by Steve Hely
So people default, sensibly enough, to a generic, noncommittal sunniness. What else is there to do? Somebody tells you an idea that sounds insane, that you suspect will lead them, at best, to skulking, humiliated retreat and, at worst, to major public embarrassment and all you can do is say, “Sounds great!”
You could say this is a kind of moral cowardice. Maybe it is. But I think it’s a kind of modesty, an acceptance that this is all beyond logic, and that all you can do is root for good things and make honest efforts and be around fun people. And maybe it’s a kind of respect for anybody who’s bold enough to spend their life running after some illusory vision.
Even if their vision sounds super stupid.
So Why Was I Restless?
I don’t know, but I was.
I had a great life in Los Angeles, writing for TV shows like The Office and American Dad. When you write for a TV show, you get something called hiatus. Hiatus is a word television people—not just writers but other kinds of con artists like actors and (most amazing con artists of all) producers—got together and made up because “two to three months of vacation” would induce outrage in the general public. The trick worked, which shows you the power in naming things, and so people who work on TV shows get huge amounts of time off.
When I was twenty-seven, I used my hiatus to travel all the way around the world by ship and train. A TV writer friend of mine—you may have heard of him, his name, Vali Chandrasekaran, lives in infamy—and I cooked up the idea of having a race around the world. We’d leave Los Angeles. I’d go west, Vali would go east, and the first person to make it all the way around the globe would win a bottle of expensive Scotch. The only rule was no airplanes.
What happened next is recorded in our book, The Ridiculous Race. It was a great adventure for me: I saw whales breaching off the volcanic Aleutian Islands from the deck of a cargo ship, road-tripped across China with my beautiful translator and two prostitute-loving drivers, stayed with a nomad family in Mongolia, took the Trans-Siberian Railway through days’ worth of forests to Moscow, partied with Swedish celebrities, visited very distant relatives in the mountains of Italy, ate in Paris, sailed from Southampton to New York on the Queen Mary, and rode with a truck driver across the United States and back to LA the long way.
That should’ve cured me, but it didn’t. I was still itchy. Every chance I got I went someplace interesting. Cuba, Vietnam, India, Dubai, Texas. None of it fixed whatever wanderlust or curiosity monster was eating me. All that happened was I got more ideas of places to go. My work was really interesting and fun, but still I’d catch myself staring out the window, wondering what it was like in the Mauritius islands or Mali or Micronesia.
Maybe I have some kind of genetic wandering disease. There might be a strain of that in Americans.
Now I couldn’t stop thinking about going south to the bottom of the map.
Maybe lots of people get ideas like this, daydream about them. Some obvious excuse comes up, or the dream passes, and they never do it. Probably their lives are no less happy for it.
For me, there was no excuse. By luck, good or bad, or choice, wise or stupid, or some swirly combination of it all, I was at that moment thirty-four and completely free of commitment. What came instead, in fact, was an odd, accidental gap in work, maybe three months before my next TV writing job started.
* * *
This was a lucky break like nobody ever gets. I had to go someplace.
The Wonder Trail
My idea was to get to the bottom of the continent. Puerto Williams, in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of Chile, claims to be the southernmost city in the world, and most reasonable people agree. That was my target, but there was a whole lot of world to see on the way.
Now, if I were a real hero, I would never once leave the ground. I would travel by bus and horse and foot and train and boat. But: In this part of the world, there are very few trains, at least trains that carry humans instead of loads of coal and nitrate.
Bus, horse, foot, boat, I’d try all the rest, but in three months. I’d never make it. Plus, there were the wonders. I wanted to see:
the Mayan villages of southern Mexico
the ruins of the ancient Mayan cities
at least one good waterfall
the volcanoes of Central America
the best coffee in the world
the Panama Canal
some traditional and strange Easter festival
the Amazon jungle
Machu Picchu
the Galápagos
the Andes
Lake Titicaca
the Atacama Desert of Chile
* * *
And at last to the wind-worn plains and jagged mountains and dramatic coast of Patagonia. It seemed like there was a trail of wonders that led down to the bottom of the globe.
* * *
Now, look, three months isn’t long. I couldn’t see it all. There’s a fork in the road there, south of Panama. I chose west.
That meant I’d miss Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana.
I know. I’m sorry. Suriname is worth seeing for its toads alone. I skipped Belize, too. Belize, once known as British Honduras, is a whole interesting weirdness of its own. Another time, Belize.
So: west. I made one plan for where to be at Easter, and then I went to work on how to cross the Darién Gap, the most lawless and dangerous stretch of this trail.
Beyond that: Well, you can’t plan too much for this kind of thing. Sooner or later you just go.
Possible Alternate Title for This Book:
A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonder of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling
Didn’t think up that title myself, actually. That’s the title of Ibn Battuta’s book. He dictated it in the year 1355. Ibn Battuta was probably the most widely traveled man in the world before Magellan. When he was twenty-one, he left his home in Morocco on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He didn’t make it back home again for twenty-four years.
