Run Over by a Train
I have one last part of the medical I need to do for Australian Volunteers International to get out of the way, so I aim to be at the clinic in downtown Flagstaff around opening time. That all goes smoothly, apart from the impact on my wallet – got to love the American money-hungry medical system. I drop my rental care off, walk back to the hostel and check out, putting my bags in storage, then I sit on the internet for hours and come up with a rough plan for the next few weeks.
El Paso is my next destination as it fits best into the route. I reward myself with lunch at Biff’s Bagels, where I don’t get a bagel. I find them a bit too chewy, so I go for another kind of bread I can’t pronounce topped with poppy seed and onion flakes, and have it filled with ham, cheese and avocado. I then walk down the road to Macy’s to get a decent coffee. Macy’s is considered a “European” café, therefore their coffee tastes like coffee. I sit outside with my cup of heaven and the guy at the next table starts talking to me. The wierdo magnet is obviously warming up for the bus trip. He moans about how no-one ‘gets’ him because he is a free spirit and blah blah blah, then asks if I would like to go swimming with him. I tell him I’m leaving soon, which is a bit of a fabrication as my bus doesn’t leave until evening.
I’m overdue a day of doing nothing; this is it. I lurk until early evening, then run across the road for a snack. I have crumbed Portobello mushrooms, which could have been better – the seasoning they use overpowers the taste of the mushrooms. Never mind. It fills the gap, and the guy on duty at the hostel has offered me a lift to the bus station, so I’m all sorted. I’m slowly developing a bus drill. I know it’s going to be cold onboard, so I make sure I have two jackets available – one to keep me warm and one to roll up as a pillow – and I have a load of snacks to get me through as all of the stops seem to be at fast food outlets. I’ve done all the calculations and worked out that with the amount of travel I’m doing over the next few weeks, it’s worth buying a bus pass, especially as a lot of the places I’m going to don’t have trains. It’ a pity, as I still prefer the trains. I get my pass sorted at the Greyhound station and go and sit on my rucksack in the queue for the bus, resigned to being approached by oddballs.
Sure enough, it starts with an older guy who seems to think he is Hugh Hefner. He tells me all about the five businesses he owns in Sedona, the twelve in New York, all the fancy houses he has and the big parties he throws. I have no idea whether he’s legitimate or not, but it really doesn’t matter. He seems harmless. If he’s telling the truth I should marry him.
When we get on the bus, it’s jammed full. It is not going to be a comfortable ride. There’s a woman close to the front doing my trick of pretending to sleep, but I catch her with one eye open and ask if I can sit next to her. She goes straight back to sleep after I sit down and I watch the rest of the people board, including a woman with a huge dog. Animals are only allowed on the bus if they are required for medical purposes. This one is definitely not a Seeing Eye dog – apparently he’s part bulldog, part dingo and part Alsatian. He’s huge, but very gentle. She sits behind me and the dog creeps forward for me to pat him every now and then. Someone asks her what the dog is for, and she says it’s a companion dog. I think I’m the only person that hears the next bit “…for mental health.” Excellent.
The guys across the aisle from me start chatting. Robbie is kind of redneck looking – he’s quite skinny, has his cap on backwards and is wearing a gangster rap baggy t-shirt and jeans. Chris seems normal, wearing regular clothes and meeting minimum conversation level requirements by not telling me inappropriate information about himself within the first ten minutes. We talk for a while and the two older ladies in front join in. Janetta is a feisty old bird who seems to have seen a lot of the world, and Saunders is a hugely overweight coloured lady with deep-seated religious beliefs. She’s so big she has a seat to herself and her daughter is sitting further down the bus. It’s all quite social.
Eventually the chatter subsides and we snooze until the first fifteen-minute stop. As we pull in, I hear the guy next to Janetta having a bit of a rant. I think I overhear him saying he was shot three times and the doctor botched the surgery on his arm, so now he has no feeling in it. I peer through the crack in the seats and see him pull up his shirt to s his arm is all deformed. The weirdo warning bells are ringing, so I’m glad I’m not sitting next to him, but I make a mental note to keep an eye on Janetta. I’ve been needing the bathroom, but I’ve heard bad things about the bus toilets, so I’m relieved there’s a bathroom here.
All few hours later, we’re at our next stop, which is a strategically located Burger King in the middle of nowhere. I get off to use the bathroom again and leave my bag on the bus. When I get back on, it’s gone from under the seat in front of me. It has my wallet, my passport, my computer, my iPod. All the important things. While cursing at myself for my stupidity,
I tell Chris and we start looking around. The woman next to me didn’t get off, so I ask her if she saw it. She says the ladies in front were pushing it out of the way. I walk forward and spot it down by the feet of the weird arm guy. I’m not sure what to do, so I call Chris over and tell him where it is. Chris leans over, yanks the handle, and pulls it out from near the guy’s feet. No-one says anything. I get my water bottle out so I can subtly check if anything is missing. Everything’s there and I breathe a huge sigh of relief.
