If You Go Out in the Woods Today, You´d Better Not Go Alone

Well, Dawg signed up for this e-amail notification for warning messages from the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara and today that action bore fruit.

Upon arriving home today at mid-day (the 26th) from a pleasant walk with one of my doggies on the Ajijic malecon, I received emergency notification from the consulate that I , as an American citizen, should exercise extreme caution when traveling in or near Tepic or Xalisco, Nayarit and also use extreme caution when traveling to all points in Nayarit north of Tepic. The consulate was careful to note that these messages do not apply to travel between Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. Well thank God for that. If Aunt Bess can´t get to Tepic, who gives a damn but, the beach condo in the Puerto Vallarta area, now that´s another matter. Anybody destined for Tepic deserves to be shot and won´t miss anything anyway even if dead because Tepic would bore a bisop to death but the beach at swinging Puerto Vallarta is another matter.

Dawg was initially pleased that he and his bride are not headed over that way but, instead, in the other direction toward Puebla, Veracruz and points southeast to Chiapas but, wait, will we have to dodge bodies tossed about in Metropolitan Veracruz or pay crooked Federales to protect us on primitive backroads in the Puebla hills? Don´t tell ém we´re coming.

Canadians and Brits are clearly immune to all danger Dawg, No warnings from our Consulates.
Soooo, the answer is simple, you adopt a British accent, Dawgette pretends to be French Canadian, and all will be well.
Proof postive, I actually travelled on the dangerous roads in Jalisco today, and nothing, absolutely nothing happened.

Where is our consulate warden to post these notices for us? Well, what the hell, we just got word that we are the second lowest crime state per capita in Mexico, Chiapas being the first.

Dawg understands how that works, like Chiapas, Michoacán doesn't really rely on the police for day to day protections but employs a type of neighborhood watch program to keep an eye on mischief-makers whose repeat offenses will eventually lead to their mysterious disappearance in many cases.

I always felt the media was over-doing the crime here, sh¡t happens but not on any grand scale unless they are just looking for it. Mischief-makers of all ilk, criminal or just pain-in-the-butt types, will make a sudden disappearance which doesn't necessarily mean they will fall victim to foul play but will take it upon themselves to feel unwanted and may eventually pack-off for DF or other parts.

In Michoacán we just chase the clouds away and our days are sunny and bright.

The famously dishonest Federales along the Mexico border with Guatemala at Union Juarez. That´ll be $5,000 Pesos to see you back from the border to Cacahoatan or, alternatively, you can walk back down this dark highway in the middle of the night and if you are never seen again that´s your ass. After our accident along this border where, by the way, we live and maintain a nearby residence, we learned not so much to our amazement that the cops were crooked but so were the functionaries that made up the ministerio publico and all the municipal officials and everybody else including us who bought into the corruption in order to remain free to return to San Cristóbal and those of you who assert that you will never bow to the system in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere in order to get home rather than decompose in a ditch in the forest will, no doubt, need to utilize situational ethics when the time comes to elect righteous indignation or hand over your wallet.

Will kiss ass in order to get home, anytime, anyplace. No contest.

Have been in the jungles of Chiapas on the border, Yaxchilán. Warnings everywhere, no problems, however if there had been, here's my wallet.

As usual, this is a lively group!

First, as to the Guadalajara Emergency Message, I also received it Dawg. We lived briefly in Guad and somehow are still on their list, even though we've been in Morelia more than three years. As for my auspicious role as Embassy Warden for Morelia, Pete, this isn't part of that. It wasn't sent as a Warden message for our area, so I'm relieved of the responsibility of posting anything. However, since you've asked, I'll post it in the proper forum here for local folks who want to visit their abuelas in Tepic.

I'd have been on it sooner, however the bride and I traveled the dangerous roads from Morelia to Puebla, and thence to Oaxaca where we are staying in a rental in Centro. What a marvelous city Oaxaca is! Its years of major tourism show, as it has many marvelous hotels and high end restaurants. The city is colorful and "happening." There are scads of churches, museums and other noteworthy sights. The artesania produced in this area is amazing, and we have started looking for a few things. We've only been here two days, but have already decided we need to return and spend more time, as we'll only be here a week on this visit. I'll provide more details later, but for now let me just say that mole and mezcal, two of the things Oaxaca is known for, are among my new favorites.

