by Randy Denmon
As we pulled out of San Luis Potosí, the road quickly transitioned from rolling hills to small mountains. The ride was superlative. The climate and vegetation had become completely tropical, and the mountains and vistas kept my attention.
As had become my routine, I’d spent an hour the night before scouting the route with Google Earth, creating a handwritten spreadsheet of the towns we’d pass. I listed their general size and miles from San Luis Potosí: 134 miles to Queretaro, 210 miles to Tula, and 269 miles to the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan. Teotihuacan had been our goal, flush with western hotels and tourists, but that morning we learned that, due to the poor roads and large crowds flocking to the site, driving a private car to the ruins was illegal on the weekends. With the engineers and computer scientists at Google on our side, we’d plow on.
Tula, with about 70,000 residents and in the heart of the Toltec area, seemed like a reasonable goal, 210 miles up the road. A staging area for tourists heading to the region’s archeological sites, it might have the basic infrastructure required by most western tourists, or mindless Norte Americanos looking for adventure. If nothing else, Tula might be a secure island in the midst of the drug violence.
The morning was overcast, green row crops filling the space between the mountains. As the day wore on, the sun broke and the land became more populated, the poverty less prevalent. The road became a six-lane freeway for a thirty-mile stretch of what looked like prosperous Mexican suburbs and urban sprawl.
On day five of our odyssey I wondered again, am I a fool? Is this too outlandish? Thus far, the trip had gone well. We’d made it over six hundred miles south of the border, and traversed a major natural obstacle, the Chihuahua Desert, but I still felt uneasy. Charging had been difficult. Even the night before, in a major city, it had been in doubt. What lay ahead? Northern and central Mexico would likely be the most developed areas we’d travel through on the entire trip.
Despite this, I felt drunk with elation, the excitement still bizarre. I had longed for something like this all my life. Most people spend their lives trying to fit in, to be normal. I have always had a fear of anonymity. Was I searching for the Easy Rider hidden in me, suppressed by the sameness of everything? Big cities hammer this home for me. We’re not supposed to follow life’s road but rather choose it. This would certainly be something to tell my kids one day (of course, I have to find a wife while I’m still fertile). But life is something to be enjoyed, not endured, and there’s no starting over.
I turned to Dean. “I love this shit. I wish I had your freedom.”
“What?”
I repeated myself.
Dean just nodded and glanced at me with a smart-ass smirk. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have the gravy of being a fat-cat boss, and the freedom. Don’t work that way.”
By early afternoon, we pulled into Tula. The impediments had been minimal, though Dean had started to develop another annoying habit: blaring music while the GPS girl gave me directions at complicated, inadequately signed intersections. I’ll say this—a good business person could make a fortune selling the Mexicans some traffic-control signs. One little green sign that said “Exit here for HWY 57 East” would do wonders for the tourists rolling in to spend their greenbacks.
Amazingly, we’d had no Federale stops during the day, and our only close call had been a mattress in the road, hidden around a sharp curve. The sheep and goats still grazed in the right-of-way, providing me with constant grief and anxiety.
On the outskirts of Tula, the State Police pulled us over. The stop was routine, but they spent twenty or so minutes mumbling in incomprehensible Spanish as they checked our car and drivers’ permits.
Finally in Tula, we looked for a place to charge. Things didn’t seem promising. The city center was a tight maze of congested roads, and we got stuck in a miniature version of a third-world Los Angeles traffic jam, except the drivers honked more. Stop signs and lane stripes in Mexico are more suggestions than requirements. I knew well that here a small fender-bender usually results in all parties hunkering down at the local police station to work out the details.
Searching hotels in our GPS, we stumbled on a golf resort. Surely they had 240-volt power. The hotel was nice, three or four stars by American standards, and the manager, Elita, spoke English.
I explained our situation, leading her and three more of the hotel staff outside to show them the car. I opened the hood, the compartment below it filled only with two sleeping bags and a long extension cord. “No motor, solamente electrico.” I opened the trunk to show them I wasn’t hiding anything, lifting up the car’s charging adapter and pointing to the socket on the side of the car.
