Downtown El Paso looking towards Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Photo / 123RF
Downtown El Paso looking towards Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Photo / 123RF
Fulfilling a long-held ambition, Ed Vulliamy drives the 3200km length of the US-Mexico border and discovers a land of beauty, poverty and paradox.
Of all the enthralling landscapes in America - and there are a few of them - none is more beguiling and awe-inspiring than that seen from the balcony outside room 258 on the upper floor of the La Quinta Inn on Geronimo Drive in El Paso, Texas, with a six-pack of beer, a lime, hot salsa and big bag of tortilla chips for company.
In the mid-distance runs the border between the United States and Mexico, in two forms: a harsh wall decorated with barbed wire, and the trickle of the Rio Grande. And beyond the boundary lies the factory smoke, the sea of lights, the lure and menace of the most charismatic, libidinous, dangerous and daunting city I know: Ciudad Juarez.
The scene is especially cogent at dusk, when fleets of cast-off American school buses have done their rounds dropping off workers from the duty-free maquiladora sweatshop factories, so that a layer of grey, gossamer-thin dust wraps the lanes like snow, only the desert breeze is as warm as a hair dryer.
This is the midway point of a journey I had always promised myself I would make from the Pacific to the Gulf, along the busiest border in the world, but a borderland that is a country in its own right, which belongs to both the US and Mexico, yet neither. I call this terrain - 3200km long and about 150km wide - "Amexica".
Amexica is a place of paradox - of love and violence, opportunity and poverty, sex and cruelty, beauty and fear - and even the frontier itself is simultaneously porous and harsh.
While the wall, patrols, Customs officers and sniffer dogs endeavour to control drugs and migrants crossing the border, El Paso, like the other 13 twin cities of the US that face their Mexican neighbours across the frontier, is almost as essentially Hispanic as its counterpart.
It is a border which over 950,000 people cross every day. Families live astride - and workers commute across - the frontier; it takes 10 minutes to walk from downtown El Paso to main street Juarez, from what is supposed to be the First World into what looks like the Third, yet is not.
The borderland has its own music, norteno, and its own Anglo-Spanish lexicon, spoken by both sides and written on the doors of bars: "Menores and Personas Armadas Strictly No Entrada."
Cormac McCarthy's book No Country for Old Men was set in these parts and I'd decided the title was wrong. I needed time alone, and to think, and during visits to work here and there along the borderland over the years, I concluded that it was very much A Country for Old Men, and now I needed to drive the full length of it, ocean to ocean.
The journey began where the desert sun sets into the Pacific, at Amexica's western edge on the frontier between Tijuana and San Diego.
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. Photo / Supplied
The flight is to Los Angeles, but there is no time to savour the City of Angels, only to drive south along those freeways out of town, itself a sensation like being propelled down a palm-strewn hypodermic needle charged with some potent aphrodisiac, toward the sign reading "International Frontier".
"Aqui empieza la patria" is Tijuana's municipal motto: Here begins the homeland, and the Mexican flag, with its eagle clutching a snake impaled on a cactus, flies vast in the breeze, and in America's face.
"You are in the Most Visited City in the World", claims the sign above Avenida Revolucion, recalling Tijuana's role in American life, whereby thousands swarmed here to savour Mexican exotica, buy souvenirs, drink margarita by the jug, get teeth fixed cheaply, maybe even rent a chica for a quickie or for the night and, latterly, buy Viagra or Prozac for a fraction of the price back home.
But the narco war has changed all that, so that now, says Enrico Rodriguez in his empty shop full of unbrowsed jewellery and neo-Aztec bric-a-brac: "I cross myself every time I make a sale, and have not crossed myself for two days."
No one wants a Polaroid picture taken of themselves next to a poor old donkey painted black and white like a zebra, and in the bars the strippers pole-dance pretty much to one another.
But Tijuana is a strong city, and provided one is back in one's hotel not too long after dark, there has never been a better time to visit. After all, the Mexicans are still there: the Fab Four Beatles tribute show is sold out, and taking your sweetheart for a skinny-vanilla-frappuccino at El Verdana is a cool date.
After reading all that Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence, I decided I really must start with a corrida at the bullring past the border fence by the sea, but I confess that I never liked either writer and in the damp, chilly air of a sparsely attended stadium, fail to feel the macho-libido rush in all this, and wonder what the fuss is about as yet another knackered bull is slashed according to plan and hauled off, while couples cheer and ladies wave handkerchiefs at the second-rate idol.
Far more rousing was the Sotano Suizo pub, heaving for the televised football match Mexicans call "El Clasico" between Club America of Mexico City and Chivas of Guadalajara. On screen, the teams unleash attack after attack in a game with far more bloodlust than the bullfight - Chivas winning 2-1.
I had always wanted to be in Mexico for the Day of the Dead - a profoundly charged entwinement of ancient faith and Christianity, an Aztec rite of communion with the underworld with the resurrection feast of All Saints, when elaborate meals are cooked, and special breads baked to share with the departed in cemeteries.
