Still in Mexico

For all of you who grew up in the community of Tapachula, Mexico, I apologize in advance for offending you in this blog entry, as Tapachula, not Rock Springs WY, is the place God will place the enema tube.  Twenty eight miles north of town, as we slowed down for a routine unmanned security checkpoint, out popped Riccardo from behind the concrete pillar, gingerly flagging us down.  Little did we know, he would become our buddy for the entire afternoon, assisting us in navigating through the cumbersome bureaucratic process of getting a vehicle and two linguistically challenged Gringos across to Guatemala.  Riccardo is what they call a Coyote, who make their living assisting people through the process.  No formal offer of employment is given...no defined tasks for a fee is discussed...just a good guy who appears out of no where to help us...hmmmmm. First, he hops in with us and directs us to a town a few miles down the road to get copies of our Mexican paperwork.  Then back to a beautifully designed governmental compex that we had already passed...with no visible signs or I.D. of what the hell it is...to process the correct paperwork to get a refund of the $200US deposit that Jim put on his card in Nogales.  At that point we realized that without the intervention of Riccardo, we never would have known that this station was the venue for such a transaction...not the border 35 miles down the road as we anticipated.  We would have had to drive back from the boarder,  pissed off and feeling stupid.  Ricardo was earning his money, what ever that will turn out to be.

We were surprised to learn that reccardo was not done with us, as he suggested that he accompany us to the border 35 miles south and assist us getting through the Mexican and Guatamalan immigration offices.  At this point, we didn't really know if that was a good or bad thing.  It was getting late in the afternoon, and we didn't want to cross the border at night.  So we decided to use a Tapachula hotel reservation we made earlier just for this contingency.  As we travelled toward town we explained this to Riccardo and asked him where he wanted us to drop him off.  He pretended not to understand the question, and we both quietly wondered to ourselves just what we were going to do with him.  However, Riccardo seemed to be intent on helping us find our hotel.  Not necessary, we said, pointing to our trusty GPS with the sexy female voice guiding us toward downtown.  What came next was 45 minutes of aimless wandering until we realized that the woman in the GPS had gone completely berserk.  Finally finding the hotel after six direction querries from strangers, we arrived at the hotel, a clean dump that blended in with Tapachula's chaotic urban blight.  Riccardo passionately convinced us he needed to meet us at 9am the next morning to complete the process, and then disappeared into the labarynth of city streets.  To be continued...