The Kindness of Mexicans (Starting a series on Pros and Cons of Living in Mexico)

I'm working on an ebook about living in Mexico and think I will post some of my thoughts here. Your comments are welcome. There are many wonderful things about life in Mexico, and also some things that can be difficult for foreigners.

One of the most wonderful things about being in Mexico is the kindness of Mexicans. Kelly and I were talking about this at dinner last night, and he said, "It's really striking -- the gentle, kind friendless, often mixed with some curiosity." We talked about how open the faces of many teenagers are.

"The man at the propane place is a great example," Kelly added. "Before he said a word about propane, he wanted to know if we had heard about the earthquake and tsunami in Asia. I told him we had, and he spoke of his concern for the people there in such a caring way."

"Yeah, it's like they often live more in their hearts than we Northern cultures," I said. "Of course, that's a gross generalization, but I still think there is something to it. There's plenty of kindness north of the border too, but I bask in it here more."

We thought of some of the kindnesses we had received in the past week or so.

• At the border, we'd gotten in the wrong line, and a Mexican man had explained the order of things to us very carefully.


• When I had been trying to withdraw some cash from an ATM card at a bank, the woman in line in front of me had stayed to show me what to do.


• When I had been browsing in an outdoor bookstall in a plaza in Ciudad Valles, Kelly had said to the bookseller that it was a pretty region. The man made a list for Kelly of some of the main tourist attractions and spoke very clearly so Kelly could follow his Spanish.


• I had asked a woman selling food in the marketplace (mercado) a question, and the way she spoke to me was so kindly that I glowed as I walked away.


• The man who runs El Bañito, where we are staying, had given us rides into town, offered to pick up things in town for us, patiently made sense of our bad Spanish, and much more.

I don't think this list really captures what I am trying to describe, as it's the easy, loving manner in which these things are done that is what makes living in Mexico so special for foreigners.

Is it a small world, or what? Running into people...

As I wrote in my last post, Kelly and I have been enjoying the sense of history unfolding here at El Bañito, the hot springs / trailer park we've been camped at for a week now, just outside of Ciudad Valles, in the state of San Luis Potosi.

The day after Christmas was very busy here, with lots of local people coming out to take the waters and eat in the open-air restaurant. As Kelly and I strolled down to the restaurant ourselves for a snack, we saw an American couple of more or less our age. We greeted each other and the man said, "I know you!" We soon figured out that we had met Jay two years ago in Bernal, in the state of Queretaro, one of our favorite towns from our last trip. (The link takes you to the page where I write about meeting him in Bernal.)

Jay had come to El Bañito many times, some 20+ years ago. His family had come to Mexico many winters, home-schooling their kids. One of his daughters was with him now, along with her husband and two young boys.

I was amazed. Of all the millions of people in Mexico, how many do we know? Even of all the foreigners here now, how many do we know?

It turned out that Jay knew we were back in Mexico and in the Ciudad Valles area, as our holiday email had gone out the week before, and we'd sent it to Robert, another American who lives in Bernal. But he was as astonished as we were. We had a great visit with him and his partner Lucy.

And do we sense an unseen hand nudging us to go back to Bernal again this trip? Hmm...

El Bañito, where we're camped by Ciudad Valles

We made this photocollage as a Christmas thank-you for the folks at El Bañito.

This is a fascinating historial spot. For many decades, the road that runs out front (Highway 85) was the main highway from the U.S, Texas to Mexico City. It was a larger trailer park then, with many caravans coming through. Now it's pretty quiet as a campground (which we like fine), and the restaurant bar is a pleasant spot mostly enjoyed by people from Ciudad Valles, just 3 or 4 miles from here. The pool you see is a sulpher hot spring, very lightly sulpherours, and warm rather than hot -- an easy temperature to get in and swim a bit. El Banito is managed by Chayo Cespedes, a friendly man who's been very helpful to us. Noe Santos Velazco (in the white shirt) is the waiter. And the iguana lives near our RV.

One evening, we had a long visit with Tony, the owner, and his family. He grew up here, as his father was adding to the trailer park and other features. Tony's English is excellent, which he credits partly to learning it here from the many Americans who came through. The next day, another man who remembers El Bañito from his childhood came by. He's an American from Texas who married a woman from Ciudad Valles.

We're getting quite a sense of what this place was like in its heyday!

A low-cost way to travel with an internet satellite dish

We are both online a LOT, and last time we went to Mexico, we spent a lot of time in often-noisy, often-slow Mexican internet cafes. The good news is that they were practically everywhere and easy to find.

