12 march 2004, 11:28pm, monterrey MX, hotel room. this trip has been amazing or as Rebecca would put it "so special", which is certainly the truth. Thursday 9pm - show up at San Luis bus station for 9:30 bus. say goodbye to johnbo & get on bus sit in parking lot til 11. drive to slaughter lane and pick up people from side of road. drive to san marcos, have rest stop for 20 minutes. (so far, in bus for almost 3 hours with a total of 30 miles travel distance). drive to san antonio and drop 2 guys off on the side of the highway. driver agrees to enable the personal lights over the seats but never does, so we talk and then try to sleep. Rebecca succeeds far better than me. we wake up at the border because we have to get travel viasas and go thru customs, which consists of pushing a button wired to a random number generator. it turns a light on-green means go, red means get your luggage searched. we pass, tho the two guys in front of us got the losing buzzer. drive 2 more hours, arrive in monterrey, at 6am, in a light but steady rain. the bus has dropped us off on the outskirts of town, but a van is there to take us to a slgithly less outskirty place, which itself is still far from downtown, aka 'el centro'. fate smiles on us as the only other american on the bus comes with us and a spanish-speaking family on the van and gives us the lowdown quickly on where we're being let out and advises us to not bother with San Luis on the way back since their bus departs from the same random location rather than the main station where zillions of buses per hour depart. we grab a very nice taxi driver and his standard-issue green&white sentra to the main bus station. he takes a blurry picture of us for us, and wishes us well. we're starving by this point so we walk around until we find a hole-in-the-wall to get coffee & tacos at. tacos are amazing, coffee is instant (& scary because they use the tapwater. but no ill effects ever surfaced. my iron constitution (ha) must have saved me). total breakfast cost, $3.40. and they even sent a taxi driver out for some fine LALA brand milk when i ordered los dos cafes. we were the only people in the place aside from the cooks the entire time. after an hour of lugging all our stuff around (doh, brought too many heavy books by half), i come up with the bright idea of shoving our heavy stuff in a locker, so we head back to the bus station until hotel checkin time approaches. minor hilarity ensues as my spanish gets a workout and finally we succeed. lesson learned: you can't always trust the dictionary - taquilla actually means ticket counter, not locker. which must have confused the guys at the ticket counter whom we asked where to find the ticket counter. we take the delightful metro to the heart of el centro and are shocked at the difference from the bus-station area. it's slum to riches, everything clean and beautiful. nice cars. police (non-threatening) strolling the plaza. the town as a whole is actually rather clean, it's just teeming with beggars & especially street vendors (everything from huge racks of dvd's to trays offering single cigarettes and pieces of gum) and bustling near the bus station, whereas it looks much like an american downtown in the actual downtown/cultural district [it's weird to call any district cultural in another culture, since the entire experience was essentially cultural, but i'm guessing you grok what i mean] we stroll, have second breakfast of the best chilaguiles ever, a warm watermelon smoothie (much tastier and milkier than it sounds) and a beer, and then check out this awesome plaza (which turns out to be called the Plaza Zaragosa on one side of the street and the Gran Plaza on the other side), until it's opening time for the highly recommended (to us, and by us) Museo MARCO, a modern art museum focusing solely on Mexican artists, at least while we were there. modern art, piled high and deep. actually hung tastefully, but still packed in a good bit more than the average art museum which meant we basically looked until our eyes hurt to get thru the end of it all. but none of it sucked (rebecca thought some of the sculpture was weak, and there were some paintings i wasn't fond of, but that was more personal taste than quality level, i think. frinstance, the sculptures were downright strange (eg: a billiard ball with tail feathers embedded in a wall 15 feet up), but they tickled my fancy anyhow.) 2 hours of satisfaction there. then discovery that mexican payphones, tho having holes of sufficient size to accept 10 peso coins, do not accept them successfully, but also then won't disgorge them or allow you to put other coins in, meaning that i effectively stopped up several phones with most of our change before managing to get a few calls off to hotels recommended in the guidebook (we used this one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1740590287 ). finally just took chris k's advice and walked south from the bus station into the fairly delapidated neighborhood and went door to door and found Hotel Mundo. used more spanish than i had tried to yet in negotiating the room, and paid up front for 2 days, at a total cost of $644 pesos. that's <$64 american, for the record. the room was...odd. about 2 hours of work would have made it nice (just touching up some paint and straigtening some fixtures), but it wasn't gross. all tile floor (for easier hosing-out, we suspected), 2 beds, a TV with cable (shock) and even AC (tho it didn't seem to work). there were even pictures over the beds. the same picture. over both beds. but it/they did match the curtains anyhow... onwards to a taste of the local flavor, a visit to the GIGANTE COLON (for some reason, all the products/brands in mexico seemed to be entirely capitalized. emphasis not added..), so named as it was a