Nogales to El Dorado

My photos (and Chris's) are on facebook at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=9751&l=186ad&id=708372808
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10166&l=ed80d&id=708372808
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10530&l=2ac8f&id=708372808
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=10953&l=afa08&id=708372808

The bussride in from the border to Nogales city limit was exhilerating. The change in atmosphere from the US to Mexico was tangeible. There were large families on the buss, public notices written in paint on the roof. shops and houses were coloured bright, often clashing colours, streets were crooked and the traffic was noisy and, chaotic. We asked a friendly passenger where we should get off given that we wanted to be near the city limit so that we could travel on to Hermesillio. I think that we told him that we were hitchhiking but he mustn´t have understood. After all it is not very expected and neither of the spannish expressions that we used for hitchhiking: autostop and "with the thumb" are common in Mexico. We later learnt that they have their own word for it which sounds like the english words "write-eh" which we are pretty sure orriginated from a mispronunciation of the english word "ride". At any rate the stop where our helpfull friend told us to get off turned out to be the Grey Hound station. No matter, we asked the first couple of people we met on our walk south how far the city limits were. The first one told us it was about 700meters and then the second said three kilometers. Not very consistant, but at least we were close... and it was really nice to be out of the United States Imperial system and back into the metric system.

Unfortunately this turned out to be our first introduction to the Mexican sense of distance. We walked for at least five kilometers and there was no sign that the city´s sprawl was ever going to let up. Just when it looked like we were on the industrial outskirts and any moment there would be open countryside there we would come accross a school and a police station or a strip mall, indicating that this was still very much part of Nogales. At the time we hypothesized that we must have crossed the city limits but that the sprawl continued outwards, but since then we have learnt that estimations of distance in Mexico are in orders of magnitude, not significan digets. 4 kilometers can be anywhere from 2 km to 20, 20km can be anywhere from 10km to 50km. My imediate thought was to blame the Mexican education system, which many of our rides have criticised, but I don´t remember being taught in school how to read a map or how to approximate distances between landmarks, I think that it must be more of a cultural thing. People just don´t think in terms of maps and numbers here. As for maps, we checked gas station after gas station for a map of the province we were in and they ínvariable don´t sell any form of map. We asked a few people where we could pick a map up and one suggested at a "papeleria" selling stationary and odd junk, but when we checked a couple of them out, they carry no maps. Finally we found maps in a book store, but they are poor quality and touristy, and they had one or two city maps and maps of mexico, but no state maps, which is the ideal scale for hitchhiking detail. I am a big map junkie so this is a bit hard for me to swallow, and when Chris and I are disoriented we show the worn Map of mexico to someone expecting them to be able to place us and point out the rout on the map, but although they can usually find us it takes a while and they often push the map aside and try to give us verbal instructions instead. Well shit I guess I´ll have to learn to think out of my box... my map box... but thats why I´m travelling, for cultural differences like that, I don´t know why I´m making such a big deal out of it.

Where were we... ah yes hiking south through Nogales, and busses from the rout that we were on keep passing by us, but they don´t give out transfers, we are trying to be really cheap, and there is no way of knowing if we have one kilometer or seven left to walk.

This hiuke was our first Mexican freeway walk too so I´ll make a fuss about it this once. In The US and Canada, and on just about all of my European travels for that matter, side walks are a good indication of wether pedestrians are allowed on the road of not. In Mexico we have never been hastled on the side of the road, but we have no idea wether it is legal or not to be there. If a police officer came up he could make up whatever he wanted to wether or not we were in the wrong and we would be in no position to argue. This is no different than corrupt or annoying cops anywhere, but we are more aware of it here because we have had so many warnings and stories about corrupt Mexican police officers. So to decide where we should or should not be, we just do what all the other Mexicans do: use our heads. If doing something seems dangerous, don´t do it. If it doesn´t then consider it, but don´t expect anyone to hold your hand through it or be liable if you screw up and... say fall into the open sewer 4 feet down with green putrid stagnant water and various disguarded shrapnel including sharp broken concrete slabs and dead rodents. The sidewalks aren't completely absent though, and where the concrete is missing there is a dirt path, or often there is a narrow curb with a ciment pad angling down toward an open sewer. and you either have to tight rope walk the curb or roll your ancles sideways at the top of the sewer. Also the intersections are not marked, If you have the right of way to cross a street, that is good, but only go if there are no cars coming. We have been cut off a few times when we erroneously thought that we were safe crossing at a cross walk. In fact we have seen an unbelievable amount of almost accidents and only one or two real ones, which leads me to believe that people here just have a higher risk comfort level. In the midst of apparent mayhem there are people walking down the middle of the street selling things, or cycling and they aren't even phased by busses or small cars cutting corners and breaking traffic rules. I have decided that people must be in more control than they look and there is no doubt that although they are on the whole more agressive drivers here they are also more skilled.