This trip is different. We are online wherever we want to be. We researched what was available and discovered that it was out of our price range at this time. Basically, there are a variety of companies that add nifty equipment to a Direcway dish. With some of them, you can actually be online while driving down the road... hopefully while someone ELSE is doing the driving! Other systems are meant to help you set up more easily when stationery.

Well, it happens that Kelly is an inventor sort (he even got a patent for one of his ideas a while back) and also a real do-it-yourself type. So we bought a complete Direcway satellite system, brand new and with the newest modem, on eBay. If you do this, you do have to be sure that the system does not have any outstanding charges on it at Direcway. Or you can buy your system right from Direcway... it's about $600 with shipping included to anywhere in the US (or at least the continental 48, not sure about Alaska/Hawaii). Direcway had a special going for $500, but we paid about $300 on eBay.

Next, we phoned Direcway and got set up as customers, giving them a credit card and signing up for 15 months of home service at about $60 a month. There was not a shorter option. You can't do the installation yourself but must have an official installer put it on your house. The official installer in our town, a friend of ours, came over and got started with Kelly but he had to go out of town before things got done. Kelly called Direcway customer service a couple of times, waited 45 minutes to an hour each time, and both times happened to get very helpful tech support guys. One changed us over to Mexsat5, a satellite that covers the continental US and also Mexico. We needed that.

With the other one answering some of Kelly's questions, we got online before our installer friend got back in town. Tra La! Faster than dialup, not as fast as DSL... that's one reason a lot of people sell their systems on ebay: they switch to DSL when it comes to their area.

Kelly fabricated a tripod out of materials we had, or he could have bought one. He fixed up a way to carry the tripod and dish on the roof of the motorhome. The thing that sticks out of the dish, the various cables, and the modem are tucked away when we travel.

You need to know your latitude and longitude (or just your zip code if in the US) so we also bought on eBay a small GPS unit that runs off our laptop. (In Mexico, we haven't even had to use our GPS unit yet, as our guide to Mexican campgrounds by Mike and Teri Church has the GPS locations for the campgrounds we have stayed at, or for ones just down the road and that's close enough.) This gives us the numbers we need to plug in,and we just follow instructions for setting up, using Direcway's software embedded in the modem. It requires Internet Explorer too.

"Just" follow instructions... it's been uncertain a couple of times for a while, but each time it has ultimately worked. The first time it worked away from home, we were in a campground in Texas, and that was a thrill. Then there was the first time in Mexico, another thrill, specially because that was totally from the solar panels on our roof. Where we are now, at a hot springs campground near Ciudad Valles, in the state of San Luis Potosi, is our third setup. It took the longest because I had put the latitude and longitude in wrong, not converting the minutes to fractions of degrees. So that's one mistake we won't make again. Passing the second step, the cross polarization, takes a while sometimes. We do it manually till we are mostly passing, then do it automatically to lock it in.

One caution: Unlike TV satellite dishes, this baby is both transmitting and receiving. (You don't need a phone line of any kind after that initial setup on your house.) So you need to put the dish where people won't get fried by the transmitting energy... 6 feet or more off the ground.

If you are interested in doing something like this, google on "internet satellite dish" and RV, or some such phrase, and read everything you can! This has certainly had its extremely frustrating moments, but with Kelly as stubborn as he is, and good at this kind of thing, it's working great for us!



Two essential parts of our hookup: the dish (among orange trees) and the blackwater drain, not always an easy thing to find in Mexico!

Making Dreams Come True, Travel or Whatever

As we got ready for this trip, we received a lot of jealous comments about what we were about to do. Often when people said, "I wish I could do that!" it was easy to read between the lines that they wished they were as wealthy as we must be.

In terms of cash flow, probably most of our jealous friends have a good bit more disposable income than we do. In terms of being able to get away, yes, we've been working to create a situation where we can travel more. For quite a while now, I've been working on internet marketing, and it's great fun to log on to several websites and discover that I've made $30 or whatever that day. Here are some pages where I describe how to create websites and be an internet marketer.

Also, we are working online a lot on the trip. We keep saying to each other, "We're really doing this!" as we pause to look out the window at whatever is going on. Right now, it's birds peeling a strip off an orange on a large tree by our motorhome and pecking at the fruit.