fairly large supermarket that happened to be on colo'n avenue. Rebecca was mystified for the better part of a day as to why it was named that but went along with the plan anyway, and we picked up a few things we needed, including some bleach to make completely sure that the shower was safe for our delicate feet, and finally a siesta. managed to drag ourselves back out of bed, shower and prepare for a night on the town. thanks to the morning MARCO visit we'd already found el rey de cabrito and so we took el tren back down there and gorged on a fabulous meal of kid, that is, baby goat, slowroasted for hours, and a plate of fabulous guacamole and some good (but not great) queso flameado. Rebecca had the shoulder and i tried the breast; they were both tasty and a huge mess. being thoroughly stuffed from dinner did not stop us from being snacky and so as we stumbled towards the barrio antiguo thru la zona rosa, we found a hugs-n-kisses store (OXXO, one approximately every 2 blocks all over the city, and stretching up to nuevo laredo at least. 7-11ish in quality) and bought some sort-of-cookies and beverages and carried on. walked on thru the barrio antiguo and stopped at the guidebook-recommended cafe infinito for some coffee (we couldn't actually find enough room to stuff any dessert in) and beer. enjoyed the vibe (very relaxed, dark, arty, and downtempo), helped rebecca flirt with a waiter (got his phone number, but then chickened out on actually spending all day with him since i would have had to translate constantly), and finally cabbed home--got ripped off by taking a cab from in front of the expensive hotel; he charged us almost 3x as much as one we took from a block over the next night. wrote some postcards, and passed out for a long time. 13 March, midnight or so, monterrey, MX, hotel room made an emergency GIGANTE COLON stop for limes so we'd be ready for whatever beers we encountered, then outwards and onwards. breakfast at the same hole in the wall as yesterday--they much appreciated the tip. i guess it was excessive but even 33% on a 6 buck meal just doesn't break the bank. we had more chicken, and something only called deshebrada, which i had no idea about. [come back to find out it means "shredded" but whatever it was they shredded weren't chicken or beef... mmm, mystery meaty!] and most importantly, BEER FOR BREAKFAST! ahh, life is grand when you achieve so many goals before 11am. then we wandered the bus-station-and-hotel district checking out the street vendors, seeking a never-found pastry shop, but we did find a BIMBO (bread brand) soccer shirt, which is so small it's obviously for someone else. but it's nifty. called Nico (waiter from the cafe on friday) to apologize for not wanting to hang out & he was quite sad but the phone asked for more money before we were done commiserating and we were out of change so that was that. quite a shame that we didn't get the intimate local exposure, but i'll aim higher on that scale next time. called the US for Mer's address; my first international call ever, and i think that was probably the most unreasonably priced thing we did, as it cost a buck a minute. got the info, got offline, and then headed for the post office. this time we walked up the gran plaza thru the esplanade of heroes (a paved city block with some statues in, facing a very impressive 18th/19th-century building and having some decent picture opportunities. sent a lot of postcards, including an impulse one to grandma from Rebecca & myself which i'm sure she'll be quite pleased by; i just saw the cathedral and thought of her. saw a wedding with a crazy amount of dressed up folk, then took in the local architecture on the way back to the train. stopped to take pictures and climbed up on a statue which drew an immediate police response (he whistled at me from across the street, which i didn't quite pick up on, and then came running over, billy club in hand). Rebecca, facing away from him with the camera, didn't even notice. fortunately i did and before he could get as close as her i jumped down and he just glared at us until we had gotten about 50 yards away. at that point i told Rebecca and she could hardly believe me. but hey, i count that as a positive brush with the law, altho i can't understand why it's such a big deal where i climb as long as i'm not defacing anything. shrug. then up to the tecate/XX/carta blanca/bohemia brewery for some free beers (i don't understand why homeless people don't sit in that fabulous biergarten all day long and drink beer. it's good beer, so fresh, and the garden is shockingly beautiful. sculptures, lush vegetation, nice tables, all shaded, free clean bathrooms (which were *quite* hard to come by outside of the museum otherwise! paid $.20 to use some fairly abused but not actively dirty bathrooms in the bus station that had no toilet seats. Rebecca called it "hovering", i called it "hold it until i find somewhere i actually don't mind sitting down." which turned out to be after we made it back to austin")), and a security guard. i actually had to leave my backpack out for the tour part and was a bit nervous about just leaving it sitting on a table in the open, but it was unmolested when i returned, thanks to the guard. the brewery tour in english (we lucked out--usually you have to pre- schedule but not on saturdays it seems. we did have to wait about an hour in the garden, but gee, that didn't suck, since there was FREE BEER) was informative (we learned how beer is made), funny (the woman had an obviously well-worn routine, but somehow kept it fresh and was a fun person), and amazing--we learned that that brewery produces millions of liters of beer a week, and is one of 6 that handles that "family" of beers. also, XX is over a century old and many other facts that a few more