Mama, I´m Coming Home!!

Here we are in Real de Catorce, magical old mining town in the Sierra Madre, and all that stands between us and Houston, TX is 18 hours on three buses. Am I ready to leave Mexico, the road, guacamole, tequila? You´d better believe it. I miss my momma, my pops, my sister, my friends, bagels with cream cheese, driving my Ford Probe through the hills of California, and wearing anything other than the four shirts I´ve had with me this year. My quest for perspective on the upcoming momentous return was waylaid yet again, this time by an impromptu hike to a ghost town up the hill, a bottle of wine and a sunset, and a riddle about a mummy that consumed me for an afternoon (There are 13 mummies--12 are filled with rocks and all weight the same amount, and one has a fabulously precious ruby that is either lighter or heavier than the rocks. You have a scale and you´re allowed three weighings of the mummies before you must choose which mummy has the ruby. If you choose wrong, you release the mummy spirits and they eat your brain. How do you find the ruby?) Nevertheless, I´m starting to get ahold of some of it all. Behold, our very own Harper´s Index: Number of countries we visited: 20 Number of flights we took: 35 Accumulated hours of time on buses: 28 days Number of different beds we´ve slept on: over 100 Number of friends and family who came to visit us on the road (not counting massive-ass karaoke rager): 17 Fraction of the year that we spent with these friends and family: 1/3 Total cost of the trip: $15,000/person (5K for flights, $20/day for living, and $2800 for the occasional fancy splurge) Number of sisters who got engaged while we were gone: 1--As of yesterday, my little sister Leela´s gonna make an honest man out of her boyfriend Sam. WOOOHOOOOOOOOOO!! The people who come to visit keep telling me that I haven´t changed a bit, which is a little disconcerting. I´m just not okay with finally fulfilling this lifelong dream and being exactly the same person I was when I left. So I´m hoping over the next few weeks, as Meg and I reunite in Houston, head to California, tour medical programs on the West Coast, and then split off so she can finish med school and I can become a cowboy, that just maybe I´ll discover some profound knowledge that I gained this year that I never could have possibly figured out in America. As soon as I come up with it, I´ll let you know. For now, I´m content with knowing I saw an uncountable number of beautiful things this year, and I saw it all with the woman I love. It don´t get no better than that. --rahul

4 days left...

And on my last Saturday night on the road, I drank cheap tequila and boarded a small train that drove us half-a-mile into a silver cave that was first mined in the 1500s and now makes its living as a high-class Mexican disco. Brian and Colin and I danced till 4, took the train back out of the mine, and walked home, trying and failing to comprehend that this trip`s about to end. Perspective is difficult to find in a drunken haze.

--rahul

The Difficult Decisions that One Faces on the Road

One of the most striking things about travelling in Mexico is how gorgeous the buses are. Seriously. After a few months in Guatemala and Honduras, where the infamous ¨chicken buses¨--converted American school buses packed with four people (and yes, the occasional chicken) to each two-seater bench seat--rule the road, Mexico`s buses are luxury incarnate. Reclining seats, foot rests, Steven Seagal movies, and even, gasp, bathrooms on board. No longer do you have to make that unfortunate decision to either dehydrate yourself or face the possibility of riding on a four-hour bumpy road while you tightly cross your legs and pray for a bathroom stop.

Instead, in Mexico, you get to decide whether to try to stand up and pee while the bus hurtles down the highway and might just possibly take a turn hard and send you hurtling through the door with your pants down because you forgot to lock it properly, or to sit down and pee and therefore emasculate yourself. There are no easy answers.

--rahul

48 hours and no kidnapping yet...

No, no, just kidding. Mexico City´s really not so bad. We´ve been walking the streets at night, going out to dinners and drinks in the fancy hipster neighborhoods, hanging out in the main square with chocolate-filled churros and sparklers (not chocolate-filled). Mexico City wins the ¨Best City that Everyone Told Me Was the Worst City and You Should Run Away Screaming From¨ Award.

--rahul

All Roads Lead to the Virgin of Guadalupe

I´ve arrived in Mexico City, home of 10 million people and the worst air pollution in the world. Whoopeee! As an added plus, you´re not supposed to walk out onto the street and hail a taxi here at any time of day because the risk of armed robbery and abduction is too high. As they say in Spanish, ¨Eso es wack.¨

In a couple hours, my buddies Colin and Bryan will fly in and we´ll begin our ten-day journey back into America. But not before we go to a massive-ass religious festival tomorrow. Over a million pilgrims from around the country are converging on the capital to honor Guadalupe, the Mexican version of the Virgin Mary, who apparently magically materialized on someone´s cloak 500 years ago and has been the country´s saint ever since. If you want something, anything, in Mexico you pray to Guadalupe. For the last 200 miles of my bus ride in today, the sides of the highway were lined with people walking and biking with huge framed portraits of Guadalupe tied onto their backs. I seriously must have seen 50,000 people on this one road into Mexico City. Not since freshman year when I dated a woman in the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship have I seen virginity so celebrated.

--rahul

Not exactly a shocking revelation, this

After I got over the initial sadness of losing my favorite travel buddy to real adult responsibilities, I thought to myself ¨Hey, this´ll be great! Just like old times! Just me by myself on the road, doing whatever I want whenever I want.¨ Then I spent most of today quixotically following riot police in body armor around Oaxaca hoping that I might get to see them fire tear-gas on a crowd somewhere. And I went to my favorite restaurant (the home of lard-free mole) to sheepishly make a reservation for, ahem, one. I`ve started talking to myself and cuddling up with the spare pillow at night. The lesson: Meg makes travel better.

