Reclining on a sunny rock, watching some ducks splash in a nearby stream, I wasn’t paying much attention. Just a few moments earlier, my fellow passengers had been loitering outside the locked Mexican bus, patiently waiting for our driver to finish his Sunday afternoon repast at the tiny rural eatery and continue our long journey between Durango and Mazatlan. It was a pretty mountain setting a long way from anywhere, and I took advantage of the lull to stretch my legs and explore up the road a bit.
But when I glanced up from my bucolic reverie, the other passengers had vanished. As my brain struggled to process precisely what that fact might mean, the Estrella Blanca bus jumped to life with a snort of diesel smoke and began lumbering down the mountain. Grabbing my daypack, I chased after it, yelling in unconjugated Spanish. Luckily, one of the passengers had his head out the window and happened to notice the gringo loping along behind. He called to the driver to stop.
As I climbed back on, the gray-haired driver waggled his finger at me in the exaggerated manner Mexicans are fond of. “Next time, senor pasajero,” he advised with all semi-seriousness, “better not to fall asleep.” The passengers had some laughs at my expense, I reclaimed my window seat and we continued on down toward the Pacific through the gathering dusk.
Even with thousands of miles of Mexican bus travel under my belt by now, I’m still prone to an occasional lapse. But after two leisurely weeks making my way by bus between Mexico City and San Diego in January, a trip I’d wanted to try for years, I can report few other serious difficulties.
In Mexico, for my money, the bus is the only way to fly.
Forget the images of broken-down buses claptraps carrying chickens and pigs and packed to the roof with wild characters, chugging through the countryside. While you can definitely still find such colorful transport out in the hinterlands–particularly in Mexico’s woolly southern reaches–intercity buses throughout the country today are far more inclined to resemble land yachts than cattle cars.
First-class and luxury lines offer reserved reclining seats, big tinted windows, air-conditioning, a (usually) functioning bathroom, roomy overhead luggage racks and–for better or worse, depending on your appreciation for action-hero pictures in loudly dubbed Spanish–video movies.
For the most part, the buses are clean, they run more or less on time, and the drivers comport themselves with the cool professionalism of U.S. airline pilots.
On my 2,000-mile trek north, I grew to prefer the Omnibus de Mexico line, which carried me through the chain of colonial silver cities–San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato and Zacatecas–several hours’ north of the capital. The big blue-and-white coaches seemed to float along the highway, the windows actually opened, and the drivers were friendly and alert, if a bit self-important.
Out the window, the view of the Central Plateau was the classic Mexican landscape: sere high desert covered in chaparral and endless miles of gray candelaria, yucca and saguaro cactus. The distant ridgeline of the Sierra Madre was etched starkly against a deep azure sky. As with most of the legs on my journey, I was the only Norteamericano on board. But a little Spanish went a long way toward making temporary friends.
At various times my buses rolled through little crossroads pueblos, sometimes stopping long enough for passengers to dart out for a set of tiny soft meat tacos or the heavenly frozen popsicles called paletas, made with anything ranging from kiwi fruit, coconut milk, fresh strawberries or walnuts to watermelon juice, papaya, coffee and guava. At shorter stops, mobile vendors trooped through with buckets of iced gaseosas (sodas) or rolls of sugared peanuts wrapped up tightly in cellophane.
Often, someone would flag down the bus alongside the highway in the dusty middle of nowhere, leaving me to wonder where they lived and how they got there in the first place. (I was never quite sure whether the first-class drivers were supposed to stop between scheduled cities for passengers, but they almost always did, collecting by trip’s end a fat wad of pesos that may or may not have been deposited with the bus company.)
The best stretch of the two weeks was the 250-mile Durango-Mazatlan run, the one where I was almost left behind. The highway meanders for hours through waves of spiky, blue-green mountains that march away in the distance, winds above hazy barrancas with no visible bottom and curls beneath soaring granite escarpments that loom suddenly over the terrain.
For the $6 ticket, it was about the best bus ride I’ve ever experienced. I hung my head out the big window all day, gawking at the unfolding vistas (sit on the left side going down to the coast) until my cheeks burned from the wind. Along with that restaurant break, where it took the cook’s entire family to feed us all, we stopped only a couple of times in eight hours, once to aid another bus coming up the mountain that had run out of gas.
After crossing the Pacific by the overnight ferry to La Paz in Baja California Sur and spending a day wandering the town, I boarded a first-class ABC bus north. From La Paz, Mexico Highway 1 rolls along the base of the Sierra Giganta through flat sandy desert and more cactus, past irrigated farm fields near Ciudad Constitucion. It nips back and forth to the Sea of Cortes through jagged, boulder-tumbled hills before reaching Loreto, a pretty fishing resort popular with the American RV set, four hours after leaving La Paz. The Loreto bus station is basically just a dirt parking lot with a tiny office for the ABC clerk and a 15-minute walk from the waterfront.
From Loreto the road hugs the shore of huge Conception Bay, another gringo RV mecca, for an hour or two until reaching the next settlement at Mulege, a sleepy palm-fringed oasis set along Baja’s only river. I spent a day exploring the banks of the jungly river, which is filled with egrets, herons and other waterfowl and wandering the town’s narrow streets.
Next day, it seemed like most of the travelers in town were planning to take the 4 p.m. ABC bus north. An Australian couple I’d met earlier in La Paz worried aloud about having time to catch it after touring the old mission just west of town. I helpfully pointed out that no bus I’d ridden in nearly two weeks had been exactly on time and advised them not to worry if they were a few minutes late.
Naturally, that particular bus arrived and departed 15 minutes ahead of schedule that day.
After leaving Mulege–and the Aussies–behind, we arrived less than an hour later at Santa Rosalia, the middle of three ferry ports for passage to the mainland and the last town of any size on the Sea of Cortez for a couple hundred miles. I got down to take a spin around.
From Santa Rosalia, our bus headed off into the Vizcaino Desert, one of the world’s driest, stopping briefly after dark at the outskirts of San Ignacio, a town famous for the nearby Indian rock paintings.
Crossing the inky Vizcaino, about 9 p.m. we pulled into Guerrero Negro, an ugly, dusty town but the jumping-off point for excursions to see the gray whales in Scammon’s Lagoon. I decided to spend the night, then catch another bus early the next morning headed to Ensenada so I could see the prettiest part of the desert during daylight.
My good luck finally faltered when, hours later, that bus conked out with a broken transmission just before dusk on a Saturday night south of Ensenada. Even so, I was able to hop on a suburban shuttle bus, which took me straight to the central station for about 15 cents. From there, for $3, another bus dropped me two hours later right at the international border, from where I walked through U.S. Customs.
In two weeks I had come roughly 2,000 miles from Mexico City, ridden a dozen different buses on five or six different lines and came home with a memorable bag of kaleidoscopic images.