At any rate we were walking along when a man sitting down eating at a street vendor asked us where we are from and going. We answered and he offers us a ride. Perfect. He then offers us a place to stay. We tentatively agree and he doesn´t push it, but he did offer us dinner from the street vendor, which we apreciatively declined. Next he told us to wait in the car while he buys comething from the grocery store. Chris and I have a quick conversation about staying alert and looking for any indication that something might be wrong. "I don´t know what a Mexican con artist looks like, but we have no reason to think that this couldn´t be one." Together with the place to sleep and the ride and that he had only just met us, we became suspicious of the generosity. What could be his ulterior motive? When he came back from the grocery store he had bought us each a couple of pasteries. We set off. We had good conversations and he spoke about as much English as Chris spoke Spannish. He told us that his job was buying and selling precious rocks and jewlery. He said that if we liked we could stay with him a couple of days and learn how to make some jewlery with wire and rocks. Free accomodation, free instruction, and he gets a few hours of work done by us. Sounded like a good deal. He stopped and bought us both coffees. He told us that his brother was a doctor in the US and because of this, his wife was going to have their baby in the United States, which will give his new baby American citizenship and so potentially to save him a world of trouble in his life and open up many opportunities down the line. We were still alert and sceprtical, but it was becomeing more and more apparent that this man, named Jesus (pronounced 'hesus' of course) was just an extremely generous man. He did make sure that we had his number in case we ever wanted to buy stones to sell on our travels, but taking us in was hardly a buisness decision because when we got in to Hermesillio he bought us dinner despite our protests and offered us to stay in his second house as long as we would like.

He was renting a house because of some falling out with his ex wife, but in the other housw a rock sculpter was living, who we were going to bunk with. (The rock sculpter was also not paying any rent, but he was buying his raw rocks from Jesus).

We tagged along with Jesus to meet one of his clients who was also interested in learning to make the wire and rock jewlery. But while we were there he recieved a call from his pregnant wife saying that the baby was on it's way. Who knows how many days we might have spent in Hermesillo if his wife had not called telling him to come back right away because the baby was coming early. We decided to make a 2 day trip out to Bahia Kino on the gulf of California coast while Jesus went up to Phoenix and back, then upon his return we would start learning wirework and exploring Hermesillio. Furthermore Jesus´s house was close to the grave yard and 'Dia de los Muertos', the Mexican 'Day of Dead People' was coming up.

So that afternon, actually Halloween day, we hitchhiked out to Bahia Kino in two rides. the second ride was unremarkable, but the first told us that he was a Lawyer, professional soccer player, father and husband. Quite a combo.

We went to Kino Nuevo (New Kino) because the beach was apparently much nicer, but of course it was chock full of RVs and expatriots.

First we climbed a hill at the end of town and got a beautiful view and then we walked down the beach. We were deep into a conversation about wether travel is uncontrovercially good, wether it is for everyone, wether it is more selfish or more globally beneficial etc. As the debate wore on the sun turned crimson and and finally disappeared and the little children trick-or-treating down the strip gradually were replaced by older ones and then they dwindled out.

