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Tuesday
With help from a waiter at Réné's, we managed to find a young man with
a battered Nissan to drive us to Santa Rosalia. He badly wanted to make
conversation with us, but the rapidity of his delivery and the strangeness of
his dialect (most final consonants were omitted – the straightforward
mas became a cryptic mah) made this pretty nearly impossible.
Even then, he managed to extract from us valuable information like whether Revathi
and I had met in the States or in India.
About halfway through the journey, he pulled over next to a construction crew
and handed over the keys to his father, explaining to me that without a license,
he couldnt drive farther. Father was a big man with a jowl continuous with
the neck that emerged from a dirty and distended T-shirt,
who doggedly kept his foot on the gas and didnt exchange a word with
us. Which is not to say he was silent. Very much the construction executive with
a cellular, his radio would go off from time to time and he'd hold extended
conferences on FM, negotiating curves and contracts at
the same time, devoting his left hand to one activity and his attention to
the other.
Santa Rosalia had developed as a copper mining town, built by a French
company in the 1880s. It had one major avenue with shops and businesses (among them
a French bakery); on either side of it rose plateaux that form the residential
quarters – the Mesa Francia and Mesa Mexicana –
the classical colonial pattern. Other than a pre-fab, modular church designed by Gustave
Eiffel that had been shipped from Brussels and reassembled in Santa Rosalia,
the town didnt have much to offer by way of attractions.
I had hoped to have my maiden attempt at snorkelling and/or scuba-diving
in Mulégé, forty miles south of Santa Rosalia; if we could buy the ferry
tickets right away in Santa Rosalia and head for Mulégé, we might make
it back in time for the 11pm boat. Sadly, it turned out that on ferry days,
the ticket office doesnt open till five in the evening – we had to stick
around to be sure of the tickets. Anyway, we were probably not in
shape for any significant physical activity after the ardors of canyoneering.
Alice and Philip blimped back into our radar at the ferry ticket office
that evening; the clerk handed us a sheet of paper with squares on it,
each representing a turista class coupé. We saw their names in one
of the squares, and filled in our own in an empty one. Each coupé had
four bunks, but fortunately there were few passengers and the operators
had the sense not to coop strangers together; this was lucky –
given the size of the cabin, "four people would be," as Alice later put it, "intense".
We didnt actually meet them till that night at the ferry port, which was
surprising, given the size of Santa Rosalia and that one didnt have much
to do there except walk up and down the one avenue. The first thing we
did was to bitch about the Cabman of San Ignacio. So how much did he charge
you finally? One twenty dollars. The bastard. Did he refund the
American the extra money he'd collected claiming there'd be only four passengers?
Ya, he did; wasnt very happy about it, though.
They'd been bored to death sitting in Santa Rosalia waiting for the Tuesday
ferry. Phil's left foot, which he'd twisted in San Ignacio, didnt seem to have
benefitted much from the rest.
Soon it was time to board the boat and we were walked through metal detectors
and sniffer dogs deep into the bowels of the ship, to our cramped cabins.
Not a porthole provided the slightest illusion of space; in fact, we were
probably under water. It wasnt nice to imagine our fate in the event of
a leak or a wreck. The voyage, however, was very calm; we could hardly feel
the ship moving, and slept like correctly fed babies.
Wednesday
We arrived at Guaymas punctually next morning at eight, and lost Alice and
Philip immediately after getting off the dilapidated taxi
to the bus-terminal. In the bus, we were reunited
with the two women and their children who'd stood ahead of us in the
queue at the ticket counter in Santa Rosalia. This bus was coming from
Tijuana; an amazingly schoolboyish Hollander was travelling from Hermosillo
to Mexico City, a 24-hour journey; both his English and Spanish, though
grammatical, sounded like
vaguely familiar languages, incomprehensible without paying close attention
like in a poorly lip-synched movie in an unfamiliar dialect.
We'd be getting off at Los Mochis; the women
were going further south close to Guadalajara; we might be traveling with
Alice and Philip on the train through the Copper Canyon. It seemed
like a bunch of tangled braids, meeting, crossing over, going
their own ways.
Few interesting things happened at Los Mochis. Revathi bought a T-shirt
with a sketch of Don Quixote, the ass and Sancho Panza, with "Los Mochis,
Sinaloa" inscribed under it. Using one of those amazing pre-paid Ladatel
cards (one that we had bought in Mexico City last year worked fine in
Guerrero Negro this time) that you swipe into the phone rather than
having to type a long secret code while looking over your shoulder all
the time, we called up India from a payphone to tell my parents we were
doing fine. As we were looking around for a payphone in a quiet place,
looking slightly lost,
a gentleman who could have passed off as a middle class Indian,
working nine-to-five in a State Bank of India branch, walked up to us
and asked if we needed any help. Maybe all he wanted was to practise his English.
In a restaurant, the waitress, on learning we were Indians, guessed that we spoke
Hindu. You mean Hindi, we corrected her, gently and partly.
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