Once I invited two college-age girls to go with me to Leon for a rodeo and fair. It was a bus trip of a few hours from Queretaro, where we were living and going to university, to Leon. Every week, starting on Thursday, I would take a bus and travel all over Mexico without reservations or familiarity. It’s one thing when you’re willing to risk your own life, which is how I lived at that time, but these two inexperienced young girls might have deserved better… anyway, I digress.

Having accepted my invitation, we arrived at the bus station and we hopped in a taxi. My MO was to choose a hotel from my handy, dandy travel book; usually (emphasis on usually) it worked out fine. No reservations or planning ahead for me. Giving the name of the hotel to the taxi driver, he asked me if I was sure about my destination, explaining that he could take me to a better place, intimating that what I had chosen was not very “safe”. But, like a good taxista, he took me where I wanted to go. I thought that this hotel was not one in which he had a deal.  I insisted that I knew what I wanted.

When we arrived, he ran into the entrance ahead of me warning the front desk that, “She speaks Spanish”. Taxi drivers get kickbacks for taking tourists to certain hotels. These might be owned by family or friends or are strictly speaking, “a negocio”, business, as usual.

The lobby was maybe 16ft by 16ft with a low ceiling. A man was running a wet mop around the floor. Behind the desk was a woman who was the epitome of a Spanish madam. She was in her 60s, hair pulled back tightly in a bun at the back of her neck, eyebrows plucked into high coal-black arches over large saggy brown eyes, ringed in black eyeliner and deep red lipstick. She sat rod straight with her dress pulled tightly across her ample body, revealing a large bosom and bloated stomach. She looked at us with a side-long glance and raised her expressive eyebrows as if confused and a little like she smelled something rotten. She gave us a price and a room. I paid up front. A woman in her 40s and two teenage girls? Not suspicious at all.

Marcelina (a fictitious name) handed me a key and sent us alone into a maze of dark hallways with single bare bulbs, hanging from frayed wires, to light our way. I should have walked out right then, but I was not one to run from a sketchy situation.

We found our room. The room number was scratched into the door jam, apparently, with a knife blade. The slatted door was not secure, having gaps on all four sides, not unlike most of the places I stayed. OK, so this is a bit more sketchy than I liked.

It was dark in the room. I blindly searched for and clumsily found the chain hanging from the one dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. The one window was nailed shut and covered with a dust-covered shutter hanging by one nail. The one bed… for the three of us… was dirty and stained and the room smelled of smoke, mildew, and Pinesol. The bathroom was, as is usual in Mexico, a “wet” bathroom, meaning a shower head came out of the wall with no surrounding glass or curtain. There was no toilet seat, also normal in Mexico, and no toilet paper, also not unusual. The walls were moldy and the wastebasket had not been emptied. In most of Mexico, one does not flush anything down the toilet but human waste. Their septic systems cannot handle anything more. I dared not look in the waste basket’s direction. Besides the bare lightbulb hanging in the room, there was another in the bathroom hanging from exposed wires. Still, I was not deterred. The cockroaches were nowhere to be seen… yet.

After a few minutes, we’d had enough of looking around, so we decided to take our backpacks with us and set off for the fair. We had a great time watching vaqueros on dancing horses and wranglers wrestling calves to the ground and dancing to music played by mariachi bands. We ate spicy tacos and hot, sweet churros and drank beer and tequila.

We returned to our room quite late. It became obvious on the taxi ride back to our hotel, that we were staying in the red light district. As we entered, a man sat at the desk… the entrance was dark except for very dim light. He greeted us with a curt, “hola”, without looking up.

Walking down the dark hallways we sensed that we were probably in danger, at the least of being robbed. We were dusty from all day at the dry, and dusty fairgrounds and greasy from too many tacos and sticky from the churros but none of us was willing to undress to shower. We huddled on the bed with our backpacks, talking until the two exhausted girls stretched out, no longer able to stay awake.

I sat up all night as men knocked on our door, men whistled strange bird-like calls, footsteps continued in the hallway all night, doors opened and closed, there were an occasional scream and a crash or two and loud voices and the knocking on doors continued. I could see activity outside our door through the slats. I hoped that no one would come crashing through.

Eventually, the morning came. We had “slept” in our clothes and were wrinkled and dirty, not even having brushed our teeth. We dragged ourselves off the bed and into the hallway, grateful that we had survived the night. I returned the key to the desk and the “madam” was there again. She asked how we had slept, with an odd, half smile on her lips… more of a snarled sneer. I’m sure she had seen worse of what she was imagining had gone on in our room… a perverted middle-aged woman and two teenage girls.

We found a cafe for fresh orange juice and coffee before we caught the bus back to Queretaro. We were tired and dirty. I had an unforgettable time. Needless to say, Gabby and Malia never traveled with me again. After one adventure with me, no one ever asked for a second trip. But I delivered them safely home, no worse for the wear and maybe a bit wiser.

I was normally a lone traveler. That didn’t bother me at all. I often slept in open air bus stations, my backpack as my pillow. I would hop a bus heading, I didn’t care where. I would end up where the sea was different shades of green and blue; I walked on white, hot sand and lounged under waving palm trees. I felt that if I died, I would die happy.

I don’t travel like that anymore. I’m now 20 years older and I like my comfort and security… and a pool and showers and lights and toilet seats and toilet paper and a clean bed and relatively quiet and no cockroaches. Gawd, I’ve gotten boring in my old age. LOL.😛

Stay tuned for more true story adventures on Mexican Memories.