More important than the results of our travel debate was our decision about the nature of this trip. We discovered that we have 24 months and 24 countries, but this doesn´t add up because we had already spent more than a month in the United States of all places and definitely wanted to spend more than one month in some countries, which would meen sacrificing significant amounts of time in other countries. We tried to plan out which countries we wanted to spend time in and which could be sped through and it was a depressing endevour. We had no idea which countries we wanted to see and what wonders we would discover in the countries that didn´t particularly peak our interest. We threw a few ideas arround and then decided that rather than dawdle around slowly, absorbing bits of all aspects of Latin America, we were going to go on a mission to make it to the southern point of South America as fast as possible without compromising too many cool things. On our way we plan to take soundings of all the cool places and things we want to spend time with and then when we turn arround to come back we will have a better idea of where we want to spend what amount of time. Also this plan will let us spend more time in far away places than nearby (it will be a lot easier to return to Mexico than Patagonia) and it will be better for our mental health: whenever we start getting homesick we can just pick up the pace. The idea triggered a surge of euphoria for the prospect of all the new experiences and adventures that would soon be coming our way. We felt bad for leaving Jesus before we had the opportunity to help him out with his jewlery, but he had made it clear to us that he expected nothing in return and that we could leave whenever we wanted to.

The next morning we caught a ride to Khino Viello, and then another to the junction with a highway that would put us back on track southward. We helped the second ride unload a fridge from the back of their truck.

At the intersection we were as usual so far in Mexico, not the only people standing on the side of the road waving our arms at passing cars. There was one other hitchhiker and a pair of prostitutes. The prostitutes that we have seen in Mexico thus far are not particularly attractive or scantily clad, they are just women, almost always in pairs, standing on the side of the road. I wondered wether this makes hitchhiking in Mexico completely impossible for a pair of women who are not prostitutes, but we found out that they have a special hand signal. The funny story that goes along with that tidbit of information is that when people indicate to us that they were too full to take us or that they are turning off soon, we generally smile or wave or nod to indicate a sort of ´thanks anyway´ message, but then when a pedestrian walked by us one time and chatted with us for a bit, he told us sarcastically that the reason that we had had such good hitchhiking luck was because Chris´s 'thanks anyway' sign looks a lot like the prostitutes' 'I'm a prostitute' sign.

We were picked up and brought to a fuel station in the middle of nowhere two (Mexican) kilometers south of the junction, the two kilometers turned out to be about ten minutes of driving at 80 km per hour.

At this gass station we waited for hours and hours before we were finally picked up by a super overloaded truck that was travelling about 60 km per hour, swerving violently to avoid gigantic potholes. I believe that there were 9 or 10 people all told crammed in plus a huge amount of gear. They were going a very long way too, but they ended up dropping us off at the next gas station because their shocks were bottoming out. This however did not prove to be a setback because we were now on a major highway leading to Ciudad Obregan with a nice pulloff. It was November the 1st, 'Dia de los muertos' and we were excited to see some of the festivities, and where better to do it than in Chris' grandfather's birth city (Ciudad Obregan).

When our ride came they were indeed able to take us Ciudad Obregan, but they also invited us to their little village of Basconcove to partake in the festivities with them. They said that they understood that our mission was to make it to Terra Del Fuego (land of fire) in Chile, but tonight their house was going to be Terra Del Fuego. They phoned ahead to make sure it was ok if we crashed the party and we accepted their invitation, because we had no idea where we would end up sleeping if we went to Ciudad Obregan, but in a small town with some friends we would almost certainly find a good safe hammock spot or some floor space.

