Hello all,
We have now reached Tucson, Arizona. Goodbye off roading, goodbye endless dust, goodbye trash by the roadside, goodbye language barrier, goodbye poverty gap, goodbye stern-faced policemen, goodbye enjoyable restaurants, goodbye unenjoyable restrooms, goodbye endless government owned Pemex petrol stations, hello Shell station (TM), hello Thirst Buster (nothing's cooler), hello stern-faced policemen, hello strange man outside Circle K that won't stop unintelligibly talking to me about his hospital experience and let me go my way.
We stayed with Gail at Barras for around a week in total. Board was earned by digging a deep square hole apiece. The earth was rocky and hard to dig into, then lower down it became clay and finally the sand of the beach. The heat and excursion made my body so sweaty it looked as if I had recently lowered myself fully into a lagoon. As I was digging a trench a kindly man let me know through rudimentary sign language that I was swinging and lodging the pointy end of my pickaxe rather close to where three power cables were buried. Further work was carried out in the nearby city of Mazatlan on a kitten orphanage, naturally. 'Tie those palm leaves on tighter!' bellowed our directors from the ground below, 'we have hurricanes here!' I leant forwards, allowing the sun to hit me square on the shoulders and back, and gingerly tied a palm leaf down while concentrating on not falling forwards and through the flimsy roof of the kitten orphanage.
We decided on a marathon drive from Barras to Tucson which was to take around eight hours behind the wheel each. I gave John odds of 3-1 that we see at least one more mechanic in Mexico. These odds transpired to be idiotically generous; our journey only reached around the half hour mark before another tire submitted to the heat and span ragged and flapping. We hobbled to the hard shoulder - not very wide - and surveyed a gaping hole in the wall of the tire. We were in the middle of nowhere. It seemed our luck had run out. The police stopped and helpfully informed us we had a 'big problem' and poked around in the boot, deaf to my explanations that we had already used the spare, and that by some diabolical practical joke it had been far too small anyway. They said some things in Spanish and drove off, leaving us with the dust and the crickets. The nearest city with an ATM, Culiacan, was 45 minutes away. John applied suncream and sauntered off down the road sticking his thumb out.
There were a few houses nearby, one of which had a nice metal rocking chair painted white and sitting under a tree. I sat in this and read the Great Gatsby. Soon a severe thirst took hold, and after some hopeless foraging I rejoiced to pull out a large can of apple juice from Ponty's boot. Failing to find the can opener in the oven-like car I resorted to striking the can savagely with the wheel wrench. A tiny trickle of juice was made available, but my drinking enjoyment was marred by the discomfort of having to hold the heavy can - now tacky with warm juice and liberally coated with dust and jolly little ants, no doubt the tarring and feathering of the tinned drinks world - high above my head and then having to squeeze it with all the might of my thumbs, causing a stream of juice to fire arbitrarily across my face. As I sat and looked angrily at the misshapen, stubborn can I recollected the scene in Three Men in a Boat where they forget a can-opener and are forced to batter a tin of pineapple with the mast of their boat:
"We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead."
This lifted my spirits a little, and I resumed reading Gatsby in the shade.
As dusk came I retired to the car and stared sullenly at the horizon. John had been gone for about six hours. Soon I was startled by a man knocking on the window and saying 'comeh, comeh!', meaning 'eat'. It seemed I had been observed throughout the day, stalking around and frowning to myself. It was true that I hadn't eaten much, the car now being virtually devoid of snacks. The hundreds of unwanted Nutrigrain bars - now capable of prompting a irresistable nauseaus reaction in me - were taken out and given to Gail to distribute around Barras. I digress. It appeared this fellow was offering me supper, so I followed him to a house made out of corrugated iron and other assorted materials. It was very dimly lit. I sat meekly on a chair and was regarded by five or six small children from hammocks and other chairs. Then I was ushered into a kitchen area and seated down at a table where a solitary bulb dangled very close to my face, blinding me at first and then giving the impression I was on stage. The crowd of small timid brown faces had followed me and was waiting for my delivery, my great monologue. An English-Spanish dictionary and tacos were plonked down in front of me.
John arrived later that night, he had been riding around in several different police trucks. Unforunately he hadn't been able to get hold of any cash and, stupidly, I hadn't given him my card, so he came back empty handed. We slept in the car and in the morning chose to both hitch-hike with the defunct wheel. We were picked up very quickly by an old man driving an almost equally old pick-up truck. We sat in the back and enjoyed the hair-whipping again. Every so often the man would stop at a petrol station and fill up the radiator with water, causing clouds of steam to issue from the engine. One breakdown lasted for half an hour. 'Piquito problemo!' smiled the old man. I inspected the engine and saw the radiator was coming loose and water flowing freely onto the ground. I squealed in pain as the radiator spluttered and shot a jet of steam onto my bare leg.
