Apparently we were wrong. We are connected to a wireless network here. “Here” is a little town called Casas Grandes. Actually, I just checked, the computer says we are signed on, but I can’t access the web.
Where we are staying is an adobe building. Adobe is like a mud brick with straw, stone and other stuff inside, which they plaster on the outside. It is really beautiful. Our hotel is a bright peach colour.
Crossing the border this morning didn’t merit the fuss everyone makes of it. There was a tall metal fence with border guards just waving people through. There was no line. On one side of the fence everything was in English, on the other everything was in Spanish. It was weird sensation. On the Spanish side of the border there was a town, on the other side was just dry scrubland. Instead of a border guard checking you into the country at once, like we are used to, each part of customs is in a separate building. First we went to a tourist permit building where the guard looked at passports. Then we went to a different building where we got a car permit. We had to get the permits and daddy’s ID photocopied, so we went to a different building yet again. Then back to the car permit place to get everything signed. At least, that is what I think was happening, everything was spoken in quick Spanish. It was a typical
The border town was run down and poor. You could see it in the peeling paint and the boarded up houses. I felt so sorry for the people living there. Not only for the people living there, but also for the people just passing through—The Illegals. The people who get smuggled out of
This town is named after the ruins near by. There is a town bout 10 minutes north called New Casas Grandes. It is bigger than the original town. So it was there that we stopped to pay our border fees. Normally you pay it at the border, but our border guard told us to pay it at a bank after the border. When we tried to tell the bank that is what we wanted to do, they said we were missing some paper work. We didn’t know what to do. Driving back to the border was out of the question. Luckily the bankers were able to figure something out, we’re not sure what, and we were able to pay at the bank. But we had to do it in cash, not with a credit card. It was something else entirely trying to get money from the ATM machine. Lets just say that first we couldn’t even get to it, the direct door on the inside was locked, so we had to go outside and then back inside. Crazy.
Getting a Mexican cell phone took two hours. We bought one fairly quickly, but then the clerks had to phone the company to ask about charging and phone cards. They sent us to an actual phone store (the first was just a pharmacy) who then sent us somewhere else to get a phone card. All of these funny quirks are what makes