We arrive at Albuquerque at 3.25am and my bus is not until 4.45am. Chris and Robbie are continuing on the same bus at 4.25am, so they keep me company. At one stage the weird arm guy comes over and tells us he has thousands of songs on his iPod, but no charger, then he wanders off again. Ten minutes later he’s back. He seems to have taken a liking to Chris. I’m avoiding eye contact by writing postcards. He starts explaining he’s on medication because he sees dead people. Oh yes. Dead people. He then gives Chris some money to go and buy himself a coffee and wanders off again. Later I wonder if he is ex-military and suffering from PTSD or something. I shouldn’t be so judgemental.
The next bus is very crowded, mostly with Hispanic-looking people. All of the people I ask tell me the seats next to them are taken. An older guy near the back stands up and says I can have the seat next to him. Thankfully, I slip into the window seat and he immediately tells me he’s just been released from hospital after an accident. His throat is raspy and he’s obviously in some pain. More duty of care concerns. It turns out he was run over by a train, so had pretty serious injuries. I’m a little bit hesitant to ask why he was on the train tracks in case he’s an alcoholic and was sleeping on them (someone told me the reason they blow the whistles on the trains in Flagstaff is to make sure no drunks are on the tracks). Turns out he was trying to board a train but the doors shut and his foot got caught, flipping him under it. He was run over at low speed, causing more damage – he gives me his medical report to read. He was in hospital for thirty-five days and has been out for a month. Now he’s heading home. He’s 52, lives with his mother in Odessa in central Texas, works on the oil rigs, and hopes one day to buy his own house.
At the next stop I stay sleeping. When my buddy gets back on, he hands me a raspberry and cream cheese pastry and coke for breakfast. It’s more like dessert, but I eat it to be polite. It strikes me that the less people have, the more they give.
Bhutanese Architecture in El Paso
When we arrive in El Paso, my new friend helps me get some information on how to get to the main part of town. I need to find an internet café as I haven’t organised any accommodation yet. As I wander into town, loaded with my worldly possessions, I find a café called The Percolater with WiFI. Perfect. I look up directions to the only hostel in El Paso and find it is not too far away. It seems El Paso is not the major tourist destination I was expecting. When I check in, I’m given a dorm room for four people to myself, with an ensuite. Bargain.
I walk into town to the visitor centre and pick up a brochure that includes a self-guided walking tour of the historic centre. El Paso is right on the border with Juarez, Mexico. Juarez is where all the gang murders have been going on, plus it is a notorious area for petty crime, so I’m not keen on crossing the border. I may as well be in Mexico though – there’s far more Spanish spoken in El Paso than English.
The walking tour is a great introduction to the downtown area, which is a little shabby, but has a kind of faded charm. There are a couple of statues, an unusual leaping alligator fountain commemorating the live alligators that used to live in the pond in San Jacinto Square, and the Boxing Hall of Fame mural, saluting famous boxers from El Paso. I'm surprised by the less than subtle gun and ammunition store on a major street corner. I don't think I've ever seen an outlet selling guns. I’m glad I’ve decided to only stay the one night here.
The woman at the visitor centre marked three good Mexican restaurants on the map, but none are in the locations she marked, so I go back to The Percolate and have a sandwich. This gives me the energy to go and find the University district.
The University is, rather bizarrely, modelled on the architecture of Bhutan, and I figure there should be more shops in the area. The lady in the café tells me it is quite close, so I set off. I guess she was assuming I had a car, because it is most definitely not close. It is miles away, especially in the dry, 36-degree heat. When I make it there, I also discover it’s not quite as impressive as it looked in the brochure and there are no shops. I stumble back towards town, desperately looking for somewhere to rehydrate. When I find a convenience store, I buy two litres of water and drink it all immediately.
I start walking towards the border bridge, but realise it is quite a long way and there’s no shade, plus a highway runs along the river, so the chances are that it won’t be too picturesque. Instead, I go back to my hotel for a nap.
In the evening, I ask for a recommendation for a Mexican restaurant from the guy at the hotel desk. I’m intent to have Mexican food in homage to my proximity to the country. The streets are now almost deserted, apart from a few shady looking characters lurking on the corners. When I arrive, it’s more of a seedy looking bar than a restaurant, but it will do. I order a Mexican plate, which includes beans and rice, a taco and an enchilada. It’s not at the high end of the food connoisseurs’ scale, but it’s cheap and tasty.
Back at the hotel, I decide to book my hotel in Roswell for the next night. The place I want to stay at is fully booked and there is no hostel, so I decide to use the Hotwire mystery hotel function, where you get a reasonable quality hotel at a discount price within a geographic area, but they don’t tell you the name of the hotel until after you’ve booked. I won’t do that again. Despite showing a geographic area of the city centre, when I look up a map to the hotel it is 3.9 miles from the centre. Guess I’ll be spending quite a bit on taxis. Live and learn.
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