WALTER'S A MAN, A LEGEND & SOMEWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD.

Martes 18 Diciembre

Habitacion 103, Hotel Tuxpan, Mexico City

Landed in Mexico City at 9:30pm, coming in low enough to the roads to see the faces on the street-side billboards on final approach. Funkadelic still reverberating in my ears, walking along the airport strip and

(as I’m typing this, a possum has snuck in through the hostel window and is hiding behind the computer desk)

buy a lush cup of chai from the airport cafe, chuffed with myself to have understood when she asked if I wanted it caliente or freo. Immediately make the mental note to get another cup of this shit when I’m due to fly out, whilst sorting my bags out. There’s a recommended hostel in the rough guide, so I get a Metro ticket and work it like a boss, reaching the Zocalo and a subsiding street party with dry ski slope, street vendors and Mexicans of all ages milling about. The hostel only takes advance bookings, but I get talking to Sergio outside the cathedral - a Chicano traveller with mixed native American / Maya blood - and after some amiable wandering, he helps me find a hotel. Must be a slow night for the sex trade, got a ground floor cut-and-shut room with mirrors above and facing the bed! M$140. Sergio crashed out on the floor and split early the next morning - he said he’s gonna hit Puebla, then Chiapas and the MesoAmerican ciudads next, so I hope to catch up with him around there. Decent guy. Switched-on and exactly the right person for me to have met at the time.
Just read in the rough guide that the Zocalo (meaning plinth) was built on the heart of Tenochtitlan, and masonry for the original church that preceded the cathedral was sourced from the Aztec temple of Hurtzilopotchtli.

(the possum has left the building)

Last night the smell of the streets and sewers reminded me of the insect house roach smell - not pretty, but honest and I like that. Plants grow out of the upper building walls, and with the buildings generally reaching no higher than four storeys, the whole city feels close to the ground. I remember dusk, take-off from Houston was epic, flat horizon, glaring deep colour in the last of the day, and so many lights on the flat Texas floor. Makes me think that America retains some grandeur, and the promise of a road movie waiting to be lived in the expanses between sizzling bulbs.