The staff’s eyes enlarged from elliptical to round, as they oohed, aahed, and mumbled among themselves as they studied the car, carefully inspecting the dashboard and the area under the hood.
I clapped my hands together and pointed south. “Estados Unidos a Panama, no gasolina.”
The staff looked at us with both fascination and amusement.
Elita squinted her big brown eyes in a cute gesture, the corners of her lips pointing down. “Yes, is it possible?”
“Maybe,” I continued in two languages. “Necesito 240 voltios.”
“Okay,” Elita said. “We will try.”
We spent the next twenty minutes with the hotel’s maintenance man walking the hotel and golf course. I couldn’t believe it. The golf course had no 240-volt power and all the hotel’s air conditioning was directly wired. I did find a 120-volt socket next to the tennis court with a 30-amp fuse beside it. That would at least give us reliable 12-amp charging at 120 volts. We could get sixty miles in sixteen hours.
Elita and the staff were so friendly and helpful, we decided to stay. She let me pull the car onto the golf course to plug up without an extension cord.
“We’ll take it,” I said to Elita. “Can we catch a cab into town to see the ruins and the church?”
“Of course,” she said with a big smile.
As I got the car charging, Dean went up to the room.
Ten minutes later when I got there, I found him laid up in the big nice bed, watching CNN on the first American television station we’d seen in Mexico. The room was plush, with a desk, fridge, and two leather lounge chairs.
Dean found the Louisiana Tech basketball game on some webpage he often used in China, and we got to watch Tech thrash Marshall on national TV. The four-star accommodations were a welcome change of pace.
“They’ve got some fast internet here,” Dean said, leaning back on the big bed. “Let’s just stay two or three days and let the car charge on 120 power!”
He was kidding, right? I said, “Don’t get too used to this. We’re on the road at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow!”
Second Thoughts
We departed the ancient, Toltec city of Tula early on Sunday morning, the church bells banging away. I weaved through the clean, tight streets, bisecting the markets and plazas, abuzz the night before, now lifeless. The Mesoamerican ruins—ancient pyramids and fifteen-foot-high stone warrior statues—guarded the city. Nestled at 6,800 feet, this was Mexico’s largest city a thousand years ago.
The natives call these antique towns pueblos magicos, magical villages, and I felt it, harmony for my soul, something unique and far from inside-the-beltway America, with its endless monoliths of steel, glass, and concrete.
The city’s only scar was the huge PEMEX refinery on the edge of town, the large and abundant smoke stacks blotting the view of the wonderful ruins from a distance.
More than a dozen aggravating speed bumps slowed our pace out of town. These annoying impediments, called topes by the Mexicans, cover the roads in urban areas. You’d think they’d at least put up a sign. The topes are by no means uniform, and occasionally we’d roll over one that scraped the bottom of the Tesla even at 2 mph. I cringed because the car’s batteries line the bottom of the car.
Always leery of eating anything significant before hitting the road, I ha
d a light breakfast of peanuts and agua as I drove onto the autopista. The drive to Puebla was the best of the trip—the road was smooth, we were waved through the only Federale stop along the route, and crossed a 9,000-foot pass. The terrain was similar to West Texas, hilly scrub, but most of the latter half of the drive was dominated by the towering 17,802-foot Popocatépetl Volcano, looming off to our right and belching steam. We passed within twenty miles of the summit.
We left the state of Hidalgo, passed through Tlaxcala into the State of Puebla, and late in the morning rolled into the prehistoric town of Cholula. Bumping over the topes, we drove around the town’s more than three hundred churches, most probably older than the United States, and the Piramide Tepanapa, a 180-foot Toltec earth pyramid now topped with a yellow-domed church.
The day was cool, the air fresh as we passed through the central square, the streets lined with pink, yellow, and blue hotels and restaurants, all with open-air cafés spilling onto the sidewalks. Classic Mexico. I noticed the young people, pretty girls strolling everywhere, and the cafés filled with more seasoned citizens. I half-expected to see Anthony Quinn sitting at one of the tables, smoking a cigarette and watching the girls.
