Forward
This mad dash to deep western Mexico and back occurred over college spring break, 1981, and constituted my first foray into Western Hemisphere non-American environs. There isn’t a lot of travel substance here, more Oaxacan-induced stream of conscious narrative. But it does represent the beginnings of a pun & obscurity referenced writing style, many elements of which still persist in my current missives. I was overly cryptic when i wrote this, however, and i can’t decipher many of my own references. Or was it the Acapulco Red?! [I’ve added some decoding in brackets]
Day 1
Plummeting eastward, Dave Wingo and i sped at breakfast speeds to reach mighty Roswell. Night was met by Texas and took her leave in Eagle Pass. There, magnolia pheromones slashed the air in ripe anticipation. Little hassle and omnipresent parfum accompanied our first hundred kilos into Mexico. Sabinas carwash was an over-the-dam breach experience. Then we played over and under with a few young mountain chains – the recuesta for sediments was topped by hot lavas and it was dark into the great CITY of MEXICO that was built on a city and built on another and built on a lake. And alien demure pollen sits sculpture on the winding boulevards. Twisting cubes and ascending vortices horrors loomed and boomed in the silent night [references to the profuse giant sculptures along the highways]. We observed the sleeping giant as only we should, sleeping! Her energies weren’t unfelt however, but i chose to sleep as our continuous driving afforded little fiesta [we were in Dave’s Ford Fiesta].
Day 2
Awoke to ascent to Acapulco. Golden dawn pushed me to the front seat and Rock Lobsters paraded us into town. The landward side of Acapulco contained bastard spawn of shanty monsters. Thousands of psychedelic shacks speckled the near-vertical landscape. We drove quite a ways south of town, past Salvador Dali’s fifth season home and then we beached it into the open Pacific. With beer and cannabis in bods, we surfed our bods and attracted dead shellfish carapaces. Little bivalve shells with angular consistency and an occasional cockscomb.
Return to Acapulco found us accommodations at a real live resort hotel, and also found us on a leisurely stroll down Acapookies strip. Hot night clubs and night beaches. And we met George. George introduced us to the family of Aliens he’d brought with him. They were no fun he said. George also said life was no fun (as a male) but we had fun with George and he took us to the Casablanca which overlooks that glimmering spectacle which is Acapulco and its bay, hounding us with haunting lights. The hotel was enormous and graciously serpentine with shadows and pools and stairways lurking amongst dozens of nooks and hideaways.
Day 3
The next morning found four feet flying as we water-skied with some French peoples. More pool sunning and barhopping and sightseeing and weed looking and cliff peering (but no diving) and we spent the PM zing in the apartment of Hans Carlson, the Geologist from Sweden. Later, we passed by an exotic nightclub into which patrons gained admittance by arriving in only their underwear. Teddy City!
Day 4
We left the next morning, driving down an ancient paved road. Our southerly direction was met by increasingly tropical vegetation and decreasingly visible civilization. Our search for coveted hidden lagoons was met with disjunction but our paths led us to the Viva hotel [at Puerta Escondida] and it’s many friends – George and Marie, the elegant couple with the snappy fishy manners [they bought us a red snapper dinner steamed in banana leaves] – and what’s his name who showed us the sketches and shared his mota [I have no idea what i meant by that – another drug reference perhaps?] and ate mucho fasto and disappeared into the night.
