Episode Three - November 2007

Moving on from Monte Gordo, due to bad navigation and the need to make a split second decision we got lost in Vera Cruz. We were safely round the town on the by-pass and then somehow managed to find our way into the down town area. We made it out and Gerald was very gracious about my mistake. Because of this we ended up coming towards the Vera Cruz campgrounds (just 2 of them) from the wrong direction (as per the guide book) and were not able to find them. We decided to continue driving along the coast and eventually found a small restaurant with a large parking lot. The owner graciously allowed us to spend the night and would not take any money for it. We ate at his restaurant in lieu of payment. Gerald had Vuelvo de la Vida which is a seafood cocktail – shrimp, octopus, etc. I took one look at it and then looked the other way until he had finished. I had scrambled eggs with shrimp. So, there we were in a parking lot, just off the highway, in the middle of nowhere. I remember thinking before I went to sleep “I hope we wake up in the morning” and then we both had the best night’s sleep we had had in quite a while.

After an early start we had a long day’s drive to Villahermosa. This is the town that was devastated by floods just a few weeks before. We stopped on the outskirts of town at a Balneario. These are wonderful water parks that you see all over this area of Mexico. This one, according to the guide book had a large field reserved for campers. Not when we were there. We were invited to stay in the main parking lot at the front entrance. We were the only ones there. The closed field had parking places marked out with water and power at each spot. We got to use a long extension cord for electricity and had no water hook-up at all. Up until a week before the whole area had been knee deep in water thanks to the floods. Now they were working anxiously trying to get the park re-opened in time for the winter holidays. We were allowed to use the water park’s bathrooms. No water in the showers and, again, no toilet seats. We were warned that there would probably be snakes in the bathrooms. Luckily we didn’t see any. There were lots of mosquitoes though. We decided to spend two nights here so that we could explore the town of Villehermosa. We did go into town to look around, do some shopping to replenish our supplies and check the route through to the other side. What was fairly average traffic on the way into town became very heavy on the way back. 2 lanes of vehicles suddenly became 5. At one point we could not move because to do so would have meant hitting someone else’s side mirror. Then someone hit our mirror on the other side. After a while we saw three army trucks unloading soldiers as if something unusual was happening. We never did find out what it was though. We were just get to get out of it and back ‘home’ to the camper.

It rained a lot while we were in Villehermosa and there were still a lot of flooded areas around. On the trip into town I saw people filling sand bags as if they were expecting another spate of floods. On our last morning there Gerald woke me at 5.15 saying that he thought we should get moving as it had been raining all night and the camper was now sitting in standing water. Not surprisingly I had been dreaming about the camper sinking most of the night. We packed up and were on our way out of town by 6 am.

While at the Balneario we met what we thought was an elderly gringo. Closer up he wasn’t that old, just had agility problems. He had moved from somewhere to New Orleans about 3 years ago and all he owned was washed away by Hurricane Katrina soon after he moved there. He said to himself ‘enough of the US’, and promptly moved down here to the outskirts of Villehermosa. As soon as he got here he sold his car. . He now lives at the far end of a very rustic dirt track and the guys at the Balneario take care of him – take him grocery shopping, evacuate him during floods, etc.