In that time, he visited China and Vietnam and Malaysia, he crossed the Sahara a few times and maybe went to Russia. Along the way he got married three times. Battuta was a proper Muslim. In his book he complains about topless women everywhere. On the paradise island of the Maldives, he basically got kidnapped by King Omar, who liked him so much he not only made him be chief judge, he also insisted Battuta marry his prettiest sister. Battuta, meanwhile, sat around stewing that no one listened to his complaints about the topless women.
Look, I’m not saying I expected that would happen to me on this trip. I’m saying I was open to it.
It’s a tiny bit presumptuous to call your book a gift. I’m far from comparing myself to Ibn Battuta, who was obviously one of the coolest men who ever lived (if a bit uptight about tits). But it wasn’t lost on me that I’m lucky. I don’t mean to brag or tempt fate. What I mean is, I was in the position to take this trip because I was born lucky. I was born where I was and when I was, I got a chance to get the best education in the world, to follow my passions and go down the roads I thought looked most delightful and interesting. I was a young (well, young-ish, even one more year and it might get creepy, I had to go now) healthy white man in America who made more money than he needed just by doing what he loved and would’ve done anyway.
That’s not because there’s all that much that’s special and amazing about me. It’s because I’m lucky. The world is wild and arbitrary, so much of it is based on luck. If there’s a moral to a book about the southern half of the Western Hemisphere, it might be “life isn’t fair.” I don’t know what you should do about the inequality of luck that exists in the world. That’s probably the greatest moral issue of our time.
The one thing I do know is that if you’re lucky, you should try to share it. That’s the point of this book. To make out of my journey some informative entert
ainment, and I hope you enjoy it.
So:
I got a backpack, threw in a few shirts, socks, underpants, a first-aid kit, malaria pills, cigarettes (I’ve found you can always start a conversation if you have cigarettes), and a couple of good books, and I went south.
When you go south from the United States, the first place you come to is Mexico.
Mexico
Spanish Level: De Gravedad
Before my trip, I’d signed up for an eight-week Spanish course at the Beverly Hills Lingual Institute, but truth be told, between the awful fluorescent lights and the persistent sweatiness of my teacher, it reminded me of everything bad about school and I skipped half the classes.
With discipline, I made up for this by practicing with an iPhone app called Duolingo. Duolingo is like a little video game that teaches you a language. You are encouraged to learn by a cartoon bird. The bird is happy if you do well. If you skip too many days in a row, the bird grows sad. The bird will cry, and grow sadder and sadder. Soon the bird was so sad I couldn’t bear to look at it and I stopped practicing.
No worries. Immersion is the best way to learn anyway. On the streets of San Cristóbal and Medellín, Spanish will flow into my ears and soon out my mouth. That’s what I decided, possessing as I did a rich, imaginative mind gifted and honed to make excuses for laziness.
With confidence I went to LAX, said, “Uno person por Mexico DF,” and boarded my flight.
There was a boy in the window seat in the row across from me. He was with his father, who sat, tired but calm, as the boy leaned forward as hard as he could against his seat belt to look out the window. The boy had Down syndrome, but you could tell he was a wonderful boy and his father loved him very much. His father was one of the most patient and gentle fathers I’ve ever seen, having so much calm it couldn’t help but calm the boy himself when he would get excited.
As I watched this, I was moved in the deepest places of my heart. I tried to listen to the soft words the father exchanged with the boy, the patient answers to his simple questions.
Then I fell into a panic.
I can’t understand most of this. Oh God. My Spanish comprehension, let alone my speaking, is way below the level of an eight-year-old with Down syndrome.
Maybe it was lucky I was skipping half of Mexico.
The Bad North of Mexico
Some of the best writing in the world, the best fiction and the bravest journalism, is about the border country of northern Mexico. Cormac McCarthy, Roberto Bolaño, Charles Bowden, Don Winslow, Ambrose Bierce, these are some of the ones I learned about it from: hard guys looking hard at a hard place.
It’s very strange country for sure. Tough country, dry and hot and dusty. On top of that, there’s a border there, a line violently imposed and held that didn’t used to be there.
From the Atlantic Ocean to El Paso, Texas, the border follows the Rio Grande, but that doesn’t make it natural. Comanches, Apaches, Jumanos, and people before them walked and camped and crossed all over this land for 11,000 years before there was a border. After the Republic of Texas had joined the United States, and the US Army had raised the American flag over Mexico City, the border was created. By no accident, most of the good stuff was in the US and the shitty part was in Mexico.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of Mexico that’s wonderful and interesting. My goal was to get to that part of Mexico as quickly as possible. I’d already seen as much of the bad stuff as I cared to.