Once we reached town it wasn't hard to acquire two new tires - one spare - and reccomence our slog. I tried to sleep while John drove for six hours, then I took the helm, aided by the imbibement of sugary drinks. At a roadside diner we found a very small kitten and abducted him, calling him Carlos. Carlos refused to stay in the house we made for him out of a cardboard box, instead roaming the inside of the car, eating a burrito I offered him and pissing here and there. At the border we stuffed him into a box and tossed in a burrito and t-shirt to entertain him. When asked if I was 'bringing anything back with' me an inner, self-destructive proclivity took charge, demanding I elongate and add Australian inflection to my answer - 'Noooo?' -, making it sound as suspicious as possible. Luckily Carlos had shut up for a while and we were allowed through.
Soon we were in Tucson, very nearly the hottest place in the world. Woe betide he who attempts to walk barefoot along any surface in Tucson that has been exposed to the sun within the last 72 hours, or, even more unfairly, he who attempts to operate a brass doorhandle exposed to the sun without first donning an oven glove. Our hosts Micah and Zach were beyond welcoming and generous. Attending the local 80s night was an unexpected pleasure. The drive to San Diego was easy and quicker than I expected. Carlos was something of a nuisance, having become larger and more energetic since we captured him. During the drive he refused to sit silently in his box, and when the meowing became too annoying and we set him free he began cavorting about the car, attacking us and pissing on the floor.
We have found ourselves back in Ocean beach. A hobo called Boston James has become rather attached to Carlos, although he insists on calling him 'hat'. Yesterday as Boston was playing with hat a lady called Denise came along and offered to house him (hat, not Boston James), and a sort of bidding war ensued. Meanwhile I scrubbed the car with disinfectant and shampoo in desperate attempts to eradicate the piss stench hat had left behind. This among other recent crumblings (fog light has fallen off leaving a sad, hanging wire; large cracks have appeared in windscreen following forceful gesticulating with a beer bottle) will severely affect Ponty's going rate when we try and flog him, I expect.
Diea Carpum!
'chard.
We have now reached Tucson, Arizona. Goodbye off roading, goodbye endless dust, goodbye trash by the roadside, goodbye language barrier, goodbye poverty gap, goodbye stern-faced policemen, goodbye enjoyable restaurants, goodbye unenjoyable restrooms, goodbye endless government owned Pemex petrol stations, hello Shell station (TM), hello Thirst Buster (nothing's cooler), hello stern-faced policemen, hello strange man outside Circle K that won't stop unintelligibly talking to me about his hospital experience and let me go my way.
We stayed with Gail at Barras for around a week in total. Board was earned by digging a deep square hole apiece. The earth was rocky and hard to dig into, then lower down it became clay and finally the sand of the beach. The heat and excursion made my body so sweaty it looked as if I had recently lowered myself fully into a lagoon. As I was digging a trench a kindly man let me know through rudimentary sign language that I was swinging and lodging the pointy end of my pickaxe rather close to where three power cables were buried. Further work was carried out in the nearby city of Mazatlan on a kitten orphanage, naturally. 'Tie those palm leaves on tighter!' bellowed our directors from the ground below, 'we have hurricanes here!' I leant forwards, allowing the sun to hit me square on the shoulders and back, and gingerly tied a palm leaf down while concentrating on not falling forwards and through the flimsy roof of the kitten orphanage.
We decided on a marathon drive from Barras to Tucson which was to take around eight hours behind the wheel each. I gave John odds of 3-1 that we see at least one more mechanic in Mexico. These odds transpired to be idiotically generous; our journey only reached around the half hour mark before another tire submitted to the heat and span ragged and flapping. We hobbled to the hard shoulder - not very wide - and surveyed a gaping hole in the wall of the tire. We were in the middle of nowhere. It seemed our luck had run out. The police stopped and helpfully informed us we had a 'big problem' and poked around in the boot, deaf to my explanations that we had already used the spare, and that by some diabolical practical joke it had been far too small anyway. They said some things in Spanish and drove off, leaving us with the dust and the crickets. The nearest city with an ATM, Culiacan, was 45 minutes away. John applied suncream and sauntered off down the road sticking his thumb out.