But the most poignant meals on this Day of the Dead were being held by the beach where California meets Mexico: the quintessential Amexican Sunday lunch, when families sit down for picnics with the border fence running through the meal. Spread out on either side of the fence are chairs made of aluminium and canvas bearing aunts, nieces, children and grandchildren. Dollar bills as well as luncheon courses get passed to and fro.
"We're trying to get papers so that we can all meet on the same side, but these things take time," says Martino Martinez, a janitor in San Diego, hosting a family reunion.
A local boy during the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico. Photo / Supplied
I zigzag my way east, criss-crossing the border. Through a lonely Californian spa resort called Jacumba Springs frequented by Los Angelinos with back problems and Buddhist monks. Back across into Mexico at Tecate, after which a bend in the road reveals the first breathtaking views on this journey, from Mexican Highway 2, of infinite distance - towards the Mexicali border crossing, southern Californian plains, sand dunes and a little cemetery in Holtville where some of those who tried to run the border, mostly nameless, are buried.
To the south, one crosses from Nogales, Arizona into Nogales, Mexico. From here the road winds through the Sonora mountains and a roughneck town called Cananea where an empty but garish restaurant serves superb quesadillas with amazement that a gringo would still want to come this way, alone.
Back into the US at Douglas, and thence a hidden treasure called Bisbee, Arizona - a hippie and biker colony dug into hills from which copper was once mined - and Tombstone, where they re-enact the O.K. Corral for tourists (an attraction well worth avoiding).
Finally, late one night, I make it to that destination I had fixed firmly in my mind: the balcony of the upper row of motel rooms in El Paso, ready to dive into Ciudad Juarez, a city at war, but a city like no other.
The twins of El Paso and Juarez have always been cities of transit. The El Paso side of the footbridge between them feels like the crossroads of the Americas - families keeping a rendezvous and travellers heading for the bus station from which a coach will transport them anywhere and everywhere in America - Dallas, Chicago, New York.
The Millennial Arch at the entrance of the city in Tijuana. Photo / 123RF
Until recently, Juarez was best known as the cradle of the Mexican revolution: the first city seized in 1910 by militias under the legendary outlaw guerrilla "Pancho" Villa, who then marched from here on the capital to connect with his southern counterpart, Emiliano Zapata.
After the United States frontier was drawn across Juarez's face, the city lived on a wire industry, distilleries and railways. But modern Juarez, just a stroll across the river for drink and any accompanying vice, boomed during prohibition in the US; the margarita cocktail was invented here, and one can raise a glass to Marilyn Monroe's first, in the very bar in which she drank it.
Juarez has become latterly infamous for the mass murder of young women and the drug war, which make this visit as much a dare as an "escape". The city lies, so they say, entre algo y nada - between something and nothing.
Yet, though blemished, this is a pulsating and soulful city. And nowhere more so than in the little streets behind the cathedral, with hot peppers and freshly gathered pistachios tumbling from every open storefront. Or in the plenteous Cerro Jeros market place, especially on Saturday, when the shroud of work is lifted and Juarez's face is hearty and sanguine.
This landscape of infinite flotsam and jetsam for sale could only be a border town, and only on a border with America. Everything that is not quite a la mode north of the frontier lines the streets in carefully arranged but overloaded quantities: 60s furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers and giant fridges.
My memories of Juarez are of a city that explodes at night. The Sphinx disco, shaped like an Egyptian pyramid, was effervescent with girls dressed to kill, spending their wages like there was no tomorrow, for this is a strange economy - the wages are disgraceful by US standards, but not by those of the Mexican interior.
In the old days, the so-called "narco juniors" would be cruising in their tinted SUVs, wearing a mix of cowboy and Versace, with a chica on each arm. Now they have vanished, the Sphinx is subdued, and the nine-storey hotel into which I check is empty apart from a boxing team on its way to fight in Finland.
The highway into Tequila. Photo / 123RF
But I am determined to enjoy this. My regular of several years ago - the Papillon on Avenida Guerrero - was a seedy, throbbing, edgy but unthreatening hangout where an all-female staff wore the compulsory Juarez barmaids' uniform of almost nothing while serenading norteno bands and vendors of naughty lingerie dropped in and out. All that still happens, but menacingly so, and there is some unspoken warning that it is not a good idea to stay on until closing time.
I crossed the Bridge of the Americas and left El Paso an hour before dawn, to drive the second half of my journey, all 1600km of which crosses the state of Texas on the US side.
Driving alone in America, the radio is one's companion, the stations channel-flicking of their own accord as one proceeds from one signal range to another, from apocalyptic Christian preaching to redneck country music via pulsating norteno and right-wing windbag talk radio.
The channel-flicking is achieved by the main theme of this journey: distance. The kind of distance film directors can only measure with receding telegraph poles by day; the kind of distances to which private cars surrender after dark, their drivers tucked up in motels, so that one shares the night highway almost exclusively with trucks, and the lights with which each trucker makes his eight-wheeled-juggernaut distinctive.
