This is a personal matter. If you handle your large rig like you were born to it, if narrow curvy roads without shoulders don’t faze you, if you can stop on a dime, if you can go with the flow in city traffic like a New York taxi driver, and if you don’t mind spending a small fortune on gasoline, then a larger rig might be just fine.

It would also be fine if you were just going a little way into Mexico, to one of the campgrounds on the West coast that are popular with tourists.

It must be obvious that I have a bias here. For several years, Kelly and I full-timed in a bus conversion motorhome, a former Gray Line tour bus the size of a Greyhound. Kelly did handle it almost as deftly as described above, but we chose never to take it into Mexico. It was just too big a thing to enjoy there, with the way we like to explore back roads.

I think that the ideal vehicle for versatile Mexican driving is some form of van. It could be one of the nice van conversions with all the trimmings or even just a regular passenger van to which you added some basic camping supplies or built in a bed, table, kitchen, and maybe a bit of a bathroom. This would allow you to use it for sleeping and eating when you wanted to, but you would still be able to stay in hotels and get the vehicle under the common short entry gates.

Rubbermaid kitchen containers make excellent mini-toilets, as they seal tightly. We used to travel in a Volvo station wagon and sleep in the back of it. We had a Rubbermaid pasta container for those middle-of-the-night moments. I sewed a cloth cover so we could discreetly take it into a restroom for emptying.

When Kelly and I traveled through Mexico in 1979 for four months, it was in a V6 Ford Econoline van that had a pop-up roof. Kelly built in the basics, and we went everywhere. It was loaded pretty full, and twice – once in Chiapas and once in the highlands of Guatemala – we couldn’t get up steep hills that we had already gone down. In Chiapas, it was a short distance, and we unloaded some things, drove up the hill, unloaded some more at the top, and went back down for the things we had left. In Guatemala, we hired a passing truck to tow us a few miles. Those were our only problems. Another thing I liked about the van was that when it was parked, it wasn’t as noticeable as an RV.

What about going in a caravan?

There are a number of American companies that guide RV tours around Mexico. They charge several thousand dollars generally, on top of all other expenses, and you drive your own rig in a parade which could have perhaps 20 other households of truck-trailer combos or motorhomes hauling tow cars. It’s a great way to spend a lot of time driving and relatively little time doing anything else, though there could be caravans that have a decent ratio of driving to relaxing.

I talked with people leading two such caravans, and in one case the man did know Mexico quite well and spoke a reasonable amount of Spanish. But the other company – which charges more than most – had no employees on that tour who knew much Spanish at all. Frankly, I was shocked. It struck me as irresponsible.

We heard a couple of stories about mishaps these groups have had. The leader of the group I was just speaking of told me this one: Mexico has a number of trucks called Green Angels, which are driven by English-speaking mechanics who have tools and supplies for basic repairs. They are a wonderful resource. Well, one day, a Green Angel was accompanying a caravan from this company. The Green Angel pulled out in front of the lead RV driven by an employee of the company, and the RV hit the Green Angel. Then several more of the caravanning RVers ploughed into each other.

Another story I heard was about Guanajuato, a small city with narrow, curving roads and a tunnel that winds under the city streets. You don’t want to take one RV into downtown Guanajuato, any guidebook will tell you. But one day, along came a caravan, and the leader ignored all the people waving to him to take the bypass around the city. The caravan ended up in the tunnel, where one of the big rigs got stuck. It took more than a few hours to extricate it.

Okay, that is the bad side of caravans, along with the risk that they will buy all the gasoline in rural stations or all the groceries in small towns. “Locusts!” one friend of mine muttered. They are very wasteful ecologically too.

But there are some good points. If you speak little or no Spanish, don’t want to go on your own, and are an avid RVer, some form of group travel makes sense. You might take a trip once and then get the know-how to go out on your own later. Another choice would be travel with one or two other RVs in a small group. Just be sure you like the people – and that your ideas of how far to drive in a day are roughly similar.

Choosing your route and finding campgrounds

I lump these two topics together because there is a definite relationship between them.

On our recent trip, we were able to boondock more than most RVers because Kelly had added a couple of extra batteries that charged when we drove. (We haven’t put solar panels on our RV, but may well in the future.) Also, we were at times willing to conserve water in order to boondock, even if it meant shorter showers, or no showers for a bit. But even so, we couldn’t go more than 3 or 4 days without hookups. This was partly because we were both writing a lot and needed to keep our laptops charged. On our 1979 trip, we didn’t need hookups and had correspondingly more freedom.

The essential key to finding Mexican campgrounds is a book called Traveler’s Guide to Mexican Camping, by Mike and Terri Church.

As a librarian, I know that no one book has everything, and we did find additional information on campgrounds in Lonely Planet and other guidebooks aimed at the budget traveler. These books were also invaluable in choosing our routes, as I pored over their descriptions of various places. I thought I had a lot of guidebooks with me, but I would take even more another time!

In choosing your route, consider the availability of campgrounds, the weather at that time of year, how much driving it would be, and what your interests are. Be aware that Mexican highways vary considerably in the speeds you can go. We averaged about 35 mph in the state of Veracruz but a lot faster on the four-lane highways in Chihuahua. We rarely went over 55 – that’s part of how we managed to get excellent gas mileage.

We chose our route as we went along, but we did set out with some general ideas. We had never been along the Gulf coast and wanted to see some of it. We wanted to go to some archaeological sites. We were curious to see if we could find places we might want to return and live for some months. Well aware that the more miles you travel, the more the trip costs and the less time you have not driving, we planned to only cover part of Mexico this time. Once there, I found it hard to give up some of the places I wanted to see that were further away, but we didn’t give in to those impulses. It was much more fun to have a relaxing journey.

When there is no campground

Whenever we were going to stop for the night and there was no campground, we started talking to local people and asking their advice about a place to stay. We had done that all over Mexico in 1979. Travelers say that it is more risky now. If that’s so, I don’t know by how much, but on this trip we did always ask, where on the earlier trip, we didn’t always bother.

By asking, we were directed to one of our favorite spots, the ferry landing near Tampico. By asking, we were welcome to stay in the parking lot at the ruins of El Tajín, where there are two night guards. By asking, we were warned away from a small town where a couple of young girls had disappeared ten days before. As we drove away from that one, I remembered the persistent Latin American rumor that Americans steal babies for their body parts. A chill ran down my spine, and I was grateful for the kind local woman who had warned us we should leave. That night, we soon found another spot behind a café, intended for truck drivers to pull in and sleep.

