SOME OVERALL IMPRESSIONS
By Dave Krieg & Anne Kiehl
We enjoyed our Mexico trip, despite having a few more problems this time than in the past. We will undoubtedly return there in a few years even if only for a few months at a time. We are both fascinated by the archaeological ruins and would be tempted to go back and take again some of the thousand photographs we took on the first half or our trip and lost. We might not soon drive a motorhome as far south as the Yucatan, Chiapas and Oaxaca but there are closer sites and museums from El Tajin to Villahermosa we'd like to revisit. San Miguel will beckon us again and there are Taxco and other old cities in central Mexico we have heard highly recommended but have not yet seen. And those West Coast beaches, some not far away, will surely draw us back.
I will offer a few comments on some other subjects of possible interest, but just as personal impressions with no pretense of carefully researched accuracy.
In some ways, Mexico appears a bit more prosperous than when we began our trips there just a decade ago. We used to see a lot of "jalopies" on the road; now the great majority of cars seem of relatively recent vintage. Modern supermarkets are often found in even medium-sized towns, while the traditional outdoor markets with many colorful stalls still coexist with them. People we saw along the street were almost always neat and clean. We saw far less roadside trash along the highways than we used to. There are undoubtedly still poor people living in shacks, but they were not obvious to us in our lengthy travel. We have been amazed at the stability of the Mexican Peso, which has maintained about the same 10:1 ratio to the dollar as it had more than five years ago; it seems that their formerly rampant inflation is now under control.
Do we consider Mexico to be a safe place for visitors? We feel that the theft we experienced could have happened in any country. It is just that one feels more helpless in reacting to it with a language barrier and we did not find it possible to be covered by pertinent insurance. We saw lots of army checkpoints along highways, especially in the south. They were often staffed by what looked like teenagers in uniform with automatic weapons. We were almost always just waved through without a word of question, let alone inspection. Nowhere did we encounter any threatening attitudes or signs of violence. Our overwhelming impression of Mexican police was of men doing their job and treating visitors with courteous helpfulness. The prevalence of uniforms and weapons might suggest a police-state, but we never sensed the Mexican people to be intimidated or overtly subjugated.
We are interested in politics but did not have the occasion and the fluency to learn as much as we would have liked. As you know, their last presidential election moved them from one-party government to genuinely contested elections and a new party in power. Actually, Presidente Fox has been quite limited in making changes, as his party doesn't have a majority in their federal congress; power is divided among three major parties, from right of center to left of center. We were stuck, as we drove around the country, by the variety of parties represented in election campaign posters. State and local governments are in the hands of different parties in different locations. Official corruption is still occasionally encountered, but I had the sense that it was more easily resisted at the local level. They might want to make a buck but are not in a hurry to throw you in jail. We encountered nonviolent protests several times, where highway traffic was blocked for a while. We was more impressed by their initiative and by the lack of overt repression of the protesters than we were by the fact that they had problems to call attention to.
All in all, a trip to Mexico strikes us a fairly easy, inexpensive and fascinating way to experience another culture and a developing nation with a very different history than ours while still allowing the motorhome traveler most of the comforts of home.
