The Best Travel Writing, Volume 11

by Rolf Potts

  Now that my ribs have been mercilessly swaddled, my makeover is nearly complete. Grinning, María hooks a necklace of dozens of gold-painted crystal bead strands around my neck, then holds up a hand mirror. The bright gold—stunning against María’s warm skin and brown eyes—clashes with my fair complexion.

  “You’re sure indigenous women won’t feel offended?” I ask, doubtful, staring at our reflection.

  “It’s fine, Laurita!” she insists, winding coral beads around my wrists, encasing my blond ponytail in a long ribbon. “They’ll like it.”

  And she’s right. Outside, beneath the palm trees and street lamps, Otavaleña women of all ages smile and titter, eyes bright. I’m an object of their amusement, but at least I’m not offending anyone. As for the men on the sidewalks, they don’t even notice me. They’re all staring at the TVs perched in markets and bakeries and farmacias, captivated by a championship soccer game. Sports announcers’ amped-up voices compete with the trills of pan flute melodies floating from open doors.

  The walk to el centro is a mile uphill, but feels longer with restricted lungs and thin mountain air. We’re at 8,500 feet, cradled by Andean peaks, each a distinct silhouette poking at the moonlit clouds. The skirts of these mountains are laced with waterfalls and lakes, rich with folklore and ritual, and sacred to María and her people.

  But at the moment, I’m less focused on the enchanting landscape, and dwelling more on my own squished torso. “Can’t we just loosen this thing?” I ask, fiddling with the faja.

  María smacks my fingers away. “Laurita! It might fall off.”

  Semi-suffocated, I gaze in awe at the Quichua women who bustle past, women who have worn these outfits all their lives. Many of them come from surrounding villages where they’ve pastured goats, cooked over wood fires, fed pigs, harvested potatoes, and navigated mountain trails much rougher than this gentle sidewalk slope . . . somehow managing to keep their blouses spotless.

  “But Mari,” I gasp, “how can you do it?”

  “It’s who I am.”

  During the eight years she worked as an unpaid child servant, María stopped wearing her native clothing, seeing it through the racist eyes of her mestizo oppressors—a symbol of poverty, filth, backwardness. The day she reunited with her sister, she put on her favorite mestiza clothes—an unfortunate safari-themed outfit from the late eighties—and carefully smoothed extra gel in her permed hair.

  When her sister appeared in the traditional anacos and embroidered blouse and gold beads and ribbon-wrapped ponytail, María felt shocked. This woman looked like the indigenous people María had learned to scorn during her years with her mestizo masters. Her sister could have been from a different planet. The divide felt unbreachable.

  After an awkward embrace, María served her lemonade, then sobbed her heart out.

  Over the next couple years, María wore only mestiza clothes, spoke only Spanish, avoided her family, and hid her native roots. And then one day, she was asked to participate in a competition for the indigenous Queens of Sky, Corn, and Water. This involved wearing traditional clothing again and giving a speech in Quichua.

  After a decade, she once again put on an embroidered lace blouse and heavy wrap-around anacos. In some ways, it felt uncomfortable. She worried about the faja coming unraveled. She felt like an imposter. But in another way, a deeper way, it felt perfect. And in these clothes that were familiar and strange at once, she glimpsed the possibility that there was something beautiful about her indigenous roots.

  Inside the fluorescent lit, yellow-walled pollería, María and I have to wait at the counter to be seated, mouths watering amidst the scent of chicken roasting on spits. Service is slow. All the cooks’ and waiters’ eyes are glued to the soccer game onscreen. As my stomach growls, I glare, annoyed, at the TV—ubiquitous in small-town Latin American eateries, preventing people from communing, chatting . . . and serving food promptly.

  I’m ravenous by the time our dinner comes— juicy chicken, cilantro-laced rice, rich potato soup, nutty lentils, fried plantains, local Pilsener-brand beer. I dig in, struggling to keep my lace sleeves out of the soup. It becomes quickly apparent that to make a dent in this steaming pile of food, I’ll need more room in my abdominal area.

  “Mari,” I plead, “can’t you loosen this faja? ¿Por favorcito?”

  She frowns. “Bueno, Laurita, I’ll do it, but before you stand up we’ll have to tighten it again, O.K.?”

