And now for something completely predictable

With J out in the desert where everything seems able to draw blood, I am left in Mexico and in control of the blog.  We shall probably write something about the desert together when reunited so I shall mull some of my solo ventures in text form

First, I waved farewell to J and went for a stroll through down town L.A. in search of the Greyhound terminal.  Wait, hold that.  First of all the library. L.A. library was very big and had lots of books which of course makes me happy.  However the first thing you see is a library store, there are lots of little ´galleries´for a dozen or so pictures, and everything is reached by escalator.  It kinda felt like a giant, sterile mall.  I´d go further that and say it´s a mall.  Why do airports have galleries and malls have art exhibits anyway? Who are they trying to fool about the bland, soulless nature of their existence?  You can´t install these things and claim the intellectual and poetic credit for them because you squeezed them into one of the identical unit (whose only merit can be described in cubic metres)  between some post-ironic(1) clothing outlet were people pay lots of money to look like they haven´t (it´s called Dereliquet I´m told)  and a stall selling food whose origin is indistinct but can be entirely eaten without having to chew.  They had orchestra halls and galleries in concentration camps.  Incidentally I´ve been reading some of Tadeusz Borowski´s short stories.  Seriously recommend them in all their screwed up horror.

So, I left the mall which posed as a library, and went down town.  This was all fine, though police were on every street corner.  Not in a organised way and nothing was happening it seemed, just lots of cops, including in the disturbing offspring of a police van and a hummer.  I was not allowed to take a picture of it, which is odd because it´s not like the thing was undercover anyway.  Anyway off I went in my Greyhound to Arizona for desert aid with No More Deaths,(2) about which I will say more when J is back from her time there.

So skip two weeks (or a fortnight if you prefer) forward, I meet J for about five hours to catch up and then it is the 1st of September when I have to be out of the Land of the Free(TM).  I am only 100km (signs are back in km here, something which I have no doubt upsets many an right-wing Fox news host.)  from the border which is eminently doable.  Even with distractions (3).  Greyhound may only go to the U.S. border apparently but there is another company will take me all the way to Hermosillo the Sonoran capital and far from the border.  But then it turns out that union fat-cats are trying to get me unceremoniously cast from America by having a public holiday which the treacherous bus company observes. Which seems unfair given the fruit-picking we did we did in Canada (which I say freely since even if the long bright red coated arm of the Canadian law enforcement were to pursue us, well, they´d be Mounties (who aren´t even mounted these days).  In short it´s Labo(u)r Day weekend.  This is no problema (see, Spanish?  Oh yes, for those who don´t know already I have zero (or cero) Spanish.  J has all the language skills, in every language.)  So, I got to the border with the aid of labo(u)r wrath risking Greyhound, which I proceed to cross on foot.  An American asks me what´s in my rucksack.  He further asks me how long I intend to be in Mexico and what my business there is.  I reply that my business with Mexico is between Mexico and myself, that as an American his job today is to thank me for my custom and wish me a good day.  He counters with an investigation of my passport.  It is legal.  However he doesn´t stamp it and I am sent on my way.  He also claims that if I want back into the U.S. I have to stay 30 days in Mexico which is very much NOT(4) what the guards said on the Canadian border coming in.  It´s almost like they don´t know what they are doing.

Through a turnstile was Nogales.  There was no Mexican customs/immigration.  Since I´m now several hundred kilometres past the border and have been so for nearly a week, it is now fair to say I appear to have accidentally entered Mexico illegally.  Which is a lot easier than going the other way across that line.  I´m not even sure who to report this to at this point.

Anyway, unsure of hitching around here, the bus to Hermosillo was very cheap.  It is the capital of the region and features some pretty colonial buildings (Colonial is a style of building here I guess, like Gothic or Victorian, but I still wince when tourist things say how ´wonderfully Colonial´a town is).  The bus that took me there only went north and south so I wandered around a bit as it grew dark, unable to discern where the town centre was. And the people I asked gave different directions.  Eventually I found a hidden corner outside the front of a bank (which given it was Saturday it wouldn´t be open tomorrow) and nestled down.  At one point 7 pick-up trucks with cops went by with sirens wailing.  They have a little frame thing in the back that 3-4 cops can stand holding on to, which makes cost effective and temperature sense i guess, but it did give them a kind of militia look.  Waving their guns around added to that as well.  Other than that it was a quiet if twitchy night and my elbows were bitten some two dozen times by mosquitoes in the night.  The next day I find the centre of town and the tourist info hut, but it didn´t open for several hours which gave me a chance to hang about, enjoy cold, cheap iced tea and chat to street folk.   The tourist info person seemed confused by the idea of the library and all commercial Internet sources were shut as it was Sunday so I just found the bus station and took a bus out west to Bahia Kino.

