by Randy Denmon
I did a quick check of the US State Department’s travel warnings for Mexico. Though the warnings are often overblown, this is what our government has to say about Coahuila:
Defer non-essential travel to the State of Coahuila. The State of Coahuila continues to experience high rates of violent crimes and narcotics-related murders. Transnational criminal organizations continue to compete for territory and coveted border crossings to the United States. Violent crime, including murder, kidnapping, and armed carjacking, continues to be a major concern in the cities….
If there was any good news, the American researchers had less to say about Coahuila than the three other states we’d cross in the first few days. More concerning were the general statements. “Carjacking and highway robbery are serious problems in many parts of the border region…. There are indications that criminals target newer and larger vehicles, especially dark-colored SUVs. However, even drivers of old sedans and buses coming from the United States have been targeted….”
A brand new Tesla, non-negotiable price $79,900, with Louisiana plates, would certainly be a prime target.
Dean, being the Army-intel type, made me get up off the bed and rewire the extension cord charging the car so he could better secure the hotel room. Then, just after dark and against my advice, he took off on a solo stroll around the neighborhood to see if he could find anything else interesting.
He must have found something, and when he returned Ol’ Montezuma got his revenge. Dean spent most of the night either puking or with his lesser half secured to the commode.
Ever leery, I was up early that morning, repeatedly infusing myself with nicotine in hopes I might get any mishaps out of the way before we hit the road.
Dean pulled the portable commode from the trunk and put it in a handier place, the back seat, while I checked my voicemail. I had a few delightful messages from friends, ranging from well-wishes to inquiries about what I was smoking. On Facebook, Dean had posted one of the videos he’d made the day before while he was supposed to be driving, and it now circled through cyberspace. How did mankind survive before cellphones and iPads?
Today’s drive was only 160 miles to Matehuala, at about the same elevation of 5,200 feet, but would require traversing an 8,000-foot pass on the climb out of Saltillo. We got caught up in a six-lane traffic mess that cost us fifteen minutes, and my cell phone rang three times. I didn’t answer it. Didn’t everybody know I was off the grid? Ideally, I would love to have thrown the damn thing in the Rio Grande the day before, but it might come in handy, especially if we got in a pinch. We were twenty-first-century Balboas, not the real thing!
Stuck in traffic, I did text my sister. She had sent me a nasty text the night before, chastising me for just slipping out of town without saying goodbye. Back in Louisiana, the family was supposed to be getting together this week for my brother’s birthday.
I had kept most of the family out of the loop about the trip, mostly because I didn’t want to hear the lectures about safety.
My family is a typical American bunch, that is, typically dysfunctional. I love them all dearly, but I could have long ago gotten rich and famous writing a book about them, or better yet, creating a reality TV show. Louisiana seems to be all the rage on the reality TV scene today, but all the eccentrics don’t live in swamps or hunt ducks. I guess there’s a chance (though slim) that I’m the screwball and they’re normal.
Hoping to have appeased my sister with a short text, we hit the open road, climbing up the rugged pass. It felt good to put Saltillo behind us. With the morning, I felt a sense of rebirth. Back in the States, across the fruited plain, people were settling in for their daily routine. Not us. We dared to go forward into uncertainty.
In less than a half hour, we found ourselves sputtering along over rolling terrain with a few snowcapped mountains off to our east. The colors gave way to dry chaparral as we entered the cool, open plains of the Chihuahua Desert, populated with thick, tall cacti.
This area was even more devoid of humans than the previous day’s trip. The Mexicans call it La Frontera, and no wonder. It’s a playground for the drug cartels.
If you read some of the statistics about the countries we’d be crossing, and this region of Mexico especially, you might think we were morons. It’s true that the official murder, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery rates in many of these countries are some of the highest in the world. And more than eighty thousand people have been killed in the Mexican drug war since 2006, not to mention another twenty-five thousand or so classified as “missing.” Worse, the cops are as likely to be part of the local underworld as not.
The stats can be a little misleading for foreigners. Most of the crimes are criminal-on-criminal violence, or include other parties with a vested interest—police, journalists, wealthy citizens, politicians—involved in one way or another with political infighting, drug wars, and the like.
All things being equal, the drug cartels would prefer to avoid the tourists. Most tourists (not those masquerading as tourists) that get killed simply get caught in the crossfire of the turf war, are mistaken for somebody else, or are moseying around somewhere they shouldn’t be.
The robbery, carjacking, and kidnapping, on the other hand, is much worse than in the States, as the statistics indicate. Mexico is the worst country in the world for kidnappings, and those victims are more likely to be people outside the drug trade.
I don’t have any official data, but based on my experience working and traveling in these countries, often driving, crime in Central America occurs much differently from the States. In New Orleans, even in the tourist areas of the French Quarter or the Warehouse district, it can be very dangerous after dark, especially if you’re going to one of the finer restaurants hidden away on a side street. On the other hand, you can drive the ninety miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans through the rural and somewhat poor river parishes on a two-lane road, even late at night, and it’s very safe.
