I said my good byes to and took final pictures with Bill, Bjorn, and Teresa early this morning. We left around 8:45, after I filled the car with some more oil and made last minute preparations. Fiona and I started our journey towards San Cristobal, and didn’t finish for 10 hours. Just got and settled into a very nice little hostel called Hotel Posado Cinco for 90 pesos a person, for a decent double size bed, blankets, towels, and warm water. The weather up here is a lot chillier. I put on my jeans and will go out later tonight with a jacket on. I think that this town could be a lot of fun and definitely looks like it has a lot of potential. Fiona and I have a fairly similar idea on how to eat, where to stay, and so on, so the drive here felt a lot shorter than 10 hours. We almost got lost a couple times, but I think we did just fine considering all the misdirections on the maps and on the road.
Apparently, the state of Oaxaca is infamous for military check points. I’ve passed some before, but today I got pulled over 4 out of 8 times. It was a hassle, everyone asking me the same thing, checking the same things, and one soldier even asking me how much the boots were. I would have given it to him if I had any extras on me, because I just have so many now days. One soldier was especially good with english. It was almost scary, but not as bad as the police. The cops may be corrupt in some areas, but the military put me at ease. Fiona agreed. They’re just doing their jobs, and since they gotta check cars every once in a while, they just thought that the Korean dude with an American passport and an Australian lady as a passenger in an old German Mercedes that literally no one in Mexico drives may just be one they can’t miss out on.
There was a guy running around frantically replacing people’s windshield wipers in one of the Pemex gas stations, and so I took this opportunity to replace my run down ones. The new ones (200 pesos) seems to work just fine. I’m keeping the original chrome ones as my own souvenier to keep in memory of this car.
The car seems ok. It looks like the mechanic must have done something other than just change the 4 boots because the transmission seems to be smoother in changing gears. But I guess it has a bit of a kick when going uphill in high altitude… almost seems like the car’s trying to determine whether it should stay in gear or shift. There’s a lot of bugs on the road and I hit a couple of them. Maybe some rock or something bounced up and hit the light… one of the light casing is broken. I hit a bird today. I don’t know if it’s ok, but it just flew right into the front right hand side of my car. I just thought it was hilarious.
I did have a major scare today, though. While changing songs on my iPod, it froze so I had to reset. That took a few minutes, and when I turned it back on, all my music was gone. I was almost starting to freak out when I reset it again and a few minutes later, there it was again!