After a maze of endless backroads through remote farmland we arrived as our ride's brother's house in Basconcove. Not only were there very few people, but the party was just a mellow family with shy kids and a drunk oncle. Terra Del Fuego??...we were duped, but in the friendliest way possible. Our ride introduced us to his family and after a couple of beers and conversations we got into a different car and drove to the grave yard. At the graveyard there were indeed hundreds of people and there were lots of food stalls, a few candle and flower stalls and even a carnival trampoline for kids, but it wasn't a sort of Fringe Festival or Calgary Stampede atmosphere, it was a bit more subdued, but by no means mournfull. Lots of people were talking to each other, milling arround, eating but there were just as many or more who were sitting with their families or close friends in small circles arround a grave, apparently just hanging out with their lost ones. I didn't see any tears, I did see a lot of beer, but no rowdiness at all. I came away with the impression that this festival is just a really mature way of dealing with death. Not to be depressed or upset or jubilent, just to spend some quality time with dead people in the grave yard, respecting their memories and monuments. With the family we had a few interesting conversations about how television is a destructive hypnotic force in Canada and Mexico and about what our motivations were for the trip, but I was worried that we were occupying too much time that was allotted this once a year to dead people. Soon however a family friend took us on a tour of the graveyard to see what we could see and give the family some alone time. Walking arround the festival graveyard was one of the strangest expreiences of my life. Not because it was a festival in a graveyard, that seemed really natural and positive, it was wierd for me because absolutely everybody was stealing glances at me or just blatantly staring at me. We gathered that visibly non-latin foreigners just don't come to Basconcove. We were completely anomalous, and I am pretty sure that there wasn't a single man in the town with hair ass long as mine. I am used to catching wierd glances and sticking out a bit, but this was just insane. Everywhere I looked eyes were turning away from my gaze and every time I stopped we were confronted cautiously by inquisitive locals. Before this point it had sort of sunk in that I was in Mexico and that I was a long physical distance and a significant cultural distance away from home but for me this ws really a turning point. In this small town I really was a long way from home. Lots of things were the same, but it was a different world. After Chris and I came back from the tour arround the festival it was about eleven o'clock pm and the family was ready to head back home. We asked them about Dia De Los Muertos and tried to straighten a few things out... they aren't perfectly straight but here they are:

In Basconcove it is the tradition to celebrate the day of dead people in the evening of November 1st. Some people stay in the grave yard all night. In the rest of the province however it is customary to celebrate the festival on November 2nd in the day and evening, so in Basconcove they extend the party for another full day. American-style halloween with trick-or-treaters and scary stories on October 31st does happen in some places, but mainly in the very northern parts of Mexico nearer to the border. The huge crazy Dia De Los Muertos festivals that you see in National Geografic and Discovery Chanel with huge parades and costumes must only happen in big cities in the south of Mexico.

When we arrived at home we were offered a midnight snack. We tried to turn down the hospitality because we already had plenty of food in our bags, but they would have nothing of it. They said that they were going to eat too, but that the guests had to eat first. So we had some amasingly good tortillas with cheese, beans and hotsauce. However after we had finnished, didn't eat. It was purely a trick to get us to accept their hospitality. Wow. We told them that we could easily sling our hammocks in their back yard, but they would have nothing of this either. They put us up in a house that belonged to a brother of theirs who wasn't there, so we had the place to ourselves with comfortable beds.

In the morning they gave us breakfast and after breakfast they gave us some mini oranges with some of the most intense flavour that I have ever tasted. They were painfully sour and sweet at the same time, but they were dipped in ridiculous amounts of salt and extremely hot hotsauce, so they basically made your head explode. Chris said 'I'm not adverse to them' but it was clear that they were not for him. I loved it, but then I am a bit of a tastebuds masochist.

They recommended that we take the buss, but we were adament that we wanted to hitchhike. After a drunken man had tried to scam Chris's address to help him cross the border, we were picked up and driven to the main road that leads back to Ciudad Obregan. After hitching for a long while, we gave in and took the buss.

In Ciudad Obregan almost everything was closed because of the festival, but we found an internet cafe and got a Couchsurf for the next night.

I might have mentioned it before, but I will spell it out now. Our buisness in Ciudad Obregan was researching Chris's roots. Chris's grandfather had imigrated to Mexico in the 1920s from Germany, intending to continue on to the US but ending up at Ciudad Obregan. There Chris's grandfather was born and spent the first seven years of his life. Unfortunately when the second world war broke out there was a rule in Mexico that Germans could not live withing a certain distance of the coast for fear of them collaborating with their homeland as spies. Their family could have moved inland, but decided that it would be better to go all the way back to Germany, so although Chris's grandfather was born in Mexico, they have no family there. Before Chris left on our trip though, he scanned a couple of old pictures of Ciudad Obregan onto his email account so that he could print them out in Ciudad Obregan and look for the street where his Gradfather was born and look for the old spot where his Great Grandfather's mechanic shop had been.

