I knew our trip was going to be a good one after the man offered us the roofless Jeep. It came at a discount because it was beat up, but more importantly in my mind it was much cooler than the other rental vehicles available at the airport in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I know some people think that serving God is necessarily bland and monotonous, and the roofless Jeep was to me yet another example reinforcing the idea that those people are dead wrong.
Chris and I were there to visit with EM partner Pastor Abel Castellanos-Espinoza and to reconnect with community members in Ruiz, Nayarit and the surrounding area, where EM teams have been working for years.
The drive to from Puerto Vallarta to Tepic, Nayarit - where Pastor Abel is on hiatus with his family and also doing itinerate preaching - takes you through rolling green hills that appear lush but are actually scraggly and dry. It’s a two-lane highway for most of the trip, and as is typical in much of Latin America, many people will attempt near deadly passing maneuvers for the sake of gaining one or two car lengths. You then catch up with them when they’re held up by an enormous 1980s Mercedes cargo truck or something of that ilk lurching up a winding hillside.
But as frustrating as such a traffic pattern could be under other circumstances, everything seemed awesome as we cruised in the roofless Jeep Wrangler. During the North American summer months the heat in Nayarit is oppressive and no matter how foreign of a concept they seemed before, siestas instantly make sense. But during our recent trip it was 75 degrees Fahrenheit at the hottest, and with the wind blowing in the early morning it was even possibly to feel slightly chilly. While this is nothing an extra long-sleeve shirt can’t take care of for most gringo visitors, it was cold enough that area school administrators feared children would suffer asthma attacks in the early morning, and so had been delaying classes for an hour each day.
We forgot to put on sunscreen and we could feel it by the time we were approaching Tepic, but we knew it would be late afternoon by the time we left Pastor Abel’s house, so we didn’t worry about it.
We entered the city of Tepic - a world of insane traffic, one-way streets that end abruptly, and hundreds of look-alike buildings made of cinder blocks and tin. We had Abel’s address, and we knew that most major streets are marked and addresses do in fact work in Mexico (they don’t in many other countries at a similar level of development), so we decided to head in and start asking around.
This proved to be more complicated than we had anticipated. We ended up asking about six people (including a guy riding alongside us on a motorcycle), and each person told us something slightly different. Eventually, however, we ended up in the right neck of the woods and we found Pastor Abel.
It was good to see him. We ate lunch and had a good meeting discussing plans for this upcoming summer. We agreed to meet in Ruiz in the morning.
It was dark in Ruiz when we arrived, but vendors still packed the tiny sidewalks, spilling foot traffic onto the worn cobblestone streets. The Hotel Rosita, where teams normally stay, was undergoing some renovations, so the small courtyard/parking lot was filled with broken cinder blocks and crushed chunks of cement. There was plenty of room for the roofless Jeep, though.
We got in touch with Juan, the hotel owner, to confirm lodging details for teams this upcoming summer.
Not a ton is open in Ruiz at night, but you can find some pretty delicious tacos until about 11 p.m. Unlike tourist towns in Mexico, Ruiz is a place where you have no choice but to eat an actual Mexican taco if you order a taco. I remember once explaining to Pastor Abel the hard-shelled, American concept of a taco.
“That,” he said, “is not a taco.”
A real Mexican taco consists of a lightly oiled flour tortilla that is very small - about the size of the palm of your hand - and is topped with beef, fish or tongue along with a few chopped vegetables. We got a variety of salsas and pico de gallo to throw on top, and they were delicious. We ate seven tacos apiece for a total price of 70 pesos ($7.00).
After dinner we walked through the town and poked our heads into the ornate cathedral where an evening mass was being held and then stopped by a community center where people were playing pick-up basketball.
Waking up early in Ruiz is well worth it. There’s an iron staircase that spirals up to the roof from the top floor and you can walk up there and see mist hanging over the buildings at base of the mountains at the edge of town. During the rainy season - June through August - you can stand up there and watch spectacular lightning storms just before it starts to pour. Also, if you’re a real early riser, you can hike a trail leading up a steep hill overlooking the town, at the top of which is a cross.
