My Mexican Bus
An ongoing spiritual journey commences anew.
We all have a special place for solace and introspection; mine is a southbound bus in Baja California.
I only take this ride once a year to visit friends, but it has become both a pilgrimage and a ritual that occupies my thoughts for a far greater time. I seem to have an inbred need for this repetitive ride that would not have the same value should I do it more often. For me, the journey has always been as important as the destination, but in this case, they are both the same.
It begins in the Tijuana bus terminal, an aging, cavernous building and a time portal for my entrée to Old Mexico. When I step through those doors, I enter another era as well as a place. The concrete-and-glass blockhouse is a utilitarian monument to 1950s Mexican architecture and a reminder of how slowly time passes here. Inside, the smell of tortillas and mole mingles with the aroma of ammonia on linoleum floors. A feeling washes over me that does not translate easily into words, a feeling finely honed and nuanced over many years, somewhere between coming home and simple tranquility.
I pay my respects at the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose statue stands a tearful guard next to the entrance to the public toilet. I drop a two-peso coin into the pay slot that lets me revolve the steel turnstile and open the door marked “Caballeros” over the grinning stencil of a mustachioed man giving me a thumbs-up. Inside, I am pleasantly surprised to find flush toilets complete with paper, but know they will probably be the last of their kind until I reach my final destination.
Outside in the main hall I walk past the cambio, a money exchange that has never been open in my presence, and then wait while the young girl behind the counter writes out my ticket by hand on a yellow legal pad with a dull pencil as she snaps her gum loudly.
Tijuana is an open city with no taxes and it is here that the braceros and agriculturos of the south come to stock up on the trappings of modern society, only recently available from the large new discount stores that line the border. The waiting hall is full of people lugging big screen TVs and assorted appliances on those tiny folding luggage rollers. One ancient grandmother has three crowded shopping bags on each arm that cause her to roll like a camel as she walks. I watch a mother wrap her children in blankets on the cold steel chairs and try to make out what the PA announcement is saying, but it is mostly garbled static.
With my fellow passengers, I walk through the metal detector that beeps loudly at each of us but fails to gain the attention of the bored-looking security guard. The folding knife I forgot to take out of my pocket will ride with me tonight.
Outside, as I stand in line to board, the tiny grandmother clutching a canvas bag in front of me is startled when I greet her in Spanish. She is so wide that it is an effort to board, but once in her seat, she pats the one next to her when I climb on. She offers me a bite of her churro, which I politely decline, then instinctively clutches my hand as the bus lurches from its stall. Her lips are moving below closed eyes and I think she is saying the Lord’s Prayer. She is a child of the old world and clearly afraid of the journey ahead in this gigantic mechanized machine. She probably leaves the desert infrequently to visit a son or daughter and now must return. Her weathered face is a definitive map of the Mexican people: not Hispanic, nor Spanish, or even mestizo, but Mexican, a distinction often overlooked by racial generalization. I assure her in Spanish that all will be well and she nervously compliments me on my pronunciation.
Baja is not like mainland Mexico. It is older and set in its ways. On the world scale it is a tiny peninsula, but its deserts rival any on Earth and its jagged mountains appear shaped by an angry God, while tucked into its most remote corners are a people whose mode of living has not changed in centuries. They are the same people whose ancestors turned back armored Spanish conquistadors with bows and arrows. Away from Highway 1, horses and burros are the main mode of transport and doors of mud houses remain unlocked because there is no crime among neighbors. Cattle wander the highways with faces full of prickly cholla cactus and cougars and wolves roam in numbers across a vast lunar landscape. It is a separate reality from my own life and part of its allure is to realize that an imaginary line on a map is all it takes to divide such diverse cultures.
The noisy diesel coughs and sputters to life and we begin to inch our way past the gaudy neon and gridlocked traffic that is the Tijuana night. From my perch high above them I wonder about the lives in the countless cars below me, thinking any one of them could have been my own. What if I had born here? How would my life be different?
A big difference is obvious when our route takes us past the high concrete wall that forms part of the border. It is covered with graffiti and seems eerily similar to one that used to stand in Berlin. While people are not being shot for crossing this wall, it still makes me wish for a world where we need no barriers to separate us from our neighbors.
As we leave the city behind, the grandmother releases my hand and with a timid smile of apology, falls asleep with her head on my shoulder. She is going home now and is happy. A chunky moon slides from behind traveling clouds to reveal iridescent rolling surf, just before the highway turns inland on the way to Ensenada.
In the silent cloak of night, Mexico has always been more real to me. In this predominantly Catholic land, organized religion has merged with peasant superstition to create a belief system all its own, especially in the high mountains and remote deserts where I prefer to travel. This is the land of the brujo, witches, spirits, and demons, a land where people pray equally to Jesus in church and to syncretic images of Santeria in mud shacks. I have spent too much time in this place to dismiss anything metaphysical and recall a midnight encounter in a coffee shop, when a stranger swathed in black warned me of the full moon and then disappeared into a brightly lit and vacant street. I have yet to meet anyone in Baja who is not related to, or not had an encounter with, a witch of some sort. They are ubiquitous here.
South of Ensenada, we climb into the mountains of San Pedro de Martir. The temperature has fallen and I pull a fleece from my bag as the repetitive hum of the tires and familiar back-and-forth swaying on the switch-backed road triggers more memories.