We had no trouble locating the street, but finding the building was a different story. We wandered arround for a bit and then decided to check out our second day of Dia De Los Muertos experience. Dia De Los Muertos in Ciudad Obregan's old cemetary was quite similar to that of Basconcove's but there was some live music and it didn't go on for as long into the night. By 10pm everybody was clearing out. We cleared out as well, found a good spot in a field and camped out.

The next morning our mission was to meet up with our couchsurfing host and explore the town a bit more. Our couchsurfing host spoke quite good english, and his family was extremely generous in taking us in again. We went out for Mexican Sushi and Mexican slushes and fresh coconuts and then went out to a field to drink beer, talk and look at the stars until we were got chilled and wanted to head home.

Our host told us was that he had only ever couchsurfing hosted once before, but the people he had hosted last time were also heading all the way down to the south of South America. these guys had worked for longer than we had and had saved up enough money to buy a car, but their plan had been to abandon it when they made it to South America. It turned out that they ditched it in Peru by trading it away for two donkies. Their ultimate goal was also to hitchhike all arround South America. As if that didn't make us feal unoriginal enough, we discovered that they were also Canadians and that they were actually from Calgary. It would be really cool to meet them at some point and compare experiences.

The next day we dug a little deeper into Chris's history and found the location where his Great Grandfather's mechanic shop had been. After they had left the shop, it was turned into another mechanics shop and then a papeleria, which is still there. We found that the best resource however was a historic hotel whose guestbook went all the way back into the last years that Chris's family had lived there. It turned out that his Grandfather used to seek refuge from the sun in this very hotel's lobby when he was a little boy.

The next day we were driven to the highway by our host before he had to be in class and we started walking down the highway looking for a good hitching spot. We never really found a good spot, but we were picked up anyway by a party car full of stereotypical ignorant-American Mexico-roadtrippers. There were three of them and a dog and to be fair, the stories that the ring leader told, that made me pass judgement made the others feal uncomfortable and embarased. They wern't malicious, they just had a vision that they wanted to fulfill of an epic road trip through a backwards country. The guy sitting shotgun told us that he liked yelling 'taco del burrito' to Mexican people on the streat because he doesn't know any other spannish words. He also told us that they were going to sleep with every prostitute in Mexico and drop them off in random places. He said that they were on an epic journey of no return full of drugs beer and indisgression. The ring leader was really excited though that they had picked up Canadian hitchhikers, another epic story to tell back home. I had heard that this sort of thing happens: American roadtrips into Mexico without the least bit of interest in Mexico, only an interest in partying, but I had never come face to face with it and it was interesting to have front row seats.

The party car was stopped in Navajoa by the municipal police for driving 40 miles per hour in a 40 kilometer per hour zone. The officer had infinite patience and understanding and was a credit to Mexican law enforecement. He told our ride that they had to have papers to travel more than 21 km beyond the border with an American car and thet they wern't in trouble but they had to go back in order to get the propper papers. The ring leader kept on telling the driver to pay off the cop, but this cop was not corrupt and did not intend to fine them... so the ring leader's friends kept telling him to shut up (fortunately the cop didn't speak any english). The ring leader kept on exclaiming "We're going to go to jail in MEXICO!" to which one of us would reply "No we aren't, just calm down!"

After explaining that Chris and I were just hitchhikers and in no other way affiliated with our ride, Chris started translating for them. But the communication still wasn't quite there so the cop called his english speaking frind to come and explain the situation. Once the english speaking friend came, Chris and I thanked them for the ride and then huffed it to the edge of town, out of that mess.

We waited for a while and debated wether it was any less ethical to be passive observers in a car full of disrespectfull Americans than it was to be a passive observer of Mexicans throwing cans out of the windows of their cars, disrespecting the planet.