There were a few houses nearby, one of which had a nice metal rocking chair painted white and sitting under a tree. I sat in this and read the Great Gatsby. Soon a severe thirst took hold, and after some hopeless foraging I rejoiced to pull out a large can of apple juice from Ponty's boot. Failing to find the can opener in the oven-like car I resorted to striking the can savagely with the wheel wrench. A tiny trickle of juice was made available, but my drinking enjoyment was marred by the discomfort of having to hold the heavy can - now tacky with warm juice and liberally coated with dust and jolly little ants, no doubt the tarring and feathering of the tinned drinks world - high above my head and then having to squeeze it with all the might of my thumbs, causing a stream of juice to fire arbitrarily across my face. As I sat and looked angrily at the misshapen, stubborn can I recollected the scene in Three Men in a Boat where they forget a can-opener and are forced to batter a tin of pineapple with the mast of their boat:
"We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry – but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead."
This lifted my spirits a little, and I resumed reading Gatsby in the shade.
As dusk came I retired to the car and stared sullenly at the horizon. John had been gone for about six hours. Soon I was startled by a man knocking on the window and saying 'comeh, comeh!', meaning 'eat'. It seemed I had been observed throughout the day, stalking around and frowning to myself. It was true that I hadn't eaten much, the car now being virtually devoid of snacks. The hundreds of unwanted Nutrigrain bars - now capable of prompting a irresistable nauseaus reaction in me - were taken out and given to Gail to distribute around Barras. I digress. It appeared this fellow was offering me supper, so I followed him to a house made out of corrugated iron and other assorted materials. It was very dimly lit. I sat meekly on a chair and was regarded by five or six small children from hammocks and other chairs. Then I was ushered into a kitchen area and seated down at a table where a solitary bulb dangled very close to my face, blinding me at first and then giving the impression I was on stage. The crowd of small timid brown faces had followed me and was waiting for my delivery, my great monologue. An English-Spanish dictionary and tacos were plonked down in front of me.
John arrived later that night, he had been riding around in several different police trucks. Unforunately he hadn't been able to get hold of any cash and, stupidly, I hadn't given him my card, so he came back empty handed. We slept in the car and in the morning chose to both hitch-hike with the defunct wheel. We were picked up very quickly by an old man driving an almost equally old pick-up truck. We sat in the back and enjoyed the hair-whipping again. Every so often the man would stop at a petrol station and fill up the radiator with water, causing clouds of steam to issue from the engine. One breakdown lasted for half an hour. 'Piquito problemo!' smiled the old man. I inspected the engine and saw the radiator was coming loose and water flowing freely onto the ground. I squealed in pain as the radiator spluttered and shot a jet of steam onto my bare leg.
Once we reached town it wasn't hard to acquire two new tires - one spare - and reccomence our slog. I tried to sleep while John drove for six hours, then I took the helm, aided by the imbibement of sugary drinks. At a roadside diner we found a very small kitten and abducted him, calling him Carlos. Carlos refused to stay in the house we made for him out of a cardboard box, instead roaming the inside of the car, eating a burrito I offered him and pissing here and there. At the border we stuffed him into a box and tossed in a burrito and t-shirt to entertain him. When asked if I was 'bringing anything back with' me an inner, self-destructive proclivity took charge, demanding I elongate and add Australian inflection to my answer - 'Noooo?' -, making it sound as suspicious as possible. Luckily Carlos had shut up for a while and we were allowed through.
Soon we were in Tucson, very nearly the hottest place in the world. Woe betide he who attempts to walk barefoot along any surface in Tucson that has been exposed to the sun within the last 72 hours, or, even more unfairly, he who attempts to operate a brass doorhandle exposed to the sun without first donning an oven glove. Our hosts Micah and Zach were beyond welcoming and generous. Attending the local 80s night was an unexpected pleasure. The drive to San Diego was easy and quicker than I expected. Carlos was something of a nuisance, having become larger and more energetic since we captured him. During the drive he refused to sit silently in his box, and when the meowing became too annoying and we set him free he began cavorting about the car, attacking us and pissing on the floor.
We have found ourselves back in Ocean beach. A hobo called Boston James has become rather attached to Carlos, although he insists on calling him 'hat'. Yesterday as Boston was playing with hat a lady called Denise came along and offered to house him (hat, not Boston James), and a sort of bidding war ensued. Meanwhile I scrubbed the car with disinfectant and shampoo in desperate attempts to eradicate the piss stench hat had left behind. This among other recent crumblings (fog light has fallen off leaving a sad, hanging wire; large cracks have appeared in windscreen following forceful gesticulating with a beer bottle) will severely affect Ponty's going rate when we try and flog him, I expect.
Diea Carpum!
'chard.
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