El Meridano

A sacrificial train journey through the Mexican jungle

          By Rolf Schmidt

      El Meridano

Copyright : Rolf Schmidt 2006

Copied with permission from www.spanglefish.com/greatreading
(See website for conditions)

Introduction

This short story is a more or less factual account of a train journey I made from Mexico City to Merida in Yucatan in the early 1990’s. I dedicate it to the Brahma Kumaris World University, whose kind invitation to their conference in Yucatan led me on this part of my youthful and innocent quest for a better world. The story contains a certain amount of bad language and gratuitous horror for which I do not apologise, just so that you know. 

El Meridano

It is related that one day they came upon Majnun sifting the dust, and his tears flowing down. They said: “What doest thou?” He said: “I seek for Layli.” They cried: “Alas for thee! Layli is of pure spirit, and thou seekest her in the dust!” He said: “I seek her everywhere, haply somewhere I shall find her.”

1. From Mexico City to Cordoba.  332 km 

Hey signor! It was early evening and I had just paid my hotel bill. I looked round. A small, dark-moustached man waved that he wanted to speak to me. Blue denims, brown leather jacket, fold-around metallic sunglasses, and a stubbly chin. It was not clear to me what the stranger might want of me, except perhaps money by deceit, in this city where I did not know anybody. His name was Emanuel. He turned out to be movie director –so he said- and he wanted to offer me a part in a movie. Not just any part in a movie; the leading role no less. He pinched my arm as if to assess its quality: “I need a man like you for this movie; white and tall with blond hair”. Before I could ask him quite innocently what the movie was about, he added: “I pay you one hundred dollars and you get to fuck nice girls.” I explained that I was in rather a hurry to catch a train, and that my career as a movie star would have to wait for now. He asked “Where are you going?”. “Merida” I replied. He followed me as I picked up my case and made for the large, glass door that led to the street. “Merida? You much better stay in Mexico City” Outside the hotel he walked beside me and tugged at my sleeve: “You don’t want to fuck nice girls?..... You go to Merida?.. You go by train?... I stopped and looked him in the eyes: “That’s right.” He stared back at me with an expression between disappointment and amusement: “You are Crazy!” I gestured him away, unaware that his final assessment of me was absolutely spot-on; at least one of those three accounts. Shaking his head, Emanuel abandoned his pursuit and disappeared into the crowd that heaved around me towards the metro station. Nice to know that I still looked good enough to be the star-stud in a porn movie…Moments later I stood packed breathless in a sweating, colourful, good-humoured bundle of human flesh while the train snaked its way through the city’s dark underbelly. 
Mexico City’s metro is an excellent system, even though it gets a bit crowded at times. Not only is it fast, frequent, clean, and efficient: It is also the easiest-to-use metro system that I have come across anywhere in the world. Navigating it is so simple that a child could get around Mexico City using it without getting lost. You don’t even have to be able to read to know where you are, because every station has its own symbol. For example, Zocalo, which is the central square of the city, greets you with the large, stylised pictogram of the cathedral that you will find there. The Moctezuma station harks back to an earlier culture with a fright-inducing portrait –or death-mask?- of the thus-named Aztec ruler, complete with grimace and bare teeth. You don’t forget that one in a hurry! The metro did not take me all the way to the main-line railway station. I had to walk a couple of blocks through the dark, deserted streets of a somewhat run-down neighbourhood until I reached a low, concrete building that could have been a small factory or warehouse, but turned out to be the station. I went in and made enquiries. According to my copy of the all-knowing Thomas Cook Overseas Timetable, my train was called “El Meridano”. Trains with names were usually good ones in my experience: good enough to be noticed by the railway gods and to be given a special place in the scheme of things. 
“No train to Merida” said the tanned, greyhaired ticket-clark, speaking through a small grille in a large, smoke-coloured window that must have been transparent at one time. As far as I could understand from his explanation, the only train ever to leave from here was going to Veracruz. However, I noticed that the departure time for Veracruz, 21:15, was the same as for Merida in the Thomas Cook Timetable. I also knew that Veracruz lay to the east on the coast; somewhat but not quite in the same direction as Merida. So I probed a bit further: “If I go to Veracruz, will I get a train to Merida from there?”. “No signor, if you want to go to Merida you change at Cordoba”. This was already much better than “No train to Merida”, but the luxury of a through-ticket to Merida was certainly not among the options. So I just bought a single to Cordoba and climbed on board the train that was already waiting. Its grubby diesel engine stood revving impatiently at the head of just three old-fashioned-looking coaches as if to say: “I’ll shift these in no time at all!”
The interior was nice and spacious, though gloomy in spite of being lit with rows of yellowish light bulbs on the ceiling. There was a heavy smell of stale tobacco smoke. The seats had dark-brown, leather-look vinyl upholstery and were placed airline-style; all facing the same way. It was a pleasant surprise to find that, by pulling a lever, I could recline my seat to a comfortable, laid-back position. The train filled-up with quite a few people and was nearly full when it left. The man who sat down on the seat beside me did not greet. He closed his eyes almost immediately. A toot and then a grunt from the engine, and the train began to move. Instead of accelerating further like a train normally does, this one just crept along at more or less walking pace, and kept doing so. What followed next was an endless procession of level crossings, each one announced by an exuberant concert on the train whistle. Most of the crossings were unprotected as far as I could see. This probably explains the slow, unsure pace of the train as it made its way from the prosperous city-centre to the suburbs. The clean, soul-less suburbs where the “have’s” lived and held their parties were characterised by street lights and security: Houses like flat, concrete bunkers were surrounded by walls, steel fences with barbed-wire, and electric gates with cameras. Nobody walked; I was sure they even visited their neighbours by means of those 4-wheel-drive trucks puffed-up with testosterone that would later become known as a “Sports Utility Vehicles”, or “Chelsea Tractors” when used for school runs around London. All of them have steel “bull bars” mounted up-front. Apparently these are necessary to protect the precious paint and chrome from being scratched by obstacles on the road, like small children.  
