Quote:
Originally Posted by SleazyDream
13. Solar eclipse in Mexico?
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Fuck yeah!
We went down to cover it for a magazine.
We were going to do it in the northern baja but found out the longest eclipse time was going to be in LaPaz, the southern end of the Baja peninsula.
It was a twenty-four-hour bus-ride. Three laughing, joshing, grinning Mexican drivers with Tres Estrellas buslines and perfect teeth in eight-hour shifts who were very competent but made us nervous. They laughed with their heads thrown back, eyes closed, whenever we were rounding cliff-side blacktops without guard-railings... played a constant stream of mariachi muzic that always featured the word "Corazon" (heart, in spanish) and stopped only when they came across a liquor-shop/taco-stand...
That's when we hit the hard stuff. Just to make it through the wood-plank bus seats and endless mexican love tunes...
I have a theory now that all spanish music or songs use "corazon" somewhere in there... test it for yourselves.
So when we got down to LaPaz we rented a room from a spooky old dude with a beard and a respirator who laid in a wheeled hospital bed from the time he opened the flaky green painted door to when he showed us our room. He didn't tell us about the cult of cockroaches that worshipped a giant mutant roach in our bathroom at night if we closed the light. That was the last we saw of our booze, we came back from a good local taqueria the next day and it was all gone.
So we slept on the beach two nights which was cool because this troupe of mystical wild dogs would find us and cuddle up next to us both nights as if they knew we needed warmth.
The eclipse rocked. The light spectrum shifted, the roosters crowed, the horses neighed, and the ants marched back to their nests in a straight line... freaky. Then the sun disappeared and the planets all lined up together beneath the corona - we could see them all because of the reduced light. Like a pearl necklace... and hundreds of people who had gathered to see this cheered across the landscape around us all at once...
Then we had to backpack it back up north.... referred to earlier.
The article was five typed pages, and very expressionistic. The editor's reply with "fixes" was about ten. Our reply was forty pages with justifications. Ultimately we turned down their 400 dollar fee and published a great piece in an indy poetry journal, of all places...
Fuck'em if they can't take the truth.
:D