[If you’re lost and in need of assistance, I’m detailing my impressions of a recent trip to Mérida, Mexico in lapidary text, sprinkled with fart jokes. I’m on day five, but I’ve finally cleared the airport. It’s a long road that has no turning.]

We got a taxi in the terminal aeropuerto, because like many American airports, Uber cabs are verboten to pick up passengers at the airport. They can drop you off, but in Merida, everyone hoofs it a quarter of a mile to a bus stop to get an Uber if you’re leaving the building. Well, we’re not everyone, I gather. It was 104 degrees out, and while it felt grand to step out of the air conditioned terminal, and by extension, our 19-degree Maine morning sendoff, I didn’t want to re-enact any scenes from Lawrence of Arabia just yet. Besides, I had two drinks and some lime soup sloshing around in me, and I didn’t want to make a bad impression on any passing pedestrians with my decks awash like that.

I was warned about the taxi stands in the airport. Hooboy I was warned. I was counseled by the internets that they were all as crooked as snakes in a hurry. In case you’re new to the internet, I’ll explain that the interwebs contain six billion websites, but somehow only one opinion for any given topic. Someone writes something, then everyone else paraphrases it in search engine optimized text, boned for weak intellectual teeth. Eventually the various invariable versions are gathered together in roundups and social media what-have-yous, and occasionally news outlets survey these roundups and say, “It is reported…”, or maybe, “People say….”, and re-report the same tired story. It’s a dark and bloody mystery who gets to write the first version of any given internet fib. The intertunnel isn’t a series of tubes. It’s the telephone game.

So I steeled myself against the onslaught of the taxi gauntlet. Taxi service procedures are unusual in Mérida, or so it seemed to me. I haven’t been in a taxi since the 1980s or so, so it would be easy to fool around with me. “No, senor, you must ride in ze trunk. It is how it is done!” At any rate, there are no standard fares for cab rides from the airport. And you don’t deal with the cab driver. There are a series of booths filled with clerks and drivers hanging around. You walk up to the booth and tell them where you want to go, and they look it up, and hand you a number written on a piece of paper. The internet tells me this is where they always get the better of the traveling gringo. Fleeceamos. Internauts counsel you to take the number to the next booth and they’ll beat it, and so on down the line, until you’re practically carried to your destination in a sedan chair for pennies.

I just looked at the offer I’d been given at the first booth, and the number was so low that I checked to make sure they were planning on doing more than driving me once around the parking lot, that my wife could also come along, because I’m sentimental like that, and that we could ride inside the car. Assurances made, I stopped paying attention to the internet altogether, paid the fare with a few pesos we’d cadged from the nearby redi-teller, and took the proffered receipt out to a driver on the curb. We were finally abroad in the land. Hey, no jokes about my wife, fellas.

The cab was sparkling new and clean, and the driver took a stab at English instead of the passengers. I’d tell you the make and model of the car, but I honestly don’t know. Mexicans drive a thousand models of cars we can’t buy in the United States. I was amused to see a Duster drive by us more than once, drifting back to my Mopar high school days, but it turns out that these new Dusters are made as a joint venture between Renault and Dacia. I just looked that up, so now I guess I have to look up Dacia, because what the hell is that? Oh, they’re Romanian. Romanian cars. Man, I have to get out more.

So I wondered why everyone in Mexico is driving a new car, because they were, while I’m driving an 18-year-old Volvo back in the states. I couldn’t find a Duster price handy, so I substituted another Renault, the amusingly named “Kwid.” It’s a very small 4-door compact. Hmmm. It’s listed at 232,100 pesos. Here we go with the grammar school math again. A peso is like a nickel, except the dollar is losing ground fast to the peso, so it’s more like 6 or 7 cents now, or at least until tomorrow when congress wakes up and sends the dollar hurtling down the crapper even further. That’s… that’s… no, that can’t be.

That’s $13,895.55 American dollars. You can buy a new car in Mexico for under 14 grand? As my toddler son once remarked, “Why for?” I was riding in one, and I didn’t have to pedal or anything. And unlike my car, the AC worked. That must be an outlier, right? Nope, the next nine cars in the list of Mexican cars I discovered maxed out at $17,500. You’ll have to drive an Ignis, or an Aveo, or a Mirage, or a “2”, or a V-Drive, or an Attitude, or a March, or an i10, or a Mobi, but you couldn’t spend twenty grand on a car in Mexico if you tried. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. You can buy an elephantine F-150 if you really want to, and pay real money for it, but you’ll have to listen to the side view mirrors thwapping pedestrians in the back of their heads as you drive downtown, in between scraping along the sides of the houses on both sides of the skinny streets. I’ll take a roller skate car for under 15 large anyday, thanks.

Later on, a maintenance guy came to our house driving a little VW pickup truck of the kind I’ve coveted for decades. He thought I was nuts when I said Usted camionetta es muy bueno, which is very bad Spanish, and sounds weird to a guy who thinks to himself, “It’s just a little truck,” only in good Spanish.  That’s because a Robust is an actual pickup truck, not a ridiculous American pickup which is essentially a $80,000 four-door Crown Victoria with the trunk lid pried off, used only to haul daughters to dance class. I looked it up when I got home. You can’t buy one of course, because Gaia is angry, and she has money for lobbyists, but Mexicans can buy one for under twenty grand. A bench seat and an open bed. God, I could weep.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting, recommending this site to others, buying my book, and contributing to our tip jar. It is greatly appreciated]