We waited for a long time before finally being picked up by a truck that drove us all the way to Culiacan. In Culiacan we eat some food and contemplated our next move. We were approached by a security guard who wanted us to pay him 20 pesos ~$2can for us to be allowed into the train yard where he said we could catch a train no problem for free into Mazatlan. It was tempting, but there was no guarentee that there wouldn't be another guard at the other side who would want a lot more than 2 pesos to be paid off and it would also meen arriving at a large, dangerous city in the middle of the night in a train yard. We did see several locals doing it, but we took the safer option and searched for a spot to sleep outside of Culiacan. We succeded in finding one, and spent the next morning hitchhiking unsuccesfully from a suburb of Culiacan. We decided that there was no shame in bussing out of suburbia and made for a small town 50km south named El Dorado.

El Dorado had a really really cool vibe to it. Lots of street vendors and it was a smallish town so there were probably going to be less crooks and mischief makers at night. We decided it would be a good place to sleep and then hunkered down in an internet cafe to write the blog before this one.

This internet cafe was nuts though. The home page that comes up when someone opens a new window had a big loop of repeating 30 second clips of bad cheezy music and every single computer had the volume of it's small crappy speakers cranked up so high that you could hear the speakers being wrecked. It was quite simple to turn the sound down, and I did so when my computer started blaring shitty pop and rap. Nobody else seemed to mind the defening noise, and there was always someone paying GTA or something, screaching virtual cars arround corners, crashing them and shooting virtual automatic weapons. It was so loud that when a couple of construction workers randomly came into the room with a jack hammer and decided to break up come concrete in the corner, didn't at first register with me that the noise from the construction wasn't just part of some computer game. The only explanation I could think of is that the lady running the place felt that the din would attract passers by from the street?

When we sat down at our computers a group of three young girls in their school uniforms came and sat awkwardly close to us and drilled us with 1000 questions about why we were there, what we were doing etc. We were told that we were the only people in the town who were not from the town. It was several minutes before they became bored and left us so that we could start blogging.

Half way through the blog I went to buy dinner from a street vendor and got an insane deal. I asked for two pieces of meet (ya my vegetarian and vegan endevours have completely failed) and I was given three really tasty pieces of thin steak and some beans and salsa all for 20 or 30 pesos.

That evening we trudged to the outskirts, asking people here and there if they knew of any acceptable hammock spots or if we could use their yards. We didn't have any luck at all in El Dorado and so continued along the road back towards the highway to the next little town. This town was so small that it was not on the map. It's name was Navito or something like that. We wandered down the street of this village and asked a man watering his lawn if he knew of anywhere we could sling our hammocks. He told us that we could probably hang them near the park and gave us directions. We walked half a block in the indicated direction and were intercepted by a hoard of village children and teenagers. They all wanted our story and wanted to show us where to go. They wanted us to tell them whose bike we liked more and wanted to know what is our taste in music. Above all they were convinced that we must smoke a lot of pot. They kept on saying "Mota? Mota? Le gusta Sensemilia? HAHAHAHA" Long after we had made it clear that we didn't have any and don't think it is sweet.

They lead us to some bleechers by a dirt soccer field and said that we could set up there and that nobody would bother us and that it is safe. We started taking out our sleeping bags, matresses and hammocks, answering curious questions from all sides, (actually I understood less than 5% of what they were saying and Chris couldn't understand either without getting them to repeat themselves 3 times and talk much more slowly. They had stong accents and used a lot of slang.) but it was too awkward. We were a full on specticle. There were no less than 20 kids sitting, standing or leaning on their bikes in a group like the audience for street performers. We couldn't take this, so as a distraction we asked for them to bring a soccer ball, and that took some of the heat off. A swarm of quick mooving feet and mismatched sizes of children zipped arround a concrete pad with no net and no passing. The goal of the game was to maintain posession of the ball for more than a second, which was near to impossible, and we saw some lightning footwork. In the shadows though we could see a man in a tank standing, top eyeing us. We realised that most of the persmission that we had recieved for sleeping in the bleechers came from the kids who probably had no authority at all. Chris went over to the man in the shadows to ask him if it was ok and if it was safe. He said that it certainly was and it turned out that he was just as inquisitive and interested as the kids. New faces of children kept on popping around the corner shyly, looking at us and then dissapearing again. It seemed as though every child in the town had come out to see the spectacle of the Canadian hitchhikers.

