Very Cool, with plenty to see and do and it was so self contained that there was a Hyatt hotel behind security meaning if I had a layover or missed connection I would never need to leave the protective cocoon of the terminals.
By some incredible cosmic intervention I met Simone at Mexico City airport, this was a magnificent feat of luck as Tania was meant to meet us at Mexico City airport around the same time and more importantly, introduce the two of us as we had never met before. Tania had major difficulties with her flight on Aerolineas Gringos (American Airlines) out of Venezuela and the infrastructure in that country does not cater for international direct dial to the US so she was basically stuck there until someone helped her work out the phones or the AA booking system, one of which eventually happened and she was on her way on a Mexicana flight. I am not sure how it happened but her story involves an overly friendly taxi driver-cum-stalker and is well worth listening to over a drink.
Thankfully I was on email at SFO and DFW airports (muchos gracias, Aerolineas Gringos) so I could keep in contact with Tania, but for reasons as yet unknown she had packed her mobile in her checked in luggage so had no way of getting word through to Simone, who was travelling Sydney to Mexico City via Fiji and Los Angeles.
Simone had no idea Tania's flight was delayed, nor what flight I would be on, nor which city I was flying in from (Dallas Fort Worth - who knew?) so when she walked past me after i cleared customs and cautiously asked if I was Dave, it was cause for much celebration; as much celebrating as 2 people can do after spending up to 24 hours in transit.
Simone had it way worse than I did but still had her wits about her and she didn't go into total panic mode (like i would have). It was one of those moments where Facebook, no matter how much it pesters me with friend, event or application requests, was really worth its weight in gold, as she was able to recognise me from Facebook.
Mexico City at 3am is really something else- the taxi driver ran 4 out of 5 red lights meaning we got to our hostel in about 10 minutes, but the upsetting thing was that I witnessed Mexico City at 3am and how the poverty manifested itself in poor people tearing through rubbish bags and leaving what was once a 1m x 1m bag of rubbish into about a 5m x 5m pile of shit. Not to mention the hundreds of dogs roaming the streets and appeared to be fighting the humans for food scraps.
There were police *everywhere* with their red and blue lights flashing; in Australia when the lights are flashing it usually means MAJOR shit is going down and there were so many police lights that I honestly thought the end of days had happened while i was at 37,000 feet. I was seriously wondering why the pilot didn't have the good sense to land the plane somewhere a bit more off the grid and self sufficient - like Cabo San Lucas - i mean fighting a dog for scraps of food? that is WAY third world and it signifies to me that anarchy has set in.
However, during my stay in Mexico City I discovered that it IS legal to run the reds at minor insersections after midnight and that the police DO drive around aimlessly with the red and blue lights flashing at all hours of the day, in fact I'm not sure what else the police do except drive around aimlessly because that is all they seemed to do. Britney Spears clearly had an impact on these people.
The other thing the Police do is to stand on the side of the road in riot gear prepared "just in case". Its confronting until you realise how pointless it is and that they are carrying on in this way to keep up appearances for the President of Uraguay or whatever visiting dignitary it happens to be, but I guess Mexico had its problems in the past and it may not have been as safe as it was when I visited there, so good on them for sorting that out.
At least the Mexicans keep their homeland security to pointless exercises of police variety shows rather than the good ol US of A who seem to impose the most inane laws and procedures in the name of 9/11 at every corner. You want a postage stamp? SPREAD 'EM.
All in all I quickly established that at night it is incredibly safe and fast to get around Mexico City including while being drunk beyond belief on dirt cheap alcohol, eating dirt cheap street vendor food, in the back of a dirt cheap taxi cab.
Even better than that was how safe I felt because every second person I saw was a cop "policing" something-or-other but loosely translated means they were on their mobiles or smoking or talking to tourists like me. I really enjoyed how the cops were up for talking shit with Australian tourists at 3am, and ever so helpfully pointing out 7/11's and once pointing out a rather public location for me to have a drunken street wee without even giving me a fine for public intoxication/lewdity/disgracefullness or what have you. Liberty and Justice for all!
