Tourist Safety in Mexico and the Best Mexican Auto Insurance Policy!

This is a true first hand account of adventure travelers from Pennsylvania driving to Mexico and other Central America countries during 2011 and the summer of 2012. This chronicle is distributed by Mexicaninsurancestore.com purveyors of high quality low-cost Mexican auto insurance policies. Remember in order to find the best Mexican auto insurance policy you need to purchase coverage online. Policies sold at the border are many times over priced, bare bones auto insurance policies backed by unrated Mexican insurance companies. The author thanks us your our help, and then addresses Tourist safety issues in Mexico.(To Mexicaninsurancestore.com ) btw — you might remember, before we departed Texas to cross the Rio, I was a nervous wreck talking to you about whether to “plunge” into the mad-crime world of Mexico. We stayed on the cuota roads around the big cities, kept to the countryside in rural areas, and never once felt threatened.

If further testimony is needed as to the fleeting of time, it has already been more than a week — Wednesday afternoon, Jul 27th, eighteen months and some days, and lots and lots of miles, some of them implausibly bone-jarring, later, and we made it back into Pennsylvania.
Like an old horse straining at its traces, the Roadtrek screeched down Greentree Hill, plunged into that brief twinkling of darkness, then burst through the Fort Pitt tunnels , to the forks of the Ohio River and into that spasm of steel, aluminum and glass (that are responsible for a lot of bird collision-kills) that Pittsburgh calls the Golden Triangle.
It was a short run up the Monongahela River to Kinsman Road, and w a sense of glee, relief and elation, Linda and I looked at each other, hugged, and knew we and the puppies were HOME!
The trip was an awesome experience. We had lots of fun – saw breathtaking displays of parrots, toucans, quetzals, sixteen species of owls, birds of every color and description; animals, insects, plants and aquatic creatures of incredible variety; wore ourselves out many times, got so many leg cramps, sore everything (“too tired tonight(s)),” numerous times caught in thundering cloudbursts and soaked to the gills; slipped on our asses on slick, steep trails, where, even when someone said, “Be careful,” someone else still ended up on their muddy butt!
We sweltered shirt loads of sweat, sometimes taking off a shirt, wringing it out, then wringing it again, until you just walked with it in humid sea level mangrove trails and under dank forest canopies; were up at 11,000+ overcast feet (more than two miles), and suddenly got caught in bright sunshine and burned to a crisp, including eyelids, ears and lips (no kisses for Jer {ouch!} for two weeks); got stung, bitten and chewed to pieces by every type of creature that can crawl, walk, slither or fly ( I had so many holes chewed into me after one thoughtless foray into the real “jungle,” in shorts and flippers, I looked like I’d taken shotgun blasts at close range from both sides. Ohhh, that was nasty (where’s the Caladryl?), for almost a month!
And the people – the locals (every type of mix and tribe imaginable), odd-ball, or wonderful, absolutely lovely extra-nationals (foreigners living there), the tourists – doing every crazy thing, like driving from Argentina (arriving by boat from Colombia); bicycling from Alaska (really, but he accepted rides); coming from Germany to Nova Scotia with some type of armored car like right out of the panzerkorps ( those Krauts, always prepared –NOBODY was going to screw w that guy), and driving the entire Western Hemisphere; trekkers, hikers, bikers, snorkelers, scuba types, surfers galore, and people just hanging out in the jungles or beaches, you name it, there was somebody everywhere doing something, so our “Trek,” might even seem mild by comparison. Then there were the hitchhikers (including those poor kids when their bus broke down, and we had to forsake them – for you male readers who might remember that tragedy); the few sharpies; the many great, nice-guy bird guides we engaged in various places (I’m sure the two of us and the puppies drove THEM crazy, but we had a good time).
The various receptions we received by different peoples, and individuals at every juncture ran the gambit of everything you can conjecture of humanity. We were in large cities w no road signage except some obscure local landmark and a packed highway of cars would come to a halt, and I’d jump out of the machine w a map and frenetically attempt to ask someone how to get to Incommunicado, or Wherever. Invariably, someone would yell in his best Central Casting accent, “Hey Moun. Werrr you whant to go?” They would point out the roads w glee, sometimes proud to show the others they spoke English (a rare occurrence countries-wide), and then proclaim, “I used to work in (fill in the lower Forty-eight), until they kicked me out . . . .” And you would look at this person, and then the illegal immigrant suddenly had a face, and he was smiling helpfully at you.
I’d wave them goodbye and go on to the next maddeningly ambiguous intersection.
Sometimes we’d ask for directions, and people would drive us there, waving down the last street. So we encountered many warm and humanistic experiences.
Then we could be in an indigenous village and we’d ask a direction, and had people coldly stare through us with an antipathy that was calculable, or we’d ask someone the road to Buttphuque, and by the vacuous response we knew they’d probably never been out of their village, and Saturn may as well have been around the next bend.
More often though, when we’d arrive in some small indigenous village, miles from nowhere, and to which most people would travel in a high clearance, balloon-tire truck, or more often, on a horse, people would gather round and just stare. I’d get out to ask for another, probably even more dauntingly obscure “road” up to some mountain top or side of a volcano or wherever, looking for the last known location for so many desperate species pathetically clinging to survival, and these people would look at the gleaming white (don’t ever buy that color for an outdoor vehicle, it sucks, and shows you off for miles) machine and the two of us. And it was if we had arrived from the moon.
