Hitch-hopping

On the first of August I leave Michael and resume the trail solita. He has his work to do, I have to explore my soul. Both of us need to do this alone.



I'm not quite alone though… Eva and her banda boyfriend Toño are heading towards Guatemala. It's with them that I find myself waiting for a lift in the rain, on the highway leading out of San Cristobal, sipping thick pozol (chocolate-tortilla drink) that sends curls of steam into the misty air.


It takes us just two days and four rides to make it to the border. We share pick up trucks with tarpaulins, small children and, on one particularly memorable ride, several hundred cans of pizza sauce, around which we contort ourselves in the storm-force winds.


I duck down to protect my face and when I raise my head I am captured by the most beautifully brief moment… a rainbow in the field next to me, hanging clean and sparkling and radiant with stunning colours, perfectly poised for a moment before it is whisked away in the slipstream.


I am left with the traces of a kaleidoscope smile on my lips.


We swerve to avoid a cow in the road.


In the next town they stop to haul a pizza oven into the back of the truck. I assume they want us to leave, but they insist they can make this work to meet everyone's needs. They spend half an hour levering the enormous hulk of metal into the back, shifting can after can after bag of pepperoni in a tetris solely designed to ensure our (relative) safety.


I do not understand why people would go to so much effort, just to make sure there are three squares of space for a few bums they've picked up, when clearly the addition of the 2-metre square pizza oven to the truck is a strain alone.


Eva says simply: "Because they can."


They drop us at a border town, where a fairground has just pulled up. The need for the pizza oven becomes clear. We are left in the flashing lights of a pathetic-looking rollercoaster and the enticing oil smells of fresh-fried churros.


For la banda, every hour can be a work hour. Toño plays drums at restaurants as we pass, begging for a few pennies to buy himself a beer. We see the same two skinny girls that we met on my birthday, twirling their fire, seeming small and out of place at the semaphoros.

We eat popcorn and hula hoop under the tinny sounds of the fair and I feel wonderful to have regained my independence.


I miss Mike but I am glad I am here alone. Crouched under the lights, echoing fairy lights from a time long gone, I realise how important it is for me to have the space to be truly me, not cramped or compromised by another.


I have a fire inside and I need to feed it. I cannot wait for Guatemala.

Nos sentamos en la calle

I turn twenty six on the twenty seventh of July. It is raining in San Cristobal de las Casas. At 6200 feet the drops fall cold and the ancient rocks of the pavement seem slicker than normal.



Michael and I spend all day looking for plush hotels and decide at the end that we'd rather spend the money on food.


Eva is here; my long-lost buddy with whom I spent December. It is wonderful to have a friend, although I've spent enough time here now that I recognise faces on the andador. We pass the evening on the slick streets, drinking maiz spirit and coconut juice out of plastic bottles and hula hooping through the puddles alongside la banda.


La banda. What a wonderful phenomenon to be part of during my travels here in Mexico.


It literally means the band, and is a term used to describe Mexico's hobos: a network of young pirates, dreadlocked, pierced, dressed in an assortment of rags. They travel their country in the back of pick up trucks, conjuring pennies to live by working the streets, the restaurants and the buses.


You're not banda unless you have a prop - a tambor drum, a fire stick, a roll of macrame bracelets. I have a hula hoop, therefore I am accepted as one of them. Whenever I travel with Eva, we listen for the sound of drums.


Like a subtle web of entertainers for the nation, these kids are always present, always audible. Their tambors sing the same rhythms in every town. Their jewellery glitters under streetlights. Traffic light junctions are fought over as the best location for fire spinning, where the perpetrators spend hours in exhaust fumes and whirls of flame, paid five pesos each by the most generous drivers.


Tonight my attention is caught by a pair of girls. Their collar bones show sharply under stained t shirts. One of them has shaved the sides of her hair and allowed the rest of it to dreadlock in a kind of parrot's tuft. The other wears a coloured scarf round her head and has eyes that move too fast. They pass a stolen cigarette between them and try to blend in. They are only seventeen.


I've seen them on the semaphoros, one with poi and the other with a fire stick. They look like they might break. They sit in the puddles like scruffy dolls, seeking their adventure in dark streets, far away from any family they may have had.


They dance well and guzzle their beer with prowess. They have the urchin look down to a T. The only thing that belies them is the nervous darting of their eyes.


I wonder where they came from…where any of them came from.


Some run, bored, from families with big homes, rejecting the streamlined world of the rich mexican for the grit of the streets. Others have no relatives at all. Some just haven't come up with anything better to do yet. These details don't appear to matter because each is accepted within the greater family of la banda.


They are the people's army; the underbelly, proudly displaying the happiness that having nothing can bring. They proclaim the alternatives: that you do not have to have a regular job, a safe house and a non-descript image to be happy.

The conditions for the movement are perfect - anyone with a grain of sense can earn money in Mexico, albeit at different rates. There is no web of legislation to climb through -- if there is, no one cares. Hitchhiking is commonplace, and pick up trucks form the greater part of Mexico's fleet.


Life on the road is exhilarating. There is no purpose to it other than to live and continue to live.


I am happy to flit in and out of the situation. Their company is interesting for a while but as Eva points out, one can become bored easily when faced with too many nights of sharing caguamons and paying for things with handfuls of change.


A stranger might look at me, hair wraps, hula hoop and holes in my clothes, and place me in their box.


For me, the difference is subtle and comes in a cup.


I am happy to have included the luxury of coffee within my budget.


For la banda, the coffee shop is on the other side of their grimy viewing window. They peer through it with interest, knowing they would never choose to fritter away hard-earned beer money on a meaningless hot beverage.

Rain splats the glass as they sit, crouched, waiting for the customer who will whisk them away.

