Driving Across Sonora

Rusty got me up out of a comfortable sleep at the truck stop and we went for a walk. There’s a $15 a night campground in town which has hook ups and a rather unpleasant toilet. We need neither but there is a clean toilet here in the truck stop. The big draw of the noisy campground is that it is surrounded by a wall and is considered safe by fearful travelers. No one has bothered us here or at any other truck stop or parking area. and it’s free. 

The “plaza de cobre” -toll plaza- is as modern as anything with a toll schedule up front and a receipt with your change. I don’t yet trust the electronic toll cards so we use “efectivo” - cash- which helps us break 500 peso bills ($25). 

We’ve eaten before at this wrecked looking truckers diner and the food is excellent. Toll booths are often centers of commerce with people selling sandwiches, ice cold drinks  and fruit to travelers. There are also usually spotless “sanitarios” -toilets -nearby. 

This is the relatively new “libramento” -bypass- around Hermosillo and it’s Costco, speeds things up too. 

A smooth two lane cement highway curves out into the desert around the capital city of Sonora State. 

If cars need to pass they use the magic third lane. If you see a car coming toward you just move to the shoulder to let them by. No fuss no road rage necessary. 

Not all traffic is motorized which is why driving at night is not advised in Mexico. 

It’s pretty boring most of it honestly here in the north. It was weird not needing to use Google maps to find out way. Verizon has increased the daily use allowed for US cellphones with unlimited plans. You now get 2 gigabytes of data daily at full speed instead of half a gig last year, which means we don’t need to keep using airplane mode to save data. I think they are trying to compete with Starlink and it works for me. We use our US iPhones as normal here. Very easy. Amazing really. 

We arrived in San Carlos at noon with plans to get ready for a few days beach camping. 

The new hospital is being built very slowly alongside the main four lane highway into town. Almost a mile behind this lies the  beach where we planned to park, separated from here by empty scrubland. One day it may be developed and the free camping may end. But not today. 

The four lane highway into San Carlos, featureless, efficient and ready for new construction, more homes, more business, the local economy is booming. 

Layne got some vegetables and beer at the upscale supermarket in town and then had me stop alongside the roast chicken shop of fond memory, remembered from last year. 

Eleven dollars worth of chicken potatoes onion and chili peppers, enough for three meals. 

Then we stopped to buy 15 gallons of water for $2:30. They fill a five gallon jug, I put it on the bed and siphon it into our thirty gallon tank. It’s a disgrace that utilities can’t provide safe drinking water that Mexicans can trust but for us it’s a convenient way to fill our tank with safe drinking water at a very low dollar cost. 

Google maps will help you find Agua purificada along the road : 

Rusty supervised operations. Some dogs came forward to check him out as he was trespassing on their street. Their owners let them out in the morning and they spend the day playing in gangs. I bent down as if to pick up a stone and they ran off leaving him in peace as you can see. 

San Carlos facing the Sea of Cortez. The weather is perfect, warm by day, t-shirt weather with no mosquitoes and no humidity and cool at night for good sleeping. 

After the shopping we drove back out of town to the beach. There are now two entrances, one for large vehicles at the end of the paved road next to some condominiums overlooking the water. And then there is the dirt road easily driven if dry and our preferred route as it is more discreet. The condo owners  don’t like campers getting freebies where they pay to see open water in safety from behind their guarded walls. Recent rains created some mud puddles around here but they are drying out and the going was easy. 

The cement posts are for the hospital construction but they got dumped here blocking the dirt road entrance to the public beach. The locals protested and the construction company opened the cross pasty he condos which had been closed and the locals created a new entrance around the obstacle.

The beach is always public in Mexico by Federal law and some kind of access cannot be denied. 

We returned to the same spot as last year, a short walk over the sand dune to the beach but mot too desirable as the water is out of sight. A quick trash clean up and we were settled for our first night. 

Looking across the bay to San Carlos note the absence of waves on a great swimming beach. 

And the condos where the paved road ends and the posts in the sand delineate the private section of the beach. The timeline is public but I never walk Rusty down there. 

Inland is the scrub land currently undeveloped. The hospital construction is on the road barely visible. 

The water is cold but tolerable…

…just over the dune behind GANNET2. 

How long shall we stay? A week maybe and then south to a warmer favorite beach at Tenacatita. San Carlos is pretty perfect. 