When we spoke with the people where we stayed, we felt included in their network. Mexicans are so hospitable that it was a lovely feeling. Sometimes children would bring us warm tortillas their mother had just made, and we would scramble around to find some tiny gift we could reciprocate with.

I must admit that I slept somewhat better when we were in campgrounds. In some of the other places, I would wake in the night, wondering what that sound had just been. Rural Mexico is not a quiet place, and it took a while to get used to sounds at all hours. Kelly generally felt safer than I did, and that is true of us no matter where we are. One night in a rare Mexican government campground, the only other visitors were a jolly group of Mexican men drinking, singing, and conversing all night. I was uneasy, though there wasn’t any danger really.

I discovered that if we had a little dry dog food for the local street dogs, they would immediately adopt us for the night. I liked it that they would bark if someone came close, though of course when that happened once, it did wake me up.

In a nutshell, it’s a matter of using common sense and finding your comfort zone.

Danger and crime

We heard scary tales of guns and crimes in Mexico, though the scariest came from an American in Texas whose ex-husband carried guns around Mexico himself!

We had one experience of petty theft. One Sunday afternoon, we were camped at a popular balneario or hot spring, and we put our bathing suits and towels on the back of the RV to dry before taking a walk. I had an old pair of sandals with me, and they were quite wet. I set them on the hood of the Toyota to dry, where they were more visible to people going by. I thought to myself that if someone did take them, it really wouldn’t matter much. I had a better pair with me.

Sure enough, when we got back from our walk, my sandals were gone. Kelly noticed that a rather rowdy group of young men were also gone.

End of story? Not quite. When we left that spot a couple of days later, my sandals were tied to a tree by the front gate, at just about the height someone in the back of a pickup could easily reach. The sandal straps were undone. It seemed that someone had tried them on but had been no Cinderella!

Of course, there are risks greater than that of losing a pair of sandals. But there is also a risk of staying at home and missing out on wonderful experiences. I have a sign over my computer: “If you don’t do it, you’ll never know what would have happened if you had done it.”

We always pulled the curtains and locked the doors of the RV when we were gone. With both our current vehicle and the van we took in 1979, Kelly installed simple sliding door latches on the driver’s and passenger’s doors, which we used in addition to the regular door locks. We came and went through the side door of the vehicle, which had an extra lock as well. In this motorhome, we decided not to use the oven but to make it our electronics center. We kept our laptops and cameras in there, and Kelly created an arrangement which locked the oven without showing. It involved removing a drawer next to the oven and poking a small screwdriver into a hole. Also, he installed an extra electrical box right beside our other one, in the closet. We kept our extra money in it, along with photocopies of our credit cards, passports, and Mexican tourist cards.

Has Mexican RV Travel Become More Dangerous Since Our 2003 Trip?

I don’t know how to judge this, since I’ve just done a little RVing since we moved to Lake Chapala in 2005. We do have some friends who traveled in their van and broke some of the rules for RV travel — they pulled off to have a snack at a lonely spot on a highway, just before dark. They were robbed, the guy fought back, and he ended up in the hospital for months. Very scary, but it is the only  incident I know of, and things like that do happen in the US too.

The news about drug cartels scares a lot of Americans, but I frankly don’t know if it would affect RV travel. The media loves bad news, of course, but then some of it IS true. Some.

I got tired of the uncertainties of where we would sleep and park the RV,  and now would myself prefer to stay on somewhat more beaten tracks in an RV. But in a van I would do more, with hotels always an option.

Would it suit you?

In my opinion, RVs are best suited for certain kinds of trips, like driving to a destination  and staying there, like the beaches of Guaymas, Mazatlan, and other northewestern shores of Mexico. If you want to spend most of your time in cities,  chances are you would be happier staying in hotels in the heart of town. If the driving would make you too nervous, go some other way instead.

So – for yourself, what do you think? Whatever you decide, may you enjoy it!

[End of the book]

Some images ©www.clipart.com and used with permission.

More on Roaming Mexico in an RV or Van is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

There were drawbacks, though. Getting lost, having to maneuver the motorhome out of tight spots, the ever-present need to find a place for the RV for the night, the challenge of visiting cities while in an RV… it was rather like having a third person along with Kelly and me, one who needed regular meals of gasoline, water, and electricity and needed to dump the water frequently.

In the U.S., it’s easy. You just take off in your motorhome of any size or shape, and everywhere you go, you can find public or private campgrounds. There are huge national directories listing them. You can have a general idea what to expect wherever you go.

Mexico isn’t like that. Some parts of the country are more developed, most notably the Pacific coast beach towns where American and Canadian RVers have been going for years. But if you get off the beaten path, RV travel in Mexico is bound to be an adventure. Is it for you? These pages are written to help you decide that.

(I’ll talk about danger and crime on the next page.)

Why travel by RV?

We found it enjoyable, flexible, economical, and convenient.

Enjoyable

We greatly enjoyed having a mini-home with us wherever we went. Having our own bed, kitchen, and bathroom gave the trip a kind of simplicity and stability that we liked. We were both writing a lot during the trip, and having a table for our two laptops was another benefit. We liked cooking most of our meals, only eating out when we wanted to rather than because it was the only choice other than snacking. It was worth something not to be living out of a suitcase – and for us, since the laptops and Kelly’s video equipment were necessary parts of our business reasons for the trip, it would have been several suitcases!

Flexible

We treasured the flexibility too. Without plane tickets, we could go when and where we wanted spontaneously. And while it’s true that the outstanding bus system in Mexico does go everywhere, I doubt we would have gone to many of the more remote places we explored if we had had to do it by bus.

Economical

Our motorhome, nick-named Cando, was of this type.

RVing is an economical way of traveling, unless you are going long distances in a rig that gets poor gasoline mileage. Our Toyota Dolphin averaged 17 miles per gallon – we kept track. So even though gas prices were higher in Mexico than in the U.S. at that time, our transportation costs were not bad at all. You do have to buy Mexican car insurance – American insurance is not honored there – but with an older RV, that cost us under $200 for a year’s coverage, including legal help should it be needed. (A year’s coverage cost about the same as two months’ worth.)

Many of our campgrounds were free.

We averaged well under $10 a night for campgrounds, specially since many nights were free.

With grocery costs maybe 60% of U.S. prices (unless you favor a lot of processed foods), we ate avocados and mangos galore.  I’m not a big beef-eater at home, but I loved the more flavorful (though generally tougher) Mexican beef. Fresh bread and bakery goods were inexpensive, and I was pleased to see whole grain breads from time to time.

