Borders

I strolled around San Diego’s Gas Light Quarter. The place bustled with Saturday night revellers. Everywhere was awash with the swirl of neon lighting advertising sports bars, pavement cafes and take aways, steak bars, Latin American cuisine and deep fried Louisiana or Chinese chicken.

Cycle rickshaws ferried people from establishment to establishment.

I pottered around Fifth Street’s Classic Cars show room and stroked a bonnet or two of collector’s items from decades before. I compared the asking prices of a 1965 Mercedes Benz, a 1955 Ford Thunderbird and  a 1956 pink Cadillac Deville (all engineless and priced at around $9,500) with that of a more modern 2000 silver Aston Martin at a cool $126,000.

Next door, in a sports bar, giant screens showing baseball, basketball and American football games surrounded me. I drank a pitcher of beer, played a short game of guess whether entrants to the establishment would get asked for their ID (strictly only 21s across the USA), ate a complementary bar snack of corn chips with salsa and went to sleep off some of the looming jet lack.

I thought that my night in San Diego was going to give me a taste of what lay in wait the other side of the Mexican border, just half an hour away by trolley bus. I could not envisage life being much different. The globally all pervading culture of the USA was not going to come to a sudden halt, once I crossed over one of the busiest border points in the world into Tijuana. The influence of the Yankee Dollar would, I’m sure, seep down a lot further south into the Americas.

At Tijuana airport I bought a ticket, for the three hour trip to Guadalajara. I priced the flights at several different airline desks, where the only language spoken was Spanish. The food in the restaurant did not resemble anything like the fast food from the previous night, it was, well traditional Mexican. Perhaps equally as telling, the restaurant TV carried a transmission of a football game from Mexico City – not American football, but good old soccer. The omens were good.

The plane followed the coastal path down the Baja peninsula for a couple of hours. Beaches and sandstone coloured mountains dominated. However, apart from occasional small fishing village, populated areas of any note were non-existent.

I realised before entering Mexico that it was a vast country. But viewed from the atlas, the way in which its long tail sweeps around to the right can be deceptive. And of course there are not may countries which have internal flights of four hours (you could fly from London to Moscow in this time). So staring out of the window at the barren mass of land provided a strong reminder that the majority of the population only occupied a small proportion of the country’s land mass.

Indeed, I was to spend many hours over the next month travelling by land or air, across wilderness, witnessing little more than sporadic settlements. But then, on reaching the top of the rim of a volcanic basin, voila, over the edge, down in the crater below would be a vast city.