through the desert...

The desert expands off into the horizon and the sun is a heavy presence. In the distance an enormous train cargo train eases along the landscape. There has been next to no traffic… only two cars have passed in the last hour. We´re just two lonesome, pale, bearded foreigners lost in the desert. These are the moments when doubt creeps in. Someone will pick us up, someone always picks you up, but cold hungry nights in the middle of nowhere are starting to wear thin especially now the girls have left us. I gesticulate frantically as the pick-up truck speeds passed us and Benji starts berating the driver for leaving two young men to toast in the desert. Which he must have heard, because he stops in the distance and reverses all the way back up to us. This moment, of excitement and elation after a long desperate wait, is a characteristic of this part of the trip and one of its highlights. We spent a lot of long, hot, dry afternoons to get to the most northern part of mexico but we lived to tell the tale.

On the road again...

My name is Mikey and I have just spent a month travelling with Benji. I met him and Raphael at the COP 16 in Cancún in November 2010 and kept in touch with Benji, sharing Ecodepa and Klimaxforum adventures throughout the year. I decided to give up using money for a month and join Benji on a trip hitch hiking through the notorious northern deserts of Mexico to a 10 day meditation retreat in total silence. What follows is a description of that trip.

We were in a town called Mixquic for the symbolic celebration of the “Day of the Dead”. Benji and I sat with our friend Xavier in silence, high upon the wall of the cemetery, contemplating the ocean of candles below us. Once a year millions of Mexicans light candles around the tombs of loved ones and spend an evening together with their family. It´s an incredible display and represents an admirable acceptance and celebration of death which is in stark contrast to the fear and solemnity it is treated with in Europe.

However, on the other side of that very same wall was the embodiment of the aggressive consumerism characteristic of life in Mexico; the street is swamped with street vendors and one particularly obnoxious man is yelling into a microphone about how cheap and wonderful his rugs are. That´s right, rugs. Thousands of tourists come to Mixquic for this day and the whole centre of the town is geared to sell them heaps of junk food, junk souvenirs and just plain junk (…rugs?). Personally I feel pretty ashamed to have contributed to this desecration of such a wonderful and spiritual event by attracting all this tacky shite, and I tell myself if I am in Mexico for this celebration some other year, I will slink of to a remote village somewhere and appreciate it with more respect.

For us it was also marked the end of a chapter; for me the end of my life in Mexico, the start of something new, and the return to the road. After a year here I had taken the decision to go back to Europe, to my family, to old friends and new adventures. We were to leave the day after. We didn´t know exactly where to, or when we would arrive, but we were leaving. I knew the next month was going to be one of the biggest of my life; hitch hiking with absolutely no money through an area internationally renound for its violence, and then spending 10 days meditating in total silence. The reports of drug related violence were daily in the region – executions, decapitations, dismemberments, massacres… but in our year in the country we had seen not even a trace of this. Absolutely nothing. We wanted to talk to the people who were living it.