Convenient

Taking care of the basics was generally convenient. Bottled water is sold in even the tiniest villages, and you can buy a large container full and then exchange the plastic bottle for another one elsewhere when you’re done. (Once in a while, you may not be able to exchange different brands of bottles if you have traveled some distance, but we never had that problem.) I was really pleased to see how widely available clean water was. It’s a terrific step forward in public health for Mexico. At just over a dollar for roughly five gallons, the cost was inconsequential for us though still a challenge for poor Mexicans.

Groceries and housewares are easy to come by – all the cities have chain-store supermarkets which also carry housewares and pharmacy items. The public markets offer a wide selection of produce and meats. Even in small towns, there are “mini-supers” (that’s what they call them) of varying sizes.

We remembered that in 1979, gas stations had been few and far between. We always filled up when we got about half empty. Now there are many gas stations practically everywhere, so we were comfortable not filling up till we got down near a quarter of a tank. We did notice that on the long toll roads in the north of the country, it could be further between stations. And you can still occasionally drive into a gas station only to discover that it is out of gas.

Of course, all this cost money, and we were pleased that the Mexican ATMs accepted both our credit cards and the debit card from our checking account at home. The receipts often told us how many pesos we had in the account, which made me feel rich indeed until I remembered the exchange rate. We did take more than one card with us, as we heard stories of ATM machines sometimes not giving back people’s cards. This was our first long trip outside the U.S. without travelers’ checks, and it worked fine. We did have a couple hundred dollars, in twenties and smaller bills, tucked into a secret place in the motor home, just in case.

Staying in touch with family, friends, and our business was easy with the internet. Everywhere in Mexico, we found nice little internet cafes. Once in a while the connect speed was prehistoric, but usually it was okay and sometimes very good. It tended to cost between one and two dollars an hour. We were online about twice a week. A couple of times, we left idyllic spots because they didn’t have connections there, but we never had far to go to find them. Mexicans are embracing the internet, and few of them can afford computers at home – and many of them have cellphones because the regular phone service can be hard to get and expensive – so the cafes meet a real need and are far more numerous than in the U.S.

Other Ways of Traveling in Mexico

RV travel is far from the most popular choice.

You can hop a plane from home and be at your destination in Mexico quickly. This is especially appealing if you are heading to the Yucatan or some other location quite far south. Package rates to Cancun, for example, can be good bargains.

You can drive a car, which gives you many of the benefits of an RV along with greater ease of navigating. Throw a tent and some bedding in the trunk, and you will be camping like the Mexicans do.

You can catch a bus. It’s hard to imagine the Mexican bus system until you see numerous luxury and first-class buses frequently going between the cities, with second-class buses going to every hamlet and wide spot in the road. The better buses have movies (not necessarily an advantage if you don’t care for violence) and bathrooms. Intercity bus travel is so common that you have your choice of time of day on most routes. If you decide to have a longer lunch, there will be more buses leaving soon. The prices are very reasonable. In a country that doesn’t have all that many passenger cars or minor airline routes, and that has essentially ended its passenger train service, the buses are at the heart of the Mexican travel system. It’s a great way to meet people, too.

How much Spanish should you know?

The further off the beaten tourist path you go, the fewer Mexicans who speak English will you meet – though we did notice that in the northern state of Chihuahua, far more people spoke English than further south. However, we found that even when Mexicans spoke English, we often relied on our Spanish to verify that we had understood them correctly. In many cases, their accents in English  are quite thick (which I find charming). Like us with Spanish, they had learned more in school about reading and writing than about speaking clearly.

It’s really a personal thing. If your Spanish is minimal or nonexistent, are you comfortable communicating with gestures and a few words, even if you should have some health or vehicle problems? Despite being able to handle daily chores with ease, Kelly and I found ourselves constantly challenged by the limits of our Spanish. With my chatty personality, I found it frustrating to think of some little thing I wanted to say to someone and not quite know how to do it. If we end up spending a considerable amount of time south of the border, I will probably take an immersion Spanish course somewhere, to move to a higher level.

What’s it like to drive in Mexico?

Kelly did all the Mexican driving on our trip, as I tend to be a klutz with motorhomes. He realized immediately, and I did a bit later, that even though Mexicans drive quite differently from Americans, they are no less interested in staying alive. We noticed that just as Mexicans make more eye contact and relate to each other more in public places than Americans do, so too in their driving habits, they expect each other to be alert to what they are doing. Someone may pass in a situation that would be madness in the U.S., knowing that both the people that they are passing and any oncoming traffic will be alert if things get tight.

Once, after a hair-raising taxi ride in Guadalajara, I came to the conclusion that our driver had mastered the underlying principle of the universe, that matter and energy are the same. I decided he had changed our taxi into energy at several crucial moments!

Mexican accident rates are reported to be somewhat higher than American. The evidence of my eyes bore this out. In about 3000 miles in Mexico, we saw one totaled small car, two different places where accidents had happened and huge trucks were burning, and one flipped pickup where the ambulances were on their way. That seemed like a lot to me – I am grateful that we didn’t see any accidents occur. These were all daytime events; the standard advice for traveling at night is DON’T. Livestock like to sleep on the warm pavements, all the busyness that you see during the day is still going on but you can’t see it so well, and there is probably a higher risk of being robbed. (Though not as high as most Americans seem to imagine.) In my reading on Mexico, I did take comfort that Carl Franz and John Howell – who have both traveled extensively in Mexico and written a lot about the country – have gone many thousands of miles. Each can tell some hair-raising tales, but neither has ever suffered a serious accident.

Another feature of driving in Mexico is getting lost. Kelly and I don’t get lost at home, but we frequently found ourselves missing poorly marked turnoffs or having to guess at intersections. We had the best maps available, but they were not always correct either. It seems to me that since relatively few Mexicans travel long distances by car to unfamiliar destinations, putting up good road signs for travelers hasn’t been a governmental priority. We found that when we were on the main touristic routes, the road signs were better. For example, the northbound bypass road around the city of Chihuahua could not have been better. Well, except for that one corner where we did guess right!

Throughout Mexico, especially at state lines, you will come up to army checkpoints. They are looking for drugs and guns. We were pulled over and checked several times, and it was never a problem. The young men were unfailingly courteous, and the searches were minimal. One soldier did find some white powder among our nutritional supplements, but he had no problem believing us that it was vitamin C. We did not crack inappropriate jokes that might have triggered more searching, nor were we transporting anything questionable. We did think that we were pulled over more often than other vehicles, but chalked it up to their being curious about us and our rig.

[Next: more tips on RV travel in Mexico]

Some images ©www.clipart.com and used with permission.