  “O.K., O.K., gracias!”

  She loosens the strip of fabric. Ahh. Sweet relief. My internal organs sigh, rearrange themselves back into normal positions. I devour the greasy, salty delight with abandon.

  As the other customers and servers watch the game, transfixed, I munch chicken and gaze at María in wonder. I’ve long admired her spunk, her determination to overcome the obstacles in her life—poverty, abuse, racism, sexism, classism, enslavement—and not only survive, but thrive. And now the latest source of my admiration: how she manages to fit so many fried plantains beneath that tourniquet of a faja.

  Now I can vividly imagine her sensations of wrapping herself in anacos after years of the baggy Western-style outfits of the late eighties. This native clothing isn’t just an abstract symbol of her transformation, but a gut-restricting, chest-squeezing, rib-cracking reality.

  When our bellies are full of chicken and local beer, we stretch and gather our things. I announce I’m going to the bathroom to wash the grease from my hands, so I won’t sully the blouse. (How does she manage to keep her blouse snow-white, anyway?)

  “Excuse me,” I say, scooting out of the booth, handbag slung over my shoulder. I stand up and head to the baños.

  “Laurita!” María calls out, alarmed.

  But it’s too late. The faja uncoils. The skirt falls to the floor, yards of fabric pooled at my feet. I am standing in my underwear, a not-nice pair, cool air grazing my naked thighs. I am smack in the middle of the crowded restaurant, exposed.

  I flush hot magenta, frantically gather the fabric and faja to my waist. Sweating and prickling with embarrassment, I raise my eyes, prepared for a sea of faces, laughing and gaping.

  But the only eyes on me belong to María—whose mouth has dropped open in a kind of amused horror—and a toddler girl in a high chair, cheeks smeared with potato. Every other face is gazing, oblivious, at the TV.

  The blessed, beautiful TV.

  After a stretched-out moment of shock, I stagger to the baños. And in the safety of the stall, I pull out the secret stash from my handbag: a loose T-shirt and sweat pants. My Plan B.

  Carefully, I remove and fold up the long faja and anacos and the lacy blouse. I slip my comfy clothes over my not-nice underwear. I leave the golden beads around my neck and the coral strands around my wrists for a bit of dazzle. By the time I emerge from the bathroom, my blush has faded, my armpit sweat has dried, the soccer game has ended, and a relieved smile has sprouted on my face.

  As we walk home, María teases me relentlessly. We replay my blooper and laugh and wipe our eyes. And despite lingering mortification, I realize that the wardrobe disaster of tonight will make our book a bit deeper, a bit richer. Not only has María let me into her mind and heart and skin, but her clothing, too.

  Our relationship has deepened into something richer, too—silly and soulful, intimate and vulnerable, all woven together with tears and giggles.

  Beneath the street lamp glow, María slings her arm around my shoulder. I lean into her, twirl my fingers around her ribbon-bound ponytail. “Gracias, hermana.”

  She responds with a hip bump and a sparkling grin. “De nada, hermana.”

  A few years later, our book is published, after a total of seven years of research and interviewing and storytelling and writing and revising. Nearly the same amount of time that María was enslaved. During those seven years, we have cried and laughed; we have confided to each other our deepest sorrows and fears; we have done makeovers and sleepovers and whispered secrets just before falling asleep; we have
teased and joked; we have fought and made up; we have helped each other through painful times; we have driven each other crazy.

  We have not yet pummeled each other over potatoes, but that could still happen some day.

  Laura Resau is the award-winning author of eight novels for young people, all set in places where she’s lived or traveled, including Mexico, France, Guatemala, and Ecuador. Her most popular book with adults—The Queen of Water, co-written with María Virginia Farinango—gained a prized spot on Oprah’s reading list for teens. Resau’s acclaimed travel essays have appeared in anthologies by Travelers’ Tales, Lonely Planet, and others. She lives in Colorado with her husband and young son, and donates a portion of her royalties to indigenous rights organizations in Latin America. For more about her writing, please visit www.Lauraresau.com.

  JAMES MICHAEL DORSEY

  My Mexican Bus

  An ongoing spiritual journey commences anew.

