Last Thursday, 26th June 1997, I made my fourth all day outing to Tijuana, this time with my friends Joel, Alan, and his lovely wife Sandra, who was born in El Salvador. I named our troop "Los Cuatro Amigos", and imagined that we would get into all sorts of epic adventures. Each visit across the border has been so different and varied, as this trip would soon prove as well.

We caught the light rail red tram ($1.75 for the 23-mile trip from Old Town Station), and reached the San Ysidro border station around 1 p.m., where we connected with Alan and Sandra and began our trek. I stopped to chat with an Aussie couple from Brisbane, gave them a packet of Jelly Bellies, and offered some advice on what to see.

Through the revolving gates we went into Mexico. It was a sunny day, mild with a light breeze. Past the taxi stand and souvenir stalls near the border, we soon caught a blue and white bus to the Plaza Rio district, and transferred across the street from the upscale shopping center to a green and white bus that would take us beyond the International Airport in Otay Mesa. I used the word "transferred", but Tijuana buses don't actually give passengers transfers. Each fare is separate, and amounts to around $0.38.

For a while the bus ran parallel with and close to the US border. Off to the right, in the distance, I could see the famous "babe with a bedroom in her chest", a free standing 56-foot tall statue of a woman by the Tijuana sculptor Armando Munoz Garcia, located in the Colonia Aeropuerto District, and called by most people, "La Mujer Blanca" (the white woman) or "La Mona (the doll). She is painted white, symbolic of purity, and according to an article in the San Diego Reader by Laura McNeal (23 January 1997), has a kitchen in her stomach, a bedroom in her chest, and a dovecote in her head. And why not. Mexico is filled with juxtapositions!

Past the airport we left the bus, and walked along a busy highway until we arrived at a sprawling, modern shopping mall. We walked through Dorian's, a very chic department store, looking for a place to have lunch, and finally arrived at Restaurant Yucatan, which is near Comercial Mexicana, a supermarket within the shopping center. It is also next door to an ice cream stall, and faces the parking lot. We sat at tables on the sidewalk. Sandra had quesadillas with beans. Alan had a dish whose name I do not remember, but were essentially enchiladas filled and covered with a dense sauce made from ground pumpkin seed (pepitoria) and hard boiled egg. With it he had a penafiel de manzana (apple soda). My friend Joel had a plate of Yucatan appetizers, little open-faced tacos with purple pickled onions on top. I ordered "carnitas pibil", a dish made with pork, a black bean sauce, and a sauce made from "achiote" (annatto seed), and also decorated with purple onions, and washed down with a very nice dark beer. We were also served two sauces: a red dipping sauce made with Habanero chilies, and a fiery sauce of chopped habaneros with onion. The very sympathetic waitress looked at me with a mix of pity, sympathy and dismay when she brought the hot sauce over. Alan and I had gotten into a "que es muy macho?" contest to see who could tolerate the most spiciness, apparently a common character flaw in over-educated gringos! Lunch was most enjoyable, and the setting was pleasant enough, with a view of the brown hillsides in the distance.

After eating, on the way to Friendship Park in a section of Tijuana called Mesa de Otay, we stopped in at Restaurant Ritz Cafe-Pub to look at the menu, and then explored the nearby Hotel Otay Bugamvilea. Both had an upscale air to them of money, comfort, and well-heeled guests. The hotel's pool was set in a lovely courtyard, surrounded by a variety of blooms. A short distance away was Friendship Park (Parque de la Amistad), where we walked over acres of grassy fields and onto a path that edged around a small lake. I had never seen so much green space before in Mexico. The park was almost completely litter free. On the lake were ducks, geese, a few white swans, and people enjoying the 2-passenger paddle boats. I stopped to buy a 2-peso (25-cents) bag of maize to feed the waterfowl. They had already spurned my fruit-filled pop tarts, which I had tried feeding to them. The only distractions from this pristine sight were the low-flying Mexicana 727 and DC-9 jets, that were about 200-feet high, and on final approach to their landing at the nearby International Airport.

