December 2009

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No country for old men II

Things are bad in Mazatlan. The streets are flooded. There is debris everywhere. The roads are littered with downed trees, power lines, billboards, canopies, and just tons of crap. There is no electricity. Which means none of the traffic signals work so it’s like bumper cars. You come to a busy intersection and just hope the people in the other lanes aren’t also going to attempt to cross. There are no policemen out. So driving is just pandemonium. And because there is no electricity, the gas stations are all closed. And you have only enough fuel for maybe another thirty or forty miles. But you keep going.

Because almost all the road signs have been blown over, it is almost impossible to tell where you’re going. At one point you realize that you have taken a road going east, towards Durango, and have to backtrack. The rain is worse. The wind is worse. The car rolls back and forth like a boat on high seas. When a truck goes by in the opposite direction, it throws off a wave of water five or six feet high, hitting the windshield like high surf, blinding you for a few treacherous seconds. Just when you start to think that you are for sure going to run out of gas and really be fucked, there is a PEMEX and, miracles of miracles, they have power. You tell the attendant in the yellow storm suit to jam as much fuel into the car as he can and he keeps pumping it until gas starts spilling out of the car.

And for some odd reason, getting gas makes the ENGINE LIGHT go out. Was the gas cap not on tight? Vapor lock? Water in the fuel? Who knows. But at least now you won’t have to stare at that cyclops light anymore. You get through Tepic, where the jungle really starts, and even though it is still thundering rain, you allow yourself to think you’re going to make it.

Following less than a hundred feet behind another car, the two of you weave and dance your way through the jungle. It’s an unbelievable scene. Hillsides have come down, blocking at least one and sometimes the better part of both lanes. There are distressed vehicles everywhere. Trucks left abandoned right in the middle of the road. Cars in ditches. And everywhere there is debris, mostly huge tree limbs but also sometimes the whole tree. In a few places there are work crews, out in the rain with chainsaws, trying to get crap out of the road. If you’re lucky there might be a guy standing in yellow rain gear in the middle of the road waving an orange flag to slow you down, but sometimes you just come around the corner and SHIT! there’s a tree in the road or four or five guys trying to push some limbs into the ditch.

The Bay of Banderas the morning after the storm. Photo by David Lansing.

The Bay of Banderas the morning after the storm. Photo by David Lansing.

And just as you’re starting to think that the Virgin of Guadalupe must be watching over you, keeping you from crashing, you go around a corner and there is a fallen tree across the road. The car you’ve been following slams on the brakes and starts spinning around and around, like it is on ice, until it slams sideways into the rock wall of the mountain. Of course, you jump on your brakes as well (not a good idea) and start spinning as well. And it’s all like a slow-motion dance. You somehow avoid the crashed vehicle sticking out into the road and then spin to the right just barely avoiding an on-coming pickup. And then your car stops. Sideways in the middle of the road. Untouched.

Everybody stops. Everybody gets out. The family in the crashed car is okay, although the little kids are crying. Some of the other drivers take off their shirts and start waving them to slow traffic and keep people from crashing into you. And then there are a bunch of men, again appearing out of nowhere, and they somehow manage to lift the crashed vehicle out of the ditch and back on the road. The side of the car is beat up pretty bad, but the front is okay and the engine starts. People get back in their vehicles and everyone goes off on their way. As if absolutely nothing had happened. So you get back in your car and leave as well. What else can you do?

You drive five, maybe six miles, your hands shaking on the steering wheel, before you realize that there’s something wrong with the car. It won’t accelerate. Even with your foot all the way down on the accelerator you’re only doing twenty, maybe twenty-five. And you can smell something hot and burning and rubbery. Whisps of smoke rise up from beneath the hood. Fortunately, there’s a PEMEX station before long. When you stop, clouds of acrid white smoke billow out from the side of the engine. It smells like burnt rubber. The gas station guys come over and say it’s the brakes. They say there is no mechanic here, that you will have to go into the campo, five, maybe six miles ahead.

So while the car cools, you tell them to fill it with gas while you stand in the rainstorm thinking about how close you are. Maybe only an hour away. Why does this have to happen now? When you finally get the courage to start the car, it rolls okay again, although there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of brakes. But what the hell. You have to keep moving forward, finish the drive even if you don’t have any brakes. So for the next hour, up and down the mountainous jungle road, in a tropical storm, you push the beast through the jungle without once using the brakes. If you go around curva peligrosa, you just hang on and hope you’re going to make it. If you start to pick up speed going downhill, you pray you’ll slow somehow before coming to the next curve. It is, to say the least, incredibly nerve wracking.