Metamorphosis

Out of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and in to Michoacan. Closer to the heart, colder to the core.

Lake Patzcuaro has been calling me for a while.

Legend paints a place where the barrier between heaven and earth is thin. I can't explain the feeling but I am sure there is someone there I have to meet.

Dan's van is going to Morelia. When I look on the map, Morelia's proximity to Patzcuaro sends a jolt of electricity through my body and once again I feel in the flow of something far stronger than me.

"Vamonos!" And so we find ourselves, crawling south.

Dan drives his van with all the enthusiasm of a Canadian on a road full of crazy drivers, Moses the husky perched zen-like behind him, Catia the newly-arrived Toronto lass, glued to the passenger window. We stop for the night at a town that begins with M, chosen by vote with map-pointed fingers.

These towns are like secrets, existing, bustling, swarming under the camoflage of anonymity. There is no way you'd see this Mexico with your head in the Lonely Planet. The square conceals millions of birds, who paint the pavement white and screech in stereo sound loud enough to raise our voices.

Catia and I share a room that sneers in spinach green. We awake early, too cold to shower. The morning mist hangs expectantly.


Our destination is one of the four butterfly reserves playing host to millions of Monarch mariposas on their winter flight from Canada. Every year, they return to the same place.

It takes them five weeks to fly down here. It will take them three generations to fly back.


The eternally moving circle of life.


The journey is lined with ranches and shacks, weathered farmers waiting patiently for lifts. Their sombreros shine whitely in the morning glow. Horses trudge their way up pine-clad slopes. Sun tints yellow, clouds wash grey.


Now we are in Austria. Only the cacti and clamouring billboards give it away.


My journey is blissful. I hug my knees on Dan's bed, a back-of-the-van secret. From time to time Moses stands, turns, sits heavily once again; dancing to my reggae soundtrack. Why does "Eastenders" exist and yet "Vehicle Windows Around the World" does not? I sink back into the pillows and lean my forehead against the glass.

We pull off onto a dirt road and find ourselves at a square of coloured shacks, steaming with woodsmoke, where children surround the van, asking for pesos. I hand out hula hoops to squeals of self-conscious giggling.


We eat our breakfast next to a fire tended by a four year old with a runny nose. She gives us cinnamon coffee that has been boiling, bitterly, on a metal plate over the embers. We clothe Catia, who smilingly admits to having arrived entirely unequipped for anything other than Toronto life, and start walking, accompanied by a tanned, toothless guide named Salvador.


We fail to follow his lisping dialogue. The wrinkles in his face tell me the stories I want to hear.

The sun filters through the pines to illuminate fallen trunks; clues to February's uncharacteristic storms. Salvador mumbles about floods and mudslides.

It wouldn't take much to cut the village off from everything.

In contrast to much of the world's broadly blind denial of change, the Mexicans seem to know something is up. Rather than 'global warming', many seem to accept that we are on a time scale told to us thousands of years ago. I have met some people who say, with no shred of doubt, that next year will see snow in this country.


Rare is the Mexican house that is closed to the elements. If it snows, millions of people will die.


I don't want to believe it and yet the rains of the last month have rested heavy on my shoulders, coming down hard and unwelcome in the middle of the historic dry season.

For now, the sun continues to shine on the delicate black veins and saffron-dusted wings of the butterfly carcasses that have begun to litter the path; dappled warning of vulnerable slumber. They exist in a comatose state for weeks, shutting down completely until the sun is warm enough to wake them.

Salvador points up to huge dark pendulums in the trees, like giant wasp nests. Our eyes adjust like we've walked into a dark room and it takes a moment to realise these are all butterflies, wings closed, awaiting the sun's touch. Focus more and tune into entire trunks, covered in wings.


The valley hums in orange.


Dan and Catia take off with their cameras and I lie back in a patch of sunlight to look straight up at the canopy.

I never thought I'd appreciate the fact that someone stole my camera last month. But I am grateful now for the chance to simply sit and absorb.

Butterflies drift as if by accident. Scraps of orange tissue, blown in the breeze.

I close my eyes and join them, feeding off the warmth of dusty beams, fluttering my joy at the world.

These butterflies have flown almost as far as me.

I am learning to read nature. The transparency of its messages is surprising. Butterflies are a theme that has been following me for weeks. They represent change.


I am glad I am with Dan and Catia. A strange trio we make; each of us is in our own state of metamorphosis. Dan still coping with the hole his girlfriend left behind, but plowing eagerly on through his mindblowing, fated journey. Catia, dressed in mournful black and shaking with the shock of leaving her life, testing out her new legs and the arch of her wings.


Me, finding my feet and so much more. Undergoing change and preparing for more. Not only am I flying right now, but in my flight I am preparing to let go of my solo venture when Michael joins me at the beginning of March. I am simultaneously nervous and exploding with excitement. Either way, letting someone else in is enormous. It is not just the change of travelling state but the mental upheaval of entering a relationship.


I feel other, deeper shifts. I wonder who I will meet in Patzcuaro.

Like the butterfly, I will soon be released from my self-constructed cocoon; different shape, same being.

All three of us are butterflies, emerging from our pods. Wobbling on legs we didn't have before. Waving antennae in pine scents. Flying away.

We return to find children still hula hooping. I play with them for an hour or so, encouraging the shy ones and exclaiming at the progress of the new professionals. I keep catching sight of the joy on their faces and laughing because it is me that has put that there.

When we leave I gift them my blue and yellow hoop. I have carried this hoop with me for three months, purely to lend to children, for everywhere I go there is a child who wants to learn.

I will need a new one for them now. But it feels right to leave it here.

The resulting light in their faces illuminates the way ahead.