Later on, a frail old lady came out to greet us and empart some wisdom. She said "I don't have any education, I have never been to school, but I am old and I do know a few things. I know that even though these foreigners may not understand your words, they definitely understand your actions. You have to treat these foreigners with respect to represent yourselves and your village. You have a lot to learn from these foreigners and you must try to learn as much as you can. This is a great opportunity for you to learn from people who have travelled a long way to be here." The chaos of giggles, running and screeming had been shattered. All the kids were looking at their feet or walking slowly, soberly. She then proceeded to invite us over to her house for breakfast the next morning and gave us instructions to get there, although it was less than a block away.

WHOA. How do you take something like that. If I had been anyone else other than Chris and I, I would have identified those words as profound, valuable words of wisdom. But they were about me and Chris. Two humble adventure junkies on a crazy odessy to learn about ourselves and others, not beakons wonder and intelligence, here to show anyone how to live. Shit we left home because we didn't know how to act in the context of our society, we went on an oddessy to straighten out a better idea of how to live. But thats not to say that we wanted to contradict the wise old lady, her words felt as true as could be: learn from people who live differently from you, be respectful, represent your village. Nothing wrong there. Chris and I were utterly blown away and didn't know how to react.

I came to the conclusion that we had just seen a message directed at the youth of a foreign town, but that an equivalent message should be sent to us. This message would come from some wise old lady of Edmonton, saying: "Chris and Ian, remember that when you are travelling you are representing your city, country and culture. Remember that actions transcend languages and speak volumes. Remember to learn from those who live differently from you. There is so much to learn from the children of this village and from all the people that you will meet along the way." The point is not that Chris and I are special people, its that meeting people who are different than you is a special experience.

The only way that I would modify the message of the wise old lady would be to tell the children to think critically. It is great to learn from different people, but not to take the information without question or to imitate thoughtlessly, especially when these villagers seem to have a rich culture of their own.

The following morning we eat breakfast with the wise old lady and her family and she told us a bit of the history of the town including a story about an idol having been stolen from the church and how people are losing their sense of community these days. Her most striking question however was "So whats life like on the other side?"

Other side of what? The US? The US-Mexico border? The poverty vs privalege? Is that a valid question? A fair question? We answered cautiously that in Canada at the moment it is quite easy to get a good job and earn a lot of money, but that where Canada has a lot of material wealth, it is deficient in community when compared with what we have seen of Mexico. In Canada, we told her, parents are afraid to let their children play in the streets at night and neighbours rarely know each other beyond a first name basis. That almost all of our friends and aquaintances come from families with marital strife and that we have such a working culture that a person's carear is often the most important part of their life, that it can be as important to them as their family, as their best friends. We told her that the afluence does not even translate directly into freedom. People in Canada are adicted to comforts and status symbols that chew up their money and entrap them. People will have tripple morgages on their houses, downpayments on their fancy, or at least fairly new cars, the latest size of TV, designer clothes, gatgets and all-inclusive resort holidays and they always want more and then always want to get away from 'it all'. This way of life is good for the economy, but bad for the community, the family and eventually even the individual. We told her that Canada is different than Mexico, but we are not sure wether it is better.

That description paints a bleak picture, but although we concentrated on the negatives, I think that all of those points were honest. We could have talked about how Canada is on the leading edge of multiculturalism, about how it is socially unacceptable to be racist, sexist, homophobic, about how many people are well educated and about our scientific advances or our public health care. But we felt that the good sides of Canadian and Western culture have been emphasized and exagerated and that in too many cases so called developed countries that have their own set of problems are idolyzed. We feal that developing countries should think carefully about what they are losing and gaining through what they call development, then make their own decisions.

I'll break in the story there because I just realised that I still havn't posted any blogging from in Mexico.

Much more to come.

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