I got really sick in Mexico City and so by day i was either miserable with a sore throat or miserable and suffering through a bout of "Montezumas Revenge", which is a really cultured way of saying "runny bum". I think this is funny because in Australia the big chain of "mexican" restaurants are called Montezuma's and everyone else in the world associates that word with incredibly painful bowel movements. Locals were flabbergastered when I told them about this restaurant chain and they all thought it was hilarious.
Note to self, Montezuma is a vengeful and unrelenting whatever-he-or-she-is and it really is possible to go overboard with the refried beans - on every single god-damn meal it is just asking for trouble.
While i'm on the Baños (bun-yoss = bathroom) stories, one of the rudest shocks I got was the discovery that the Mexican Sewerage System was not designed to handle paper. The two go hand in bowl where i'm from, not hand in bin-without-a-lid. I was greeted at 3am by a sign telling me not to flush the paper and to put it in the unlined open bin next to the toilet for disposal later and this was initially bemusing and then appalling when I thought back to the pepperoni pizza I had at SFO and the McDonalds i'd inhaled at DFW (aka "The Last Supper"). I knew I was in for a rough time of it. Its bad enough that I dry retch when I look at the paper the first time round, let alone every time I walk into the Baños and subjecting everyone else to this nightmare is just all kinds of wrong.
Baños is just a funny word and I used it in a variety of ways, like when I made up my Spanglish words like "Baños Grande" (Big Bathroom) which was coined when we were out with Tania's gentleman friend and she took a while in the Baños and in the interests of making conversation across language barriers I asked him "Tania tiene Baños Grande?" (Tania has big bathroom?) and he cracked it laughing - Tania was not so impressed, citing a lack of intelligible signage for her delay.
So despite being sick and Tania having travelled all through South America and only really partied once at a place called La Cucaracha (The Cockroach) she was well keen to hit the town and so we did - the first night we had together we went to a bar that served some awesome Mexican food but due to my families incessant warnings and avice about the food/water/air (basically "DON'T EAT, DRINK OR DO ANYTHING - you will get sick") i stuck to Jack Daniels with purificado ice and a rather average Hamburger made all the more palatable by loading up on the jalapeño's - but the Taco's Tania ordered were fucking fantastic and were nothing like what I had ever associated with the word "taco" before.
After that the girls insisted on checking out the pumping club area we were in and I protested due to my families warnings about doing *anything* and feeling sick and tired, but thankfully we did and walked past a club playing some awesome music, which turned out to be a gay bar.
All of a sudden, I forgave Mexico City.
They are such a nice people, I really discovered this by night when the Mexican youth were able to kick up their heels and party Latino style and that really was fun. Simone and I downed a top shelf tequila shot (at $3 USD it would be rude not to) and I inadvertantly ordered another round, despite trying to ask for the bill, but it went down a treat. Sick? me? NEVER!
Tania started to die in the arse and given that she had flown Venezuela, Miami, Mexico City earlier in the day I was surprised she made it out at all. When we were walking back to what appeared to be the taxi rank (it was actually a taco street vendor - same thing) I was drunkenly Hola'ing good looking people, one of which stopped and chatted to us for ages. He was Peruvian and had some story, but all I really knew about Peru was that la cocaína es especialidad de Peru and through a series of broken spanglish and hand gesturing we discovered that yes, it was indeed the source of much national pride.
The day after we ended up on the open topped Turibus in what can only be described as armageddon style "end of days" heat, which made that Tequila I had rented the night before evict itself thru my pores at an unprecidented rate. We had prime seats in the front row of the double decker bus and as such were not keen on the idea of "hop on, hop off" and god forbid, miss a photo opportunity. We stayed on that bus for what felt like an entire Summer and when as a group we decided "lets get the fuck out of here" we were back at the nightclub district which by day was kind of nice. I was dying of dehydration from a variety of reasons including but not limited to the heat and so had a soup, which turned out to be Alphabet Soup, in a restaurant. Go figure?