And as far as they were concerned, we were from another world; one of affluence and wonder, with expensive gadgets and recording and playback devices for birds, and these other toys of which they could only wonder. But you might also find an internet café where people were connecting to the web, and the absolutely beautiful little children walking in droves to their schools, so it seems the world is tying itself together through cyberspace.
Other anomalies presented themselves. The US apparently sends south a lot of used clothing, through charitable and church groups, and they sell them through these Pacas, used clothing stores. So there would be these little rural teen hotties who somehow come to know the same styles as their City Cousins, strolling down these earthen village streets in those DKNY, or Abercrombie, or those fancy French or Italian names I never see at Sears. Racially, many look Chinese or Asiatic in their features, and it is easy to make a connection of the land bridge that once must have spanned the Bering Strait (the waterway between Siberia and Alaska). They seem to have an interesting DNA mix, and it has occurred to me that those who possess Spanish blood must have a few genes of Arabic. The Moors ( Iago from Shakespeare) occupied Iberia (the peninsula of “Spain and Portugal) for some hundreds of years until finally driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 (which enabled them to hastily recall a particular Genoan seafarer already on his way to the French court seeking ships and money to find the Spice Islands from the west, because he had the peculiar notion the world might be round). Those Moors seem to possess those huge almond eyes and black features that give them their own striking look when they are not driving planes into buildings or otherwise creating mayhem. The genetic result sometimes seems those little chippies were an exotic cross between Kim Khardashian and Jay- Lo.
School buses. One of the mesmerizing highway features were the profusions of American school buses. There must be some kind of law here they can only be used here in the US to haul our dear young scholars for so many miles, then have to be arbitrarily retired, because there are zillions of old American school buses still surviving everywhere in CA. Some are still the cattle-car yellow in to which they were born, but more likely they have been re-decorated with every hue and color of paint and decorated w lights like a profusion of Christmas tree lights by folks w a bad eye for color schemes. They are often adorned w the names of the driver’s latest love, or praise to the Almighty. These giant behemoths run the road like mad bulls at all hours of the day. I swear the drivers must be high on whatever gets them going, or overdosed on testosterone and caffeine, because they almost roar right at you and DARE you to get out of the way; and you better! The way vehicles tailgate each other, especially the buses and huge trucks on those sometimes narrow precipitous roads made it a miracle how there wasn’t an accident every other mile.
The venerable Roadtrek looks like it went through a few tank battles with Patton and finally ran out of ammunition. I’m sure yet another huge bill looms to try to restore it yet again to some semblance of its original elegance. We lost a few more pieces of metal from the underside, and the rest is strung w wire and duct tape to keep things temporarily together. But it performed heroically in getting us down through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua Costa Rica and Panama, chris-crossing the various isthmuses and mountains ranges numerous times, and on to some incredible places, finally driving to the “end of the Road,” and back. Scott Holden, Roadtrek’s chief of Service Operations, up in Ontario, was great in helping keep us on the road, and is worth whatever they pay him, and probably a lot more.
I’ve previously written copious pages about various aspects of life from the Rio Grande to the Canal, and could probably write another ten times that, but I have to get my butt back to work, paying taxes, and keeping the government afloat, so although this started out as just a brief, joyous announcement, that to the dismay of too many, I got my sorry *ss back home in one piece. But as you well know, I never know when to shut-up, so rambled this missive, just like when I needed those college essays (10 pages, and no crimping the margins) back-when to finish school,
And we are hopeful Sammie the cock-a-poo does not appear to have a major illness, and hopefully just had a serious infection for a bit and will recover.
On more than one occasion, we were stopped on some village lane, and little kids would run up, gaze into the machine and spy us, and shout, “Gringos!” (I’m not making any of this up. If anything I’ve downplayed much of the crazy stuff that happened ). Once we were in a little village with a guide guy (these are local folks usually trained by an organization from the US helping to create jobs and economic opportunities from the protection of nature, and often marvelously well-schooled in the bird songs and habits, so opened doors for us to find more some rare or elusive skulkers) and some kids came running up, stared, giggled, then ran off.
We looked at him in surprise, and he said, “They don’t see white people very often. They like to get a good look at them.”
After that, I told Linda to practice her best vacuous, parade-float wave as we traversed little villages.
. . . and finally . . .
. . . .
{long pause}, should I say this . . . ?
Okay, here it is – I’m in a supermarket of some kind, in a country I’m not even sure of anymore (“In a country where they turned back time . . . ?”), and there is this local thirty-something watching me, sort-of following me around, and then she starts talking me in English. At first, she’s saying she wants to learn English better because it will help her, she wants to get a better job. And all this time she has been looking at me kind of funny, and then she suddenly blurts, “You have beautiful eyes. I’d like them for a baby (honest, I SWEAR I’m not making this up). “
Well even an old has-been like me can be flattered; she was kind of a cutie. But I wanted to warn her, blue eyes and recessive genes did not give her a real good chance, but even worse – her kid could end up w the face!
I’ve heard a few crazy things in my life, but not quite packaged in this manner, and as I was thinking of exactly what to say (Linda was still getting yogurt and cheese somewhere), she sweetly followed up