By contrast, the further-outlying slums of Mexico City looked like something medieval in the smoggy glow of the city. In these places the only transport was no-wheel-drive. The houses were packed close together; walls crumbling and held together with sheets of plastic. No signs of security in the slums; no fences, no gates, no cameras. Perhaps this was because there was nothing worth stealing. Or perhaps they just had a different system of security. 
When the lights became few outside, the train began to gather some speed at last. The gentle rocking of it sent me into a slumber that I woke up from a few times, not knowing where I was for the first few seconds. Oh yes, in a train in Mexico of course. 
I had arrived in Mexico City about 48 hours earlier, shortly before midnight on New-Year’s Eve. Despite the five-hour wait in Chicago and despite the inconvenient timing, the cheap airfare made it a pretty good deal from Glasgow with American Airlines. It can’t have been a good deal for the airline: It was a roomy and practically empty Boeing 737 that took me from Chicago to Mexico City. Having my own, personal air hostess attending to my in-flight requirements was a nice touch of luxury. The amount of aviation fuel used by that large plane to carry me and just one other passenger was decadent to say the least.  
During the five-hour wait in Chicago I did not venture out of the airport. I could have taken a train down-town, but it was dark and raining. Besides, I did not know of anywhere in particular where I would want to go. So I just spent the time hanging around in Chicago’s huge, busy airport; watching planes and watching people coming and going. This was my third and my shortest visit to the USA. The first time I had loved it. When Icelandair began cheap flights from Luxemburg to New York and Chicago, I took the opportunity to hop across on an ageing DC8 airliner that needed to stop at Reykjavik to refuel, and I spent two weeks backpacking around the States by Greyhound coach. Coming from tiny, overpopulated, restricted, rule-ridden Holland, I simply loved the way Americans did everything big, and I loved the freedom and the apparent ease with which ordinary people could start something and make it work. In Washington DC I visited the Capitol and met some of the senators. Yes, me, a tourist just walking in. Now that was democracy and open-ness! Never mind such trivial things as the Vietnam War, and never mind the subtle but ingrained racism that I found still prevalent when travelling in the South. At least there was freedom, and freedom meant hope as far as I could see then. And Americans in their own country, strangely unlike American tourists when in Europe, were welcoming, helpful, and friendly. 
I wonder how much was in the eyes of the beholder, and how much the country had really changed by the time of my second visit. This time I flew in from the west across the Pacific and landed in Los Angeles. It was a place I had missed-out on my first trip, but from the moment I stepped off the plane I realised there was nothing angelic about Los Angeles. To me it was a mean place full of selfish people with a could-not-give-a-damn attitude, especially to visitors. A notable exception that I remember is a skinny girl with glasses that worked in the downtown public library. She was genuinely nice and helpful with finding me a book I was looking for. She then spent some time giving me lots of useful information about L.A. and how to get around it without your own four wheels semi-permanently attached to your behind. This proved to be possible with good walking shoes and a lot of patience in caching those rare and elusive local buses.   
A few days later I boarded a Greyhound coach and I travelled via Las Vegas to Chicago, aiming to get a flight home with good old Icelandair. The fantastic scenery and the friendly people I met on that overland journey made me think that L.A. was probably the exception, and that the USA was still a great place to be. But what was fact and not coloured by my perception, was that gap between rich and poor had drastically widened in the USA during the years between my first and my second visit. The Greyhound long-distance coaches, at one time affordable transport for all, had gradually become the domain of down-and-outs. The bus stations, although never very attractive places, were becoming centres of drug trade and drug abuse. 
My third visit to the USA was that five-hour stopover at Chicago Airport. Unlike a bus station, it was very clean and free of crime and drugs, but everything about the USA and its people by then seemed to express estrangement and fear. People were afraid of other people; turning away if you asked them for directions. They talked about the winter weather as if it was something sinister that was lurking out-there to pounce on them. Judging by the behaviour of stressed-out passengers in the check-in queues, a flight delay or a missed connection meant the end of the world. They were also afraid of germs: Every toilet had an automatic mechanism that covered the seat with a brand-new, disinfectant plastic sleeve each time it had been used. I remember flushing a toilet quite a few times unnecessarily, just to marvel at the ingenuity of it. 
But most of all, the rich were afraid of the poor. They had started to build walls and fences around their luxury neighbourhoods, complete with armed, private security guards. On my first visits I had found the U.S. people and their news media largely ignorant of the wider world outside their own country. But then the wider world changed: The Berlin Wall came down, and with it the simple security of a two-superpower world. The “tiger economies” of Asia began to demolish US manufacturing industry, causing wide-spread unemployment. So by the time of my third visit, people seemed considerably more worried by the outside world, though not necessarily any better informed about it. They even seemed a bit afraid of foreigners like me, but not very afraid yet because this was still a few years before September 11th. With hindsight it is perhaps no wonder they got attacked, because fear tends to invite attack.  
But even though I could see things were not right, I still loved the ideals on which this great nation was built. So perhaps I hoped that it would find its courage and moral balance again. 

