by Randy Denmon
I felt refreshed, having slept until eight-thirty. Except for the obligatory 3:00 a.m. rising to check the car’s charge, the nine hours of sleep was my first elongated rest of the trip.
Due to our late arrival and the time required to charge the car, daylight had become our main problem. With the midday departures, we would likely run out of sunshine before battery. It wasn’t advisable to drive in any country south of the border after dark, and I could only imagine the complexities of finding a charge in the darkness.
Having learned our lesson, we took the “good” road out of Catemaco. The one we should have taken the evening before. In the first hour alone, I counted thirty-four topes, three washouts that removed a lane from the road, and two cows in the road. Mexican potholes aren’t like the American versions. If they’re only four inches deep and two feet wide, you’re lucky. Just like Louisiana during the harvest, sugarcane was scattered everywhere, and overloaded cane trucks drove wildly all over the place with complete disregard for anybody else.
The seemingly endless topes caused the most consternation for both me and the car. The constant decelerating and accelerating kills the car’s range, then there were the unnerving winces as our batteries scraped over every ninth or tenth bump.
Catemaco and the Tuxtla mountains, now behind us, had all the trimmings of a nice little tourist trap where the locals could line their pockets with western currency from tourists and wacky environmentalists, if they’d just build a road there.
Finally we rolled through downtown Acayucan, topes city, and found a toll road. Whipping onto it, I spent the best pesos of my life as we accelerated to 45 mph, practically light speed. Moving onto the Tabasco Plain, we soon skirted around Minatitlan and then Coatzacoalcos, the latter the home of Salma Hayek.
From Coatzacoalcos, it was a 150-mile climb up to Tuxtla Gutierrez. Checking the vitals, we had about two hundred miles of battery, but only three and a half hours of daylight.
“Let’s do it,” Dean said.
I nodded and set the GPS. The road to Tuxtla Gutierrez was a big improvement. That is to say, it was paved and had no topes, but just to keep me from getting too gutsy, every few miles or so we crossed a pothole field. To my discontent, the potholes precluded sunglasses, necessitating hours of squinting. During the drive, dozens of foolish drivers passed us on all portions of the road, regardless of curves or hilltops. I wouldn’t want to hold life or car insurance policies on any Mexican drivers.
• • •
Twenty miles out of Coatzacoalcos, we passed over a somber landmark, one of the two railroads that connect Chiapas with the rest of Mexico and the United States. Known as the “Beast” or Tren de la Muerte (death train), these are the rails that Central Americans ride on their perilous, illegal trip to the land of milk and honey. This rail leads to Tenosique, near the Guatemalan border. On a few occasions, I’d seen some migrants riding these trains, but nothing similar to recent images in the American press that depict hundreds of people clinging to boxcar roofs.
The sight must be jaw-dropping, a first-person view of the great twenty-first-century migration, like the mass Irish exodus west more than a hundred years ago. This movement by train is more akin to the early settlers’ trek along the Oregon Trail across a lawless land, fraught with danger from fickle Nature and hostile Indians. But at least the pioneers had some organization, resources, and weapons.
In addition to the physical dangers, such as falling off the train, Mexico’s darker elements ride the trains, robbing, murdering, and raping the defenseless migrants. Exact numbers are unknown, but estimates put the annual deaths from this arduous trip in the thousands. The Mexican authorities are often willing bystanders, if not participants. Two months after we crossed the Beast, several government officials were arrested for the torture and extortion of migrants during this very week in the Tenosique area.
Numerous local, international, and religious organizations have set up camps along these rails to house and feed these itinerants, offering some temporary shelter and protection. These groups have sometimes been harassed by the government and the gangs. Franciscan Fr. Tomás Gonzalez Castillo, who operates one of the camps in Chiapas and is a human rights activist for the migrants, has had death threats and been investigated by the federal government for human trafficking because of his relief efforts.