Mr Bean Goes To Mexico

Webb Chiles is fond of saying that professionals don’t have adventures, adventures are for amateurs. He’s right; an adventure is a journey or expedition with an uncertain outcome. You don’t have adventures on cruise ships or at Disney World, because if you do something went seriously wrong, you have experiences. Our entry into Mexico was an adventure, an amateurish series of blunders born of overconfidence and my lack of attention to detail. This is NOT how you do it. 

The Naco port of entry, seen above from the Mexican side is one of the smallest least visited crossing points with no lines and usually easy going officials. The US side is similar and they post an immigration officer at the line to direct traffic and make sure you haven’t goofed and really want to cross. In this case the young officer was homesick and from Miami (“the 305”- phone area code). He noticed our Florida front license plate and we chatted about what we missed from home and so forth piling up traffic, three Mexican cars waiting to enter the US.. such that by the time I turned to enter Mexico I chose the wrong lane. Nice one. Much waving and shouting got me backed up and into the correct lane. Layne was laughing. At me. Customs naturally pulled me aside for inspection.  

They inspected us too. I handled the boss who checked our registration against the VIN and license plate while Layne was overrun by young inspectors pulling out drawers and uncharacteristically looking in the toilet compartment…Rusty sat under the steering wheel watching anxiously. 

We smiled, shook hands all around and parked Gannet2 across the plaza. Now for Immigration, normally a breeze. This is the photo I took of the office from last year when we waltzed through the process. This year I took no pictures around the border. 

The Immigration inspector took the papers we had printed out at the Sierra Vista Hampton Inn and shuffled them for a good long while. Then he looked up. 

Did you not get the FMM form itself he said? I vaguely remembered a green and red form that this year had not issued from the printer. We looked in our phone archives. Sure enough there it was: the email with the immigration form attached. I blushed and handed him my  phone. He smiled and emailed himself the missing paperwork from my phone. Silly gringo. 

If you enter Mexico for less than a week it’s free. For us the entry permit was $35 up from $31 in 2020. That was already paid when I applied online but I needed the receipt and the stamped form attached to my passport. With a smile and a flourish the inspector extricated us from our self imposed woes. Layne gave him a KWPD patch for his trouble. We shook hands and all laughed at my ineptitude. We were in Mexico with a permit for 180 days. 

We left the unheated office with our papers only to have a beggar hit us up for spare change so we gave him 20 pesos ($1). Might as well make somebody else’s day better even if ours was not going brilliantly, I thought. Up next: Cananea and the vehicle import office. But first we hit a speed bump at 40 miles an hour, brakes locked as I suddenly remembered what I had forgotten. Those bloody topes, they are everywhere and make driving Mexico a high attention skill. We bounced, Rusty looked pained and Layne choked while laughing. That improved my mood as I remembered to scan the road for obstacles. We were in Mexico at last. 

Because Naco is so small you have to drive to Cananea to find the government office that issues vehicle permits, called Banercito, the “Army Bank.” It’s a 45 minute drive through the very scenic Sonoran desert, which is exciting because it’s Mexico but it’s not that different to the desert north of the Wall. 

Naturally I missed a turn leaving Naco where the main road veers left and I went straight. We had to cut through some of the less scenic parts of an already not terribly scenic village. Those are Arizona mountains in the background. 

Only half the road to Highway 2 has been freshly paved so the first half is rumbly and rough as you leave Naco. At the four lane highway turn left to Agua Prieta (“brown water”) and Douglas Arizona or turn right to the industrial mining town of Cananea. We turned right. 

No surprise, it really does look pretty much like Arizona…

This is the four lane Highway 2 which runs along most of the border from Baja toward Texas. Some of it is in excellent shape and some isn’t. Semis run this road a lot and tear up the asphalt making the left lane smoother than the right. 

There are some scenic mountain passes to get through with huge double trailers grinding uphill at twenty miles an hour. Passing spaces are rare. It was one o’clock on the afternoon of Wednesday the 18th and we had plenty of time to get to our planned overnight in a truck stop in Santa Ana on the main highway south. 

Google maps works surprisingly well in Mexico with only the occasional goof sending you off on dirt backroads as “shortcuts.” Nowadays Verizon gives you two gigabytes of data daily in Mexico which means it’s easier to use a  US cellphone than ever. I only use airplane mode now when I’m navigating. 

What luck! There was an open parking space right in front of  the  office space. Just at that moment the clerk and his boss happened by. We went inside and handed over my passport with the freshly stamped tourist card, my registration and driver license. We waited. And waited. The clerk went out and checked the car sticker on the driver door. There was a problem. Sigh. I knew already what it was. Busted. 