The opposite holds true in Latin America. In the cities, especially around the businesses and tourist areas, there’s less chance for malice. The security presence is high. As long as you don’t wander off aimlessly, and get in at a reasonable hour, you’re likely to be fine. It’s in the no-man’s-land between the cities where problems lurk. There’s typically no cell service and little police presence.
I’ve noticed something over the years—a common scenario by which tourists get into trouble. This situation involves foreigners in a nice car going to a little or midsized city and staying a few days, driving around, being visible. If you’re white or black down here, you get noticed. You’re different, probably taller and dressed differently from everybody else. They know you’re a stranger. When you do this, the bad guys take notice. You have to leave sometime, and when you head out into the sticks, they pounce.
Anybody that really knows anything about the Latin drug trade knows that the biggest sin is encroaching on someone else’s territory. They shoot first and ask questions later. If they got the wrong person, at least they sent the message. White guys milling around an out-of-the-way town for a few days in a Tesla—well, you figure it out.
This may seem over-the-top, but in El Sicario, The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, the anonymous hit man who undertook hundreds of kidnappings and murders in his career, mostly in northern Mexico, bluntly stated that his daily routine entailed: “Patrol the city. Look out for new people in town, new vehicles.”
Much of Mexico and Central America off the tourist circuit is truly a wild west, especially if you don’t have any security or look wealthy. Over the years, I’ve developed a plan. Really, it’s only common sense. Drive the main roads during the day. Drive point to point, no stopping or loitering. Arrive in a town, park the car in a secure location for the night, and generally keep a low profile. Then get up and be on the road as early as you can. I’m guessing thugs and drug dealers like to sleep in. Don’t get caught in the boondocks with dark approaching. Know where the bad areas are
and try to avoid them. Adhere to these rules strictly, especially the notion of constant movement. If you see something that worries you, find a safe place, contact the authorities, and wait.
These measures are more problematic in an electric car, but employing them as best you can reduces risk, in my mind anyway, to acceptable levels. Lastly, these endeavors are not for penny-pinchers. Nothing you bring with you, even a car, is worth getting into a scrap in a foreign land. Factories around the world are rolling out computers and cars by the thousands every day. I promise you, you can get another one. Come to grips with this before you depart.
• • •
During the day, we only passed five or six ramshackle little villages. The tin roofs sat on wood or cinder-block structures between dirt roads. The only tourist attraction in the area was the Buena Vista Battlefield, about twenty miles off the road, where General Zachary Taylor and five thousand Americans defeated Santa Anna and sixteen thousand of his men during the Mexican-American War. I would love to have seen it, as the battle constituted a significant portion of my second novel. But this was not a sightseeing trip. We had road to cover, and later in the day, we’d be glad we hadn’t made any side trips.
The good news was the Tesla’s range had increased significantly, easing my worries of the previous day. Our range meter indicated that at our current driving rate, we’d get 330 miles on a single charge. Wow! Maybe the batteries hadn’t been fully charged the day before, or maybe it was thin air at a mile above sea level. I didn’t care.
The sparse, open road was uncomfortably lonely, with only a few vehicles coming and going. To my surprise, during the day we were only forced to go through one Federale stop. The southbound road had only a four-car wait, but the northbound queue stretched more than a mile, mostly 18-wheelers. The policía were obviously worried about northbound cargo much more than southbound.
The car’s graffiti again aroused the guards’ suspicion, but after a few questions and some explaining, the courteous policeman inquired in English, “Is your wife mad at you?”
“No esposa,” I said and everybody, including the tough-looking policemen, laughed as they waved us on. I turned to Dean. “Tonight, we’re going to rub that stupid paint off.”
The rest of the day went smoothly, my only concern the hordes of sheep and occasional horses grazing in the federal highway’s right-of-way. If we hit one of those, that might be only slightly better than an encounter with the local bandits. The best-case scenario would be a busted window, and I’m sure getting a Tesla window in Mexico would be fairly impossible. It has no North American operations outside of Canada and the United States.
By 1:00 p.m., we came through a small pass and coasted into the dusty, desert town of Matehuala, population about seventy thousand. Local legend says the name is derived from an indigenous phrase that means “Don’t come.”
Latin Electricity
After a few wrong turns we pulled into the hotel and RV park: Las Palmas Halfway Inn—halfway across the desert.
The rooms had window ACs with 240-volt sockets, right where we could drive up and plug in without even using the extension cord. I inspected the sockets, standard NEMA 6-20s, just like we’d used the night before. I checked the outlet with my voltmeter, 240 volts. Good. Thrilled, we purchased two rooms, one hundred dollars American.
Then I tried to plug in the car. Tesla’s charging adapter would not produce the little green light that showed it was charging. I quickly tried the AC in Dean’s room. Same result. I then pulled out a standard 120-volt extension cord that might be used for a set of hedge clippers in the States. Same result. Tesla’s adapter checks for several things—ground, circuit, thermal faults, etc. And if these don’t check out, it will not allow a charge.