In recent years, several major Spanish-language films have been made about this human tragedy, two by major Hollywood production companies, but to date, most of the media attention has been in the Latin world, leaving most of our fellow citizens in the dark about the deadly consequences of reaching for the American dream.
• • •
As we climbed up into the green mountains of Chiapas, I found the drive hypnotizing. The lush, verdant blanket of trees draped over the virgin hills, cool air, and gigantic views entranced me. The rugged mountains were a patchwork of green shades and unimaginable curves, especially with the sun shining from the side, all a rare experience.
When you’re from Louisiana, hills of any sort are exotic. Much of the state is below sea level, and Mount Driskill, the tallest hill at an elevation of 575 feet, is so cloaked in thick forest that I’ve driven by it hundreds of times and never seen its peak. And when it comes to weather, Louisiana is rather plain, if not downright boring. With the exception of the brief seasonal transitions, the days are either miserably hot and steamy, or overcast and rainy, all lacking vivid hues and brisk, clean winds. When the wind does blow, it usually means it’s about to rain cats and dogs.
As we plowed along, my restlessness started to ease. I’d even forgotten the day of the week. Time was dissolving. The Latin world lay ahead, without a plan, only a goal, and the trip had started to become a pleasant break from the world. Maybe I could relax and enjoy it? I hadn’t had a vacation of any significance in five long years, the longest stretch of time in my life.
A couple of years earlier, my dear mother had passed away after a decade-long struggle with breast cancer. I assumed the role of her keeper for the last several years. Though spending so much time with her had been a gift, especially after years of separation since she sent me off to college with smiles and hopes, the additional time her care required and the trauma and chores involved with her death, had further complicated my miserable little life and kept my mind continuously buzzing.
One of the things I missed about Mom, especially as I was without a wife or kids, is not having anyone to make proud. A mother is the one person we never want to disappoint. Instead, mine was forever bragging on me, cutting out my newspaper clippings, or recording TV shows to show her friends. Since her passing, I had for some reason picked up a fondness for kids and little old ladies, going out of my way to give either a helping hand or friendly greeting.
I don’t even know if I could’ve taken this trip while Mom was alive. A Southern drama queen, she would have worried constantly, and I would’ve likely been required to give her hourly updates on whereabouts and safety. Maybe she would have been a typical mother like Dean’s, one of my favorites, who was actively, and likely continuously, tracking our progress via Dean’s Facebook page that was now getting hundreds of views a day.
Thirty minutes before twilight we crossed the mountain reservoir of Netzahualcoyotl. Only forty-five more minutes to Tuxtla Gutierrez! I had been behind the wheel for more than five and a half hours and my eyes and mind yearned for a break. This wasn’t like a scenic drive down the Pacific Highway. It was six hours of my devout attention, dodging gaping potholes, pedestrians, cows, and idiotic Mexican drivers. Certainly no place for dozing.
At dusk—just at the Mexican rush hour of 6:00 p.m.—we pulled into Tuxtla Gutierrez, sitting in a large valley in the Chiapas Mountains, its seven hundred thousand residents all seemingly trying to get home on the six-lane road we now traversed. At least I thought it was a six-lane road. It had no stripes, and the traffic varied from two cars wide to four cars wide on each side. Six lanes was only a good guess. We had succeeded again
in our quest to leapfrog between population centers on our limited power. Our range down to about fifty miles, we were here until we found a charge, no matter what.
Through some internet research the night before, we had located a possible charging spot, the Hotel La Hacienda and RV Park. We found it without a wrong turn. Pulling in, I went through my now daily routine—lots of smoking, explaining, tips, questions, bartering, begging, and coaxing as the natives checked out the puzzling machine. The hotel manager led us to several rooms before we thought we had a charge point, a window unit with a 240-volt socket where we could pull the car to. We checked the voltage and plugged in the adapter. A green light!
An hour later, a call summoned me to the hotel’s front desk. The owner wanted to see me. What now?
The old man, his hair departing and gray, his posture stooped, looked over a ledger and flashed his eyes at me.