cups of beer wiped out. but sincerely enjoyable. finally back to el centro for lunch, since we were starvin by then. walked and walked, sauntering thru the palatial monterrey metro museum in search of a cuarto de ban~o and left after steeping in culture for a few minutes, and were about to settle for the place we had chilequiles the first day when we found a little hole in the wall that happened to be las monjitas, a place the guidebook had talked about and that Rebecca had wanted to visit for dinner! it's run by nuns. well, we decided, not necessarily *real* nuns but definitely women dressed as nuns. the guidebook was a bit noncommittal so we drew our own conclusion. at any rate, the food wasn't too expensive, and was reasonably tasty, er, nummy, er, nunny. after which we waited in the sprinkly weather again for the phantom trolley which was supposed to come but never seemed to, and finally headed al hotel for a late siesta at 5p. unfortunately for us, our key had stopped working. fearing the worst, went to the desk where they fixed it up for us (whew) and then we crashed. almost ended up sleeping the whole night thru at siesta since we'd been walking all over, but rebecca dragged us awake and we got ready for another night on the town. considered going back to infinito but then decided that we should expand our horizons and visited a place called la Tumba instead. it was absolutely divine! we were the only people there, but there was a beautiful guy playing beautiful folk music and singing; he gave us an hourlong concert and we just soaked it up. i translated the snippits i got for rebecca but mostly we just basked...his voice was so smooth and friendly and his playing was quite good and we just drank, talked, listened, and smiled for the entire hour. then someone who wasn't as pleasant came on and we (still the only people in the bar) gave the previous singer a note expressing our appreciation in whatever kind of spanish i could muster at that point, and wandered out to see the rest of the barrio antiguo. we ended up on this really nifty riverwalk which i still can't find on the map, but smelled so much nicer than the san antonio version; it was shorter and had architecture of at least equal interest, and some really nice cafes alongside.. it ended up at some huge library where we turned around and wandered up to a cafe, took some comfy river-facing seats, and had amaretto, a bloody mary, and two extremely fine desserts (not that we had hunger. but we sure made room!) Dessert cheese rules! sweet and so rich. and some icecreamtype stuff with a bit of piecrust in. probably one of our most expensive meals there, but so worth it for the flavor and the atmosphere. got rebecca a souvenir tecate ashtray on the way out, and then had a fine flavorful $2 taxi ride home (7 minutes of constant motion. a 7 minute taxi ride home after we got off the bus in austin cost $20. zoiks!) before meeting the pillow with extreme prejudice yet again. 14 March 2004, back in austin. whew, back from mexico and safe in bed by 5am. today wasn't super eventful, but here's the highlights: woke up, decided to try out random street taco vendors, much to our tasty success. paid too much for 4 barbacoa tacos (oops, i just found out what that actually is. it's tasty so i'm not gonna complain, but Rebecca was a bit squicked.) too much in this context is still less than 50 cents, but considering we next paid 50 cents for 8 taco-lets (such cute 3" tortillas) al vapor from our favorite vendor (i swear i ordered 6, but i won't complain, especially since they were heartily tasty). we decided that was enough food until we could find some pastry, and after a quick water pickup at the EL COLON aimed for rental car land, so that we could visit the two natural wonders we wanted to see, which were in completely different directions. there was very reasonably priced public transport to both, but we didn't think we'd make it to both working on someone else's schedule, so i decided to brave the streets if it could be done for a reasonable sum. hertz? unreasonable sum. we ended up with Derby rent-a-heap, and got a neon for a little under 90 bucks. not unreasonable, but not cheap. it was cheap until you factored in insurance and an automatic transmission--if i were possessing mexican insurance and able to drive standard, i could have gotten a weecar (ford ka or similar sized vehicle) for like $20. still not as good a deal as one gets in the US but, uh, it makes sense considering how freaking crazy people drive in the city. so we pick up our heap, knowing we only have a little over 6 hours before we have to return it (the place closes, and then our bus leaves about an hour later). we figure out how to get where we're going immediately (the hotel, to pick up our stuff), and tho it is only 3 turns away as the map looks, it takes us at least 15 to get there, thanks to the very confusing system of one way streets, often divided into two separate streets by a median (still both one way!), so we end up doing a lot of 4-right-turns-just-to-change-lanes type maneuvers. finally we're a block from the hotel and on the wrong side of the median on the one way street. but there's a stoplight, so i wait for the green and then turn left, not realizing that the other side of the median also has a green. Rebecca squeaks and i suddenly notice that we're about to get t-boned, and slam on the brakes. somehow the tires (which earlier had skidded to a leisurely halt inches from the bumper of a pickup truck from 5 mph) held and we didn't die, but i blasted thru the intersection...and saw the cop waving his arms at me furiously from the sidewalk. he stepped out to the car and so i stopped to, i assumed, get summarily executed. however, after he said something to the effect of "You can't do