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.)

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BACKGROUND

• Drive me crazy in New Mexico

• Cross the Yukon on an Alaska road trip

• Highway threatens remote Mexican tribe

• Off-roading in Argentina

• Three of France's best drives

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• Drive me crazy in New Mexico

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.

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