After almost three months and more than 2,000 miles on the road, a plane will fly me home on May 30th, ending my journey through Mexico. I will fly, in a matter of hours, over the cities, mountains, deserts and seas that took so long to traverse overland. It feels a little like cheating after such a slow progress. But it is my ride home, and I intend to take it.
What to say about such a varied and surprising collection of places? Mexico has more often than not been much different than expected, and almost always the opposite of rumor. Never robbed, beaten, kidnapped or even really harassed, (except for that little bribe I was encouraged to pay to the Ensenada police) my journey has been almost without any “real” problems.
Of course, I have dealt with all the things that any traveler must, – mis-communications, sickness, loneliness, fear, joy and confussion – but my fortunes were not much more than what, in a vague way, I had expected. Of course, there was also the unexpected: The rat that fell on my bed – or jumped – as I slept in a cabana on the Michoacan coast was not part of the plan, and neither was the killer flew I had while stranded on a beach in Baja.
After moving south for so long, through much of Mexico, what has changed most is the loss of a kind of fear that was all to present when I first crossed into Mexico at Tijuana. It was a partially informed, gossip-filled, fear of the unknown: bandits on the roads; taxi kidnappings; drug killings on isolated beaches. It was like I had a little nervous man in my head warning me not to go down any unknown path. Don`t go down that lonley road. Don`t turn into that town not on the map, off the radar screen.
Now, that is mostly gone. Coming upon places that are new, having to navigate worlds unknown to me, has become more of the norm in my day to day. I think this comfort is good and bad. On the one hand, it lets me enter into places I might not have entered before, and with confidence. On the other hand, I find it has perhaps lessened by capacity for awe and wonder, my ability to revel in the exotic of the new.
Yet in order to gain the confidence I needed, I had to accustom myself, acculturate myself, to the foreign. This was a process of normalizing or numbing the strangeness of a place, which in turn made Mexico less foreign.
To navigate through foreign countries, worlds, ideas and cultures you need a bit of wonder, which in a way drives you forward, and a sense of comfort that gives you the confidence to go into the unknown without fear being your only rudder.
