Bus Fares and Tortillas: Small Price Rises, Big Challenges

This past winter, the cost of tortillas rose. About the same time, the cost of riding the city buses in Guadalajara went up.

The price increases were hardly anything you or I would notice. What's a couple more pesos for fresh tortillas now and then?

But I found them a reminder of the income gap between even the poorest of the expats and the working class of Mexico. To save bus fare, people were walking long distances in the city.

Here's an astonishing figure:

Seven out of ten households in Guadalajara live on less than two Mexican minimum wages a day. This works out to about 94 pesos a day, or about $8.60 for TWO minimum wages for a day's work. (Source: a study by the University Students' Federation quoted in the Guadalajara Colony Reporter, January 13-20, 2007, page 3.)

Whether this is exactly true or not, I don't know. But it certainly gives a ballpark figure. Even if it's twice that, it's peanuts to us. Many Mexicans around Lake Chapala do better than this, in large part due to the influx of foreign money, creating jobs in construction and much more.

I never forget that I am among the wealthy of this planet. And I am grateful, and I feel it as a responsibility too.

Making Tortillas the Old Way

Early one Sunday morning a while ago, Kelly and I went for a walk in our town of San Juan Cosala, heading roughly westward out of town on Calle Zaragosa. When we came upon this woman making tortillas outside her front door, I asked her permission to take a photo to show my friends. She kindly consented. Quite a few people still make them by hand for special occasions or in restaurants, though the widespread availability of machine-produced tortillas means that relatively few Mexican women are doing this before dawn now.

She's flattening the dough between her hands, from the metate or grinder in front of her, then cooking the tortillas on the wood-fired griddle.

Are the handmade ones tastier? Yes!


We continued our walk into the nearby area called El Limon, where we admired these rock walls.

(This is one of a series of posts I wrote before going to the US for a while. We're currently in Idaho, and about to head for Colorado.)

Driving from Lake Chapala to the US Border at Nogales: How We Did It

Last week we left our home by Lake Chapala early on Sunday morning, in our VW Jetta, our pets staying home with good care. This turned out to be a good time to drive, as the ever-busy Guadalajara traffic was less crowded. We drove past Jocotepec onto a good four-lane highway into the city. Then we got onto the Periferico, and drove around the city counter-clockwise till arriving at the exit for Tepic. We took that and it was another good four-lane road. We were beyond Guadalajara about an hour an a half after leaving home. The good highway was quite welcome as when we had driven this way a year and a half ago in the other direction, it was being working on and we had to go through one detour after another. Now there were just a few. We did pay tolls for several sections of the highway. I can be frugal about a lot of things, but the greater emptiness and quality of the cuota or toll highways make them well worthwhile.

We had heard it would be about seven hours to Mazatlan, and it took us a bit more. Late May is not really tourism season there, as it's plenty hot and the Mexicans who come during the school summer holidays hadn't started yet. We stayed in an old beachside hotel, and it was great to gaze at the surf from our second-floor balcony. Between undertow and rocks, the beach isn't swimmable in that area (or in many areas by the city) so we took advantage of the pool.

Our second travel day took us from Mazatlan to Alamos, which is charming small city about 45 minutes off the main highway. Traffic was heavy on the 4-lane road. Mexico generally does not have toll roads unless there are also free alternatives, and for the later part of this day, there was no toll road and we were on the 4-lane libre or free road. Kelly made good time, weaving deftly between lanes at times, while I thought to myself, "I'm not exactly enjoying this." But once we left Highway 15 at Navajoa and took the excellent road up into the mountains at Alamos, my spirits perked up. I will do a blog entry about this town. We stayed in a very nice American-run B&B, and had a layover day there.

Travel Day Three got us to Santa Ana, within an hour or two of the border. Operating on the advice of one of the Americans we had met in Alamos, we didn't try to cross in the hot late afternoon, but found a very American-style motel in Santa Ana, the San Francisco, complete with wireless internet. This day was about as long as the other two had been, but traffic was not so heavy and it was pleasant enough.

Our fourth day on the road, we crossed the border and got as far as the home of a friend in Prescott, AZ. While we were driving north, some ways north of where we had slept but still in Mexico, a warning light came on our dashboard. I looked it up in the manual and to our relief it was nothing urgent. We got it fixed in Prescott the next day.

We arrived at the place where you have your car stickers removed, some 20+ km south of the border in Nogales. It was pretty clearly marked in English, and the young woman reached past Kelly, who was in the driver's seat, to scrape off the sticker. We gave her the piece of paper that the sticker had come in last year when we entered with the car at Columbus, NM / Palomas, Chihuahua, she gave us a receipt, and we were done.

She smiled goodbye at us. "But where do we go to get our FM-3 visas stamped that we are leaving the country?" I asked in Spanish. She waved at the larger customs entry point across the highway. If I hadn't asked, we would have gotten out without those stamps. That happened to us once before at a different crossing, and we got scolded when we came back into Mexico. So we parked the car near her booth and walked across the not-very-busy highway to where the customs officials stamped our visas (which look like passport booklets, sort of). Noticing that we live in Jalisco one of the officials made the universal Mexican hand signal for drinking alocohol. I didn't understand till one of the other guys explained that it was a reference to the product of the town of Tequila in Jalisco.

Nogales has two different border points. We haven't gone through town there, but have taken the bypass route which avoids city traffic. There was nothing to do on the Mexican side, and then we were in bumper-to-bumper traffic going up to several gates on the US side. Most of the cars around us had Sonora plates and seemed to be commuters. Newpaper vendors were doing a brisk business. After a 10 to 15 minute wait, we drove up to the customs agent. He asked if we were US citizens and glanced at Kelly's passport but didn't bother with mine after he heard my voice. He asked if we had anything to declare, and I said we had a clove of garlic. "Any fruits or vegetables?" he asked, and I said we had some raisins. "Do you want those?" I asked. Listlessly, he said no and waved us through. As we drove away, we commented to each other that the fellow seemed depressed. His job must not be a whole lot of fun.

A few details about the trip: never was there a really scary close encounter on Highway 15 as we drove north. I was also pleased that we saw very few dogs on the edge of the highway, and only only dead one in all that distance. Our Verizon cellphone didn't work from just outside Guadalajara till the US, as Verizon doesn't have a mutual agreement with a Mexican cellphone company in that area.

Back in the US

This is our third day back in the US, and I'm enjoying how clean things are, but not how expensive they are! I've been out of the country for almost a year so things that seemed normal to me are now kind of surprising, like the large number of obese people, and how utterly this is a car culture. Not to mention all the housing being built everywhere.

In some ways it feels great to be here and in others it doesn't. I'm too tired to write more now, have to leave this motel early tomorrow to get to our Idaho destination in the afternoon. Lots to write about whenever I get a chance.