that!" i stumbled over the equivalent of "uh, i didn't know, it won't happen again" and he, obviously unamused with my inability to string a sentence together (he must have assumed, due to my gringo-ness, but it was actually due to still being in andrenaline-mode from almost being killed), annoyedly waves us onwards without another word. so my second (and, fortunately, last) encounter with the monterrey police ends without incident. we park illegally and get our stuff after the obligatory get-the-key-reset incident. and we're off! except the street signs are for crap, when they even exist. so navigating is about equal parts luck (in ending up on the right roads accidentally) and squinting at the tiny/poorly placed/deliberately hidden road markers. amazingly, we arrive in the town where the guidebook intimates that we should turn off the highway without any serious incidents, except that i keep expecting to get a ticket for using my turn signal, since aside from me, i only ever saw one other person use theirs out of many hundreds of cars we drove near. and i think his may have been an accident. however once we exited the freeway, (this guidebook merely said "take a north turn at the town of cercada. which unfortunately was several miles long.) we drove for awhile but it didn't seem to be obvious that we were even on the right path. so we stop at the world's friendliest tiny-town grocery, and ask halting directions, as i stumble over my tongue in my worst communication effort yet (even the cop went over better than my first two tries to say "i'd like to get to the waterfall") but the very nice ladies asked me to slow down and i eventually got it out, and it turned out that the street to the waterfall was about 20 feet past where i'd parked. that street was picturesque if poor; Rebecca commented and i agree that it looked like what we expected most of mexico to look like...a winding narrow street (not as poorly paved as it might have been) bordered by ramshackle houses, local artisans' statues (most for sale, all looked incredibly heavy), tiny churches, and zillions of kids playing in/on the street (which, as you may recall, was pretty narrow to start with). 6 miles up we reached la cola de caballo, or "the horse's tail", or rather, we reached its parking lot. at least when you get jacked for parking fees at a resort in mexico, it's still only $2. a 1km walk later, we were confronted by the largest waterfall i can ever recall seeing, and beautiful, too! this is a national park, and it was at least as nice as most of the ones in the states, albeit fairly tiny since it consisted pretty much of the waterfall and the walkway up to it, tho there were beaucoup (er, muchas!) picnic tables. and places selling film (or batteries for the digital warrior) & beer (three great tastes...). but then a nice walkway, and a bridge that stood about 15 feet from the waterfall over its fally-into-pool (that's a technical term, get over it). standing on the bridge means that you're getting wet. the mist washes over you, but the WIND from the rushing water tousles your hair and plays with your shirttails. it's an intense experience to stand that close to all that rushing, plummeting liquid; while i've always wanted to play in a waterfall, i don't think i would have survived long directly in the stream of this one. we contemplated the waterfull, nature, god, the nature of god's waterfall, and took a bunch of pictures. then we quietly (still somewhat awestruck) descended and became tourists for about 10 minutes as we browsed the souvenir shops. got stuff for johnbo and steph and francois in addition to the things we already had for meredith and rebecca's various folk. we put some thought into trying to make it out to the carlsbad-alike caverns, but the drive would have been long and the time would have been short; we decided to luxuriate in and around cercada for awhile and have a less tense last afternoon in mexico. we found a hole-in-the-wall for lunch, with the owner taking our order speaking spanish so fast and basically ignoring all consonants that it was a bit tough to understand him. apparently he felt the same about us as we never did get that queso flameado, but the goat soup and the guacamole were absolutely divine. we left, stuffed as usual, and walked up and down the drag of cercada. it turned out to be longer than we had time to explore fully, but we did see some neat stuff, get a great view of a surprise lake that was hiding just off the road and north of town from a pedestrian overpass, and find a perfect gift for Rebecca's sister/my cousin Mary. then we drove back into town with no trauma, navigated successfully even in the absence of road signs, and made it to the rental agency with time to spare. hung out in the gran plaza for a little while doing madlibs and people-watching before we headed to the bus station and rode home. this bus (thank you sendero travels/turimex!) was like being in a first class airplane seat, so much legroom and our own personal LCD to watch really bad movies on. we ignored the movies, and the screaming babies as much as possible, and settled in for the long drive. this time we waited about an hour at the border, tho the xray didn't flag our stuff as suspicious, the bus ahead of us took a really long and thorough searching for some reason. however at the checkpoint just north of laredo we (Rebecca and i) did get fairly thoroughly grilled by the border patrol because he didn't seem to grok that we really just went to Monterrey to be tourists and not to bring back a big load of contraband. he searched rebecca's suitcase and then slowly left. and we slept til 4:20 when the bus dropped us off in austin, not quite 10 hours since departure (which was on time, amazingly). it was fun. i'll go back, as soon as possible =)