Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

Cambodian Picnics, Green Vermont, and Being Stuck in an Earthquake Zone

Yes it’s time for another fine issue of Perceptive Travel, where we circle from Cambodia to China to Vermont, then go around the world again with a rundown of graphic travel novels from Marie Javins.

Michael Buckley goes picnicking at the ruins of Angkor Wat, Carolyn B. Heller finds herself in an earthquake zone in China on the week the earth shook, and upstate New Yorker heads to Vermont to see if all those green living claims are for real.

As always, we’ve got a giveaway going on and anyone who is a Perceptive Travel newsletter subscriber has a shot at it. This month we’re giving away a nice carry-on convertible 40-liter backpack from Lowe Alpine. See the Perceptive Travel home page for details and a link to it and sign up for the newsletter at the top right of the page to get in on the action from now on.

Mexican Buses Rock!

I’ve talked before about how great the Mexican bus system is, but this is one method of transportation that keeps getting better. I am writing this blog post on the bus itself, on my 4-hour ride from Zacatecas to Leon. Yes on the bus—they have Internet access now on the executive class ones from ETN and it’s faster than the connection I have in my apartment here. How cool is that?

What’s even crazier is that I picked a seat in the middle of the bus because many of the other ones were showing as occupied. The other riders must be getting on in Leon though because I am the only person on here! I have a private bus and I’m not even in a band.

Unlike most of Central America, you don’t have to endure “chicken buses” here. No dilapidated old school buses with stuck windows. Even second class here is pretty nice and first class is air-conditioned, express, and usually with a movie and snack. Above that though is executive class, which is awesome. Only 3 seats across and 24 on the entire bus, so it’s like business class on an airplane except it leaves on time. Two bathrooms, foot rests, curtains, a movie, seats that recline way back, a snack, a soda/water, and good shocks.

For all this comfort you used to pay about $5 to $8 per hour of travel depending on the route and whether there are toll roads. Now that the U.S. dollar fetches 13 pesos, this 4-hour trip was under $15. Sweet.

You can buy tickets in advance at any station where that particular bus company has an office, but most of the time you don’t even need to if there are frequent departures. You just show up, buy a ticket, and you’re off. At worst you’ll have to wait an hour for the next bus. You can go pretty much anywhere in Mexico on a bus, including to El Norte. In the station I was just in, one company had signs that said “Texas,” “Alabama,” and “Tennessee.” Yeee-ha.

Here’s the best resource page I’ve found for who covers what route in Mexico.

Your News Intake While Traveling

One of the wonderful things about traveling is you can remove yourself from the incessant silly faux-news chatter going on in your home country. OK, Michael Jackson died and it might have been drug-related. Do we really need to know any more than that? Wake me up when it’s settled.

It does pay to keep an eye on the headlines though. Pick an English language paper up once in a while (if you can’t read the local one) or pull up a news page when you’re logging on somewhere to check e-mail. The BBC site is always a good stop because it’s easy to navigate by continent or country and they tend to focus on what matters instead of what will titillate the masses.

Sometimes there are things going on that can cause big trouble if ignored. Trying to bus into a town when there’s a civil war erupting is never a good idea.

For instance, if you were headed to mainland Honduras this week, you may want to reroute that trip. A major coup just took place. The president sacked the head of the military. Then the military forcibly put the elected president on a plane and sent him to Costa Rica. They then proceeded, with the help of the Supreme Court, to install the speaker of the legislature as head of the government.

There are two sides to this mess of course and both have some validity, but it’s upheaval no matter what. Keep an eye on the website of Honduras This Week. If you’re flying in and out of Roatan you’re probably fine. It hasn’t really gotten all that ugly elsewhere either, but you may want to wait until things work themselves out. After all, many of those Hondurans are descended from pirates. They don’t take well to rules and authority figures.