And then you make the last curve, come out of the jungle, and practically roll to a stop in front of your house. Eleven hours of driving, fourteen inches of rain, forty to sixty mph winds, car crashes, downed power lines, geese through windshields, no brakes—but you are here.

You sit on the balcony drinking the largest margarita imaginable, watching the lighting and the rain over the Bay of Banderas, feeling the thunder when it rattles the windows behind you. Just holding the drink in your hand gives you a charley horse in your thumb or the back of your hand or your forearm. Places you didn’t even know you could get a charley horse, the result of gripping the steering wheel a little too tightly for a little too long. And you can’t stop shaking. It is like you have a high fever. So that you have to use two hands to bring the drink to your mouth to keep from spilling it. You’re watching the lightning and you keep seeing images of the power lines sparking on the highway and the wild bird going through the windshield of the car in front of you and you miraculously spinning around and around as your car danced it’s way past the crashed vehicle against the side of the hill. Forgetting all about dinner, you make yourself one more drink and then fall into bed with your clothes still on and when you awake the room is hot and steamy and sun is streaming through the gauzy white curtains. Thirteen hours of sleep. Nevertheless, you roll over and close your eyes. And fall back into a narcotic-like sleep. For hours.

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No country for old men

This is how it happens. This is how one gets in trouble. You decide that rather than take the direct route, the easy road, you’ll wander off track a bit, let yourself roam, look for that dusty little store near the church in Guadalupe where you found the retablos years ago, not knowing what the name of the shop is or if it’s even still there, and then you get a little lost, because there are no signs out here, just ridiculously narrow tracks meandering one way and then another, and you can’t find the shop, can’t even find the church, and suddenly it is getting late, late enough that you’re a little shocked when you realize it will soon be dark and you don’t even know where you are so you get that little panicked feeling, that tightness in the chest that comes from realizing you are an idiot, even more so because you’ve forgotten to pay any attention to how much gas you have, and it isn’t much.

But wait! Wait, wait, wait! Isn’t there a hotel you’ve stayed in around here, a little place with a restaurant that serves good chile rellenos and a security guard at night who looks after the parking lot? And then your luck comes back because the road starts to look vaguely familiar, the fields and the tall cypress trees, and then there it is, the hotel up ahead on the left, just as the last of the deep orange light drains from the sky.

The night sky at my hotel just before all hell broke loose. Photo by David Lansing.

The night sky at my hotel just before all hell broke loose. Photo by David Lansing.

The food in the restaurant isn’t as good as you’d remembered or maybe the cook has changed, and it seems a little more forlorn than the last time you were here, the room a little mustier, the carpet more frayed. Plus you’d forgotten that the train tracks (evidently there are trains in this part of Mexico) are just across the street from the hotel and just as you’ve gotten to sleep, there’s an earthquake. At least, that’s what it feels like when the freight train rumbles by shortly after midnight. You just get back to sleep when the rain and wind start, not heavy, but steady, the rain peppering the windows and the courtyard palm trees slapping around in the inky night. You can’t go back to sleep as the storm intensifies and so around four a.m. you give up, take a shower, decide to hit the road, hoping to get to Mazatlan while it was still early in the day.

It is so dark out. No lights anywhere. And because of the rain, which has intensified, hard to even see the road in front of you. The further west you go, the heavier the rain and wind become. You slow to forty and then thirty and even that seems too fast when you hit low spots where the water has collected and the car starts to swivel and shake, as if it were dancing.

And then you start hitting the potholes. Potholes, potholes, POTHOLES! Not little potholes but potholes the size of bathtubs and just as deep. There are long stretches of them, one after another, and you grip the wheel tightly as you try to straddle them, sometimes making it, sometimes not, always a vicious, jarring smack when a wheel slips into the black hole, and sometimes, a quarter mile or so later, there’d be a Mexican car on the side of the road, its driver standing in the rain looking at a shredded tire. And sometimes there would be a truck, its emergency lights weakly warning you away from it, stalled in the slow lane, an axle broken and its tires splayed like a ballerina in a toes-out position. And the winds are now so high that all kinds of crap is sailing sideways through the sky at you—ripped branches, pieces of woods, parts of billboards. They smack into the side of the car as you grimace and think, Shit, what the hell was that.

