Pistacho-ing Around
There’s a guy on the road to Tequila that sells the best pistachios I have ever tasted. He sells them from a cart alongside the road near a train crossing. His pistachios are low in moisture and well salted far better than what can be found in stores. Mary and I thought about those pistachios, and said “Road trip!”
We piled into the car, fired up the CD player with Jimmy Buffet’s “Changes In Latitude, Changes In Attitude”, and cruised on toward Tequila.
When we reached the pistachio vendor, Mary got out to bargain with the guy, but that has become little more than a formality because he and she know each other from previous purchases, and the price has stabilized to 90 pesos a kilogram. We try to establish personal relationships with vendors by always buying from the same person. If a vendor knows that you are a repeat customer, they will go out of their way to keep you happy. Conversely, we immediately drop anyone who cheats or shortchanges us like a certain vendor in Tequila who substituted an inferior grade of Tequila because we had said we were returning to the US and he didn’t think we would return. We dropped him like a hot rock.
There is a very picturesque man near the pistachio vendor’s stand. He stands in the middle of the road, right on top of the railroad tracks. He wears baggy old clothes and a cowboy hat. Mary thinks he may be an unemployed ex railroad employee - out of work because all the passenger trains in Mexico have shut down. He holds a tin coffee can in the crook of one arm, and waves traffic through with sweeping gestures using his other arm. The coffee can has a plastic cover with a slit cut in it. The man never holds it out, but if you want, you can pause for a second in your journey, roll down your car window, and offer him some coins. He will then hold out the can, and you can drop whatever you like into it. He thanks you, and you can resume your journey with a warm and fuzzy feeling, knowing you have helped a fellow human being who does not ask for your help, but graciously accepts it. It may be that he spends every peso at some local cantina, but one thing Mary and I know; old age in Mexico is not for sissies. I guess, when you come right down to it, Mary and I just like his style.
After our pistachio purchase (try to say that three times really fast), we headed southwest toward the town of Ameca just to see what was there. What there was, was sugar cane fields of it. Someone was burning it. Whole fields were on fire. They do this to get the leaves off the cane and to clear out the snakes and what not, so they can safely harvest the plants. We saw trucks carrying the cane to a huge processing plant. The trucks had high walls, but the ingenious Mexicans had extended the walls even higher with poles, so that each truck could carry even more cane (Mexicans love sugar). The overloaded trucks probably had something to do with the condition of the road it was potholed to hell and back. You had to zigzag to avoid them.
We reached Ameca, drove around until we got lost (which took less than five minutes), and finally fumbled our way back out of town. I didn’t feel like retracing our route back through pothole city, so I took another road that seemed to be heading toward Guadalajara. Mary tried to dissuade me, but I just cranked up the CD player a little louder. It was a great day to be on the road.
We reached a small town called, Altavista de Ramos (high view of Ramos) and guess what - the road ended there. On the way back to Ameca, Mary explained to me that Mexico does not have a road system like in the US where there are few dead ends. Instead of a net topology, Mexico’s road system is often more like a tree. They extend a road as far into an area as possible, but when the countryside gets too rough, they stop. That results in a lot of dead ends.
On the way back to Guadalajara, we were passed on a blind curve by a semi truck, but that was only a warm up. The jackass was in such a hurry that he then tried to pass another truck a propane truck. We could see that the idiot wouldn’t make it in time oncoming traffic would crash into him first. El jackass realized it too, so what he did, was to lurch toward the bomb on wheels (the propane truck). I guess the plan was that the propane truck would apply his brakes to let the idiot get back in his lane.
The propane truck failed to do this (it might have been machismo, confusion, or stupidity), so what the jackass did, was to cut the propane truck off. He just flat out cut back into the right lane. This forced the propane truck off the road where it swerved wildly on the almost nonexistent shoulder as the driver fought to regain control. Thankfully he did so, or he would certainly be dead and you might very well not be reading this. Meanwhile, the jackass went on his merry way and continued to pass more vehicles. With any luck, he won’t be with us for much longer.