Llama for Lunch (4 page)
Not long after leaving Chicago the train stopped for a further half an hour’s delay. Looking out of the window I saw several men moving along the line and the conductor said, ‘Ah, they’ve gotta walk the train. That could take some time’. Apparently there was a fault in the air brakes. It was comforting to know it had been fixed. Or had it? No one said. Later several more unscheduled stops occurred.
At dinner everyone complained that you didn’t get anything unless you asked for it on this train. ‘Where’s the sweet on the pillow the brochure advertised, or the early morning coffee?’ But up a small flight of steps from my compartment on this double-decker train was a permanent supply of good coffee, bottled water, juice and Coke to which you could help yourself. On the top level there were bigger compartments with showers and toilets. As they were higher, they afforded a better view of the countryside – down at my level you mostly saw only the trees that were planted thickly along the railway line, although later these did thin out and I could see that everything was beautifully, verdantly green.
By the time I was allocated a dinner sitting at half past seven I was famished. I dined with three pleasant people who had massive, good-looking Texas rib-bone steaks that didn’t, contrary to the description, contain a single bone. I had catfish with a black pepper coating. It was delicious, and I followed it up with a sinfully sweet desert.
After I had fought my way into my bed I tried to sleep, but whoever was driving this train had a mania for the horn – and leaned on it heavy, long and often. I was told that engine drivers had to sound the horn three times at every crossing. Well, the crossings must have been legion.
I woke up in Arkansas to discover that my breakfast sitting was now on. So much for the promised wake-up call. Dashing to my ablutions, I tried to use the shower down the corridor but I couldn’t work out how to get the water to stay on, so I had a sketchy wash. The first time I had used the toilet the night before I had almost brained myself senseless. I had pressed what I took to be the flush button above the loo and, lo and behold, a clunky great baby-change table came crashing down on top of me. I’ve always suspected that babies are a danger to your health.
Presenting myself for breakfast, I sat outside the dining room for half an hour waiting my turn then, finally up at the trough, waited another hour for my bacon and eggs because one of the children at my table had ordered pancakes and they had run out of mix. Pesky child. The whole table had to wait. Eventually the pancake mix was obtained – maybe they got it at the next station. I had a communication problem with the ordering of the eggs. The waiter didn’t understand fried eggs. You had to ask for easy or hard over or whatever, but when at last it arrived around lunch time, the breakfast was decent.
The trees along the line were a type of pine unfamiliar to me. The flourishing green crops were soya beans, a dwarf kind of maize that is used as cattle food, and a corn with a kernel-like wheat that is also used as animal feed.
In Little Rock someone hurled a huge pile of Sunday papers under my door. They contained a staggering amount of advertising pamphlets, confirming that this is a society inclining to the materialistic.
This train had one superior feature – electronic press buttons that opened doors between carriages, no struggling with a heavy door on a rocking train. But otherwise it was not a patch on Australian long-distance trains that run dead on time, are superbly well organised and have marvellous, willing service. Lazy Boy treated me like a nuisance.
It was Sunday in America. All the little towns of twostoreyed houses that we passed through had masses of cars outside their churches. We travelled further south until we were deep in Texas, where the country became less green and a lot like Australia in places. By dinner time that evening we were running three hours late, but it didn’t matter to me as I had a long wait scheduled between the train’s arrival and the departure of my bus. I ate an enormous tender steak then, returning to my compartment, saw that someone had interfered with my case, which I had left on the spare seat. A small purse had been left outside it. There was no way that I had done that. Nothing had been taken – the purse had been empty – but it made me feel peculiar. Earlier I had seen Lazy Boy acting suspiciously in another compartment and, as all the passengers from down this end of the carriage had been at dinner together, he seemed the prime suspect.
I slept a little as it got dark and at half past one in the morning we arrived in San Antonio. The air-conditioning on the train had been too cold and it was lovely to step down into the balmy fresh air. I was told that the four o’clock connecting bus to Laredo would come to the railway station door to collect me. In the waiting room I tried to sleep but it was a small crowded room and the carved polished wooden benches, although mighty attractive, were hard on the rear end and not conducive to a snooze. I read my book and talked to a hugely fat but agreeable woman.
