INTRO
I'm sitting in a tiny cafe-cum-mezcal speakeasy called Restaurant
Flami on Calle de Trujano in Oaxaca City. I deposited myself here
early this morning because the coffee is cheap and the place looks
quiet. I contemplate the deer's head on the wall, a faded still
life depicting voluptuous bunches of grapes spilling from a bowl,
the dust-coated fire hydrant, a few meters away the doors open on
white sunlight, and I'm thinking Fine, fine - here is an environment
free of distractions in which to commence our story.
There's a great sense of romance for a writer to sit in some obscure
little cafe or cantina and write the stuff of life. Still, distractions
persist. The people you watch, those who watch you, the random moments
that encircle and crowd, an hour's vanished, a second coffee. I'm
thinking how life streams by like the white line fever of the highway,
and this is especially so when traveling. The road is an invitation,
bringing an expectation of experience piling upon new experience:
shining landscapes, conversations, histories, more of other worlds.
Our trip begins with the highway, the road - to be replaced by
more highways and roads, dusty tracks, known and unknown; the back
roads, the "free roads," the roads that have been tenuously
carved in the bellies of parched mountains, where Death may stare
back at you in the form of a lumbering lorry veering across the
white line at 100 kph, or in the dumb, glazed eyes of a burro loitering
on a blind curve...
Our main character, Ron Mader, had a plan early this year to drive
the free roads from Mexico City to Oaxaca and I came on board for
the ride, to write up the journey. I generally concentrate on travel
and my own fiction. Ron writes on ecotourism and the environment.
Don Ron worked as an environment reporter for the Mexico City News
during the years 1992-3 and it was in mid-'93 that I made his acquaintance
- when I began my own tenure at the imperishable English-language
daily. He moved onto Austin, Texas, the following year, and later
Miami - maintaining a close relationship with Mexico by covering
US-Mexico border/environment issues for various publications.
Last year Ron moved back to Mexico City, working freelance and
running the Planeta.com website. This year John Muir Publications
will publish his ecotourism guidebook Mexico:
Adventures in Nature.
I haven't always comprehended Ron's passion for the environment.
As an Aussie, engaging in "ecotourism" simply meant "going
bush." Nature never struck me as a resource that needed to
be actively protected - it was just there, everywhere, an inevitable,
glorious abundance.
Yet during our journey to Oaxaca and back, a short enough trip
as it goes - Monday, January 13 to Wednesday, January 22 - I experienced
a crash course in the wisdoms of ecotourism, and saw how positive
action, as Ron has demonstrated, begins with the individual.
I also learnt a few more things about the Mexico in which I've
so far lived for five years - receiving keys to new kingdoms, greeted
by new smiles; and felt the old pulse of the road, its mystery and
mysticism, its palpable beauty and yes, palpable danger, penetrate
the showed crevices of my city-beat soul once more.
- Oaxaca City 15.1.98 - Mexico City 26.1.98
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