On an unrelated note, you know those people who leave their estate and money etc.to their pets? Do the pets pay taxes on those things?  Where does that fall into ´No taxation without representation´ arguments?

I arrived and almost immediately people took pity on me and gave me tasty food.  The Gulf of California (which at no point touches the State of California though you can see Baja California across the Gulf when the weather is nice) is near body temperature warm even at night.  I set up the inner part of the tent on the beach as two separate people told me this was fine.  Then a storm hit about 2am.  10cm (that´s 4in for imperialists) of rain fell in two hours .  Everything was soaked and I just slung the remains of my tent and belonging´s in the ¨shelter¨of a villa´s wall and hunkered down till morning beneath the tent fly I had neglected to use.  Though the tent would have simply collapsed in the wind anyway.  The following night I slept under a trailer to protect me from the storm, which never came, but many mosquitoes did.  The following night I went into my tent as soon as it got dark at 7:30pm and sweated so much I think I lost weight.  Sitting on a beach has proven surprisingly difficult and stressful.  Not to mention having to carry all my possessions with me and move each night as several people with enough English to talk to me have warned me that people intend to rob me in the night.  I´m seriously confused as to who chooses a beach vacation at this point.  But I am trying to balance the bugs, heat and storms as beaches are one of the few places I´d feel confident setting up a tent without worrying it´s someone´s land.

Bahia Kino is a weekend beach for people from Hermosillo and Arizona.  This means that during the week I basically have it to myself.  There are pictures but I can´t get them off the camera here it seems.  I´ll work on that for next time. There´s hills and cliffs as well, with many pelicans and turkey vultures.(5)  While trying to explain to someone that I had seen two vultures eating the washed up corpse of a blue-footed booby, I had a bit of a language fail.  They didn´t understand me saying ´buitre´ which is vulture so I showed them my dictionary and pointed at the word.  Except they read the word underneath and confusion reigned for a surprisingly long time of their belief that I was claiming to have witnessed a blue-footed booby (of which there are none here so that was also difficult) being devoured by two vulva on the beach.                

So I have about another week before J and I are reunited.  I aspire to find some relaxing time (and a laundry place) between now and then. So not much will happen (hopefully), I mean looking at the above not much did happen last week.  But the blog is to be about our journey and I think accurately covers what travelling with me at this time would have been like.  Feel free to email J your condolences/sympathies if you wish.
  
       

Footnotes

(1) I have been wondering about what on earth post-ironic is supposed to mean.  I´ve considered that it exists simply because being ironic is so 90´s, but I am growing to opinion that it in fact means reactionary, conservative, sexist, racist white male who´s too much of a coward to just be a conservative like the non-college educated/living in New York, London, Montreal or Paris reactionary white males would call themselves.

(2) People´s remains found in the desert last year - 183

(3) Sonoran Dogs!  The link explains all.  All except why I eat it.  This cartoon does that.  Which brings up another point.  This is not the first time I have been haunted by the eerie description of my life and inner mental life by Wondermark. It is one of several sources who do this to me.  It is very distressing because you think you are a unique individual, a combination of genetics and experiences that cannot be replicated, that is the proverbial new thing under the sun and that your experience is thus both singular and valuable.  You later discover that not only are your thoughts, feeling, loves, hates and experiences are not only not unique, but are readily predictable and transferable into cartoon format.  Or that Raskolnikov stole your life 150 years before you lived it.  Not that I´ve killed an old lady, but if I did do so, I´d probably be thinking of Napoleon. Or many parts of David Foster Wallace´s writings.  And to top finding your personal thoughts and dreams stolen by people now dead, it is distressing that they are doing it so much better and more articulately and clearer than you could.  Of your own feelings!  I´ve written to David Malki about this and await his reply.  

(4) If you enter the U.S. (even when transiting) any time spent in Canada or Mexico thereafter is counted as time spent in the U.S. If you then return from Canada or Mexico and enter the U.S. again, this does not mean you have another 90 days to use. 

(5) Turkey vultures are a lot like punks it has been explained to me recently. They are great scavengers and never really kill anything.  In fact, their beaks are unable to pierce many animals hide and so they circle around it (since they often spot them first thanks to their good vision) until a hawk or some such shows up to do the lacerating job. They have no real predators, except for other birds of prey that sometimes eat their young.  To help prevent this, turkey vultures make their nests intentionally diusgusting, leaving piles of half-digested rotting meat around it.  If this fails and a predator does land at the nest, the vulture projectile vomits in the face of the attacker.