After breakfast we met with Pastor Abel and he hopped in with us as we roofless Jeeped our way up a long, winding highway to the small town of Presidio.
Presidio is a place you can see the origins of many of the stereotypes regarding traditional Mexican culture; men with thick black mustaches riding horseback are commonplace.
Chris has been coming to Nayarit for 20 years and was excited to visit his old friends Santos and Elario. Santos had moved to Ruiz, we learned, and Elario was still in the United States, where he is employed as a migrant farm worker. His meager wages there have allowed his family to move from a small hut with a plastic roof to a basic brick home.
I walked through the main street of the town and a man who had been sitting on a cement porch stood and asked me, “What commission sends you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who are you here with?”
I told him.
“All right,” he said. “Welcome to Presidio. I’m Luisio.”
I talked to Luisio and his friend Roberto for a while and then continued walking. An old man stopped me to say good morning. He asked what we were doing in Presidio.
I explained who we were and then asked, “How long have you lived here?”
“I’ve lived here 40 years, since I moved from the other side,” he said.
“The other side? Where’s that?”
The old man pointed down the road.
“Over there,” he said. “On the other side.”
We drove back down the smoothly paved road, which had been rocky and nearly impassable for standard vehicles until just a few years ago, until we got to the small indigenous village of Tijuanita, where EM teams have been building homes for four years now.
A pastor named Bernancio works with the community there to determine which families have the greatest need, and Pastor Abel directs teams there. We sat down with Bernancio to talk about the things he thought teams might be doing that summer and to ask about how things were going for the families in Tijuanita.
Lucky for us, they were having a birthday party and so had made plenty of fresh tamales. They gave us some for the road. Delish.
After leaving Tijuanita, we went with Abel to check out work teams had done on his church, the Iglesia Vida. There we ran into Hugo, one of the participants of the EM-sponsored trip to Tecate for Ruiz youth in 2006. After chatting with him for a while, we visited Carlos, another participant who now studies tourism in Tepic and comes home to Ruiz on the weekends.
After visiting Carlos and company, it was time to leave. We said goodbye to Pastor Abel, which was appropriately treated much more as a “see you later” than a goodbye, and then drove off.
We had only 75 pesos (about $7.50), and with at least a three-hour drive ahead of us, we needed cash for gas and highway tolls. Cash is translated into Spanish as “effective” for a reason. Without it, you’re at the mercy of those places that actually take cards, and in Latin America those are often only very large places. Many gas stations in Mexico do not take credit cards.
Unfortunately, the only ATM in town was out of service. We looked for a money-exchanging house and found one. It was closed. This was a problem. We had just $15, and we were in an area where only pesos counted.
Thankfully, a woman at the Hotel Rosita exchanged it for us, and we were able to get enough gas to get to the next gas station down the highway and find and ATM.
The sun was beating down on the way back and the question of where to find sunscreen grew increasingly urgent. We stopped at a small pharmacy and I went in to ask. It occurred to me that most people in that part of Mexico really don’t need or wear sunscreen at all.
Confirming my suspicion, the pharmacist came back with three bottles of SPF 4 tanning oil.
“Do you have anything stronger?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But let me check one more place.”
He disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a bottle of SPF 30 “gel.” The price tag on top was old and gummy and the box was covered in dust. It was $17.
Because you can’t put a price on your skin, we forked over the dough. The sunscreen had the exact color and consistency of hand sanitizer, and when I rubbed it on my nose it stung and smelled just like sanitizer, too. We rubbed it on our already-burnt faces and forearms. Worst case, we figured, we would be sanitized.
The drive back was just as beautiful as it was on the way down, and it was also beautifully uneventful. I mean, there was of course a part of me that yearned for the Jeep to break down or for someone to rob us just for the sake of spicing things up, but I’m not certain Chris shared that sentiment.
Experience Mission is offering summer 2008 trips to Ruiz. Visit www.experiencemission.org or call (360) 554-8060 for more information.