How (and Why) to Roam Mexico in an RV or Van is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

7. Travel with children – or dogs

Especially in Mexico, where people love children so much, yours will draw a lot of positive attention. I haven’t traveled with kids myself in years, but friends assure me that it works all over the world! When Kelly and I were in Mexico in 1979, we met an American couple because they were traveling with their baby. That woman recently turned up in our lives again… she now lives a few miles from us!

Travel with children.

I do travel with my dogs. We left them home on this trip, but at other times, we’ve had a lot of nice conversations with other dog-lovers – and in my unbiased view, dog-lovers are some of the nicest people!

If you travel with dogs, you will frequently be doing the next method.

8. Go for a walk

Go for a walk.

Naturally, this works best if you walk where other people are out and about. If you are staying in a campground, getting a bit of exercise by circling around it gives you a chance to chat with other campers.

9. Go where people are relaxing

We went to as many balnearios, or hot springs, as we could. We also found people to be talkative in restaurants (after their meal and especially if there was just one person). Going out dancing or sitting in a bar can lead to conversations too.

10. Pay attention to your own feelings

When we arrived in the town of Xico after not having found a place to stay in Xalapa, we drove past a touristy gift-shop sort of place. “I have a feeling to go in there!” I said to Kelly, not knowing if I just needed a break from the hunt for accommodations or what. It turned out that the owner of the shop directed us to a place we loved – and I bought a lovely purple blouse!

Other times, this can work in reverse. One Sunday afternoon, we were swimming and relaxing at a balneario, and many Mexicans were doing the same. Four black-leather-jacketed young men roared in on their motorcycles and settled down to ogle the bikini-clad young women who were everywhere. I was inclined to go chat with the bikers – was going to ask them how the police treated them – but I was tired and also wanted to finish catching up in my journal. So my feeling was to let the opportunity pass, and I did.

11. Be willing to be rebuffed sometimes

It’s nothing personal, but the person may be preoccupied, in a hurry, or just plain unsociable. If I am not sure, I start with a very simple comment and see how they take it. Also, if I am rebuffed and it happens to bother me, I make a point of talking to someone else as soon as possible, so I don’t get discouraged.

12. Ask if you may take their photo, perhaps with a local landmark

This is one area where I am very shy. I don’t like taking pictures without asking permission. So what works best for me is to ask, sometimes if I can take the picture or sometimes if Kelly can take it of them with me.

Ask if you may take a photo. This historical picture must have been taken in the days when you were supposed to look serious.

Kelly, who has worked as a professional photographer, is much more at home taking shots without asking – the wonderful picture of the priest chatting with visitors in the El Chorrito chapter is one result.

13. Seek out people with similar interests

If you have special interests, you can ask hotel, shop, or campground staff if they know people you could talk with. This can often arise spontaneously too. I have a Quaker background, and in one campground I met a man of my generation who had run the Quaker center in Mexico City at one time. Kelly is passionate about alternative building and got into some good conversations on the subject.

14. Go with the flow

This is related to paying attention to your feelings, but it can also be larger than that. Our last day in Bernal is a perfect example. We were quite enthralled with the town, and in the morning we agreed that we would just allow the town to show itself to us in whatever ways it did. This led to our having dinner with the only two Americans living in the town right then, whom we met during the day. One of them sold real estate and was able to give us a good overview of the market there.

15. Get introductions before you leave home

The internet makes this one easier than ever before. If you are a member of any group that might have members where you are going, see if you can email people in advance.

We met Andy Watson and Dorothy Gerhart of San Miguel de Allende this way. They had emailed Kelly at his greenhomebuilding.com website not long before we left home.

16. Travel with an extrovert – or maybe with a group

A friend of mine recently took the train across the U.S. She traveled with a friend of hers who is very outgoing, and they ended up hanging out with a varied group of people.

If you choose to travel to Mexico with a group, such as a tour group, it will be easy to get to know your fellow travelers. Whether this will help or hinder your getting to know the local people depends on the purposes of the trip. Kelly once traveled to the then-Soviet Union with a citizen diplomacy group and he met far more people than he would have if he had gone alone – which was rarely allowed in those days anyway. But in general, if you travel with a group, you will have fewer opportunities to meet the local people.

Here’s a summary of the list you can carry with you for encouragement:

1. Express appreciation
2. Ask questions
3. Smile
4. Offer to help
5. Buy something
6. Learn something of the language and customs
7.Travel with children – or dogs
8. Go for a walk
9. Go where people are relaxing
10. Pay attention to your own feelings
11. Be willing to be rebuffed sometimes
12. Ask if you may take their photo, perhaps with a local landmark
13. Seek out people with similar interests
14. Go with the flow
15. Get introductions before you leave home
16. Travel with an extrovert – or maybe with a group

[Next: pros and cons of RV travel in Mexico]

Some images ©www.clipart.com and used with permission.

Ten More Ways to Meet People is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

The joy of connecting, even when it is brief, can make all the difference in how you feel. I noticed that as I wrote this report, I was smiling most of the way through it, remembering so many good times!

So here is a list of ways to meet people, with examples from our experiences….. Even if you are shy (and I can be at times), you’ll find something you can do!

Meeting people is at the heart of a trip.

1. Express appreciation

It has to be genuine, but that usually isn’t hard – even a happy comment on the weather will get you started.

The first time I noticed the power of appreciation on this Mexican trip was when I went up to the entry desk at El Tajín, the great ruins in the state of Veracruz. It was our second day there, and two men were working at the desk. One of them recognized me from the day before. I told them, in my far-from-perfect Spanish, that I had never seen museum employees who were so interested in their work. That got their attention, as people who go the extra mile get taken for granted all too often. They told me that they were Totonacs, descendants of the people who had created the magnificent ruins. They were so deeply connected with the history that my whole visit there took on a deeper meaning. We talked quite a while longer, and it was one of the most satisfying conversations of the whole trip.

Totonac clay face

After that, I made a point of finding times to express appreciation. (Actually, looking for things to appreciate is a longtime habit of mine, especially when I am a bit down and want to raise my spirits, but expressing it is a different matter.) One time, Kelly and I stopped in a bakery in Xalapa to get some fresh bread and pastries. The bright-eyed elderly man running the place seemed interesting, so I said simply, “We like your city.” He grinned and, tongue in cheek, announced himself the founder of Xalapa. We had a nice, brief conversation.

Here and there in Mexico, the Pemex gas stations are entirely women-run. I always commented on that, how I was glad to see it. Once a woman asked if we had all-women gas stations in the U.S., and when I said I had never seen one, she was pleased that Mexico had something the U.S. didn’t.. Another time, my comment seemed to inflate the war of the sexes (which is alive and well in Mexico anyway). A very dramatic and pretty young woman amused us and her co-workers with a hilarious monologue – with gestures – about how useless men were, except for one thing. She assured Kelly that he was of course the exception!