  We all have a special place for solace and introspection; mine is a southbound bus in Baja California.

  I only take this ride once a year to visit friends, but it has become both a pilgrimage and a ritual that occupies my thoughts for a far greater time. I seem to have an inbred need for this repetitive ride that would not have the same value should I do it more often. For me, the journey has always been as important as the destination, but in this case, they are both the same.

  It begins in the Tijuana bus terminal, an aging, cavernous building and a time portal for my entrée to Old Mexico. When I step through those doors, I enter another era as well as a place. The concrete-and-glass blockhouse is a utilitarian monument to 1950s Mexican architecture and a reminder of how slowly time passes here. Inside, the smell of tortillas and mole mingles with the aroma of ammonia on linoleum floors. A feeling washes over me that does not translate easily into words, a feeling finely honed and nuanced over many years, somewhere between coming home and simple tranquility.

  I pay my respects at the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose statue stands a tearful guard next to the entrance to the public toilet. I drop a two-peso coin into the pay slot that lets me revolve the steel turnstile and open the door marked “Caballeros” over the grinning stencil of a mustachioed man giving me a thumbs-up. Inside, I am pleasantly surprised to find flush toilets complete with paper, but know they will probably be the last of their kind until I reach my final destination.

  Outside in the main hall I walk past the cambio, a money exchange that has never been open in my presence, and then wait while the young girl behind the counter writes out my ticket by hand on a yellow legal pad with a dull pencil as she snaps her gum loudly.

  Tijuana is an open city with no taxes and it is here that the braceros and agriculturos of the south come to stock up on the trappings of modern society, only recently available from the large new discount stores that line the border. The waiting hall is full of people lugging big screen TVs and assorted appliances on those tiny folding luggage rollers. One ancient grandmother has three crowded shopping bags on each arm that cause her to roll like a camel as she walks. I watch a mother wrap her children in blankets on the cold steel chairs and try to make out what the PA announcement is saying, but it is mostly garbled static.

  With my fellow passengers, I walk through the metal detector that beeps loudly at each of us but fails to gain the attention of the bored-looking security guard. The folding knife I forgot to take out of my pocket will ride with me tonight.

  Outside, as I stand in line to board, the tiny grandmother clutching a canvas bag in front of me is startled when I greet her in Spanish. She is so wide that it is an effort to board, but once in her seat, she pats the one next to her when I climb on. She offers me a bite of her churro, which I politely decline, then instinctively clutches my hand as the bus lurches from its stall. Her lips are moving below closed eyes and I think she is saying the Lord’s Prayer. She is a child of the old world and clearly afraid of the journey ahead in this gigantic mechanized machine. She probably leaves the desert infrequently to visit a son or daughter and now must return. Her weathered face is a definitive map of the Mexican people: not Hispanic, nor Spanish, or even mestizo, but Mexican, a distinction often overlooked by racial generalization. I assure her in Spanish that all will be well and she nervously compliments me on my pronunciation.

  Baja is not like mainland Mexico. It is older and set in its ways. On the world scale it is a tiny peninsula, but its deserts rival any on Earth and its jagged mountains appear shaped by an angry God, while tucked into its most remote corners are a people whose mode of living has not changed in centuries. They are the same people whose ancestors turned back armored Spanish conquistadors with bows and arrows. Away from Highway 1, horses and burros are the main mode of transport and doors of mud houses remain unlocked because there is no crime among neighbors. Cattle wander the highways with faces full of prickly cholla cactus and cougars and wolves roam in numbers across a vast lunar landscape. It is a separate reality from my own life and part of its allure is to realize that an imaginary line on a map is all it takes to divide such diverse cultures.

  The noisy diesel coughs and sputters to life and we begin to inch our way past the gaudy neon and gridlocked traffic that is the Tijuana night. From my perch high above them I wonder about the lives in the countless cars below me, thinking any one of them could have been my own. What if I had born here? How would my life be different?

  A big difference is obvious when our route takes us past the high concrete wall that forms part of the border. It is covered with graffiti and seems eerily similar to one that used to stand in Berlin. While people are not being shot for crossing this wall, it still makes me wish for a world where we need no barriers to separate us from our neighbors.