After a while we left the park, crossed a large intersection, and headed through a quiet neighborhood, with a variety of satellite dishes and TV antennas on their roofs. Off to our left, we saw a big open burned out lot and a very dense colonia on a hillside way past it. It invited us to reach it, and we took up the challenge. The four of us cut through the lot, walking down a long gradual hill. It smelled like a garbage dump. On our right, as we walked downhill along a wide dirt road, we passed a porcelain workshop with samples of the day's output drying on the roof, and residences of declining socioeconomic status all around. Eventually, we came to level ground, and kept walking straight ahead. We stopped to talk with a passing woman who told us in Spanish that it was absolutely not possible to reach the colonia if we continued straight ahead. She was quite emphatic about this, I imagined in my non-existent Spanish. Needless to say, we continued straight ahead anyway. On our right was a cattle ranch or dairy farm. We could smell other barnyard animals. We walked past the hay stacks, and some interesting houses on the left with lion statues in front of them.

Finally, we came out of this agricultural area, turned left onto a paved road, and saw a convenience store or bodega where we stopped for cold drinks, sitting against the building wall in the late afternoon sunshine. We were all thirsty from the dust, exotic smells, and our journey on foot. We got some directions from the proprietor, and continued straight ahead after leaving the store, before turning right into a deep river bed wash, which was also nicely forested. For me, this was the high-point of the day's exploration. We made our way on sandy paths through dense vegetation, including loco weed (Jimson Weed), and another poisonous weed with nettles, called Castor Bean, paused on a hillock within the river wash to survey the topography, then pushed onward to a steep trail that traversed the hillside leading up to the colonia, which was called Fraccionamiento El Lago, until we emerged at the top and saw the 4-story buildings on our left, and a soccer field off to our right. This experience reminded us of "The Lord of the Rings", "Narnia", "Heart of Darkness" and childhood adventures of exploration and discovery. As Alan put it, "The journey through the river was like a trip to the inner station of the ultimate horror." He later told me that his remarks were actually drawn directly from John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," whose "hero," Ignatius J. Reilly, described his visit to Baton Rouge in these dramatic terms. My own reaction was a mix of Huckleberry Finn, Joseph Conrad, and Carlos Castenada. Literary imagery were running rampant.

Walking through the colonia, I could hear loud music coming from a variety of sources, and tried to count the radio stations, but soon gave up. I felt that we must look like benign aliens dropping in out of the clouds to these people. We went past fast food stands which served as the neighborhood candy store, pay telephones, parked cars, and basketball hoops mounted on light poles. This solid working class neighborhood had everything. Finally, we came to some stores which included a lavanderia or Laundromat, and a video rental store, and crossed a busy street which led into a small neighborhood park with sandy dirt trails, and barbed wire protecting the grass. We sat here and watched the joggers, walkers, and dogs, doing what dogs do on the grass. What a great adventure, I thought, marveling at all that we had done.

After a bit, we left the park and caught a mini bus with bad shocks and suspension to the El Cinco y Diez shopping area, where we walked to the corner, turned right, and almost immediately connected with a 6-passenger red jitney that dropped us off on Boul. Agua Caliente past the bull ring, and near a famous pizza restaurant outside of which two men had been recently executed by a shotgun blast. Life can be violent, wherever you live. We crossed the street and walked a few blocks to El Yogurt Place in Colonia Cocho on Guanajuato where we had dinner on the outside patio. Joel had a cactus leaf salad (nopalitos), which Sandra also ordered with a bowl of vegetable soup. I had the 35.00 peso dinner special ($4.50) consisting of mushroom soup, turkey meatballs in a tomato sauce, and a wild rice mixture, along with an apple and mango fruit juice. A fresh loaf of toasted whole-grain bread was served with the meal. The restaurant was a twin sister of a similar eatery by the old bullring, next to the ocean where I had once lunched. The atmosphere was tranquil and lush, a true oasis in the midst of a city of over one million people.

When dinner ended, we walked briskly back to the border in about thirty-five minutes, passing the Cultural Center and other landmarks in the darkness, and not stopping until we were back in the United States. It was a memorable outing, which I'm delighted to share with all the amigos and dreamers in the world.

For another view of Tijuana, and beyond, see John & Linda Lipman's excellent perspective of a more traditional tourist visit.