That Train Ride to Mexico City

Saddleback Mountain, Monterrey, Mexico

I have been to Latin America numerous times, adding up to nearly eight years. All but one of those stints were related to service assignments with the Mennonite Church, or leading educational trips for Hesston College and Eastern Mennonite University. 

The only time I went for the pure experience of it, was when Dwight Roth, Bob Hostetter and I spent two weeks one summer traveling from Hesston, Kansas to Mexico City over land. Dwight and Bob were colleagues of mine at Hesston College. Dwight's specialty was sociology, Bob's was theater and peace studies, mine was Spanish language culture. Neither of them had been to Mexico and I had been there at least seven times; three times studying in a master's program in Puebla, and four times leading cross-cultural groups to the area. I was the expert--or so they thought!

We began our 1,500 mile journey by car from Hesston. Our first stop was in Alice, Texas, where a sister and family lived. We were packed in my VW super beetle with no air conditioning. Our trip to the border with Mexico couldn't have been more boring. It was flat, hot and dry. We tried to entertain each other by singing along with the songs on the radio, but our taste in music was different. Dwight and I were more eclectic than Bob, loving anything from country and rock to classical, but Bob was strictly classical. When we entered Texas, about the only stations we could find on the radio played country music. Ernest Tubb came on singing "Waltz Across Texas." That became Dwight's and my theme song. It irked Bob beyond measure. You know how long Texas is, so we gave it a lot of air time.

After spending the night at my sister Jeanette's house, we headed to the border with Mexico at Laredo. The cheapest way, but not the fastest, was to go by train, the Aztec Eagle. It departs at 6:00 pm from Nuevo Laredo (when you cross the border into Mexico, the name changes from Laredo to Nuevo Laredo) and travels overnight to Mexico City, arriving at 8:00 pm the next day--a 26 hour trip. The train makes intermediate stops all along the way, dropping off and picking up mail and passengers. Because of the night-time trip, we suspected that some elicit things were also picked up and dropped off. 

The Aztec Eagle train engine

Our first class train fare included sleepers for the night. For some reason, our tickets only included two bunkers, so I spent the night wandering around second class and trying to find a place to sleep. So much for my expertise. The train also included a dining car where we ate our evening meal.

The terrain changed drastically from the boredom of the plains in the USA. Mountains rose majestically behind Monterrey, our first stop after boarding in Nuevo Laredo. As we continued on, night fell and as we meandered through the mountains. It began to drizzle. 

We decided to grab something to eat in the dining car. We were sitting at a table. Dwight and Bob couldn't believe how inexpensive the menu was. We ordered steak and all the accompanying goodies. While we were discussing how cheap and delicious the meal was, we pulled into a train station in a remote village. Our eating was interrupted by a tapping on our window. Outside, in the mist, stood a man, probably hungry, with an extremely angry look on his face, tapping our window with his stick. In spite of many similar experiences in Latin America, this left an indelible memory with me; even more so with my compatriots.

When we arrived in Mexico City, my traveling companions stared in awe at all the new sites, smells and sounds. Whatever image they had of Mexico was erased and re-imaged at every corner we turned. 

The first morning we went out for breakfast, we were again amazed at the low cost of the meals. I had chosen particular restaurants that were between the high class ones and the ones catering to the working class. Even so, prices were cheap. At our table was a basket of Mexican sweet breads and rolls, and we kept eating them as the meal went on. When we were presented the bill, we were shocked by how much we were charged. The sweet breads in the basket were not free like the tortilla chips at any given Mexican restaurant. We paid for each individual one that we ate. This is true all over Mexico. So much for my expertise, once again. 

We got from place to place in Mexico City by the metro. It is a cheap and efficient way to navigate the hustle and bustle of the largest city in the world. The metro system was designed by the same architect as the one in Paris and Washington, D.C., and is very well maintained. Each station is very well marked by images so that no one needs to be able to read in order to know where they are. My companions were very adept at learning the system. On one occasion, however, we stopped at a station and one of them thought it was our station, while it was one stop prior to where wanted to get off. He was quite confident about his ability to navigate the system that casually meandered on to the platform. He turned around to see where we were and realized that we were still on the train. I never in my life saw anyone bolt so fast to get back on the train with us. He could have set the world record in broad jump. I can identify his panic, being in the largest city of the world and not knowing a lick of Spanish. It was a harrowing experience for him.

Another cultural shock for my two friends was walking down the street and seeing shops that sold caskets with show windows right on the street like a clothing store. To be so glaringly confronted with death was startling. Mexicans are far more comfortable with death than we in the USA. In fact, they celebrate their dead relatives on All Saints Day with special ceremonies called The Day of the Dead. 

Of course, we visited all the most famous museums and tourist traps, but we found a special place where we returned frequently during our stay. It was at the intersection of various metro lines and was called the "Glorieta." It literally means traffic circle, and there are many such traffic circles in Mexico City. However, at this one, instead of a monument to some long-gone hero, there was an open shopping center. It had boutiques, cafés and live entertainment. Every evening there was one café that featured Latin American folk music from all over the region. This music alone brought us back time and again to be immersed in the culture.

In addition, the glorieta  was filled with people coming and going and made a great place to people watch. There were people from all over the world as well as many locals going to and from work. This explains the attraction to this place from three lonely bachelors. My two travel companions were quite jealous of my ability to strike up conversations in Spanish with people interested in conversation, but there were others who wanted to practice their English on us. 

We returned to the USA the same way we came; by train. On the train we met a group of US Americans in the dining car with a wide variety of interesting stories and backgrounds. We passed away the long hours conversing. When they discovered that we were Mennonites and taught at a Mennonite College, they really had questions. One man confessed that he had grown up Southern Baptist but had abandoned his faith. We started to sing old gospel songs that we commonly knew. We also began to sing songs that we all had learned in elementary school. It was a great way to fill up the boredom of darkness in the backwoods of Mexico.

After we crossed the border back into Texas, we had to stop to fill up for gas. The place we stopped at was in the middle of the boonies, and everything about the place freaked me out. We had come from one of the largest, most cosmopolitan city in the world, surrounded by incredible experiences and cross-cultural learnings, hearing and speaking various languages, steeped in the high culture of art and music, discussing literature with each other, only to end up with honky-tonk music blaring on the radio and cowboys chewing and spitting tobacco while guzzling beer and profusely peppering their speech with obscenities. Welcome home, Don! To say I was in culture shock was to put it mildly, and Dwight and Bob tease me to this day about the rude homecoming I had had. 

The only time in my myriad trips to Latin America that I did for pure pleasure turned out for all of us to be a wonderful and memorable experience. 

PS: I write this dedicated to Dwight Roth, one of my traveling companions on this trip, with whom I spent hours reminiscing about this trip and conversing on the fragilities all of us experience as we age.