Published in the April issue of The
Sunday Times Travel Magazine
Have you heard the one about the immigration officer who’d never left his own
country? Sadly, it’s not a gag. I met this ill-travelled employee of
international relations while crossing the border from Mexico back into the
US.
Though Officer Ceejay of Laredo, Texas, lived less than four minutes from
Mexico, he’d never visited, and when I asked him if he’d ever been to
England he spluttered, ‘you won’t see me on a God-damn plane’.
Yet there was Mexico, a tobacco spit from his desk, just itching to be
explored. How did he not see the magic of this? (I didn’t have the heart to
tell him about the deliciously sour Margarita I’d just enjoyed or the taco
at Pepe’s on the plaza that was so good I didn’t care when it dripped salsa
and onions down my front.)
I’d been wanting to take my parents on holiday, and this represented the
ultimate bargain: two destinations for the price of one.
This had been the biggest draw of a southern Texas roadtrip – the region had
all the sass of Mexico but with better roads, and when we did fancy things a
little grittier, the real deal was only a walk away.
Literally. From my hotel in Laredo I’d simply followed a big blue arrow saying
‘Mexico’ as if it were directing me to the post office. Three hundred metres
across the bridge and there I was. In Mexico: where a burrito breakfast
costs 90p, Christmas lights line the streets even in June, and the
blue-and-yellow buses honk loud enough for the folks back in Texas to hear.
There are crossings like Laredo all the way down the Texan side of the Rio
Grande – at Progreso, McAllen, Brownsville – where bridges, crossable on
foot and by car, take you into Mexican ‘border towns’. Getting in is a cinch
(the Mexicans don’t even ask to see your passport) and going back is almost
as easy (even when you’re faced with Ceejay and his narrow outlook).
Escaping February in England, we were following the Rio Grande from the dusty
north to the swampy south, crossing into Mexico when we fancied it. At the
car rental office in San Antonio we’d fallen for a low, white Pontiac with
no boot space (suckers) but a top speed that laughed in the face of the
105kph speed limit.
We pulled into Laredo for the ‘Jamboozie’ party, the peak of the George
Washington Birthday Celebrations, a festival fabricated purely to improve
Texan/Mexican relations (there’s pretty much a party every month somewhere
along the Rio Grande Valley). It worked. From the balcony of my room at La
Posada hotel (you can ask for either a ‘Mexico view’ or a ‘USA view’) I
could see a line of cars coming across the border into Texas. By sundown,
things had hit fever pitch. In San Augustin Square, kids who couldn’t afford
to get in to Jamboozie were having their own parties in trucks, listening to
trumpeting cumbia on the radio and drinking Coronas. Within the party gates,
a gyrating Tejano pop group played so loud the warm Tarmac shuddered beneath
our feet.
BEACHES AND BLUES: TRUCKING SOUTH FROM LAREDO
With just seven days to cover 1,000km, the next afternoon we sped southwards
on Highway 83 past ranches with wistful names like Los Recuerdos
(‘Memories’) and truckers’ lay-bys catered only by an open-air urinal and
tortilla stand. Our roadtrip took us on a circuit of classic Texan song
lyrics: from ‘San Antonio’ (Patsy Cline, Emmylou Harris), due west to
‘Laredo’ (Johnny Cash), down south along ‘El Rio Grande’ (ZZ Top), through
‘Brownsville’ (Bob Dylan, Hank Williams) before reaching our most southerly
point, South Padre Island.
ERROR! The defenders of the Alamo in 1836 lost! The fort was overrun and the Texas revolutionaries died to the last man. It was a moral victory, though, because the defense delayed the advance of the Mexican army, allowing the rebels to consolidate their own forces, and it provided Texas with the lasting battle-cry, "Remember the Alamo!"
Anthony, California,