Guillermo was on the lead horse when it reared up, and without any commands, trampled a rattlesnake to death. Its patterned skin eventually became a somewhat mutilated hat band. Later that day, while returning from a cave painted 6,000 years ago by the Cochimi people, we stopped at a rancho for beans and rice. I noticed what appeared to be a human skull on a shelf in the adobe. When I turned to ask the old patron about it, his face appeared weirdly contorted and I suddenly felt dizzy. The moment passed and when I looked again, the skull was a chunk of obsidian and the old man was smiling benignly. That revelatory moment ended any more questions on my part. Some things are just not meant to be understood.
The hours pass while my thoughts are elsewhere. Night in a foreign land is when I rethink my own life; what I should have done differently, what I can do better. What will I do next? The bus is silent except for random snoring and the hushed conversation between the middle-aged driver and his young girlfriend seated on the aisle floor next to him. We stop on an isolated piece of road where towering cacti stand like night sentinels in our headlights. The cargo door opens and a gentleman and young lady emerge to trade places with the driver and his friend, both girls giggling as they switch. Our new driver, refreshed in more ways than one, takes over.
I return to the night, and when the first purple streak of dawn slashes the sky we leave Highway 1 for the service road into Guerro Negro, gateway to Scammons’ Lagoon. On the sides of the road we begin to see platforms topping telephone poles for the osprey to nest on and avoid electrocution. On the beach side, we roll past the enormous skeleton of a gray whale that announces this village as a major whale-watching destination.
Behind the bus station, the ever-present Virgin of Guadalupe, haloed by blinking Christmas lights, watches over the parking lot with outstretched hand. A faint whiff of marijuana comes to my nose and as I step inside, two ancient and gaunt vaqueros in straw cowboy hats are drinking coffee and passing a hand-rolled smoke. I buy a cold empanada so stale I toss it to a stray dog after one bite. Because it is close to the ocean, it is often bitterly cold in Guerro Negro at night. This evening I watch my breath rise in hazy clouds to disappear in the breeze. Above me, the Big Dipper sits low in the sky, the end of its handle pointing the way home for when I return. As we leave to continue south, the morning light begins to crawl over the horizon, mingling land and sky that slowly separates into a new day.
An hour’s ride south, the desert floor widens and the road disappears into a cottony ground fog. The top of a distant volcano pokes through it and gigantic Cordon cacti slide in and out of sight in the haze, their upturned arms saluting as we roll past, a vast silent army, guardians of the land. We have reached the edge of the Viscaino biosphere, 5 million hectares of protected wilderness that cover a quarter of the Baja Peninsula. Suddenly, distant shadows become a herd of wild burros that cause us to brake hard enough to wake everyone, and we laugh as the driver must exit and physically shoo them off the road. Kestrels are hunting insects in the morning haze and the cacti appear to be stretching after the evening’s sleep. Everyone crowds to one side and cell phones are snapping photos. The quiet night is gone. Across from me, a man in silver-tipped cowboy boots draws a long pull from a pocket flask then slumps back in his seat, his Stetson tilted low over his eyes.
The fog parts like a curtain and we pass low flat mesas full of sandstone caves carved by the eons. I know if I were to explore them I would find artifacts that hold stories from centuries ago. East of the mesas, rolling flat lands give rise to the Tres Virgines, three active volcanoes, named for the inhabitants of an old folktale. They sit in a perfect row, descending in height from the one nearest the highway, all mighty vents from the lungs of the planet. Archaeologists have speculated that when they last awoke, tens of thousands of years ago, they spewed molten lava up to 100 miles, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, from whose tidal waters on a clear day you can see the hazy outline of the tallest volcano.
Just north of San Ignacio we stop for a military checkpoint where a cardboard soldier holds a sign warning against drugs. An officer with a clipboard climbs into the bus and struts up and down the center aisle, not really looking for anything; more an act of machismo than a search. Outside a sniffer dog scratches at the baggage compartment and after an amused soldier looks inside, we are waved on.
People are moving about the bus, stiff and sore after the long night. The driver puts a movie on the overhead screens and cranks the volume up to rock concert level. It is Snakes on a Plane with Samuel L. Jackson, a very bad B movie that makes me realize that a good movie is not about to be playing on a public bus in the rural deserts of Mexico.
We round a hairpin turn and from the tiny valley below us the adobe-tiled roofs of San Ignacio come into view through the date palms. It is a tired and sun-worn village whose main industry is cement brick and whose people appear to live in slow motion. The town sits astride an impossibly beautiful river full of egrets and herons that contribute to the town’s casual aura. Two hours to the west, gray whales have annually migrated into the lagoon of the same name for centuries.
We pull into the dirt parking lot and I spot Jorge leaning against his van, waiting for me even though we are three hours late. He has one cowboy boot on the bumper above a “Jesus loves you” decal and his arm rests on the bullhorns mounted on the hood. He still wears the aviator shades I gave him two years ago. It is stifling hot under a van Gogh sun.
A stray dog barks at a swirling dust devil and I stare up at the familiar sign over the bus office.
I smile as I read, “Bienvenido A San Ignacio.”
I am back.
James Michael Dorsey is an award-winning author, explorer, photographer, and lecturer who has traveled extensively in forty-five countries. He has spent the past two decades researching remote cultures around the world. He is a former contributing editor at Transitions Abroad and frequent contributor to United Airlines’ Hemispheres and Perceptive Travel. He has also written for Colliers, The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, BBC Wildlife, World & I, and Natural History, plus several African magazines. He is a foreign correspondent for Camerapix International, a travel consultant to Brown + Hudson of London, and a correspondent for the World Explorers Bureau. He is also a fellow of the Explorers Club and former director of the Adventurers Club. His latest book is Vanishing Tales from Ancient Trails. His stories have appeared in nine travel anthologies. He is a nine-time Solas Award category winner and a contributor to The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10.