Distances across which the endlessly long, thrilling freight trains rattle and surge so that sometimes in the desert night, I pull over just to wonder at their thunderous passing.
I pass forests of windmills on Interstate 10 between somewhere called Fort Stockton and somewhere else called Ozona, take the occasional detour off the freeway through hippie colonies, yuppie colonies and redneck outposts with old cars rusting in the yard, and make a quick stop at Del Rio - obligatory because of the famous hotel shoot-out scene in No Country for Old Men.
It turns out - once one has breached the Business Loop and Sirloin Stockade - to be a quiet, bleached town in which Sam's Boot Corral seems to have gone bust, but where you can get a good coffee and old men wearing Stetsons have plenty of time to chat outside restaurants on Pecan St.
What was the mountainous desert now flattens towards the place at which four bridges connect Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side to its sister city on the US side, Laredo.
In terms of freight traffic, this is the umbilical cord connecting Latin to North America. Thousands and thousands of American trucks converge on Laredo every day to meet a matching number of Mexican trucks, for the transfer of payloads 16km inside the US.
This is "where one country blends into the other", the former Mayor of Laredo, Betty Flores, told me.
Indeed, the bridge over the Rio Grande River may separate two countries, two worlds, but it connects a single main street - both ends of which look, sound and smell the same.
To the south, Nuevo Laredo is proud that it was founded by those Mexicans who refused to live on the US side of the river after losing the Mexican-American war in 1848. Now, fountains in the square over which the facade of one of the loveliest and oldest border churches presides, infuse the chatter with the dulcifying sound of water on water.
I leave before dark and cross the bridge on foot, to spend my last night on the border in bustling, friendly Laredo where the trees are decked out in fairy lights along the Via San Angelo, where, true to Amexica, I could have one beer in the 66 Club with bikers listening to the Allman Brothers, and another at Club Cabana, where the chicas were gearing up for an evening I was not going to join in on with a final, monster drive to follow next day.
Instead, back at the motel on the slip road of Interstate 13, what could be more inviting than norteno music booming into the muggy heat from a speaker right across the road, where a stall called La Tremenda was serving the best quesadillas of the entire trip on tables outside for US$3 a pair, with brain-blowing condiments, to teenagers spilling out of pick-ups and a truck driver called Roy from Detroit who reckons he's eaten there 50 times, not least because the host had no problem with us bringing over six-packs from the gas station for consumption outdoors, which is illegal in a state where almost anyone can buy a semi-automatic weapon.
The remaining 300km east were a descent into the humid pyrexia of the Gulf. The so-called Texas Tropical Trail weaves through war-torn Reynosa and Matamoros on the Mexican side, and McAllen and Brownsville on the Texas side, the latter of which declared itself recently to be the poorest town in America.
The trail is an ugly, dense urban freeway lined with the usual hoardings advertising "Legal Advice on Brain-Injured Infants Due to Hospital Malpractice" - but which one can turn off at Glasscock Rd on to a byway that skirts the river and border, through low-slung shanty towns and agricultural compounds surrounded by barbed wire.
Everything is suddenly eerie, for all the bright colours of the birds along the telegraph wires and watermelons sold by the sackful beside the road. The sky is lurking darkly in that Texan way which tells you there's a storm blowing in, and the bright sun is turning a sickly blood-red. The palms bend in the wind and rain comes harsh and sudden, so that I wonder why on earth I am doing this, rather than heading straight for Houston and the airport.
The answer is obvious: I have to reach the end of the line, the edge of Amexica, a place called Boca Chica, which seems, from the little one can see through the storm, to be a sort of tropical Torquay, only the rain drives diagonally and the wind is warm.
Looking at my sodden map, I learn that I am near the site of the last battlefield of the American Civil War. Maybe a few months ago this place was a blanket of babes in bikinis and jocks flicking frisbees, but right now the promise of a Boca Chica village store in black paint on a white board is a fraud because it, like everything else, is shut.
A couple of miles south of here, the Rio Grande - the Rio Bravo - reaches the Gulf, and 10 days after leaving LA I have reached my destination.
It felt wonderfully pointless, in that way of which Albert Camus wrote, about purpose without justification, achievement for no reason.
I felt outrageously happy, had one bottle of Sol left from the six-pack they let me drink outdoors at La Tremenda and - for all the ferocity of the Texas highway patrol and with hours more to drive - risked a solitary toast to the road from sunny Tijuana to this torrentially wet communion with the Gulf of Mexico; slipped the lime through the neck of the bottle and drank to ... What? La Frontera! Amexica!
Then slammed the car door against the downpour.
CHECKLIST
Getting there:Air New Zealand begins regular flights from Auckland to Houston in December. They go on sale next month. The airline also flies direct to LA and San Francisco.
Details: Some helpful websites include dhs.gov and drivetheamericas.com. If you're an AA member, your card will get you discounts on everything from theme parks and accommodation to car rental, restaurants and shopping wherever you see the "Show your Card and Save" or "AAA Club Rewards" logos.