One last example: when we were at the waterfall in Xico, I was just watching people while Kelly had gone off someplace. For about five minutes, I watched a man playing with a young dog. It made me miss my dogs. After the fellow sat down, I went over and told him how much I enjoyed watching him and the dog. Again, this led to one of the most delightful encounters of the trip.

2. Ask questions

People generally love it when you are interested in something that they can tell you about. When we arrived in Bernal, having only read a brief, disparaging remark about energies there, I wanted to find out more about them. When I noticed a rock shop, I knew that would be the place to ask – leading to the friendship with Ana and Juvenal that I described in the chapter on Bernal, as well as to more understanding of the energies. I continued to ask around town, and once received quite a long lecture on ecology from a shopkeeper!

Asking for help is a variation on this theme. When we were looking for a hotel in Xalapa that had space for our motorhome, we went from one hotel to another. Usually, the people were very kind in suggesting other places we could try. And eventually, much later that day, asking led us to a delightful spot in the small town of Xico nearby.

Often, if you ask for directions in Mexico, people will take you part way, or even all the way. One thing to know about asking directions is that the Mexican desire to be of assistance sometimes means they will give you inaccurate directions. When we were in Ciudad Victoria, our friend John Lowman drove Kelly across the city to find a dentist whose address they had written down. When they returned hours later, they were shaking their heads at how many helpful people had mis-directed them!

These two methods – expressing appreciation and asking questions – are probably the main ones. Do them alone and you’ll have a lot of good connections!

3. Smile

Mexicans make more eye contact with strangers than we do. Sometimes just a passing smile with someone is a very satisfying encounter. I remember:

• a smile I exchanged with a woman in a grocery store as I removed a large stuffed animal that a child had placed in my cart.
• a baby who kept watching me and grinning.
• the deeper sense of connection that I shared through a smile with a woman who was pushing an old man in a wheelchair at El Chorrito, a pilgrimage center.

4. Help someone

Offer to help and you might learn a new skill!

I learned this one from Carl Franz in the marvelous book The People’s Guide to Mexico. He would take on farm work or other activities, thereby learning new skills and making new friends.

My attempts were more modest. When we were stopped for gas at a Pemex in Poza Rica, there were the usual teenage boys who cleaned our windshield with their rags for a small tip. One of them asked how to count in English. He already knew a little, so we went over the numbers from one to twenty while the gas pumped. When it was time to go, his buddy asked how to say adios in English so I told him and we drove away with a cheerful chorus of “Goo-buy!” ringing in our ears. I especially enjoyed this encounter because the kids looked like tough guys when we drove in.

5. Buy something

This makes a natural opening for asking a question or expressing appreciation. As we bought a kilo of peanuts from a market vendor, I asked how things were in Mexico now. He had strong opinions on the subject, and it was interesting to hear his views on how the politicians are stealing from the people.

6. Learn something of the language and customs

The more of a language you know, the more you can converse – that’s a no-brainer. But I think people often don’t realize that when you know nothing of a language to start with, every word you learn can make a big difference. If you know the numbers, the greetings, and some basic questions, you are in much better shape than if you don’t. Also, a number of times, Mexicans who spoke English, whether a little or a lot, enjoyed using their English with us.

One Mexican custom that I just noticed on this trip is the habit of greeting people when you enter a shop or restaurant. I liked how it gives a human touch before you get down to business. You say goodbye or thanks when you leave too.

[Next...ten more ways... ]

Some images ©www.clipart.com and used with permission.

Sixteen Ways to Meet People When You are Traveling is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We own four acres of land in southern New Mexico, so the next day in Deming we enjoyed the pleasures of an American laundromat and did other errands. We treated ourselves to a Mexican lunch and then went out to our land. Kelly dropped me off near the entrance to it and went on to get some water for Cando at a campground nearby. I enjoyed walking in the hot March sun, knowing I would soon be back in cool Colorado.

When I reached our land, I was surprised to see that our simple dirt driveway now had a coating of gravel and road base on it. How strange! Whoever put it there had done a good job, but why? I looked forward to Kelly’s reaction, and while I waited for him, I enjoyed the open miles of chaparral and the views of the nearby mountains. After the ubiquitous trash in Mexico, it was a treat for my eyes not to be looking at plastic bags stuck in the bushes.

Kelly was as puzzled as I was by our nice new driveway, so that evening we set out to ask a neighbor if he had seen anything.

“Oh, yeah, I ran the guy off,” he chortled. “I went over to see what was up, and he thought it was his land. I told him it belonged to some folks from Colorado. When we looked at the maps, I figured out that he had bought land in a completely different area, but the lot numbers were identical. He was planning to put in a storage shed too.”

Poppies were in bloom near our land outside Deming.

“Next time, let him get the well and the swimming pool in!” I quipped.

We camped on our land for a couple of days, and it was the most relaxing time of the whole trip. Wonderful as Mexico had been, I realized that at some level I had always been “up” for whatever we might have to deal with.

Having this time gave us a chance to think about our Mexican journey before we were caught up in the exigencies of daily life at home. What had we learned? For one thing, RV facilities were minimal outside the well-beaten tourist paths. We had strayed from those paths, and finding accommodations had been an ongoing challenge. We had left some of our favorite places in order to find electricity, water, or a dump station.

That had been fine for this trip, which had had an exploratory mood, but I thought that next time – whenever that was – I might rather go to a place with an abundance of RV facilities, such as the Pacific coast, or take buses and then stay in a hotel. In either case, I was more interested in going somewhere and staying put next time. As usual, Kelly had more of a flexible, wait-and-see attitude.

We talked about developing this New Mexico land of ours, as a winter base that would make it easy to go into Mexico. The unexpected gift of the driveway sparked our imaginations, and we pictured a variety of things we might do. Some of them would be pricey, but others wouldn’t be.

As we let our Mexican memories percolate in our minds, we agreed that the trip had been a total success. Even though we had been in Mexico a number of times before, the joyousness of the Mexican people had really reached our hearts this time. We knew that many Mexicans were struggling economically, but there was still a vibrancy to life that we didn’t see in the U.S. Even in our few hours of running errands around Deming, we had noticed the difference.

Did we want to go back to Mexico? Definitely!

Might we want to live there part of the year? Maybe.

That had been one of the questions we had been exploring on the trip. I would want to put a lot of energy into improving my Spanish. It got old not having a good command of the past tense verbs! But both of us were pleased at how much our comprehension of spoken Spanish had improved.