I was not sure what to expect on arrival in Mexico City. Luckily, it was not like some places in Europe where New Year causes madness, and where everything grinds to a halt in drunken stupor a few days. I readily got a taxi from the airport to the city centre. It was one of those yellow Volkswagen Beetles that so much colour the streetscape of that city. The driver sped along the wide and almost empty boulevards as if embroiled in a personal feud against time itself. A little dazed by the experience, I arrived at my hotel at about the same time as the new year, finding the staff as helpful and attentive as if I arrived in the middle of a normal working day. 
The next day, after a wonderful sleep, I set out to explore the city. It soon became clear to me that the scale of this place was so enormous that exploring it on foot would be entirely pointless.  Fortunately, I soon found an entrance to the metro which was very easy to use as I mentioned earlier, even for a foreigner without a word of Spanish.
I remember Mexico City as a relaxed, easy-going place with genuinely friendly people. I also remember it as a place of bright colours and warmth. On the other hand, what I remember of the sights of Mexico City is not very much: Just the Zocalo with the cathedral and some Aztec ruins not far from there. There was probably more, but I am writing this story almost fifteen years later without the benefit of notes, and that’s all that that seems to be left. Strange how memory can be selective; well, mine anyway. Whole tracts of a journey disappear entirely, but a few casual words that someone said, or a view taken in at a glance without really looking, will suddenly come back after all that time. I suppose I am trying to pull this story up from the murky pond of my stored memories in which it has been submerged all that time. It is like dredging with a hook, pulling-up this bit and then that bit, not necessarily in the right order; not even obviously connected or fitting together at first. I envy travel writers who are so organised that they pick up a story, by its beginning of course, from the crystal-clear pond of their memories and their meticulous notes, and then just pull it out in one long string, all of it making sense from the start. In another sense I don’t envy them at all because I find their journeys rather boring. That is because they already know where they have been, if you can still follow me…
So what brought me to Mexico, and why did I set out on a 1600 kilometre journey by train from Mexico City to Merida in Yucatan?

