Hitchhiking in Mexico for the Holidays

“You can’t hitchhike there. It is dangerous. Someone will kill you...or worse.”

I have been given this advice by at least one person just about every time I’ve ever set off to hitchhike. Anywhere. Of course Mexico is particularly bad because of the narco violence. Right? 

Who’s to say? My friend Benjamin has seen just about every major road in Mexico, and he never took a bus. Kristen and I took a bus from Oaxaca to the border with Guatemala because it was 12 hours and we were technically illegal in the country. If we got stopped at a police checkpoint, we could have been detained, fined, or even jailed. 

By divine intervention or whatever explanation you prefer, there were checkpoints, but all the other buses got stopped at them. Not ours. 

We arrived in Tapachula: the southernmost city in Mexico, and possibly the most unpretentious place I’ve seen in Mexico. It’s vibrant and thriving - the citizens seem happy to be alive, the streets are packed. And by god, they’re friendly! We’ve been plenty of places where the locals take a look at your skin color and decide you’re either to be exploited or disdained. But there wasn’t a hint of that kind of cynicism or opportunism in the people we were lucky enough to meet. The plan was to go straight to the border to resolve our passport situation, but we kept getting wrapped up in conversations, so it was almost sunset by the time we reached the border. 

The problem we were facing was that we failed to get stamps in our passports upon entering the country at Tijuana back in November. We tried to get the stamps in Oaxaca, but they said you can only get them at the border...or else do a huge amount of paperwork and face fines up to $300. This is annoying for a 180 day visa that is otherwise free. That’s why we decided to risk getting arrested in order to go to the border and pretend like we were entering from Guatemala for the first time, thus gain legal status, avoid the paperwork and fines and be able to move freely without fear of arrest. 

And it almost worked. The border guard had his stamp ready, but as he looked more and more closely, he couldn’t find an exit stamp from Guatemala. He told us to go back to Guatemala to get one. 

This posed a problem, for we didn’t have entry stamps to Guatemala either. 

We shrugged and walked across the river that separates the two countries (totally unimpeded...it’s wonderful and hilarious how easy it is to walk back and forth across the border without anyone even thinking of stopping you). Went to the Guatemala office and asked for entry stamps. There was a tense moment when I think the guy was looking for the Mexico exit stamps we didn’t have, but our passports are full of confusing stamps from many different continents and eventually he gave up and just stamped them. 

Then he wanted money. Kristen knew that the stamp is free, but they always ask for money. This degree of corruption is taken for granted. We took our passports back and Kristen scolded him for lying. He didn’t press the matter.

Then we went to the exit stamp window, got those and went back to Mexico. Luckily, we had a different border guard this time, so he didn’t have any context in which to find our actions suspicious. I handed him my passport open to the Guatemala exit stamp page and he immediately gave us the entry form to fill out and stamped us into legality.

Already this blog post has gone on too long and we haven’t even gotten to the second day yet. This adventure lasted 2 weeks. 

Now I’ll tell it how it felt: strange, magical, nonlinear. 

We went to Palenque for the solstice, the end of the world. We didn’t have much time to get there, so we rode a series of colectivos (cheap, local buses that only go as far as the next major town). By traveling this way instead of taking long distance buses directly to our destination, it cost about half as much, we got to ride crammed up against commuting locals, and rode probably the most visually stunning road I’ve ever seen in my life. 

Palenque is the home of some of the more famous Mayan ruins, but what it’s really known for is mushrooms. The alternative vibe there is overwhelming, the spiritual soup everyone is swimming in, the feeling that all are one, there’s nowhere you can be which isn’t where you’re meant to be, the reign of serendipity, the sense of destiny everywhere you turn. 

You wander in the jungle and stumble upon un-excavated piles of ancient houses, howler monkeys howling in the background (everyone says they sound like dinosaurs, which is a totally ridiculous thing to say because who knows what a dinosaur actually sounded like? Yet everyone says that...then someone reminds you that they used recordings of howler monkeys to make the dinosaur sounds for Jurassic Park. Go figure), and of course, mushrooms.

There was a Rainbow Gathering happening there: my first. Everyone had descended on Palenque to ring in the new world, to take mushrooms, to live in a money-free gift economy. It was chaos in the way that only thousands and thousands of people wearing gorgeous, outrageous gypsy clothes, dreadlocks, tattoos, crystals and much much more intricate accessories, carrying bongos and didjeridoos, hugging for periods of time ranging from a brief 30 seconds to upwards of 15 minutes, gazing longingly and seriously in each others eyes, sharing bits of prophetic knowledge (like the 3 days of darkness that were supposed to descend on solstice), with random outbreaks of ecstatic dance. Imagine a city populated almost entirely by the most alternative people you can dream of. It was a world far far divorced from Mexico, yet it was also totally, completely awesome. 

What can I say about the experience? Kristen and I got separated, and I spent too much time trying to find her (mostly because we locked up our valuables, including almost all of my money, in a safety box, which only she had access to) and stressing about not having money. But I was taken care of. People bought me meals, shared what they had with me. I had a watermelon, peanuts, cheese, and bread to share in return (NOTE: this was before I made it to the Gathering, where money basically doesn’t exist). The solstice itself was a freak torrential downpour, completely out of character for the season. There were rumors of a hurricane coming. Many Rainbows got scared and left early. For others, it was a baptism, a purification, a symbol from God that the pollution of this last age of man is ending, and a new time of benevolence, faith, and healing is on its way. 

I found Kristen. We were feeling frustrated, unproductive, like tourists walking through a market with nothing to buy or sell, only to see the sights. We were both behind planes of glass, trying to meditate through into the real world, into life. 

There was only one wish I specifically had going to the Gathering, which was I wanted to try DMT: the spirit molecule, a chemical that is apparently released in your brain at the time of death. It’s the active ingredient in ayahuasca. The day after Christmas I met a girl who lived in the town of Mazunte (which was where we went after the gathering because there’s a 49 day silent meditation there that I’m considering enrolling in) and she asked me if I wanted to try DMT, so we went to the top of a hill and sat on blankets where it was administered. I said a prayer before I inhaled asking God to show me reality as I needed to see it in order to know what to do with myself in the new year. 

All around me, people we smoking and flying off into different worlds. I’ve never seen high people so far gone from where they were moments earlier. I smoked. I waited. Nothing happened to me. 

The guy who administered the drug told me it doesn’t affect 3% of the population.

I walked around the gathering, feeling disappointed, then suddenly feeling like my prayer had been answered: I was seeing reality exactly as it is, with no psychedelic enhancement: the world I was already living in. 

Serendipity took over. Every conversation flowed perfectly as if each person filled in the next logical paragraph where the last one left off. If I wanted to see someone, I would run into them; if I didn’t, they were nowhere to be seen. 

The colors, the love, the songs sung in harmony: the more that I give, the more I’ve got to give; it’s the way that I live, it’s what I’m living for.

Kristen and I decided it was time to return to Oaxaca to work on our projects. She was antsy. She felt unproductive. I, too, felt like a tourist, but I was enjoying the serendipity. As we were leaving, we met the Brazilian holy man, who only spoke Portuguese. He gave us some cereal of granola in mango juice. Then hugged us and we all wailed out rising notes of song in unison, harmonizing our spirits to one another, declaring to the universe that we are all one.

Then the Tarot reader told us that choice is an illusion. We can stress about it all we want, but every decision we ultimately make was inevitable anyway and everything is God. Then the Polish cousins gave us avocado salad and reminded us that to stay or to go amounts to the same thing. And we went to the top of Coffee Mountain and meditated as the sun set. We decided to leave, and ran into the Brazilian holy man again, now on the other side of the Gathering. 

In town we ran into the one person we wanted to see but had no contact info for: a young painter who dreams of living in Paris. In the morning we explored the jungle and the following day started hitchhiking across Mexico. 

Every ride came instantly and was either the bed of a pickup truck, the cab of a mack truck, or the air conditioned inside of an a wealthy local’s brand new car. We flew across Mexico. Everyone was more than kind. Each night we ended up where we needed to be. When we took the wrong road, it turned out to be a more than spectacular view. 

On day 2, we were a little disappointed that by the time sunset came around we hadn’t made it very far. This was because we got a late start and took the wrong road. We were walking to the edge of town looking for one last ride that night, when a 23 year old kid drove up and offered us a ride to the last gas station. On the way, he told us more than any human being need know about DMT and in the end, he drove us instead to a college where he worked as a night watchman and we made dinner, talked about meditation and the soul, and that’s right, he let me try DMT a second time. 

This time it hit me. 

My takeaway was this: when in doubt, look to the Earth, to the soil. And also that I have no more interest in drinking or taking really any drugs. I felt so strongly the incredible sway of peace that comes from clarity, vitality, physical strength, engagement with the world as it is: presence. Those other substances, I felt only introduce clouds that need to be dissipated. 

In the morning, he woke us up at 5 and we were on the highway by 6: sunrise in the desert. Rides came without any effort and we made it the rest of the way to Mazunte (a little beach town near Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca), arriving at sunset on December 31st, 2012. 

We spent New Year’s celebrations in relaxation on the beach, meeting the right people all the time, mentally preparing to return to Oaxaca and to get back to work. 

When the time came to hitchhike home, the first car to stop had 3 chilangos (people from Mexico City), who picked us up and treated us to an amazing lunch, an amazing dinner, a cabin in the mountain town of San Jose del Pacifico, an amazing breakfast, and a ride back to our front door in Oaxaca. We got back last night. I’m here now, ready to finish my novella tentatively called A Fictitious Life. 

01-04-2013

Oaxaca, Oaxaca