The girl sitting beside him turned to face me. “You will have to pay for the extra electricity,” she said in a dramatic tone, like she was informing me I had a fatal disease.
I didn’t respond, saving myself the anguish, but reached into my front pocket and pulled out a half-inch wad of American bills. I flipped through them like a ticket scalper counting out change, all the while watching the old man’s eyes. The bills got bigger as I continued to thumb.
The old man nodded at an exposed twenty.
With a flare of animation, I smirked, licked my thumb, pulled lose the twenty, plus an extra five, and set them on the counter, utterly enjoying the experience.
I didn’t care. In the two days since I had considered abandoning the trip, we had gone 460 miles, more than I ever imagined or expected. Was it a coincidence that this had occurred once my aggravating cell phone had quit working, and I could finally concentrate on nothing but the trip? Was it Dean’s General Patton pep talk a few days earlier? This was starting to look easy, but the Guatemalan border loomed only a day and a half away. Could we really pull this off?
Bouncing into the Clouds
We had another late departure the next day, the car not charged until noon. My only complaint with the Hotel La Hacienda: one side of my bed was six inches lower than the other. I’m sure the hotel manager didn’t want to put us in the room, but it was the only one where we could get the car close enough to charge. To my satisfaction, the night before, I had my first American food of the trip: two large orders of French fries from the Burger King down the street.
Removing and replacing the battery on my cell phone got it working, and I passed the morning writing and returning a few emails. To my surprise, the phone didn’t ring that morning and my email inbox was scant. Maybe everybody had finally determined I wasn’t going to respond.
Dean surfed the internet, trying to plot our route as he bitched about my security protocols, leaving the door open every time I went to the car or left the hotel.
We didn’t see much of Tuxtla, but it appeared clean and neat, its lights spanning miles across the huge valley at night. I had heard the city had a large indigenous population, but saw nothing discernibly different in the people, all friendly and helpful. There wasn’t much to see in Tuxtla Gutierrez anyway, it being largely a transportation and administrative hub for Chiapas or for tourists heading to the ancient ruins of the powerful Maya: Palenque, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, and Chinkultic.
On our way out of town, we passed the international airport, and I was reminded that I could quickly pull in and end this folly. Dean behind the wheel, we climbed up to San Cristóbal de Las Casas, forty miles away and five thousand vertical feet into the Sierra Madre de Chiapas Mountains. It was the toughest climb so far, consuming nearly a quarter of our battery.
Dean’s personality generally doesn’t fit the slow, conservative driving required to maximize the car’s daily range. That is, he likes to drive aggressively. Not recklessly, but with a lot of accelerating and decelerating, which consumes more power. It’s hard to blame him, as the Tesla Model S is intoxicating to drive. It’s one of the fastest factory cars in America. Despite its benign appearance, it can go zero to sixty in 5.6 seconds, and will pull your cheeks back just passing somebody on the interstate. The Tesla is built to drive fast and also has a five-star crash safety rating, one of the best on the road, but due to its spunk, I suspect it can induce dangerous driving. It’s certainly easier to burn power in the car than it is to replace it, especially in these parts.
Understandably, any two people that spend all day together in a car, and then are forced to bunk together, will be sick and tired of each other after a week. So at the top of the San Cristóbal pass, Dean wanted to stop and take a picture. I didn’t object, but instead of pulling just off the road, he motored beside an old debris pile where someone had dumped a bunch of concrete, flush with forming boards, nails, and rebar.
When I said something about it, he got all stirred up and yelled. “You drive if you don’t like the way I drive! You’re being so damn conservative and worried, you’re ruining the trip.”
“Hell, yeah,” I said under my breath. “We’re in the middle of Chiapas. We don’t know a soul. I barely speak the language and you don’t at all.”
I took over the driving. Both of our nerves were frayed from the long days, the unknown, and the general discomfort of being in such an isolated spot with no friends or support.