--rahul

Countries are Different

You know how when you go to the theater to watch a movie, there`ll usually be a public service anouncement mixed in with the previews, like maybe the Will Rogers Institute asking for money, or the government telling you that your brain will turn into a fried egg if you smoke pot? Well, in Mexico, the public service announcement before movies encourages kids to not bribe their high school teachers for better grades.

Baby, It Ain´t Over Yet

Right now, Meg´s in Texas shopping for an interview suit and hopefully feasting on baby carrots and hummus. And I´m starting to get emails mourning the end of TMTTV, as one of our most faithful readers graciously dubs it. Hey! I´m still in Mexico! It´s exotic. There´s still lots of brown people around. The risk of explosive diarrhea still looms. And we´ve still got buttloads of photos and stories and deep, profound, life-changing insights to share! So don´t go leaving us just yet, allright? Especially now that my partner in crime and favorite editor in the world isn´t around to put the kibosh on my worst tendencies toward sickeningly flowery language, overuse of apostrophes and parentheticals, and unnecessarily casual grammar, I´m gonna start getting really crazy. This blog is going to have more almost-but-not-quite endings than a Lord of the Rings movie. We´ve got stories from Detroit we´re still grilling up, we´ve got our ¨100 (or whatever number it ends up being) Best Photos of the Trip¨ and don´t even get me started on what´s gonna happen in 2006 when I move to Oregon and become a cowboy. We´re addicted. We´re just getting started.

But then, superego temporarily overcomes id: Actually, feel free to stop reading whenever you want. The fact that anyone ever looked at this thing makes us happy.

--rahul

You can never have too many thanksgivings

I knew the day would come whether I liked it or not, and so it has. The trip I had dreamed about for a decade has come to an end. Rahul and I stood outside our hostel in Antigua this morning waiting for our shuttles to come and whisk us away--he to the Mexican border and I to the airport. His came first, and it was not with dry eyes that I said goodbye and watched him head off into the darkness, minus his partner in crime for the last two weeks of his journey.

Being home is wonderful, even if the being home for good part is hard to swallow. Reuniting with my parents, my aunt and my puppy dog felt damn good, as did a hot shower, my comfy bed and all my favorite foods. My mom treated me to the Thanksgiving dinner I had missed, which was heaven, and once we had sufficiently stuffed ourselves we decorated the Christmas tree while Pavarotti serenaded us in the background. This time last night Rahul and I were gorging ourselves on 50 cent tostadas and papusas in the street, prepared by an adorable elderly husband and wife team who run their small food stand every afternoon until it's all gone.

It's jarring to leave behind the life I have been leading on the road for the past eleven months, to return in a snap to my real life back home. But if there's one thing I've learned this year, it's how insanely fortunate I am that these are the lives I get to live. It blows my mind that this year is over, but even more that it happened at all. As countless people from all over the world have told me all year, I am a lucky girl.

- Meg

T-minus 48 Hours!!!

In 48 hours, Meg´s year around the world will come to an end, and she will be eating dinner with her parents in Houston (leftover Thanksgiving goodies thanks to her awesome Momma and freezers). She is somewhat at peace with that idea and somewhat in denial and somewhat freaking out.

We intended to set today, the last non-travel day we had together, aside to ¨do nothing whatsoever¨ and to reflect on all the amazing things we´ve seen and done this year. But we caught wind of spectacular spectacular thrills just around the corner from our little hippie haven, and we couldn´t resist. And so we ended up swimming through caves with a candle in our hands (trying to keep them lit as we plunged behind waterfalls and shimmied along slimy bat dung walls), jumping off a bridge into a turquoise river, and tubing down a river at sunset with a bottle of wine. A fitting last day.

There`s much more in the way of reflections from us coming before the end of this year. Meg´s off to the East coast to start interviewing for residency, and Rahul`s heading back towards Texas overland to join La Familia Pearsone for Navidad in Houston. Stay tuned.

La Frontera

Most border crossings take you through total bungholes (Rahul´s picturing Malawi-Tanzania, Germany-Poland, and Tijuana right now) filled with tractor-trailers, crooked moneychangers, and dudes who look like they´re sizing you up and trying to decide whether to beat you up or just jack your bags. But crossing from Honduras to Guatemala takes you through a beautiful little town (Copan Ruinas) and pastoral (or, dare we say, bucolic) countryside, and the van drivers help you navigate immigration and wait for you to clear customs before they drive, asking you if you´d like them to stop at a bathroom on their way out. Meg was already smitten with our ayudante for this display of toilet chivalry, but when he brought our bags down from the roof when it started to rain (doing some kind of crazy flip maneuver onto and off of the roof while the car was moving), even Rahul started crushing on him hard.

The highlight of the drive was when Meg started to peel an orange and the dude next to her promptly whipped out his machete to try to help. When we declined his offer, he gave us two more oranges instead. So next time you´re in the mood to cross a border, we highly recommend Honduras-Guatemala. Good times!

The five days on the island of Roatan with our friend Kimmy were spectacular. We managed to get recruited as ringers for quiz-night at a local beach bar (coming in second only because we didn´t know that Madonna and Michael Jackson were born in the same year), bike in a quixotic search for dolphins, and leave with over 50 sand-fly bites each on Kimmy´s and Rahul´s bodies (apparently Meg´s skin is delicious only to mosquitos). Also, good times!

Tomorrow, we search for Guatemalan caves and limestone pools.