To answer the first question: I had travelled to Mexico to attend a conference on consciousness, to which I had been invited by a less-well-known religious organisation that gave consciousness a very important place in the order of things. The programme of the event seemed to fit-in with the kind of spiritual quest that I was on at the time. I had wondered why they had invited me, a complete nobody, to a conference that was obviously aimed at attracting some of the world’s great scientists, industrialists, writers, and thinkers. I had also noticed that they kept addressing their mail to me as Herr Dr. Schmidt, even though I had pointed out to their secretary that I posses no such title. Was it perhaps a case of mistaken identity? In any case the proposal seemed fine to me: The conference itself was hosted by a wealthy adherent of the organisation, and therefore free of charge. I would just have to make my own way there and back. Taking some time off work and getting to Mexico and back was no problem. To be honest, I had looked forward to discovering Mexico at least as much as to discovering what this conference was actually about. This leads us to very neatly to the second question: Why the train journey? 
Well, I like trains. So I decided to fly to Mexico City a few days before the conference started. Instead of using a domestic flight, I could then complete the journey to Yucatan by train at my leisure and see a bit of the country.  

Everybody was smoking on the train to Cordoba. With the windows shut and the air-co replacing the air only slowly, it made a fug that was not conducive to sleep. I was unaware that my desire for fresh air on trains would be rather generously fulfilled before this journey was over, as would be my wish for the lights to be off at night for sleeping.  
Cordoba was reached in the early hours of the morning. To my delight, a train to Merida was expected in just one hour and I could buy a ticket for it. “Can I have one single ticket to Merida then, with a sleeping-car berth please.” The ticket-seller looked puzzled for a few seconds and then produced a ticket. It was surprisingly –or rather suspiciously- cheap. By comparison: if I had spent this amount of money on buying a train ticket at London Euston, it would have got me about as far as Coventry. What lay ahead in this case, was something like the distance from London to Belgrade. The ticket did not mention sleeping accommodation. A bit disappointed, I assumed it would be a reclining seat again, like the one I had in the train from Mexico City to Cordoba. Not my favourite way to travel, but survivable I thought, and probably better than staying behind in dark, unfamiliar Cordoba at 4:30 in the morning.   

