away. The whole thing was a bit crazy really, getting off a plane after a twenty-four hour flight and almost straight away getting on a bus to somewhere i had no idea about only that it was on the way to where i wanted to go - although i had no idea how far that was from Oaxaca, or even the faintest clue how to get there. Also, leaving Mexico that morning was a big mistake, as i was to discover later.
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The bus trip to Oaxaca wasn't a vast amount of fun that day. I'd really done enough sitting for a while and another nine hours wasn't really what i needed. However, i did get an interesting first glimpse of Mexico, as the bus drove through what seemed to be semi-desert all the way. It had the look of human-made desert about it too, although i wouldn't like to say how much of it that might apply to.
I chatted a bit with the old man sitting next to me and i was quite amazed that after ten years of not being in a spanish-speaking country, i could still use the language well enough to have a reasonable, but basic, conversation. I told him i'd just arrived from Malaysia, a country he'd never even heard of and certainly had no idea where it was. I gave him the handful of malaysian coins i had left, which pleased him a lot. I had a, possibly rather patronizing, mental picture of him inviting everyone in the village around at one time or another, to have a look at his malaysian coins, which would have been much more of a novelty than the occasional yanqui dollar which probably finds its way there. I doubt many of the other people in his village would have heard of Malaysia either.
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At Oaxaca bus station i somehow managed to find out that to get to Zipolite, you have to catch a bus to Pochutla, which was another six hours or so. This was a serious drag as i was totally exhausted by this point. I had the choice of getting a bus in an hour or two and then arriving in Pochutla at one in the morning, or waiting a few hours and arriving at fiveish. I couldn't be bothered dealing with trying to find somewhere to stay in Oaxaca, which would have been only putting off the journey and adding to the aggravation involved. I just wanted to get where i was going and stay there long enough to recover properly. The bus station seats were uncomfortable and all i wanted to do was sleep. I decided i could best do this on the bus to Pochutla - so i caught the first one.
Pochutla at one in the morning, when you've never been there before, is actually a much better situation than a lot of places. However, i didn't really know what i was doing and unfortunately i didn't appreciate my situation. I ended up catching a taxi to Zipolite, which the driver said would cost me forty pesos, which was actually not as far over the odds as it could have been. I'd asked someone else how far it was beforehand, and they'd told me it was ten kilometres. The taxi driver said it was twenty and i had absolutely no idea of what sort of place i was heading for anyway.
The driver had a mate with him and when they realized i didn't know where i was going and that i'd hardly slept in the last couple of days, they started acting strangely and glancing at each other. Naturally, i began to feel a bit nervous, although i had nothing of value except two passports and some travellers cheques. And it was probably not without cause, either, as more than one tourist had been robbed by taxi drivers in that area.
They also started giving me some bullshit stories about how everything would be closed in Zipolite and that it would actually cost me eighty pesos to go where i wanted to go.
We came into Puerto Angel, which, although i didn't know it at the time, is only three kilometres from Zipolite, and i told the driver to stop. I got out and paid him his forty pesos and went to the nearest hotel. It cost me fifty pesos for a bed for what little was left of the night, but by that point i didn't give a shit.
The next morning, i discovered Zipolite was only just around the corner and i walked there in under an hour.