And that’s when you notice that the Check Engine light is on. So now you’re driving in the dark, in a pelting rain storm, with high winds, and the red engine light staring at you from the middle of the dashboard like the angry eye of a cyclops, warning of impending doom. And, of course, this just happens to be the nastiest stretch of road on the trip, where you can go 100-150 miles without seeing a single PEMEX station or anything else for that matter. But you’re pretty sure you’ve got enough fuel to make it to Mazatlan, maybe, and so decide to just keep going—what are your choices?—and hope the car doesn’t die on you out here in the middle of nowhere.

Maybe the sun is up at this point but you’d never know it because it’s still as dark as night. And the closer you get to the coast, the worse things get. The rain is now falling literally sideways, hitting the driver’s side window so hard (like paint balls) that it starts to leak inside the car. You’re only going twenty-five now but there is almost no visibility and sometimes the fields and pastures on both sides of the highway are so deep in water that they have flooded the road and you have to slow the car to a crawl as you come up to what looks like a lagoon but should be the highway and hope that it’s not too deep to cross and that there is actually a road beneath all that water.

And now the landscape is getting so bizarre that you feel like you’re in the middle of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Four or five Brahmann bulls, with sad humps riding over their shoulders, stand helpless in a flooded field, stuck in mud that goes all the way up to their shoulders, their heads, less than a foot above water, lifted up to the flooding sky to keep from drowning.

There are highway signs, twenty feet wide, that have blown over and are covering the road. Peasant houses are completely blown over, flattened into the mud. At one point the road completely disappears beneath the stream of water flowing everywhere so you follow close behind a beat-up farm car creeping along at less than twenty mph. Something catches your eye and you look up, through the blurry windshield, and see a flock of black geese swirling counter-clockwise, like something out of the tornado scene in the Wizard of Oz, and one of the geese, twirling and twirling in the wind, slams into the windshield of the farm car ahead of you, completely blowing out all the glass. You stop and run through the rain and the wind to the Mexican car, which looks like it has been in a head-on collision. The dead goose is splayed all over a woman in the passenger seat. She can’t move and she can’t stop screaming and there is glass in her hair, face—everywhere. You help the woman out of the car and try to brush away the glass, cutting your fingers, and there is blood all over the woman’s face and you can’t tell if it is from the goose or from her because she won’t stop crying and won’t take her hands away from her face.

And then there are other people there, you don’t even know where they’ve come from, they seemed to have just appeared out of the sky like the black geese, and the woman is helped into a pickup truck and the man climbs into another vehicle and suddenly everyone is gone, the destroyed farm car half on, half off the highway, the windshield wiper weakly waving back and forth like a hand where the windshield used to be and the blood from either the goose or the woman washing over the dirty seat and out the open door of the car.

Just before Mazatlan, you watch as a thirty- or forty- foot tree is uprooted and falls towards the highway just in front of you. It’s thick canopy snaps the first string of power lines but the second string stops the tree from hitting you, though it pushes the power pole to a ninety degree angle. In your rear-view mirror, you watch as the downed lines dance like strings of Chinese firecrackers on the ground, sparks flying everywhere as the cars behind you skid and swerve to avoid them. But you don’t stop, don’t even slow. You keep going. What else can you do?

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The faces of mariachi

If you have never been to the International Mariachi Festival in Guadalajara, you must put it on your bucket list. It is a colorful as the Rose Parade and as thrilling as a Saturday football game in Austin–even if you hate mariachi music. There are mariachi bands from all over: Berlin, Scotland, New York. And, of course, some of the most famous mariachi bands in Mexico: Los Camperos, Mariachi de America, and the venerable Mariachi Vargas. But words cannot express the grand spectacle of watching any of these famous mariachi groups perform as they slowly make their way through the streets of Guadalajara. Only photos can do it justice. Here, then, are the faces of Mexican mariachi.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

Photo copyright by David Lansing.

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As I’ve mentioned, The Flâneur always travels with a can of Spam. Just in case I come across a chef who has never heard of it. Then I give them a can and ask if they’d mind using it in a meal (without telling them anything about it). The results are always remarkable (see my story about the Ritz-Carlton chef at Montego Bay, Jamaica who jerked a can of Spam for me).