Living outside the United States is not a simple matter. What of house-sitting, beloved dogs and cats, staying in touch with family, running our publishing business? The internet made staying in touch easier, with internet cafes in every town and city. We had not yet found a place in Mexico that had what I considered the perfect mix of foreigners and Mexicans. There were too many foreigners for our taste in San Miguel de Allende, and too few elsewhere.

We still had 10 months on our Mexican RV insurance, sold by the year. I teased Kelly about his frugality, suggesting that would make him find a way to return to Mexico in the coming months.

“Maybe it will,” he grinned. “Will you come with me?”

“In a heartbeat!”

As I finish writing this book, we are back in Colorado. There’s no place like home, and it has been a constant love feast with our cats and dogs ever since our return. It’s good to see our friends again too, and to have long conversations with them in English.

But here we are in late April, and it’s been snowing for hours. I’m homesick for Mexico!

[End of story part. Next: 16 ways to meet people when you travel]

Back in the USA is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Northern Mexico generally does have quite a different flavor from the south. More people have cars, the roads are often wider, the tortillas are flour instead of corn, the population is less dense, and it is generally more prosperous. We stayed in an RV park just south of Ciudad Camargo. It had once been someone’s ambitious project but had deteriorated to a state of disrepair.

The next morning, as we approached the city of Chihuahua, we noticed people walking along the side of the highway. At first we thought maybe a bus had broken down, but soon we realized that it was a pilgrimage. People were walking singly, or more often in small groups, and they were strung out for miles. Most of the people were relatively young, but by no means all. Many were quite heavy. There were a few children, and even some dogs on leash, going along. Mexicans love pilgrimages and accept hardships as part of the process.

Suburbs, Mexican style, in the process of being built in Chihuahua

The periferico, or ring road, around Chihuahua, was the best marked one we had encountered. We circled around the edge of the city, past countless yonkesitos (junkyards… yonke coming from the Mexican pronunciation of “junk”). and repair shops. When a Denny’s appeared shortly after I had begun gazing out for a place to eat, we stopped there. With most items $6 or more, it was an upscale place, and the staff all spoke and understood at least some English. Our meal was less interesting than many in Mexico, but we enjoyed the liveliness of the young people working there. One musical fellow was singing and thumping on the counter along with the cheery Mexican music playing in the background.

On the northern side of Chihuahua, we passed a bicycle race with dozens of riders, sleek costumes and all. They didn’t mind slowing the rest of us down, and sometimes took over both of the two northbound lanes. Just before a toll plaza, they all turned left, heading back toward the city.

The usual way back to the U.S. would be to continue north on the highway and cross the border at Ciudad Juarez/ El Paso. But in keeping with our style of avoiding large cities, and in order to arrive in the part of New Mexico where we had things to do, we left the main highway to go northwest to the city of Nuevo Casas Grandes. Once again, our map book was behind the times – there was a toll road cutoff that made our trip shorter than we expected.

It was fun to return to Nuevo Casas Grandes just about exactly a year after we had been there. That time, we had made a one-week trip by car to the renowned pottery village of Mata Ortiz. There, hundreds of villagers are turning out works in a variety of styles, and most of what we saw was of a finer quality than we had seen anywhere else in Mexico or the American Southwest. As we wandered around, people would ask us, “Do you want to buy pots?” and if we said yes, they would take us into their homes, where pots for sale might be sitting on a sofa or bed, or perhaps displayed in cabinets. I loved the excuse to go into their homes and chat with them, even when their pottery style didn’t appeal to me or I couldn’t afford the $500 and up for the ones I liked the best.

The bedroom we had stayed in when we took our car to Mata Ortiz. There were not enough motel rooms, so villagers rented out spare bedrooms. This was the room of a daughter who was now married.

How did this village become world famous for its high-quality pottery? It’s quite a story. In the 1940s, the village was not a prosperous place. A boy named Juan Quezada only went to school from the age of nine until he was twelve. Gathering firewood, picking fruit for the Mormon farmers in the nearby town of Colonia Juarez, gathering wild honey and other gifts of the land – in these ways the growing boy contributed to the family’s livelihood, but his passion was drawing. He would draw on the walls of his room, experimenting with local minerals to make his paints.

The boy picked up bits of ancient pottery that were everywhere around. He became fascinated with how they were made. With nobody to guide him, he found clay deposits, experimented with making and firing pots, and learned from his many failures. By the time he was married and with a young family, he began to sell a few pots. They were exquisitely made and in the style of the ancient works he had found.

One of Juan Quesada’s sisters selling pots made by her branch of the family, from a spare bedroom

In 1975 Quezada was selling enough pots to local traders that he could afford to take a year’s leave of absence from his job on the railroad, and he never had to go back. With few ways to make money in the village, he began teaching family members his techniques, and from the start the quality of the pots sold was much higher than the folk pottery sold throughout Mexico.

The next year, 1976, anthropologist Spencer MacCallum came across a couple of Juan’s unsigned pots in Bob’s Swap Shop in Deming, NM. He bought them, thinking they were prehistoric, but he was assured by the store owner that they were contemporary. About a month later, he decided to see if he could find the person who had made them. He assumed it would be a woman because the most renowned Southwestern Native American potters are all women, and these pots were so well made. He took photos of the pots with him and went into northern Mexico, showing the photos to anyone he came across – even the police officer who stopped him for speeding! Within a couple of days, he had found his way to Juan Quezada’s home in Mata Ortiz.

A husband and wife pottery team holding a pot we had just bought from them

Later that year, he offered the potter a monthly stipend that enabled Quezada to experiment freely and expand his methods and styles. In the next few years, MacCallum arranged for showings and demonstrations by Quezada and other village potters in the United States, and the fame of Mata Ortiz began to grow. A number of Americans have become involved with the village since then, as traders, authors, arrangers of exhibits, and more. Now there is so much going on that MacCallum publishes a monthly newsletter listing it all! And Juan Quezada is now one of the most famous artists in all of Mexico.

This year we didn’t go out to the village, but our camping guidebook led us to another treat. We first went to a hotel in Nuevo Casas Grandes that had RV facilities, but they only offered a dusty field. This would be our last night in Mexico, and we wanted something special.

Kelly comparing the Pistolero and the Refuge Club, where he grew up

So we drove over to the Pistolero Restaurant, which the guidebook said had allowed RVers to boondock free on its grounds.