That’s one problem with The World’s Cheapest Destinations: they tend to be a bit less predictable than the developed countries with a longer history of stable government. As we’ve seen in Thailand lately and plenty of other cheap countries in the past, local political disruption can quickly turn into major travel disruption, even if safety isn’t an issue. Being willfully ignorant about celebrity gossip and political punditry is good; being willfully ignorant about what’s going on at your next destination is not so good.

One last note on this Honduras coup though: when’s the last time you heard Hugo Chavez and the U.S. Secretary of State agree on something?

Mexican Fiestas Have it All

Where I am currently spending a month, in Guanajuato City, offices, the university, and banks are shut down for four days so that everyone can have ample time to party. This is a common occurrance in Mexico and the reason doesn’t really matter, but in this case it’s to celebrate the start of rainy season. Last night we went into the thick of things on what is the main night: when the floodgates are opened up at a small resevoir atop a hill and fireworks go off to mark the event.

I love a good Mexican fiesta because they always throw in everything they can think of to keep people entertained. You can get wasted on cheap beer and micheladas by the liter, you can bring the family and enjoy the rides, you can watch some kind of entertainment, play games of chance, and eat eat eat.

But wait, there’s more! Darling daughter got her face painted for 10 pesos (about 75 cents these days) while I went and bought another beer—which of course you can drink in the streets. She also got to ride some rides with one of her new friends from where we’re taking Spanish lessons. When you get on a carnival ride in Mexico, you need to commit. Each one is kind of expensive in local terms (usually 10 or 15 pesos), but the guy running the contraption makes sure you get your money’s worth. It’s not unusual to be on the ride for at least five minutes solid. Meanwhile he may go off and talk to his friends, go buy a snack, or take a smoke break. If you’re about to barf by minute number three, too bad! Eventually he’ll come back and turn it off so you can stagger out and off.

When your stomach recovers, you never have to walk more than a few steps for something to eat. The full range of Mexican street food is laid out in all its glory, from pozole to gorditas to flautas. That $ sign in this picture at the bottom means pesos, not dollars. Trust me, it’s cheap.

When we made our way through the throngs to one of the two entertainment areas, there was some kind of women’s boxing tournament going on. I headed to the nearby open-air bar, where a wrestler with his mask on asked me, “What time is it?” in the world’s thickest accent. I told him in Spanish than I didn’t know and showed him my bare wrist. “Salud,” and I was off.

When we returned later though, it was time for lucha libre—Mexican wrestling. The local guys (including the one who had been at the bar earlier) were not too good at selling the moves and making it look real. The masks make it a little more fun though.

Always check the calendar somewhere to see what’s going on where you’re heading in Latin America. Nearly any month of the year there will be some kind of festival going on. It’s a great time to comer, bebir y disfrutar.

My Guanajuato Home Base

Since I’m halfway through my month of kicking back in Guanajuato, Mexico with my family, I suppose it’s time to talk about where I’ve been logging in from.

Since I have worked myself into a job that’s portable, I am spending a tad more than six weeks in Mexico and a tad less than two weeks in Belize. I’m currently in one of my favorite cities on the planet: Guanajuato. I’ll run some pics and details from this fine city later should you happen to travel through at some point, but we rented an apartment here for a month so I am feeling like a semi-resident. The butcher a block from our house debones the chicken and flattens the breasts with a mallet. We can walk one direction to the flour tortilla shop, or the other direction to the corn tortilla shop (10 pesos a kilo—about 75 cents.) The open-air market is about a 10-minute walk away, the supermarket about 15 minutes. Since everything is curvy and hilly here, we’re all getting plenty of exercise.

We’re taking Spanish classes at Escuala Mexicana, which is literally around the corner from where we sleep. It’ll be a long while before I’m fluent, but I am sounding less ignorant each week anyway.

The pictures here are, in order, the view from our roof deck, the entrance to our pad, and the street we’re off of which leads to the school. It’s pedestrian-only, as most of them are once you start going up the hills. Much of the traffic is diverted to tunnels that run under the city—a great concept. I’m going to be sad to leave.