Day 23 El Paso/Ciudad Juarez

11 oct
So all day Saturday in El Paso , I'm on a 'strip' full of motels, typical strip malls, fast food joints and a few sleazy bars, near to the airport. There is nothing else for it but to 'get on my bike' and explore, kinda cycling in my spare time! Downtown El Paso is pretty boring, near the frontier its a bit more lively with a couple of clothes markets and shops. There is nothing to do but cross the border into Mexico and Ciudad Juarez which sits on the other side of the Rio Grande conjoined to El Paso like some evil siamese twin.There are generalised warnings not to go there and to take great care etc but I am no stranger to 'Ye olde third worlde' and I 'speaka de lingo'.
When you come off the bridge and enter the city the contrast is abrubt and dramatic. El Paso is a very hispanic city, More than half the faces you see are Mexican so its not the change from seeing whites to seeing morenos, its the change in the infrastructure and the vibe, the streets are all broken up and the buildings are 90% in a state of disrepair, music is blaring out from every corner, there are no hustlers on the streets but the streets are full of people, meeting , greeting , shouting , selling, nursing babies. I've seen all this before of course in S. America , Africa and the far east, but the contrast causes more impact since I didnt sit in a plane for x hours to see this change all I did was to walk over a bridge.
Ciudad Juarez is not dangerous though it might be to drunken american college students making nocturnal visits testing their limits. But having said this it is easy to see that the noise and hustle bustle going on here would make many americans nervous about safety issues, I hope that dont sound like a put down, but Americans I have spoken to have little enthusiasm for a visit here.
Enough pontificating, I had a delicious steak and of course a damn fine Margarita to wash it down, Cuidad Juarez, not a pretty place, border towns seldom are, but certainly lively, for such a large city more than a million, the centre was disappointingly small and had few grand or colonial buildings.
My wee excursion put another 20 miles on the odometer which is now 5 miles from the 1,000 mile mark. Saturday night in El Paso I stayed in my motel room mostly on t'internet but I had a fine time. .

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