• • •
Charging a Tesla can be an art as much as a science. Though I’m very technically oriented, electricity was a subject I struggled to understand all my life. My only formal education in the field, the college-level course in circuits required for all engineers to graduate, produced a D on my transcript—and I’d been lucky and quite happy to receive the minimal passing score in the science that confounded me.
In recent months I’d undertaken a newfound interest in the subject and spent hours trying to understand the basic concepts: 240-volt electricity, or what comes from the big sockets we plug our dryers or air conditioners into, can supply the most energy, but equally important for charging, much larger amperages can be supplied with 240-volt power.
Amperes, or amps, represent the rate that the electricity is available, and hence, larger available amps means faster charging. For example, 240 volts at 20 amps can fully charge the Tesla in eighteen hours. Two hundred and forty volts at 40 amps can charge it in nine hours. With 120-volt power, or the simple two-pronged plug we have in our houses for lamps, etc., the charging time increases by a factor of four or more. It will take standard 120-volt, 12-amp power almost three days to fully charge the Tesla. We needed 240-volt power to have any success.
Before the trip, I’d rigged up about twenty different adapters for 240-volt power, a range of three- and four-prong plugs used in this hemisphere. There are actually more than fifty different 240-volt plugs in use, but I thought I had most of the frequently-used plugs. The good news is that, while in Mexico and Central America, the available electric grid, at least in theory, mimics that in the United States, supplying consumers with standard 120- or 240-volt, 60-Hertz frequency power, through a variety of NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Association) sockets.
• • •
Now I had the right plug and voltage, but something wasn’t right with the power supply. I looked around at the hotel’s wiring, a hodgepodge of electrical lines, hastily patched into rooms. Some of the ACs were wired directly without a plug. Who knew what was really inside the walls, and what this mangle of electrical patchwork at the hotel could handle. A seasoned electrical engineer would be lying if he thought he knew.
To put it mildly, in Latin America, electrical codes and standards aren’t as uniform or rigid as in the States. There is a never-ending array of sockets, and though these may be designed for certain voltages and amperes, they are, let’s say, adapted for many different uses.
I met with the hotel maintenance man, asking him if he had some portion of the hotel that was new. All my questions brought negative responses, so Dean and I did a little checking. The town had one other major hotel, The Casa Real. It was next door. We drove over right away. The hotel had window AC units.
Inside, I was greeted by an attractive Mexican gal fit for the front desk of the Mondrian in West Hollywood. What the hell is a woman like this doing in the middle of the desert? I had recently read an article in some paper that the drug lords had a fondness for Mexican beauty queens, and vice versa.
I spoke up in my best Spanish. “Good afternoon. We’ve got an electric car we need to charge. Can I see if I can charge it here? Can I test it on one of your rooms?”
My charm worked. She smiled and called the hotel’s maintenance chief, a short, friendly man. He let us in a room. The window AC units were only 120 volts, and the Tesla’s adapter wouldn’t produce a green clearance light while plugged in.
I asked the man if he had a 240-volt socket anywhere I could use. He promptly led me to the hotel’s laundry room and pointed to a rough socket on the wall. I didn’t know if I had the adapter, but more disconcerting was the Christmas tree of wires leading to it.
I studied the setting and the hotel’s wiring. It was doubtful the shoddy wiring could damage the Tesla as the charging adapter will not let it access power if something’s not right. Could this makeshift setup damage the adapter?
The bigger problem was what the car could do to the socket. The Tesla allows the charging rate or amperage to be set before charging. In the States, if the socket is rated for 20 amps, you’d likely set the charging rate at 18 amps to be a little safe, as I did the previous evening. If you overpower the socket, the fuse just trips. Then
, you simply reset the fuse and lower the charging rate. If the system is not properly wired or doesn’t have the correct breaker fuse, who knows what can happen? I didn’t fancy sitting in a Mexican prison for burning down a hotel.
Dean and I got back in the car and rode around town for about an hour looking for somewhere to charge. We found four or five hotels, scruffy ten-dollar-a-night types. We traversed the compact city center, a traffic nightmare, getting nothing but a glance at Matehuala’s huge but unfinished cathedral. Construction began on the mammoth stone structure in 1906. Things happen slowly here.
We finally stopped at an automotive shop where nobody spoke English. Fifteen minutes later the manager was more confused than we were. Like most of the people in the crowded city centro who stared at us with immense, prying eyes, he surely wondered who these silly gringos were, driving around town in a fancy sports car looking for electricity.
Desperation setting in, and out of options, we returned to the Las Palmas wondering when or if we’d get to leave Matehuala. We had motored around enough. The little desert town looks small and simple on first inspection, but just over a year earlier, it had made international news. The mayor-elect and his aid had been gunned down here by one of the drug cartels as they left a birthday party.
We rode to the back of the hotel where RVs were allowed to park. There, they had five or six old 120-volt sockets. We plugged the Tesla’s adapter into one of the sockets and finally got it to charge at 12 amps—not much, but enough to add about 60 miles of range to the car overnight. I quickly calculated that with the power we had left over from the day’s trip, we’d have about 190 miles of range by 7:00 a.m.. San Luis Potosí was 133 miles to the south.