I just want to say that you don't have to be some sort of superachiever, or wealthy, to make your dreams come true. It takes planning, vision, some stubbornness and less cash than you would expect -- you probably have enough of all of these things.

Then there is fear. That's a biggie. I wrestle with it a lot. But somehow, I am more afraid of NOT living my dreams than of taking the risks that go with them.

La Pesca, our first night in Mexico

From the border it took us about 5 hours to get to La Pesca, a fishing village of no particular character on the Gulf of Mexico. But along the Soto La Marina river, there were a series of country homes (some very elegant) and hotels.

A guidebook indicated that the Villa del Mar hotel had places that RVs could camp very inexpensively, so we tried them. With solar panels on Cando (our motorhome) and plenty of water in our tanks, they only charged us $6 a night. A peaceful spot. We got our internet satellite dish working (will be blogging about that soon)

...and sat back to enjoy the sunset. We liked this spot so much that we stayed a layover day there.

Chaos and Crossing the Border

It only took us an hour to get through the border at Matamoros, south of Brownsville, TX, the other day, and much of that time we pretty much knew what we were doing. Life in Mexico is more chaotic than in the US, and often that's one of the things I love about it. Still, we'd had to give our Spanish some work to even find the right building. Were we in a truck with cargo, a truck without cargo, or an auto? Kelly, who was driving, decided our motorhome was an auto and that did get us into the right building.

When it comes to officialdom, it's nice to have your ducks in a row. As we were standing in our third (and final) line of the morning, some other Americans came in and asked us where to go. The only sign in English was for someone selling Mexican car insurance. A Mexican man had kindly pointed us in the right direction, and I was able to do the same with the other Americans. "You get your tourist card there it's free but you have to go to a bank soon and pay about $20 for it, then whoever is going to be driving your car goes over there to get some photocopies, then you come to this line we're in to have a large deposit put on a credit card and get a sticker for your windshield."

I couldn't help but wonder how many Americans didn't even realize that they needed to stop... OR once stopped, didn't have a clue what to do. The English of the officials was minimal.

So in a nutshell, here's what we did before they turned us loose on the streets of Matamoros (another example of chaos, with an intrinsic order of some sort). We each had to present our passport and fill out a form that become our FMT, or tourist card. The official who gave us the forms decided we were taking too long to fill them out and told me to give him mine. As a result, I have no idea what my occupation is... likely housewife, but I couldn't read his scribble. We are supposed to have our FMTs with us pretty much all the time, and we will get some photocopies made soon for backups. We easily got 180 days, the maximum.

Next, since Kelly is the main driver of the motorhome, at another counter he had copies made of his Colorado driver's license, his FMT, and our vehicle registration. They may have copied the copy we brought of our vehicle title too. The young man with a thick accent asked for a propina, or tip, so we gave him a dollar. I think other times we have been told there was a copying fee. We could have bought Mexican car insurance here, from a man who did speak English, but we had done that already on the internet, from a company called Lewis and Lewis. I don't have the url, but you can google it.

Last in this office, we stood in line for quite a while before giving the copies and a credit card to someone else. She typed up a very official-looking document that we are to surrender when we return the car to the US, which also must be in 180 days or less. All went well till we got stuck by the question of whether we had a remolque. I recognized the word as something to do with vehicles. Was it brakes? No, I decided it wouldn't be, as I'd never heard of brakes being required for entering Mexico. Another young woman in the office had overheard this question and non-answer, and explained to us, "try-lar" -- ah, no, we didn't have a trailer. Kelly signed 3 copies of a credit card receipt for $300+ deposit for taking our vehicle into Mexico. I don't know if they will charge us -- I think they just hold it till we take the motorhome out. Mexico is not interested in people bringing cars into Mexico to sell, clearly.

We went and paid our tourist card fee at a bank next door, figured out where to put the sticker on the windshield, and off we went!

But not quite. Some miles down the road there was a checkpoint where an official wanted to see our car permit, stuck his nose in the back door of the motorhome, and that was that.

Whew. But more than one confused American has been turned back at the checkpoint and told to go get their papers, which would not be fun. Though at least a second time around, we wouldn't have made the wrong turn and gone through that interesting little neighborhood...

Pros and Cons of Living and Retiring in Mexico

I am thinking of writing a whole book on this subject but will just go for a blog entry now. Mags asked in a comment, " Hola, Mexicophiles, After a 2-week trip in November, we are starry-eyed about retiring and moving to Mexico. Like now. But I'm worried we're not being objective. I'd love to hear from US citizens who did so and hated it (and why) or seriously investigated it and decided against it. I've got lots of "pros," now I need some "cons."