2. From Cordoba to Coatzacoalcos. 441 km

Quite a few people were waiting hopefully on the dimly-lit platform of Cordoba station. Two hours later and in daylight, I was still waiting when a freight train crept in along the platform. Its engine was of the same type as the one that had hauled my train from Mexico City, except that this one looked like it had been salvaged from a scrapheap: The engine’s original colour was impossible to tell through all the rust and grime. Most of its engine covers were missing. A loud, irregular throbbing issued from its quivering, oily intestines, accompanied by a resonant clatter of such metalwork as was still hanging on. The handrails that ran the length of the engine were so impossibly twisted from a multitude of minor accidents, that they could easily have won a prize at an exhibition of modern art. The monster rolled past while showering me in sooty clag from its exhaust pipes. The train it hauled consisted of two battered, rusting oil tanks, followed by five or six boxcars in similar condition. A boxcar is a kind of large, enclosed freight wagon that is used on the railways of North America. I noticed that people had started to move along the platform towards the rear of the freight train which was now slowing down to a reluctant halt. And there it was: The last vehicle that emerged was not another boxcar but a passenger coach, or at least the sad remains of one. “It can’t be” I thought, “Surely it can’t be!”. So I asked someone and they cheerfully replied “Merida, si!”

My train to Merida left a bit to be desired with regard to passenger comfort: Saying that, the lack of doors made it easy to get on board, and the lack of glass in most of the windows ensured that there was plenty of fresh air. There would be no problem with tobacco smoke on this train! The speed at which it travelled would ensure that there was no risk of excessive draughts either, so in that sense I never had any reason to complain. Now the seats: They were not nearly as good as the reclining ones in the earlier train: These were hard and bolt-upright wooden benches with a token cladding of vinyl, on some at least. 
Now we get to the matter of sanitation, that topic of intense fascination for every British reader of travel stories about less-civilised, foreign parts: Firstly, there actually was a toilet, which was a good thing to have on a journey of several days. The cubicle also had a door. Never mind that it had several large holes in it and no lock: It was the only precious door in the whole vehicle, and given the choice, that’s where you would want it to be, wouldn’t you? There was of course no water.  Even if there would have been water, it looked like the pipes and fittings had been ripped-out a long time ago. A very low toilet bowl stood on top of a gaping hole in the floor that emptied down onto the track. In a way that was quite hygienic, I mean for those on the train as long as all made appropriate aim to ensure that what went down didn’t end up clinging to the sides. Toilet paper was not provided, but I was prepared for this by bringing my own, having already travelled on trains in the less-privileged parts of Europe in previous years. I was very glad that I had kept those little foil packages with perfume-soaked refreshment tissues from my earlier plane journey. If nothing else, they satisfied my conditioned need to wash my hands.
The one-coach train was quite full; nobody standing but not many spare seats either, so there was no chance to stretch-out a bit. The seats were arranged in two’s opposite each other. I ended up with a young-ish couple opposite me and their little boy of about 6-7  years old beside me. None of them spoke any English and my Spanish ran out before we had even left the station. They seemed friendly enough. 
A hard, sudden jolt sent us on our way. This jolting would happen each time the train sped up or slowed down to even the slightest degree, due the slack in the couplings and this being the last vehicle of the train. Very soon the journey settled in to a rhythm. Further down the coach, a man was playing guitar and singing folk songs in Spanish. Others joined in. The early-morning air was nice and cool, and I felt myself getting drowsy. Alright, this train had its faults, but its spirit felt good to me. 
When I woke up I could not turn my head. My neck was in agony and felt like it was locked in a vice. Such is the punishment for sleeping upright without head-support. The little boy lay stretched-out across my lap, sound asleep. His parents opposite me sat upright leaning against one another with their eyes closed. They both looked in their thirties, not wealthy but not slum-dwellers either. She was wearing one of those bright-coloured flowery dresses that most Mexican women wear. Her face was not unattractive, a bit more angular and Spanish than Indian-indigenous. He was wearing denims and a white, long-sleeved shirt. His tanned, grooved face was stubbly, much like the stereotype Mexican in a spaghetti-western movie.  
We were moving at a considerable speed. I watched the day get brighter, sitting very still because I did not want to disturb the sleeping boy. The bushes on both sides of the line were too tall to look over. Occasionally there were houses, and gradually more of them. At last the train slowed down and began to side-kick and stagger over numerous points, instantly waking everyone on board. The boy lifted himself off my knees that had gone completely numb, and began rubbing his eyes. With a final jolt and a prolonged groan of dying metal, we rolled to a standstill in the middle of a large freight-yard. The land was flat and I somehow felt that the sea could not be far away. The sun stood low in the sky above a clutter of freight wagons. I turned my face towards the light, my neck now unlocked, and enjoyed the gentle warmth on my cheeks with my eyes closed. Just to feel the warmth of the sun was wonderful. 
I had just spent the last two months without seeing any daylight at all in my new place of residence in a remote part of the Highlands of Scotland. 
    