Raqueteer, as for warnings not coming from Canada, I am amused to see that Canada is warning visitors to be wary of parts of Florida in the US! I know lots of Canadians go to Florida in the winter, but if I were going to be listing places in the US to be wary of, Florida would be way down on my list.

Y'all take care....

Jim

(Quote)


Raqueteer, as for warnings not coming from Canada, I am amused to see that Canada is warning visitors to be wary of parts of Florida in the US! I know lots of Canadians go to Florida in the winter, but if I were going to be listing places in the US to be wary of, Florida would be way down on my list.

Y'all take care....

(end quote)

Ohhhh noooo, what could have happened in Florida? A stampede at the early bird special? Some unpleasantness at the bingo hall? A broken fingernail at the check out counter, or something even more sinister such as mild substance abuse, or worse, smoking during line dancing. OMG.

What am I going to tell the 50 people we personally know who have fled North, especially the four who escaped from the wilds of Ajijic and made a strategic retreat to, you guessed it, FLORIDA!!!

Perhaps they're warning about death from boredom, and doing all Canadians a public service? It's hard to say.

raqueteer wrote:

Will kiss ass in order to get home, anytime, anyplace. No contest.

Have been in the jungles of Chiapas on the border, Yaxchilán. Warnings everywhere, no problems, however if there had been, here's my wallet.

Ah, yes, heading down the Usumacinta River to Yaxchilán from Frontera Corozal watching the crocs at play and the Hondureños crossing the border on their way to the U.S. or to become slave laborers in the Lacandon or sex slaves in a Tuxtla Gutierrez whorehouse or, perhaps, Zeta mules on the Texas border. If raqueteer and Dawg are the only passengers on the Yaxchilán ferry when stopped by the Zetas requesting a toll charge, she and I will be fighting each other to see who is fastest with that wallet handover. Those crocs (as well as those Hondureños) look mighty hungry so, in the modified words of my hero Henny Youngman, "Take my wallet, please."

By the way, that reminds me of another Chiapas story. It is not unusual for even major highways to be blockaded down there by any number of community factions up to and including the Zapatistas. It is normal to pay any requested contribution whether in celebration of Emiliano Zapata´s birthday or some civic project for improvements to the infrastructure of some ejido whose land is traversed by the highway. So, there we were on our way from San Cristóbal to Palenque on the main highway between the two places when, in a remote ejido in the Ocosingo Municipality, we and every other motorist were stopped by a contingent of men from the ejido "requesting" that we contribute to building a new basketball court for their local school. The reason they were requesting this of passing motorists, they told us, was that the community had voted en masse for the new municipal president of Ocosingo based on his promise to them that he would see that a new basketball court was constructed at the school if he were elected and he, once elected, had reneged on that promise so the ejido leadership elected, alternatively, to collect the necessary funds to build the court with toll funds collected from passing motorists until sufficient funds had been raised. The Mexican woman in front of us with Veracruz license plates, initially refused to pay to pass. Within seconds her car was surrounded by many burly men with shovels and pickaxes and such and she was invited once again to pay or turn around and head back toward San Cristóbal forthwith. She paid and believe me brothers and sisters, so would you. The toll was only $20 Pesos after all. However, we were not negotiating the price but paying for our freedom. Decisions like this are always easy in the backwoods of Chiapas.

I forgot to mention a couple of rip-off artists in my above posting citing the myriad crooks one has to deal with in the wilds of Chiapas. That would be the towing company that towed our incapacitated car from the jungle into Tapachula and the taller in Tapachula that fixed the car one or both of whom stole everything they could get their hands on in the car including the jack and tire changing assembly.

Sometimes there are unexpected costs to buying passage to paradise but, what the hell, we got to Palenque after pleasant stops at Aqua Azul and Misol Ha and that ejido got their basketball court. A win/win. I sure wish that sumbitch hadn´t ripped off that jack, however as, a month later as we returned to Lake Chapala we had a tire blowout on the freeway in a remote part of Veracruz State and had no jack to change the tire. We were fortunate to receive help from passing motorists but that was a bummer..