Each person's pros and cons will be different, of course. I highly recommend that you get yourselves back to Mexico, one way or another, for one or more longer stays as tourists, before thinking of packing up your worldly goods and moving there lock, stock, and barrel. Don't have the money? There are always ways. Like teaching English there (see my previous blog post), or housesitting for other foreigners if you are drawn to San Miguel Allende or Lake Chapala especially.

For great info on all aspects of gringo life in Mexico, there is a superb forum along with many articles at www.mexconnect.com. This is a membership site (which keeps out the ads for toner cartridges and worse) but with a one-week no-cost trial. I learn a tremendous amount there.

Okay, here are some of my own personal pros and cons.

Cons:

• The way they drive overwhelms me at times.
• I get tired of looking at trash in the streets.
• Sometimes I have problems co-existing with the extreme financial poverty of many Mexicans.
• Although my Spanish is far better than that of many tourists, I am not yet really fluent. It can be frustrating to realized I don't know the words for a simple comment or question.
• The places I tend to like best have fewer foreigners than I would want for longterm living.
• Mail delivery is iffy.
• Can't get books from Amazon as quickly as I am used to, though I have read that it's do-able.

Pros:

• The friendliness of the people
• The joyousness of the people
• Being stretched emotionally and intellectually by being in a different culture (this is a con at times too).
  
• Public transportation is far better than in the US
• I can live there more economically, and eat all the avacaos and mangos I want!
• The variety of places, reasonably close to each other (mountains, beach, city, town...)

Mags didn't ask for my pros, but I can't write cons without them!

The Costa Esmeralda in winter

A comment to my last post was from a woman in her mid-50s, thinking of driving her SUV to the Emerald Coast north of Veracruz and tenting on the beach for a while this winter with her dog. She wondered

• Would it be warm enough for tent camping in winter?
• Is the water warm enough for swimming?
• Is the area friendly and safe?
• Is it crowded?

So I decided to make this a new topic, so others could find it. Obviously, having been in the region a few days does not make me an expert. As for what is safe for a solitary woman, I don't really know. I personally would not feel comfortable doing what she is thinking of. However, here's a tip: when Kelly and I park our small RV in a place that isn't a campground, we go around and talk to local people about whether it is safe. Here's a story from my book Mexico with Heart about the one time that we were told it wasn't safe:

http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/book/09-beyond-xalapa.html
near the bottom of the page

And while I'm giving links, here is the page where I talk about our stay on the Costa Esmeralda:

http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/book/07-toward-xalapa.html

Now for a bit more on her questions: Some days it was warm enough for swimming, other days it was a bit too chilly. Once in a while some of that cold Artic air comes down via Canada and the American midwest, and zaps the Gulf Coast. I don't know about tenting or swimming on those days. We hit some of that weather as we entered Mexico, but on the Costa Esmeralda I wore shorts and sandals most of the time, slacks in the evenings (partly because there were bugs).

We were told by local people that some parts of the beaches have undertows.

We found the people there as friendly as anywhere in Mexico, which is to say very friendly. As for safety, considering that you and I are fabulously wealthy compared to the average Mexican, your possessions are always something to be aware of. Hmm, that would be another issue in tent camping, if you left your tent and stuff. There are MANY campgrounds along the Costa Brava, so it would be best in my opinion to select one and bargain with them, rather than try to camp right on the beach. I think that is more common in Baja. As for personal safety, I addressed that a little bit above. I didn't find the region crowded, just a nice number of people around. However, at Christmas and Easter it is likely a mob scene.

A note about driving down: Hwy 180 along the coast is very very slow and full of potholes and topes (traffic bumps). I remember this mainly before and after Tampico.

This whole region is much less accustomed to folks from the US than is Baja, so another factor could be how good your Spanish is or how comfortably you get along without much.

I'm writing this in Texas, before we cross the border. We are thinking of going soon to a fishing village north of the Costa Esmeralda, called La Pesca. If we get there, I will post about it, so y'all-come-back-and-see-us-again-now-hear? (Typical Texas goodbye when you leave a shop)

All in all, it's a very nice region, keeping in mind that the beaches are not the glorious white of some other parts of Mexico. A high point of our trip was the nearby El Tajin ruins, also described in the book. (Go to mexico-with-heart.com and then the sitemap to find the link, I'm running out of time!)