Day 5
And the next morning after an intense night of spray and sound and pressure on the beach, we befriended Kasam and his prejudices, wonders, and travel home. And i met synchronistic Judy, with her blue eyes flashing and her pinnacles wild, bopped me with a new Tantric Tarot [the Dakini tarot deck – she also told me about a Mayan pyramid (the temple of the magician?) in Palenque that had many pyramids inside one another and one could descend between them and also find lots of psilicybin]. And the reading was nice [Well, actually, she told me that i had a negative imprint on my root chakra and i think i still do, but I’m considering surgery] save minor illnesses by friends [the red snapper dinner from the night before gave Dave a fierce case of Montezuma’s revenge]. Afternoon at poolside. Sun died, we cried. We found ourselves afloat on an island with a moat, and yet no tide. [we spent the night sleeping on a grass-covered "island" in the resort’s yet unfinished golf course]
Day 6
Further sunshine warmed us on down to the virgin shores of Puerta Angel where we almost got some crabs. We made buds with a Oaxacan loco weeded out from several natives [can you spot the drug reference again?]. He dissimulated our equilibria and took us for a dip. The view of his little beach home from the middle of the bay, resembled a proto/supra disneyesque scattering of fanciful villas. Architecture pumped supreme and elegant genetic isolation manifested itself in natural astonishing formations. Little paths and terraces ran in and around every house and the walls reverberated the cries of avian jungle jukeboxes. [Dave and i bought some amazing light-green pot from a local, got stoned, and swam into the middle of Puerto Angel’s little harbor with rock cliff walls, fishing boats, and multifamily dwellings dotting the shore. Even through the mists of short & long term memory loss, i distinctly remember being quite impressed and felt that perfect moment that Spaulding Gray so anxiously sought in Swimming to Cambodia]
We sped into the jungle late that afternoon and were greeted by misty dusky jungle mountaintops as we headed for the city of Oaxaca. Primitive roads agitated our nerves but the scenery mellowed them out again. Paved road timed its arrival for nightfall and technology bit some dust enroute [our air filter crapped out on us].
Day 7
We camped in Virginia’s Oaxaca [?] and dawn found us mechanics. Noon found us at Monte Alban [Zapotec temples/pyramids], however, and the site was impressive. We faked the purchase of some genuine artifacts, or was it visa versa? I took lots of photographic impressions as well as many of the usual neural-sensory ones. Much wandering amidst the ruins found us in general satiation and cosmic unity at days end.
platform at Monte Alban, Oaxaca
Footnote
I left lots of detail out of this story, obviously, but there are a few other things worth mentioning. In Oaxaca, i encountered two foods for the first time: tortilla soup and tortas. The tortilla soup was served at the Monte Alban guest house restaurant and was tomato-based with lots of tortilla chips in it. I have since replicated this recipe many times, often sautéing some garlic in the bottom of the pan before I add the tomato soup. Tortas were the last thing i discovered before I left Oaxaca. Available from street vendors all over town, they were crispy, fragrant bread shells with black beans smeared on the bread and spicy meats and vegetables stuffed inside. I ate two or three and got heartburn they were so delicious.
Along the food line, at some point Dave an I stopped at a little local grocery store and bought snacks. There we saw and bought a loaf of Bimbo bread. The packaging was the same as Wonder bread – white background with colored circles – but was it for bimbos? We also saw ELF lube and I still kick myself for not bringing back a can – you never know when your elf is gonna get stuck!
Our return trip through Mexico City was pretty exciting. While we passed south through MC in the middle of the night, we passed north through it during afternoon rush hour traffic. We were pulled over by a mayors police who spoke no English and threatened to take us to jail "carcion" (sic), if we didn’t pay a fine for an unspecified infraction. While I’ve heard of such urban legend fines/arrests, this was for real and he wouldn’t leave until we gave him the last 100 dollars we had, whereupon the bastard shook our hands, smiled, and drove off. I think it was during my trip to the Yucatan several years later that I realized how much our red and orange license plate stuck out, making it easy to be spotted as an "out of towner." On that latter trip, I met a bunch of hippies riding around in a van with Oregon license plates. It so happened that Oregon and Mexico license colors were the same – green characters on a white background – and on top of that, VWs are manufactured in Mexico. These hippies, ripe for police hassling, had gone unmolested for two months of touring southern Mexico owing to their license camouflage.
The fine pissed us off because we barely had gas money to get back to Soccoro, but we did, in a 40 hour, non-stop race back to the dorms. We had a brief encounter at the border where the Mexican customs official wanted to know if we had any drugs, We semi-honestly offered up the caffeine pills we had been scarfing but hid from him the tiny amount of Oaxacan we had left over from Puerta Angel. We made it back to school without further incident.