I finished my book. I asked the station master about the bus a couple of times and was told that, yes, it was on time. Far be it from me to nag, but at five I finally said, ‘Has the bus forgotten me?’ And it was decided that it must have. The station master, a handsome, friendly, Mexican-looking man – almost all the locals here looked Mexican and were pleasant – tried to phone the bus depot but got no answer. He then gave me a voucher and sent me off in a taxi. The ease with which he made this arrangement left me thinking he’d probably had plenty of practice at it.
By the time I arrived at the bus station a faint pink glow of dawn was in the sky. The next bus to Laredo left in ten minutes. It was a Greyhound and supposedly a good bus but the seats were uncomfortable and the air-conditioning freezing. Halfway into the two-hour trip we stopped for a feed at McDonald’s. I slept a little and then we were in Laredo where, to my surprise, everyone spoke Spanish. The taxi driver greeted me with ‘Buenos Dias’. No one understood me when I spoke English.
I wanted to leave my big bag in storage at the bus station but the change machine didn’t work. An affable chap who was washing the windows helped me get the bag in the box and minded it while I went to get change from the desk. A taxi took me a long way out of town to Motel Six, where I had booked a room. This district, just off the busy freeway, was a desolate place surrounded by a concrete jungle. By now the temperature was over one hundred degrees but I had a comfortable room so I took to my bed.
A good five-hour sleep later I went in search of dinner. I had used the phone in my room to ring a few travel agents and ask about the train to Mexico. No luck, it doesn’t run any more. If I had known this beforehand I would have taken a bus direct to Mexico from the Laredo bus station.
In the diner next to the motel I ordered a dish of chicken breasts and vegetables that sounded delicious. But everything came fried and oozing fat. The huge chicken pieces were coated with thick slabs of breadcrumbs and the veggies were hidden in deep balls of batter. A large potato was piled high with cream and margarine and the whole mess was accompanied by a mountainous pile of heavily buttered French toast. At least it was filling.
At eight in the evening it was still a hundred degrees of very dry heat, no inducement for a walk. I went back to my room to watch television. There were about seventy channels. I was amazed by the advertisements permitted – cigarettes, medicines, divorce and anti-cancer drugs. Eating, getting un-married and taking medicine seemed to be generally very popular. I went to sleep watching the television and slept soundly for another eight hours.
I had heard that it could be a two-hour hassle to cross the border to Mexico but it was actually a breeze. In the morning at the Laredo bus station everyone treated me kindly again. This certainly seemed to be a friendly kind of town. I needed seven dollars in quarters to liberate my suitcase. Buses from Laredo run frequently to Nuevo Laredo just across the border and I only had an hour to wait for the next one. In the functional – well, uncomfortable – waiting room an old man peddling tacos for a dollar came up to my perch. That was breakfast.
In the fullness of time the bus arrived but the driver warned me not to get on it. He said it smelled very bad. I put my head in the door to perform the sniff test. It sure didn’t smell like violets but I’m not as fussy as some folk; years of bedpans have seen to that. I think an inconsiderate person had left a baby’s nappy in a rubbish bag. The driver said he’d take anyone who was game. One Mexican woman and I decided to brave it rather than wait. Once again everyone spoke Spanish and expected me to do so too.
We headed off. It is just a five-minute ride across the Rio Grande, which isn’t all that grande but forms part of the 3326-kilometre Mexico–USA border. On the bridge long double lines of cars waited to cross from Mexico but there was no one waiting on our side. Once over the bridge I had to go through customs, but there seemed to be no immigration officials. I stepped off the bus, said that I was carrying nothing prohibited, walked through a shed, pressed a button that said ‘passe’, identified my bags and got back on the bus. No one looked at my passport.
Now I was in Mexico, a large country of almost two million square kilometres that borders Guatemala and Belize in the south and the USA in the north. It has coasts on both the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico and two north–south mountain ranges that frame a broad group of plateaux varying in altitude from 1000 to 2300 metres. In the original land grab from the Indians, the area that is now Texas was part of Mexico, but in 1836 the territory seceded from Mexico to become an independent republic. From 1839 to 1841 an area of the Rio Grande valley of Mexico also declared itself separate and independent, proclaiming the Republic of Rio Grande with Laredo as its capital. The US annexation of Texas in 1845 precipitated a war with Mexico which the US won in 1847. After this the Rio Grande was established as part of the border and the Mexicans built the town of Nuevo Laredo, on their side of the river.