We struck paydirt there. The Pistolero was a rustic rock-and-wood building that greatly reminded Kelly of the remodeled nightclub in Idaho that he had grown up in. It was Sunday afternoon, and a small rodeo was going on, right on the restaurant grounds. Everyone was most welcoming, and we had a grand time, going to the rodeo for a while
and later having a good dinner, complete with Mexicans singing karaoke!

We had a very peaceful night there, tucked inside the walled compound of the restaurant. We woke the next morning with mixed emotions at having to leave Mexico. A few hours took us to the border town of Palomas, a town we knew somewhat because we had spent two winters across the border from it, in New Mexico, going to Palomas now and then for dinner, to get eyeglasses, or just to wander around.

Informal rodeo at the Pistolero

Then it had seemed exotic and rather poor. Now it was all quite normal to us. We had lunch in a restaurant, Kelly got a pair of glasses, and I discovered that the pink tourist store had become a much larger emporium of arts and crafts from all over Mexico, with what I thought were good prices considering the distance they had to bring things. The main road was still dusty and full of potholes.

Mexican and U.S. border formalities were brief. Suddenly, we were back from Mexico. Just like that, our Mexican trip was over.

[Next: back in the USA]

Mata Ortiz and Chihuahua is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

The drive north from Matehuala had light traffic and we had a good talk. I raised the question of what the downsides of spending time in Mexico had been for us. Trash all over the landscape, getting used to the traffic, frustrations with the language, and the constant quest to find a place for our motorhome were all we could come up with. As for what we liked? Well, we went on and on. How kind and jolly the people were, how they looked you in the eye, how much beauty there was, the sense of history, the diversity of places to go, the low cost of food, the fun of our Spanish getting better, that neither one of us had gotten sick beyond Kelly being a bit off one day, the relaxing balnearios, the friendships we had made … The list hardly stopped.

We passed huge forests of tall yucca trees, spreading out across a vast valley as far as the eye could see. Then, abruptly, and long before we expected it, we were confronted with a choice between going right to Saltillo and Monterrey cuota (toll) or left to Saltillo free. K pulled over and we read the maps.

They made no sense, so we used our intuition. We both felt to take the left turn, for Saltillo free. Once on it, there was a sign for Zacatecas via Highway 54 and I was able to figure out that we were going west on a minor road that was cutting over to 54, which would enter Saltillo more from the southwest. Then, to my delight, I noticed that we could get to Parras without going through the city of Saltillo at all! The map showed a couple of minor roads going west off Highway 54. We could take those. I patted the little image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that now graced the front of Cando, and sat back to enjoy the ride. For once, the mysteries of Mexican highway signs had worked to our advantage.

Those little back roads turned up, more or less where we expected them to be. They were the emptiest roads that we drove on in Mexico. I was glad we had plenty of gasoline. The land was bare desert, and there were few people or habitations. For a while, traffic was down to seeing another vehicle about once every 20 minutes. Then gradually there began to be orchards. One huge place was ringed with yucca trees, going for miles around its perimeter.

The countryside around Parras, and one of its large pools,
from the rock the church was built on

We were coming into Parras, passing part of its old aqueduct. It had the somewhat more spacious roads that are typical of the North. We stopped and parked in the town, and wandered around for a while, doing a little shopping and getting the feel of the place. Many of the doorways were ancient, and reminded me of where I had once lived in Spain. We stayed north of town at Rincon de Montera, an elegant and virtually empty resort, with a bit of green lawn on the edge of things for RVs.

The wall of thank-you notes to the Virgin for miracles

We stayed over a day, to further explore Parras. One of its landmarks is a church at the top of a hill. The way up was a steep walkway around a rocky core. The church was a sweet little chapel, and next to it was a room where people left notes and pictures of thanks for miracles that had happened. I read one from a young woman in Monterrey, whose pregnancy had been difficult and whose son had been born with asthma, but now he was almost 2 years old and she was giving thanks. Other people had brought their diplomas, or copies of them. There was a poignant photo of a thin woman of about 50 looking right at the camera, from her hospital bed, with Santa Claus next to her. I saw a painting from 1917, and there were earlier ones too.

The view from there was extraordinary, with Parras spread out all around, and fruit orchards also. Goats and burros were grazing on the flanks of the hill, which rose up from a large plateau that was part of the town. The views from the edge of the plateau would have been a nice overlook above the town, but in usual Mexican fashion, it was just poor houses around there. I had a moment’s fantasy of buying a run-down adobe.

A man and a Dalmatian-type dog had come up, but the dog was very lively and the man didn’t want him bounding into the open church, so we all went down together. We chatted a little about the dog and town and why we were there. A moment like this made the town come alive.

In the winery’s tasting room

Later we drove out to Casa Madero, the first winery ever established in the Americas. We took a tour with a Mexican man who had worked there 29 years. We were the only tourists in this tour. He didn’t slow his Spanish down for us, and he had a way of slurring his speech and trailing off, so it was quite a challenge to follow him, but we got the drift. We wished our winemaker nephew was with us. Much of the processing has been automated – they had a new huge Italian machine that they had bought the year before – but the sense of history was palpable. There were wonderful huge old vats, some from the 1700s.

Sunrise in Parras

We added Parras to our list of favorite places. It wasn’t quite as high as Bernal or Xico, but then we hadn’t made as many heart connections here as we had in those towns. We liked it that Parras was closer to the U.S. Maybe we’ll go back again someday. The closer we came to the end of our trip, the more we talked about returning someday.

[Next: Chihuahua and the famous pottery village of Mata Ortiz]

Parras de la Fuente and Its Winery is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

We hated to look at the calendar, but there was no avoiding it: we had to be home in ten days. It was time to get some kilometers behind us…

Most of the road now would be divided highways, with some toll roads. Driving was easier. Happily, even before we had reached the divided roads, I had become much more relaxed about Mexican traffic.

Our first night of this leg of the journey, we stopped at Gogorron, a pretty spa about half an hour off the highway. In the dry and dusty terrain of northern Mexico, its green lawns and huge trees were a welcome sight. In the morning, the birdsong from the canopy of trees overhead was an exquisite wake-up call. As usual, we were the only campers there, but Mexican families were there for the day or overnight, staying in the motel rooms.

Kelly and I had a long soak in one of the lukewarm swimming pools. There were a couple of Mexican families near us, and we watched how the parents treated their children with love, attentiveness, and the usual Mexican jolliness.

We had seen this everywhere in the country, not just at vacation spots. What a contrast it was with our own country, where many parents rarely seemed to experience their kids as delights.

