San Felipe Hotels
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Day One Sixty-Three
Entry 67 of 119 | show all | print this entry |
Driving into Mexico took about sixty seconds. No inspection, no questions, no nothing! Finding a place to park Zoobley in the shade in downtown Mexicali while I went to the migracion office to get my tourist card (formas migratorias turistas or "FMT") took a while longer. Many of the Mexicali streets are one way and the red, octagonal "ALTO" signs seem to be more of a suggestion to Mexican drivers than a hard and fast rule. I eventually found a suitable spot and we were on our way with the requisite paperwork. This process involved visiting the migracion office and completing a short form, walking across the street to the bank (HSBC) to pay the N$210 fee(N$ denotes pesos which at the time are worth about nine cents U.S. which works out to about $19USD for the tourist card), and then walking back across the street to get the form stamped and get my passport back from the migracion officer. This took only a few minutes since I had read my guidebook beforehand but one could easily spend hours figuring it out since there are no signs or migracion officials posted at the crossing to tell hapless tourists how to proceed. One would also think that the Mexican immigration officials posted at the U.S. border would speak at least some English as I have observed the U.S. officials speaking fluent Spanish, but one would be wrong. Fortunately, pointing and nodding seem to be universal forms of communication.
Back on our way, Kudzu and I immediately got lost in the maze of unmarked streets and bemusedly enjoyed a one hour tour of Mexicali. I was a little shocked. Being at the U.S. border, I assumed Mexicali would be fairly modern but it can only be described as having an adventure-movie third-world flavor. I wouldn't have expected a city of 700,000 people only inches from the richest country in the world to have dirt streets infested with hundreds of diseased stray dogs. There were a few nicer neighborhoods and even a Mexican version of Costco but in general, Mexicali exactly fits its border town stereotype. One interesting surprise was the number of Chinese restaurants and markets. According to our guidebook, many early Chinese immigrants to the U.S. fled to Mexico to escape the persecution they found in California and Arizona. By 1920, 93% of Mexicali's population was Chinese. Today, the population is still approximately 6% Chinese.
We finally found our way to Mexico Highway 5 and the two hundred kilometers to San Felipe were slowly clicking away. The eighty kilometer per hour (50MPH) speed limit made for slow going but the pot holes made it even worse. The first thing we noticed was that there was nothing in any direction. Nothing that is but overturned, burned-out cars (about one per kilometer), old tires, washing machine drums, beer bottles, and thousands of other miniscule, unidentifiable bits of garbage. There were no houses, roads, businesses, farms, or any other signs of human habitation beyond the highway itself and tons of human refuse.
Just beyond the intersection to Mexico Highway 3 leading northwest to Ensenada, we came to our first military inspection post. To satisfy the American government's futile, supply-oriented war on drugs, the Mexican military has established inspection posts throughout the country to supposedly catch the bad guys. I had heard that these were no big deal, especially in the tourist dependent Baja region, but didn't really know what to expect. Nevertheless, I had my passport and tourist card out and was prepared to drag everything from the truck and be strip searched if necessary. The young soldier, all of eighteen or twenty, wasn't the least bit interested in my tourist card and after a few harmless questions became more interested in the buxom senorita in the northbound lane and waived me on to San Felipe. This is where I realized my ability to master the Spanish language may be something of a challenge. Knowing that I was headed south, I had purchased a few books early in March and had been studying. As the military guard asked questions, I was frantically searching my Spanish-English dictionary frustrated that I couldn't find ANY of the words he was using before I realized that he was speaking English. It occurred to me that because of my hearing impairment and occasional slow-wittedness, I frequently can't understand my fellow Southerners and have to ask them to repeat themselves. I pulled away from the inspection post with the uneasy feeling that this young soldier was going to be telling everyone at his barracks that night about the American that couldn't even understand plain English. In my defense however, I have always been more conversant in Hillbilly that in the Queen's English. This Spanish thing may be more of a challenge than I had anticipated.
Kudzu and I made it to our selected campsite for the night, the serene and peaceful sounding Playa del Sol, only to find that the guidebook failed to mention that the handful of beach front palapas were surrounded by a trailer park. Despite the trailer park, the beach was nice and the water was warm so we decided to spend the $12.00 and give it a try. The guidebook did mention but I failed to grasp that the San Felipe area is a dream spot for people with motos (what Easterners call ATVs and Southern Californians call OHVs) and dune buggies. Fortunately, the Department of the Interior and the California Division of State Parks have pretty much run these obnoxious, polluting rednecks out of Southern California so they have all loaded their infernal combustion nightmares onto trailers and headed to Mexico where there are apparently no restrictions except the availability of gasoline. The otherwise serene beauty of the Sea of Cortez is punctuated every fifteen minutes by of convoy of these motorons (moto morons). Tomorrow we'll try to search out a more peaceful spot.
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