I drove on into the clouds and around the edge of San Cristóbal. When the fog broke, the land revealed itself as a wonderful alpine world, the towering slopes thick with pine. We passed through five or six tiny hamlets, minuscule collections of woodsheds and a few lean-tos around a dirt plaza with maybe a brick well along the highway. The short, tan natives walked along the shoulders or gathered near the bus stop. Likely, nothing has changed in these villages for decades.
We rolled over topes galore. I don’t know how many, fifty, seventy-five, one hundred, probably closer to the latter. On four or five occasions, we scraped over the speed bumps. How much more pounding could the batteries take? The Model S weighs almost 4,700 pounds, without us and our gear, extremely heavy for a car its size. A Corvette, for example, only weighs 3,200 pounds.
By midafternoon, the fog returned, this time much worse. Visibility was reduced to thirty feet on the tight, mountain road without shoulders. It was so bad, even the locals wouldn’t pass. As I drove along, white-knuckles grasping the steering wheel, I feared a dumbass barreling around a curve, or one of the cows we’d seen earlier that day walking in the road. We’d likely collide with either before we saw them. I hit one tope without a sign at maybe 20 mph. My heart jumped into my throat, but we dodged a bullet. The obstacle was small, just a bump instead of the bone-jarring collision I feared.
I can’t speak for all of America, but there is no way Louisianans would tolerate all these speed bumps. They’d be out in the road with their own backhoes and dozers removing the damn things, drinking beer, and likely putting the concrete rubble they scraped up to good use, touching up the shoulders on their driveways or building new roads to their deer hunting camps.
We finally made the ninety miles to Comitán, the last town of any size before the Guatemalan border, in just over three hours. At this pace, batteries wouldn’t be our problem. It would take ten to twelve hours to expend our daily range. We planned to stay here for the night as we’d been told to cross the border as early in the day as possible.
In town, we cruised the main drag a few times, looking for a charging point. We stopped at one thirty-dollar-a-night hotel without luck. We then headed for the congested city center. There, we parked and Dean and I took off in opposite directions, canvassing the area on foot for possible charging points. This went on almost two hours. It was something like a comic opera, the residents wondering who the white-faced lunatics were who kept pacing around from hotel to hotel on some arcane business. Complicating this, Dean didn’t have a cell phone. We decided to meet back at the car if we found something, which we didn’t.
Coming to grips with the fact that we’d probably on
ly get a partial charge this evening, we stumbled on another hotel, the Hotel Lagos de Montebello, a fifty-dollar-a-night establishment. I went in and explained our situation. The hotel bellboy led us around back to a few old sockets against the back fence. They looked like they hadn’t been used in years and also had an unusual design, but they were 240 volts and I thought I had an appropriate adapter. My voltmeter told me no power, but we got the bellboy to find the breaker and turn them on. The power restored, my voltmeter read 240.
The adapter was a little more complicated. I wasn’t familiar with it, but had picked it up somewhere and thrown it in my plug bag, and hadn’t ever wired it.
We cut the power and went to work putting the plug together. My first attempt at wiring didn’t give us a green light on the Tesla’s adapter. We cut the power again, and I rewired the plug, double-checking the two positive leads. Two-hundred-and-forty volt power is not something to mess around with. It can kill you quickly.
We plugged everything up and got the bellboy to flip the power back on. I held my breath. The voltmeter read positive, and just a few seconds later the Tesla adapter went green. Success! We were hooked up to 240-volt, 18-amp power. The car would be fully charged in ten hours.
The hotel manager arrived at the spectacle, and he and the bellboy discussed something I didn’t understand.
The manager then spoke up. “There will be a fee for electricity,” or something like that.
The two hotel employees then conversed and bickered for another thirty seconds. Shoulders shrugged. Both men mumbled. The manager scratched his black hair and then turned to me. “Cost to charge is 150 pesos.”
Eleven dollars. One thing was for sure—in Mexico, the price for charging, even if extorted, was highly variable!