I am still not sure where this freight yard was. If I am correct in thinking that it was near the coast, then it must have been Veracruz. As far as I could see on the map, Veracruz was the only place that seemed large enough to warrant a freight yard that size. But if it was Veracruz, then it meant a considerable detour.
A few people got off the train with their belongings and walked across the tracks towards some low buildings in the distance. Then the engine was uncoupled and its noise disappeared. Then nothing….
This was certainly not the most active freight yard in the world. 
I opened my carrier bag with supplies, got my knife out, and started my breakfast. I was reasonably well-prepared for this journey, so I thought: An extra-large plastic bottle containing a litre-and-a-half of water, a loaf of bread, about a quarter-kilo of cheese, three oranges, and a large bag of mixed nuts and raisins. It was not really enough for a journey of a day and half, especially the water, but I was sure that I would be able to get more water and some fresh supplies en-route.      
It was almost an hour before the engine that had taken us there re-appeared, bypassing the train on another track. After another half hour of silence, it went past again with a string of box cars in tow. Leaning out from the coach balcony I watched it coming back again, on the same track as my train this time. The next moment I was nearly thrown clear off the train when the box cars propelled by the engine hit the stationary portion that I stood on. American trains do not have sprung buffers with hook-and-chain couplings like European ones. Instead, they use a kind of knuckle-shaped couplings that have no give in them whatsoever. They just ram the vehicles together hard enough for the two half-open fists to engage and clasp together; easy!  
The shunting operation in (maybe) Vera Cuz took nearly two and a half hours. Short bursts of bone-shaking action were separated by long spells of hot, sticky silence. The sun had risen to its zenith, and the temperature in the coach began to soar in the absence of the cooling air-stream of motion. 
At one point the train seemed pretty well assembled with the engine revving at its head. But then all but two of the boxcars were taken off again, away into the shimmering heat. After what seemed an eternity, a violent jolt announced that something was being coupled-on again. I looked along the train and saw that a long string of flat wagons had been attached. From this angle I could not see what was on the wagons, and I did not want to step off the train in case it would suddenly take off to somewhere else, unlikely as it seemed by then. 
At last it looked as if the time of departure had come. We were rolling forward and gathering speed, dancing over the points; on our way at last! But I rejoiced too soon. We came to an abrupt halt, and then back we went on a different track. I stood watching in the opening of the missing rear door; the one that would have led to the next coach if there had been one. Ahead on the line stood a single boxcar that looked quite different from the rest. It was sparkling new and light-grey instead of the usual shades of rust. Fascinated I looked down as the vehicles touched, much more carefully than on all previous occasions, and I saw the two half-open fists clasping together with a satisfying snap-clonk. A railwayman in a blue boiler suit appeared out of nowhere and secured the coupling with a steel pin. 
I looked up at the boxcar again. It was covered in black and yellow warning signs. Even with my limited Spanish I could guess the meaning of “Explosivos!”. Apart from that, there were several no-smoking pictograms with crossed-out cigarettes. Behind me, the four men on the seats closest to the door had just lit up. While I walked back to my seat, the train began to move again. Another false start? No, this time it was for real. 
Out on the single track of the main line, I soon spotted what was on those flat wagons. A curve in the track revealed that each of them carried one army tank and five or six armed soldiers.  
So that was it: I had ended up in a military train, my passenger coach being the buffer vehicle -and human shield in case of rebel attack-between forty-or-so tonnes of ammunitions and a tank brigade of the Mexican Army. 