At another hot spring, we had walked along with a middle-aged woman who was selling her homemade candies there. When she heard that we had only one child, she felt sorry for us. (Actually, that one child is my stepdaughter, but I didn’t usually bother telling Mexicans that.) This woman had nine children. Mexico’s population has greatly increased in the last decades, and I’m sure that the love of children which is such a strong cultural trait makes family planning less attractive. But more families are just having a few children now, so that they can provide better opportunities for them. We often saw condoms in stores, and I was told that other methods of birth control were available too. The more educated people are, the smaller their families tend to be.

Balnearios are everywhere in Mexico.

On our way back to the highway the next day, we stopped in front of a modern grocery store in a small town. I went in to buy a few things, and was surprised to be greeted in fluent English. Two brothers owned the store, and had just built it from their savings after working some 15 years in California and Chicago. They enjoyed using their English with me. I asked them where they would rather be – in Mexico or in the U.S. One brother said, a little regretfully, that now they were going to be here, where their extended family was. He had a wife and two young daughters he didn’t want to be parted from. But, as so many Mexicans who have worked in the U.S. told us, he liked it better there.

Further north on the highway, I saw a new-looking sign for Rio Verde, a town that had been recommended to us, with a wonderful lake near it. The map book showed a dotted line where a new highway was planned. Well, the highway now existed (at least at this end), and it wouldn’t take us many hours to get over there. We contemplated our options. Regretfully we agreed not to add more driving to go to a place we wouldn’t have time to stay long. But maybe next year…

[Next: we explore Parras de la Fuente and its winery]

Northward from San Miguel is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Andy Watson and Dorothy Gerhart at Karacadir,
a center for sustainable development

Kelly has a website, greenhomebuilding.com, which discusses all aspects and forms of sustainable architecture, and before our trip Andy and Dorothy had emailed him. When Kelly told them we would soon be in Mexico, they were most welcoming. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for wanting to connect with them, we might have skipped San Miguel. We hadn’t much liked it when we were there a couple of times before. I liked it better this time, and felt that I got more to its heart.

Andy and Dorothy took us out to their land. Their first three-week earthbag building workshop had just ended, and they were exhilarated from the empowering effect it had had on the students, who were both foreign and Mexican. In particular, there had been three young Mexican single mothers, who had been greatly affected by the event. Andy and Dorothy doubted that the women would actually build houses as a result of the workshop, but thought they would contribute to their communities is other ways — perhaps a wall, or a shift in attitude.

We talked long into one night with Andy and Dorothy. They have lots of visions and plans, and a realistic awareness of the challenges involved. Luckily, they both like challenges! It will be fun to see what develops at Karacadir.

A pleasant walkway

As for San Miguel, I gradually came to see it in a new light. I can imagine spending time there again. Particularly if I were going without Kelly for some reason, perhaps to take an intensive language course, it would be an easier place to be than one with only a few foreigners.

No longer just another pretty little Mexican city, San Miguel de Allende has become a kind of portal between Mexico and the rest of the world. It is the place where many Americans and other foreigners get their first taste of Mexico. Institutions such as the Allende Institute and the Biblioteca Publica (Public Library) have the flavor of being a cultural blend. Beyond the unpleasant stereotypes of pretentious and/or dissolute foreigners lies a whole complex world, a place where alternative builders, midwives, artists, and others – both Mexican and foreign – blend creativity in a variety of exciting projects.

[Next: heading north and finding a pleasant hot spring]

Karacadir, Near San Miguel de Allende is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Right away, I did both.

San Miguel de Allende is a very livable small city, cradled in rolling hills, with much of the city built in traditional architecture. Like nearby Guanajuato and a number of other cities in Mexico, there are restrictions on modern buildings, at least in the center of town, and this creates a very pleasing look. San Miguel is clean and prosperous, with a number of small parks and beautiful old churches.

The city is an art center, due to the longtime existence of the world-famous Allende Institute, which offers classes in drawing, painting, lithography, and other arts. There are numerous galleries, along with the pretension that an arts scene often seems to include. The Allende Institute and several other places offer Spanish-language courses for people at all levels of skill, and many people come here to take those.

San Miguel’s main plaza, called the Jardin (Garden)

Everywhere you go in downtown San Miguel, you see foreigners. Americans, Canadians, Europeans – mostly older (guess Kelly and I included there!), many quite old. And in line with Juvenal’s image of the place, I mistook a huge liquor store for the grocery store I was looking for!

San Miguel has a reputation for being one of the more expensive places for a foreigner to live in Mexico, and certainly the number of upscale restaurants was far beyond what we saw elsewhere. To buy a home in San Miguel can be quite expensive, and we read ads of palatial homes for rent or sale, for huge sums. But it seemed to me that if you had the self-control, you could live about as modestly here as elsewhere. There are low priced restaurants, and in many parts of the city, the foreign presence is not dominant. We met an American couple who were renting a charming two-bedroom apartment on a quiet dead-end street in a peaceful suburb, with a rooftop with lovely views, for $175/month on a one-year lease. Utilities only added a modest amount.

Riding a city bus one day, I asked a local Mexican woman how the Mexicans felt about so many foreigners living in the city. I didn’t expect she would be anything but diplomatic, but her enthusiasm surprised me. The income is very welcome, and it seemed that she found the foreigners interesting.

The courtyard of the Public Library

Another San Miguel landmark is the Biblioteca Publica, or Public Library. It is not like a public library at home, in that it has no government funding. But it has a collection of thousands of books, in both English and Spanish. They can be checked out, if you a small membership fee. The library raises money in a variety of ways, through book sales, a gift shop, a cafe, and its popular weekly tours of upscale San Miguel homes.

I found the librarian at his desk on a Saturday afternoon. Like many librarians, he had books stacked everywhere in his office, and he was in the process of cataloging the pile on the middle of his desk. As I have been a library director myself, we compared notes pleasantly for a while, and when I said that we were thinking of spending more time in Mexico, he said gallantly that he hoped it would be in San Miguel – and that I would volunteer at the library. I assured him that if I did spend time here, I would be glad to help out. Many of the activities of the library are done by foreign volunteers.

One of the most impressive programs is the creation of school libraries for the many small schools in the surrounding countryside. Typically, those schools might only have a few textbooks, but the Biblioteca Publica has donated small collections of some 200 books to over 300 of these rural schools. Aside from the costs of acquiring the books, it is not an easy matter to get the books out to the schools — there were photos of a VW van on rugged dirt roads.

I left the Biblioteca Publica with my heart full. Later, I read in the weekly San Miguel English-language newspaper about squabbling on the Library Board, something I have encountered in my own career. People are people everywhere!

[Next: more around San Miguel ]

San Miguel de Allende, Where Americans Abound is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico