Mexico

This little pooch almost got to continue the trip with me, but as I got closer he snarled and growled and immediately canceled his invite. Tecate, MX


This is my perfectly comfortable motel in Caborca.


In about 600 miles I encountered 1 military check point, at which the soldiers were very polite, did not or chose not to speak any english, and inspected my van, top to bottom every nook and cranny, for about 45 mintues. The only thing that seemed to cause any interest was all of the sunflower seed shells everywhere. In addition I drove through 3 Immigration Check Points, only stopped at 1, and 1 Agriculture checkpoint where I had to give up my 4 remaining apples, which were going bad anyway.


The border fence is intense, and climbs every hill. How can it possibly be guarded for this distance?


I entered Mexico at Tijuana. It is not all as bad as I had heard, and it is a lot bigger, and there is a lot of character there, but there is a lot of seedy stuff as well.

Once out of the city of Tijuana the country is just beautiful. I drove for hundred and hundreds and hundreds of miles through the Sonora Desert and came across lovely little towns: Tecate, Mexicale, San Luis, San Feilpe, Tobasco (off my route, but I had to go there), Caborca (where I found very inexpensive lodging for a night), Altar, Santa Anna, Magdalena and I will eventually turn north towards Nogales. What great food and what great people and what a wonderful language. It only took 2 days for me to start to remember how to speak enough Spanish to get myself into conversations I could not finish. Several hundred miles south of the border English disappears.