Well, Saturday night I ended up at the Hacienda El Carmen, a Colonial hotel not far from Tequila that, back in the mid-1700s was a convent (for some reason I’ve spent many an evening sleeping in former convents; something for this former altar boy to ponder). It’s full of old stone arches and bell towers and dark, moody rooms with thick walls and artwork from old Mexican churches. My kind of place.

The Hacienda El Carmen, a former convent. Photos by David Lansing.

The Hacienda El Carmen, a former convent. Photos by David Lansing.

The chef at Hacienda El Carmen, Ambrosio Saavedra (how can you not love a chef named Ambrosio?), has been here forever and has a reputation for serving Jalisco specialties like conejo adobado, a wonderful rabbit stew braised in adobo sauce, and lomito de cerdo—sweet pork back in a pasilla chili sauce. So naturally I wondered what Ambrosio would think of my Spam.

When I gave it to him in his dark, dungeon-like kitchen, and asked him if maybe he couldn’t make a little something with it before dinner, he turned up his nose. And handed the can to his sous chef, Manuel Rodríguez.

“¿Qué es?

“It’s a type of meat,” I told him. “Muy popular entre algunas personas.”

Then he took it out of the can and dumped it out onto a plate the way one might a can of dog food. He looked at the Spam, looked up at me, looked back at the Spam and shook his head. Which is when I took my leave.

That evening, as the guests sat down at the long wooden table under the portales outside the kitchen, Manuel came out with not one, but two different appetizers made from the Spam. In the first, he’d taken a home-made plate-size tortilla and covered it with thinly-sliced Spam, dots of bacon, roasted pasilla chiles, and Oaxacan queso. Sort of an open-faced quesadilla—or maybe a Spamsadilla.

Manuel Rodriguez with his Mexicanized Spam dishes.

Manuel Rodriguez with his Mexicanized Spam dishes.

The other dish was sort of a variation on Chef Ambrosio’s conejo adobado. Manuel had replaced the rabbit with Spam, cooked it in the adobo sauce with some onion, and then wrapped it in an avocado leaf and steamed it. I thought it was amazing, but I wanted to know what some of the other guests thought, so we passed it around.

Alexandria, from Argentiana: “This is very different. I like the picante of the adobo with the sweetness of the meat. I love it. Maybe I make this at home.”

Kerry, from England: “It’s quite good, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever tasted Spam prepared this uniquely.”

Alex, from New York: “Believe it or not, I’ve never tasted Spam before. But this is fabulous.”

An unnamed French guy: (Shakes his head when I ask him which is his favorite and, after making a little puffing noise, gives me a look of disgust as if I’d just asked him whether he’d prefer the Gallo red or the Gallo white.)

Well, you can’t please everyone.

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Friday Cocktail: The Paloma

Two things that might surprise you: One, the most popular type of tequila in Mexico is reposado, which makes up over 50% of the market. In fact, at some places in Jalisco, like around Puerto Vallarta, reposado is about 80% of the market—or more. In fact, when I’m shopping at my favorite tequila store in Bucerias, I might find 30 or 40 different reposado tequilas compared to five different brands of blanco. The rest is anejo. What I’m told, by people in the tequila industry, is that older people like blanco tequila because they like the “rustic” taste of the agave while younger consumers prefer reposado which, for the most part, they dump into cocktails.

Which brings us to the second surprise: The most popular Mexican cocktail, for the younger crowd, isn’t a Margarita but a Paloma. This is particularly true with women. So what the hell is a Paloma? Well, at most restaurants in Mexico if you order a Paloma what you’ll get is a tall glass filled with ice, a shot of reposado tequila, and then topped up with Squirt. That’s a down and dirty Paloma. But we can do better.

Ingredients for a Paloma cocktail.

Ingredients for a Paloma cocktail.

You can improve this drink tremendously by doing a couple of things. First of all, only fill the glass half-up with ice. Then sprinkle a pinch of salt on the ice cubes. This seasons the drink. Then give yourself a good pour of tequila (I usually do two ounces). Now squeeze half a Mexican lime in there, fill the glass with more ice, and top it up with some sort of grapefruit soda (I prefer Jarritos Toronja to Squirt, but that’s not always available).

This is a pretty damn good Paloma. But if you want to make it perfect, let’s do one other thing. Instead of using grapefruit soda, use half-a-cup of fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and then top it up with club soda. Now that’s a Paloma that could stand up to a perfectly made Margarita.

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