We inventoried two hotels—no power or ACs. The owner of a third hotel apparently got the bulk of his business by housing the roaming Federal Police as five armored vehicles, guarded by a dozen locked and loaded soldiers, were parked at the hotel. What the hell were we doing here?
The owner spoke English and tried to help, but the hotel just didn’t have a 240-volt socket.
Moving on to Puebla, we passed the huge 750-acre Volkswagen plant, the biggest automotive plant in North America, employing fifteen thousand people. The plant produced most of the Beetles that roamed the American highways in the ’60s and ’70s. We checked the Holiday Inn for a charge. No luck.
Dean entered the flashy, new, twenty-story Fiesta Inn, cased in steel and glass, and tried to explain our situation to the clerk. Despite his terrible Spanish, she seemed sympathetic and called the hotel’s maintenance man, Hector, who spoke very good English, and told us he had only one 240-volt socket in the hotel kitchen. The manager said we could possibly use it after the kitchen closed at midnight. We could simply pull the car up to the first-floor café and run our extension cord through the restaurant.
“Really?” I said in amazement, but the joy was soon quashed when I inspected the socket—a very rare, four-prong, locking NEMA that I knew we didn’t have.
The Tesla now down to a range of about thirty miles, we had one more lead, the Puebla Marriott about three miles down the autopista.
We were staying here, with or without a charge. I threw my MasterCard and Marriot Rewards number on the counter. It was time to solve this problem the American way, with money instead of bullshit. I gave the bellboy a big tip and told him I wanted to see the hotel maintenance man.
I showed the maintenance man, Antonio, the car, inducing a similar reaction as the day before. Tipping him, I explained, “Necesito 240 voltios.”
“No have,” he said.
I spread my arms wide. “Necesito 240 voltios.” I pointed to the hotel. “No 240 voltios, tres dias.” I smiled and put my arm around his shoulder in a friendly gesture. “Por favor.”
He thought for a few seconds and then led me out on the hotel’s lawn. There, he pointed to a socket. “Doscientos cuarenta voltios.”
“Dean,” I said, bending over to look at the plug. “Will you go fetch my voltmeter?”
The socket was odd, but I thought I had something to rig it to the Tesla’s adapter.
Dean arrived. The voltmeter read 240 volts. I quickly checked my electrical bag. I had the plug, but it was only rated for 20 amps. We’d get an 80 percent charge by ten the next morning. The only problem, the socket was more than a hundred yards from the car.
Dean and I ran our long extension cord literally through our hotel room (in the front door, out the back window) to make the distance. I rigged up the plug, checking all the leads with my voltmeter. We held our breath and plugged in the Tesla’s adapter. Green. Whooh!
I gave Antonio a big hug. “Muchas gracias.”
• • •
That afternoon, as the car charged, I sat in the hotel room pondering the feasibility of the trip. Two of the previous four nights we only got a minimal charge, and in the two big cities we stayed, it had taken gargantuan, desperate efforts to find 240-volt power. Earlier in the day, before we had finally gotten the car plugged in, my stress level had peaked. Things were likely to get worse as we moved further south, into more rural and poorer areas.
For the first time since leaving Texas, I had genuine second thoughts. Was this whole venture possible? It was starting to look doubtful. A sense of gloom fell over me as I tried to put my emotions, now at a frenzy, aside and size up the future. Were there other alternatives? I spent two hours surfing the web for options to abandon or modify the trip. Possibly we could drive only to the Guatemala border, and then maybe back up to Cancun.
Yes, we had gone about eight hundred miles, but we’d brought a third of those miles with us by pre-charging the car. If we could get only 120-volt power every day, it would take us months to get to Panama. Worse, the power supplies that we’d found so far were not up to American standards, and the plug types were growing more rare and old.
I spent another couple of hours soul searching.
Before leaving, I heard the predictable discouragement from friends: This is not a good idea; you shouldn’t go; don’t get kidnapped; when you get somewhere cool like Costa Rica, I’ll fly in; do you have a death wish? These things never worried me. My motivation was the challenge, and doing it in an electric car with limited range. Charging was the problem.
