Austin, 2:30

It’s an atypical departure for Vanilla.: he’s out the door and on the road with plenty of room for fuck-ups and delays. It’s 3.5 hours to Laredo from Austin and Vanilla has allowed more than five to arrive on time. He kisses R. goodbye on muggy overcast day and hits the road. Ah, but there’s some much time to kill. Vanilla takes the scenic road, avoiding the Highway of Death, I-35 (there are good reasons for the moniker: Charles Whitman, Branch Dividians, a certain Grassy Knoll, the Murrah Building.) There’s been a lot of death going around the past few days—the Virginia Tech massacre is weighing on everyone—so why not take the more laid-back, bucolic 290?

Right outside of Austin, the phone rings. It’s a job interview and Vanilla gets excited. In fact, he loses all sense of direction. He is supposed to be headed in a southwesterly direction, but somehow—and he has really no idea how—he ends up making a 30 mile loop around southwest Austin and ending up right back where he was one hour ago.

The job interview goes well, so Vanilla is happy. But then, the dread sinks in. He’s still 230 miles from Laredo and the bus is leaving in four hours. With some very ambiguous algebra swimming in his brain, he figures he can make it if he doesn’t stop once and drives 70 the whole way.

But the gas. He’s out. Ok, one stop for gas and a King Size Almond Joy—his only food all day.

He’s on the road, hauling some serious ass—between 90 and 95 he averages. You expect some sort of fanfare arriving at the border, but all of the sudden it’s there. And it’s time to go. Laredo looks like small towns in American probably looked 50 years ago. There’s life there.

He finds a couple that run a taxi service. He tells them that, even though they charge $30, he’ll give them $40 if they can get them there on time. There’s a little hang up at Customs where no one seems to notice the Texas taxi van. Finally, the woman taxi driver and Vanilla find one of those arbitrary stoplights that you push: if you get green, you go (you go, gringo!) and if you push red, you get a thorough check-over.

“Por dios,” the woman says, “verde.”

There’s no time to do the right thing—get a tourist card, exchange money, etc.—so they’re off. (Doing the right thing can mean a huge delay and indifference from the Mexicans—as noted in last summer’s car trip around the Central Highlands).

Funny, Vanilla Thunder was worried about gunfire—it is notorious in Nuevo Laredo, where drug mafias effectively control the city. But, to his surprise, it’s one of the calmer, most well-kept border towns he’s seen. And the tax driver is very sympathetic. She screeches through stoplights—right in front of cops. It must be true—the police have no control.

And sure enough, they arrive with five minutes to spare. And Vanilla takes off running for the ETN bus. No sign of the ETN. Vanilla asks around.

“Oh, that’s at the new bus station,” one guy finally says. Girls working at the counters of other bus stations are no help. They are giving him bedroom eyes, as girls in border towns often do. Their overt flirtatiously is disconcerting. It simply doesn’t occur in the U.S. of A. Vanilla doesn’t let it go to his head. He knows they’re just looking at him as ticket out of Nuevo Laredo.

An employee tries to call the other bus station and tell the bus to wait five minutes while the gringo gets a taxi. Vanilla grabs a taxi, and he’s there in five minutes, but it’s too late.

There’s another bus at 9:45 and it’s now 7:50.

Vanilla enjoys a fabulous meal at a swanky Basque (!) restaurant in a filthy, violent town. He finds himself doing the absolute one thing that his friend AP from the Knight Center for Journalism told him not to do (AP is from Ciudad Juarez): he’s withdrawing money from an ATM after dark on the outskirts of town with no one else around. A perfect target.

But the meal is worth it. Carne asada, enchiladas, guacamole, 2 Negra Modelos. After only eating an Almond Joy all day long, Vanilla is content.

Now it’s time to get the bus.

It’s confortable enough, but the noise! Vanilla loves Mexico. Really, really loves Mexico for so many reasons, some of the them he can’t really articulate. But one thing that bothers him is the noise. There’s always so much damn noise in this country.

In this case, we’ve got some classic Ranchera music—which is actually not bad—competing with the strangest movie ever shown on a Mexico bus: The Syrian Bride. Vanilla pays half-attention to the movie, which seems to be about a Syrian woman getting married to an Israeli. The climax—which never really happens because it’s too long and boring and there’s this really annoying French intermediatry getting in the way of the dramatic action—concerns the impossibility of the bride ever making it to Israel because she has a Syrian passport.

Vanilla knows it will be tough to sleep with all this raquet, so he takes a Xanax and an Ambien. He moves to the back of the bus to get away from the ranchera, and sleeps ok.

Now it’s morning in Queretaro, and he’s had bad coffee and brushed his teeth with dirty bus water.

Time to write the paper he will present tomorrow!

April 20

Mexico City How can something that appears so chaotic allow people to live their daily lives. As we come in, a try to not look at the horizon. The smog makes my eyes water just looking at it. At the bus station, I am patted down by seemingly random people for weapons—twice!

Leaving the bus station was pass the airport, which is tearing down entire neighborhoods to expand. In one of those neighborhoods, I see something that looks like a 1930s vaudeville show and a public swimming pool combined. It’s right next to the freeway, and two people—a 30-something father and an 8-year-old—are trying to cross. They have nothing on but swimming trunks. I wonder if they will make it. Across the freeway, a llama, a camel, and a zebra (or a horse painted as a zebra) are chilling out in a flat-bad pickup truck. There are humvees and cops with automatic weapons. There is a man selling broken pieces of talavera tile on a median. And there is traffic, dirt, and smog.