That night we ended up going out AGAIN this time with Tania's gentlemen friend who is a local and a local with connections, so while we got into the first, empty club for free, we went to another club which was not free (200 pesos - $20 - fair enough) which was TOTALLY pumping Latino Style. Live band with singers on stage performing a mix of Mexican Pop and Western Pop was a truely magical experience made all the more magical by the bottle of Absolut we had purchased. The night is a total blur as I drank to forget everything that upset me so far in Mexico City and I ended up making friends with a bunch of Mexican people who were ever so nice, except one chick just could not understand why I would not make out with her - it was just very weird and I ended up pretending that I already had a girlfriend just to get away from it. I'm a fan of Absolut Grape but i'm not a fan of the Absolut Grope!
In the following two days I was sick as a dog, as you can well imagine. Tequila and Vodka do provide temporary fortitude against illness but my body was just not coping with everything all at once, and so I missed out on going on a hostel tour to some Ruins near Mexico City, and I lay pretty low.
Tania kindly offered one afternoon to take me to a park to chill out and walk around in the fresh air, which turned out to be a complete shit fight because neither of us had looked into this situation, resulting in the park being closed when we arrived, and we had to experience peak hour on the Mexican Metro. The crush was so bad at one point that my feet didn't actually touch the ground and members of the catholic church could argue that my levitation onto the Metro train and subseqeuent getting of a seat was nothing short of a modern day miracle.
I also got to see the top of the Torre Latinoamericana building which gave me a really great 360 degree view of Mexico City from one of the the highest building in the world - not the tallest - as Mexico City is at least 2000m above sea level. The building itself looks totally third world and has under 50 floors, but given that Mexico sprawls so much and there really aren't that many 50 story buildings - it was impressive. The views were spectacular, especially of Mexico City airport which is located almost in the middle of the city, and would have to be one of the scariest landings to perform as the houses go right up to the runway. That building survived so many MAJOR earthquakes and had a museum of the destruction
When it came time to leave Mexico City I had almost fallen in love - maybe next time I will do things differently, I will stay somewhere which insulates me from the outside world a bit more because the outside world by day was really something else. Mexicans have no idea about how to shut the fuck up and so at every conceivable opportunity there was some outlandish noise which varied from some guy yelling about a WC (my business is clearly his business) to people playing street organ things to yelling and screaming and bad latino music. By night, the city was much quieter, it was managable, it was amazing.
We left Mexico City on what has to be one of the worlds oldest commercial aviation jets - the Boeing 737-200, flown by Aviacsa. Tanias Gentleman Friend had laughed when we told him which airline we booked and said he hoped we would survive the flight. That plane was so old it had not been fitted with the modern turbulence controls that we are used to on the planes that fly around Australia, which I thought was kind of cool because it felt like we were riding in a cart pulled down a dirt road by an irritable donkey. It was an experience to say the very least.
As we came in for landing in very bad weather at Villahermosa, WE ended up hoping that we would survive the flight. At one point we could see the leaves on the trees out the left hand side windows as the plane banked so sharply very close to the runway. We missed the runway and the pilots gunned the engines and i noticed some kind of smoke coming out of the ceiling which psychologically did not help the situation but no one seemed to fussed by this and I am sure it was normal and condensation of some sort. It just did not help the situation AT ALL.
We went around for another attempt at landing and by this point I had found God and prayed so incredibly hard, double hard when we appeared to be about 5 metres off the ground, surrounded by lush swamp lands and no sign of an airport. It was truely scary!!!! At the last second the runway appeared and I am pretty sure we landed before the "piano keys" which signify the beginning of the proper runway and the plane actually landed this time, which was SO GOOD.
Everyone on that old plane cheered so loud and clapped and everything.
We taxied to the gate and thus began the second part of our Mexican Adventure.
Tania and I at Centro Historico
Tania, Simone and I at Dinner
Alphabet Soup
Mexico Nightclub
Tania and Antonio