Rusty meanwhile was the center of attention. In the US I get jokes wondering if he has a license to drive when he hops up onto the driver’s seat. To the Mexican passersby he looked like a circus freak. They were fascinated  endlessly taking his picture. He ignored them staring at the place whence I had disappeared. 

The boss had noticed the van is a camper. Our registration in Florida shows it’s a van. The door sticker says it weighs 9500 pounds. For an RV that’s no problem in Mexico. For a van or truck if it weighs more than 7700 pounds it’s considered commercial and isn’t eligible for a tourist Temporary Import Permit. We fell into the crack  and we’re not getting our TIP which we need to travel south of Guaymas. Well, bollocks. 

But this is Mexico and to every problem there is a solution. And I know what you’re thinking: it’s Mexico therefore you pull out a bribe…Not so, rein it in gringo. The clerk was the consummate professional and led me out of the office to the van where he handed me back my papers and gave me some advice at very low volume. Lucky I speak Spanish I guess.

You could go to Agua Prieta and try again, he said in low tones. I think you’d do best to go to Nogales. But this time park a long way away. Make sure you have to walk a long way to the office. Park where they can’t see you. And then walk. He kept repeating the walk thing as though he knew gringos hate to walk across a parking lot. I nodded and thanked him profusely and shook his hand and we parted smiling, he back to his irritated boss in the office and us on to the scenic mountain road to Imuris the town on Highway 15 where we go north instead of south to get our paperwork completed. 

I suppose it was good karma for me because when I got Europeans who showed up in a jam at the Key West police station and they were listening,  I would explain off the record how to maneuver the bureaucracy to get what they needed in our foreign country. We drove off and I was irritated I hadn’t changed our registration in Florida and irritated I took the first open  parking spot etc…We decided to keep going south even if we failed at Nogales and give the vehicle papers one more try at the Banercito office south of San Carlos for procrastinators who decide at the last minute to keep going south. 

We saw a hitchhiker in a village in the mountains and stopped to give him a lift. It turned out it was a woman who lives up the road in Santa Ana and was going home to see her family and get a job in the mines.  We were so preoccupied with our paperwork we weren’t in the mood to talk. But she got her ride to within 40 minutes of her home. As it was we dropped her off and failed to get a proper picture of Cucu

We too should have been driving south to Santa Ana for the night but instead we turned right to go north 30 minutes to Nogales. Grrr. First Rusty got to stretch his legs.

Imuris is a town of ten thousand sitting astride the junction of Highway 2 going East-West and Highway 15 going North-South from Nogales  to Hermosillo and it’s the main tourist route from Arizona. 

Google maps promised a half hour drive to the tourist entry station 15 miles south of the border proper. Many visitors complain they miss the turn off the freeway and fail to get their documents. I was keen to see for myself. 

We pulled over across the highway from the official parking area. We scoped the scene out and bought cheap gas to fill our tank at $4:30 a gallon…cheap is relative! Then we made a u-turn and drove past the official entry and parked in front of a convenience store well away from the offices…per instructions. 

I wrapped up this fiasco of a day by forgetting to take photocopies of my documents. I had to call Layne to bring pesos to pay the photocopy guy. We saved $800 worth of  pesos from last summer and I always recommend visitors order peso bank notes from their banks before driving to Mexico. It makes life easier if you don’t have to work out ATMs on top of everything else in the border confusion. 

We got our papers despite the official’s credit card machine not accepting my Visa card. He took my First State Bank debit card instead, the one that has no chip and we made a $50 payment and a $400 deposit which will be paid back when we leave Mexico. The plan hatched in Cananea worked perfectly. More or less. 

We took off south, back to Imuris toward Santa Ana down highway 15. By now I was used to topes, the speed bumps found even on freeways and with papers completed we turned up the Mexican radio and rocked out to some thumping banda to celebrate. 

Darkness was falling as we arrived in Santa Ana around six and Layne shouted “Stop!” For a roast chicken shop. Par for the course this horrendous day, they had just closed. Layne made deli sandwiches for dinner in the truck stop and with a beer each we passed out. 

Lessons learned? Never get complacent facing borders. Arrive early and plan to drive all day dealing with whatever comes up. Stay cool, be cheerful and look for solutions. It was all my fault but we arrived at the planned truck stop just 90 minutes late after a long stress filled day when it should have been easy. 

And here we were the next morning totally unmolested by bandits or narcos or corrupt police parked by the side of the road. We never even heard the semi pull up alongside us. Next stop: the beach.