Failure at anything had always terrified me, especially public failure. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to succeed as I didn’t want to fail. But the sensible side of my brain said that we had bitten off too much.
Later that night, I told Dean I thought we should be prepared to modify our goals. Possibly he was as leery as I, but he put on his Army face, telling me what a baby I was (not in those terms), and reminding me of all we’d been through—that this was nothing.
“I got in that car with you when nobody else would,” Dean said, his voice growing louder, “and I’ll be damned if we’re going to pack it in now. I’m supposed to be looking for a job. I’ll push on without you if I have to. If we can’t do it, we can’t do it, but that’s only after we actually can’t do it, not just you thinking we can’t do it. Quit being such a pussy.”
Somehow, Dean’s scolding eased my stress. I lit a Mexican cigarette and looked into his determined eyes. “Okay, we’ll push on, feeling our way south, and see how things work out. But if I think we’re getting into something that’s not doable, we’re stopping. We’ll ship the car home.”
As we argued, two hotel staff and the assistant manager showed up at our room. Two or three times during the day they had come to inspect the charging operation. I wasn’t really sure what the problem was, but they didn’t feel comfortable with us charging our car from their lone 240-volt socket on the hotel’s back lawn. It didn’t help that during the day, when we routed the cord, we accidentally set the charging rate to 30 amps—for a 20-amp socket! I don’t know how we didn’t blow a fuse (either the plug or the fuse was mis-wired!), but it must have shot their power meter up. I’d noticed the problem a couple hours earlier and lowered the charging rate to 14 amps.
The assistant manager, a young professional woman in her twenties who spoke some English, put a hand to her chin. “We think you should not charge the car tonight.”
What now? I tried to think of a response to appease her.
Dean spoke up, confidently. “Electric cars are the new thing. Gringos will soon be pouring into Mexico in electric cars. The Marriott is a five-star hotel, and you need to be prepared and equipped for this if you’re going to stay in business.”
The assistant manager looked at Dean and then
the car again. She seemed to buy his bullshit. “Okay, but we will keep a watch on it. But you will have to pay for the electricity.”
“No problem,” I answered. I think it was about 10:00 p.m. when the hotel staff left the room.
“See,” Dean said, “it just takes a little can-do attitude.”
I shrugged. “If I weren’t such a high-flying Rewards member, they’d likely have pulled the plug on us. Maybe you can be a fat-cat and have the freedom.”
Highway to Hell
The next morning, two-dozen German engineers dressed in expensive suits sat around the lobby of the Marriott discussing business very seriously. While I was checking out, the staff mumbled, trying to determine our cost for charging the car.
One of the clerks looked up at me and said, “Fifty dollars, American.” I gladly paid.
It was 11:00 a.m.. We’d learned that it was best to wait until late morning for the fog to clear before making our descent through the mountain pass at Maltrada, so we decided to stay and let the car fully charge before departing Puebla.
I walked out to the hotel’s portico and looked up at La Malinche, one of the three towering volcanoes encasing the city. Piercing the blue sky, its snow-covered apex turned steeply to the heavens. Named after Hernan Cortez’s Indian mistress, whom the Mexicans still consider a traitor, the English translation of La Malinche is “Wicked Woman.”
Below the mountain, the six-lane road hosted a modern traffic jumble, horns blasting away. Puebla, one of the country’s original colonial cities, has a grand plaza and some of the most beautiful homes, squares, and elaborate churches in Mexico, including its cathedral, with fourteen chapels of various styles. It was here in 1862 where the Mexicans defeated the French on Cinco de Mayo.
And fifteen years earlier, during the Mexican-American War, the US Army occupied Puebla. The Mexicans undertook the siege of Puebla in an attempt to remove the Americans, ensconced in two forts on a hill a few miles away. The Mexicans cut the city’s aqueducts. A testament to the city’s antiquity sits behind the Marriott, a three-story-high portion of an old stone aqueduct, hidden away in a back alley and not important enough to be of any interest to anybody around here. We took a picture under its splendid, brown arches. Puebla was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Around the splendid Baroque and Spanish Renaissance architecture, a modern industrial city has developed, attracting major companies from around the world.