Cuernavaca

I left Oaxaca for Puebla in route to Cuernavaca on the 10:30 bus. The trip to Puebla was peaceful and scenic and I sat back and enjoyed my new cds and watched the Mexican countryside go from lush green farmland to dry, mountainous desert.

When we arrived in Puebla, still sans any guide book, I asked the bus driver where I would find a bus to continue on the Cuernavaca and he pointed me in the right direction. I then asked a gas station attendant and two friendly men ferrying some sort of equipment across the highway who directed me to a bus to the bus station. Once on the bus, I asked my seatmate to tell me when to get off, after which I questioned the guys at the bus stop, a man washing his car on the street, a policeman and a taco vender. Finally, thanks to the combined directions and arm gestures of all of the previous men, I found myself at the bus station where I purchased my ticket to Cuernavaca.

Once in Cuernavaca, I headed immediately to the zocalo, which I remembered from my trip there some years before, in search of a cheap hostel. I had read in a guide book in the hostel in Oaxaca that the cheaper rooms were to be found on Matamoros a street near the zocalo, so I asked around until I found myself in that general area. The guidebook I had utilized, not one which catered to the backpacker crowd, had described the hotels in this area as of the type which “rent rooms by the hour.” Thinking the book snobbish; I expected to find simple, clean rooms, simply beneath the editors of that particular guidebook, but what I found, did indeed, appear to be rooms that rented by the hour: small, windowless cells with dirty sheets and scurrying shadows. I looked at three places, before finally settling on a passable one within my price range. Unfortunately, after paying and returning to change for dinner, I noticed that I was to share my room with a family of giant cockroaches. Disgusted, but composed, I returned to the office to ask the man behind the counter if he had anything to kill the “cucarachas,” upon which I was told that they just come in under the door and that there was nothing he could do. He handed me a broom and a rag with which to block the door and sent me on my way. Resigned, conscious of the darkening evening, I swept the roaches out the door and used his rag to block a hole in the way into which the one roach I was unable to sweep out, disappeared. I then blocked the bottom of the door with the bedspread, piled all of my belongings on the bedside table and headed out for dinner, knowing that I was in for a long night because there was no way I was sleeping in that room with the light off!