In a previous burst of restlessness, years back, I took a bus from Los Angeles to Mexico City. My idea was that maybe I’d see “the real Mexico.” I think I did, and I didn’t like it. I changed buses in Ciudad Juárez. This was in 2008, when the mayor and the chief of police of Juárez had fled the city. What I saw mostly was the bus station, which armed soldiers with automatic weapons discouraged me from leaving. This was when Juárez was still the world’s murder capital, with drug war killings piled onto what some suspected was a diabolical serial killer, or killers, who was murdering some unknown number of young women from the city’s maquiladoras—“assembly factories,” or “sweatshops.” What I saw once I got on the bus were streets that looked half-abandoned as the sun rose on the dismal paint of lifeless-looking stores, but it was very early in the morning, so who knows? Since then, I’m told that Juárez, murders much reduced, is having a mini renaissance. I hope so. When the mini renaissance has taken full hold, maybe I’ll go back.
What I saw for two days on the bus were Mexican men in white straw cowboy hats sleeping through Spanish-dubbed American movies like Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker.
What I saw outside the bus was dry, rough desert. Off to the side of the road, across the dust and brown earth, we passed a prison. Wow, I thought to myself, inside of that prison is one of the top places on Earth I never want to be. Some months later I read an article about a riot in the prison where twenty people died.
Our bus stopped in a town called Villa Ahumada. The bus driver, without a word, stopped the bus and vanished into the town. It was three hours until he came back, and we took off without explanation. Not more than two weeks later in a Mexican newspaper I read about how a drug gang had ridden into Villa Ahumada and shot it up. The entire police department fled.
After two days the bus arrived in Mexico City, where I went to see a bullfight. The bullfight was no joke. The Plaza México holds 45,000 people. I’d say it was 40 percent full when the events got started, just as the sun was starting to go down. It’s wrong to call a bullfight a fight. It’s not a fight, it’s a sacrifice. A dangerous sacrifice maybe, but it’s always gonna end with a human killing a bull for the benefit of a crowd.
This bullfight wasn’t even a good one by bullfight standards. The third and final bull ended his days up against a clumsy matador who was failing to do his job, which is, literally, to kill. The crowd was not helping. They were booing. People threw programs and seat cushions into the ring. Ugly, the whole scene. No one could’ve enjoyed it. The bull was killed, finally, after enough time for the crowd to make clear what they were feeling. Disgust.
That wasn’t one of my best trips.
If you go looking for horrible things to see in Mexico, you can find them. I’m not a journalist. I decline to take that on as my job. I’m an entertainment writer, weekend library historian, and amateur explorer.
My job’s to discover wonderful things, I decided. So I began my Great Southern Expedition by flying right to Mexico City, where the craziest action and wildest ideas have been since at least the days of the Aztecs.
If You Have One Hour in Mexico City:
Do this: Start at the Plaza de la Constitución.
(I will assume you can teleport yourself there. If your hour starts at, say, the airport, then forget it, you’re done.)
Here is the Plaza de la Constitución, a huge paved square with an almost-as-huge Mexican flag flying over it. In 1847, the American flag flew over this square, when the US Army invaded and drove their way into Mexico City. Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant were both there. But after slicing off what they wanted of the northern part of Mexico, the US Army went back home and a few years later, American veterans of Mexico spent their excess energy killing each other in the Civil War.
Now have a look at that enormous church on the north side. That is Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral, largest in the Western Hemisphere. Inside it’s crazy. There’s a whole lot to see: You can stop at the shrine of the Niño Cautivo if you need to pray for someone who’s kidnapped. But with just an hour, stay outside. Have a look at the whole size of the thing.
Now notice how the cathedral is leaning. This is because it’s sinking, because the ground you’re standing on was once in the middle of an enormous lake.
Hard to believe, but this is true. Where we are was on an island in that lake. On the island, there was a city, and in the year 1519, it may have been the biggest city in the world.
Their temple—the temple of the Mexicans, the Aztecs—stood right in the middle of the island. It was enormous. A Spanish soldier named Bernal Díaz del Castillo stood on top of the temple in its last days. Just to walk up the stairs was exhausting. Díaz says that at the top there was a massive statue of a dragon “and other hideous figures.” He says there was a stone altar, and the day he went up, it was wet with blood from humans who’d been sacrificed that very day. But to him, that wasn’t even the scary part. Writing fifty years later, he still remembered how stunned he was when he looked out.
You’d see for miles. You’d see the city. You’d see the marketplace and “the swarm of people, buying and selling.” Díaz says you could hear the noise of the marketplace from three miles away. Men with him said it reminded them of Constantinople or Rome. You’d see streets of houses with flat roofs, and smaller temples everywhere, on out to the three causeways that led out of the island, across the lake, but the lake would be full of boats, and on the shores of the lake would be many more towns and towers and temples, on and on.