  As we leave the city behind, the grandmother releases my hand and with a timid smile of apology, falls asleep with her head on my shoulder. She is going home now and is happy. A chunky moon slides from behind traveling clouds to reveal iridescent rolling surf, just before the highway turns inland on the way to Ensenada.

  In the silent cloak of night, Mexico has always been more real to me. In this predominantly Catholic land, organized religion has merged with peasant superstition to create a belief system all its own, especially in the high mountains and remote deserts where I prefer to travel. This is the land of the brujo, witches, spirits, and demons, a land where people pray equally to Jesus in church and to syncretic images of Santeria in mud shacks. I have spent too much time in this place to dismiss anything metaphysical and recall a midnight encounter in a coffee shop, when a stranger swathed in black warned me of the full moon and then disappeared into a brightly lit and vacant street. I have yet to meet anyone in Baja who is not related to, or not had an encounter with, a witch of some sort. They are ubiquitous here.

  South of Ensenada, we climb into the mountains of San Pedro de Martir. The temperature has fallen and I pull a fleece from my bag as the repetitive hum of the tires and familiar back-and-forth swaying on the switch-backed road triggers more memories.

  Guillermo was on the lead horse when it reared up, and without any commands, trampled a rattlesnake to death. Its patterned skin eventually became a somewhat mutilated hat band. Later that day, while returning from a cave painted 6,000 years ago by the Cochimi people, we stopped at a rancho for beans and rice. I noticed what appeared to be a human skull on a shelf in the adobe. When I turned to ask the old patron about it, his face appeared weirdly contorted and I suddenly felt dizzy. The moment passed and when I looked again, the skull was a chunk of obsidian and the old man was smiling benignly. That revelatory moment ended any more questions on my part. Some things are just not meant to be understood.

  The hours pass while my thoughts are elsewhere. Night in a foreign land is when I rethink my own life; what I should have done differently, what I can do better. What will I do next? The bus is silent except for random snoring and the hushed conversation between the middle-aged driver and his young girlfriend seated on the ai
sle floor next to him. We stop on an isolated piece of road where towering cacti stand like night sentinels in our headlights. The cargo door opens and a gentleman and young lady emerge to trade places with the driver and his friend, both girls giggling as they switch. Our new driver, refreshed in more ways than one, takes over.

  I return to the night, and when the first purple streak of dawn slashes the sky we leave Highway 1 for the service road into Guerro Negro, gateway to Scammons’ Lagoon. On the sides of the road we begin to see platforms topping telephone poles for the osprey to nest on and avoid electrocution. On the beach side, we roll past the enormous skeleton of a gray whale that announces this village as a major whale-watching destination.

  Behind the bus station, the ever-present Virgin of Guadalupe, haloed by blinking Christmas lights, watches over the parking lot with outstretched hand. A faint whiff of marijuana comes to my nose and as I step inside, two ancient and gaunt vaqueros in straw cowboy hats are drinking coffee and passing a hand-rolled smoke. I buy a cold empanada so stale I toss it to a stray dog after one bite. Because it is close to the ocean, it is often bitterly cold in Guerro Negro at night. This evening I watch my breath rise in hazy clouds to disappear in the breeze. Above me, the Big Dipper sits low in the sky, the end of its handle pointing the way home for when I return. As we leave to continue south, the morning light begins to crawl over the horizon, mingling land and sky that slowly separates into a new day.

  An hour’s ride south, the desert floor widens and the road disappears into a cottony ground fog. The top of a distant volcano pokes through it and gigantic Cordon cacti slide in and out of sight in the haze, their upturned arms saluting as we roll past, a vast silent army, guardians of the land. We have reached the edge of the Viscaino biosphere, 5 million hectares of protected wilderness that cover a quarter of the Baja Peninsula. Suddenly, distant shadows become a herd of wild burros that cause us to brake hard enough to wake everyone, and we laugh as the driver must exit and physically shoo them off the road. Kestrels are hunting insects in the morning haze and the cacti appear to be stretching after the evening’s sleep. Everyone crowds to one side and cell phones are snapping photos. The quiet night is gone. Across from me, a man in silver-tipped cowboy boots draws a long pull from a pocket flask then slumps back in his seat, his Stetson tilted low over his eyes.