Mexico’s civilization began long before that. The first people came down through America from Siberia across the land bridge that existed 60,000 to 80,000 years ago. By the time of Christ the great city of Teotihuacan was being built. It incorporated the Pyramid of the Sun, still the third-biggest pyramid in the world, and the Pyramid of the Moon, which is only slightly smaller. The Mayan culture flourished from 250 AD to 900 AD. The Mayans had a system of writing and calendars that accurately recorded earthly and heavenly events. Religion played a major role in early Mexican cultures but their gods were cruel, demanding frequent human sacrifices, usually by beheading or being thrown into a well, and blood-letting from ears, tongues and penises.
The Toltecs, who became a power around the thirteenth century AD in central Mexico, worshipped a feathered serpent called Quetzalcoatl until he was displaced by Tezcatlipoca – ‘Smoking Mirror’ – the god of warriors who demanded a regular diet of warm and often still-beating hearts. Wars were fought to obtain a steady supply of these organs from captured enemy soldiers.
By 1426 the Aztecs had become the most powerful people in the valley. They were also warlike and sacrificed prisoners, believing that this was necessary to keep the sun rising every day. In four days in 1487, twenty thousand prisoners were slain to dedicate a temple.
I found an intriguing description of a ball game that all early pre-hispanic Mexican cultures seemed to play. After the game one or more players would be sacrificed. No one knows whether winners or losers were chosen for this grisly end but I can’t see it catching on in Australian Rules.
Nearly three thousand years worth of Mexican culture was destroyed in two years by the Spanish after their invasion in 1519. They annihilated the civilisation and reduced the native peoples to slaves or second-class citizens. In Mexico the Spanish leader Cortes is considered the villain of the piece. By 1821, when the fight for independence from Spain was successful, the population of Mexico consisted of native Indians and Mestizoes – a mixture of Indians, Spanish immigrants and African slaves. Now Mexico is a federal republic and, although it had been an almost entirely agricultural economy before 1910, it is one of Latin America’s most industrialised countries. Ninety per cent of the eighty-one million population is Catholic. The missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries won the local people over by grafting Catholicism onto the Indian religions, and witchcraft and magic still survive.
In Nuevo Laredo my financial expenditure took a turn for the better. Taxis had no meters but travelling quite a distance to find a hotel cost only five dollars. My first choice of hotel was full but the taxi driver took me elsewhere. At the Fiesta Hotel the receptionist said, ‘Ah, Australian! Crocodile Dundee!’ It seemed everyone who had heard of Australia associated us with crocodiles. The night before the TV in Laredo kept advertising that ‘Croc week is coming’. The show they were referring to was that Australian fellow who overacts with a lot of snakes and crocodiles.
The receptionist also told me that the train I had hoped to take from here into Mexico was no more. ‘There was a train but not now,’ he said. It had stopped running the previous week. The story of my life!
But all was not lost – the receptionist said that there were many buses going south during the day. All I would need to do was go to the station and wait for one.
My room was a few steps off the main street, up and down which I walked several times looking for it before I realised that this narrow path lined both sides with small grotty-ish shops was indeed it. Although unimpressive it stretches for two kilometres in one direction – south. In front of the shops lots of makeshift stalls sold tourist trash, as well as some decent handicrafts, while posters on the walls advertised bull fights. I had expected downtown to be big and elaborate like Laredo across the river, but this was a totally different world. Still, it was pleasant enough, and no one hassled me to buy his wares.
My hotel room was Spanish in style and had a huge bed, much black iron-work placed against white-washed brick walls, a white tiled floor and heavy, black, wooden doors. I knew I was back in the Third World when the first room I was taken to had no light bulbs. We moved on to another. This room had only a couple of missing bulbs but the showerhead sat on the floor. The mattress on the bed was almost as old as I am and sagged nearly as much.