On the other hand, the train was moving and the sun was nice and warm on my skin. I supposed if they were going to have a military exercise, it made good sense to transport their troops by train rather than clogging-up the roads. At the same time I couldn’t help feeling that somehow the mood in the train had changed. The conversations around me now included a new word: “Zapatistas”. It was mentioned often and always with a serious expression. We made several stops, but the names on the station signs, if present at all, did not correspond with names I could find on my map. So I still did not know where I was. At one of the stops, a village with undulating fields of some green crop and a view of distant hills, the couple with the little boy got off. We shook hands and smiled without words. They waved me off from the side of the track as the train began to move again. As the day progressed, a few more people got off. Some new ones got on, but on the whole the carriage became emptier. I realised that nobody who had joined at Cordoba was still on board. It seemed that I was the only one crazy enough to go all the way through to Merida. 
If I was ever going to get there…The engine had just broken down. For the last half hour it had been making an increasingly-loud, whining noise while going slower and slower. And now it had broken down with white clouds of steam billowing out of its side. Inside the train, the temperature was also soaring to sauna-levels. A few people made for the exit, climbed down the crooked steps, and sat down on the grass on the shaded side of the train. I followed their example and moments later I lay pleasantly reclined against the grassy bank that supported the track. This was definitely much better than my hard, bolt-upright bench and the sticky heat inside the carriage. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds. I could hear the enginemen’s voices far ahead in the distance, and a rhythmic banging of metal on metal. There was a bird with an exotic song in the bushes close-by, and the chirping of some insect…. I suppose my lack of sleep from the previous night caught up with me. 
The next thing I became aware of was a rumbling noise and the wheels of the train rolling very close above my head like giant coins in a slot. Oh-shit! I tried to get up but my body did not respond. When it finally did, I stumbled onto my feet, heart pounding, head pounding too. The train had started to move, but it was not the crisis it seemed to be at first; a crisis that involved me sprinting after the accelerating train for a final, desperate leap, and then me dangling mid-air from the rear-end of that ammunitions car until the next station. Instead, everything and everyone was totally relaxed, except me. A few people were still casually walking alongside the slow-moving train and climbing on board one by one. I quickly caught up and swung myself up the grid-iron steps, feeling dizzy and a bit sick for a good while after. 
The rest of the day passed rather uneventfully. I caught the occasional glimpse of distant mountains on the right, and lower, gentler hills on the left, but most of the time the vegetation was too high on both sides of the track to see anything interesting at all.
The train kept up a slow but steady pace. Whatever repair they made to the engine, it seemed to work fine now. At some of the stops I ventured outside to walk around a bit. The soldiers never left their positions beside the tanks they were guarding; machine-guns pointing loosely down to the ground. The passenger coach and its inhabitants appeared of no concern to them what so ever; just part of the cargo I suppose. 

Shortly after 18:00 we reached Medias Aguas, five hours later than the time given by Thomas Cook for “El Meridano”, the train I was supposed to be on, or was it? 
Another freight train stood waiting to leave in the opposite direction. It did not have a passenger coach. There was quite a lot going on at Medias Aguas. All around the station were military trucks and jeeps. Sun-glassed officers wearing gold-buttoned, multi-ribboned uniforms and over-large hats were parading back and forth along the trains. I reckoned this was the assembly station for their military exercise or whatever it was they were doing. And sure enough, the entire military portion of my train was taken off and put into sidings in a complicated sequence of shunting moves. The ammo car was detached and deposited on its own at the end of a long, empty siding overgrown with bushes, together with six armed guards to protect it. In contrast with the earlier shunting operations that morning, it all went very swiftly this time: We left Medias Aguas only about half an hour after arriving there. The train was very short now: Just two box cars and the passenger coach that I was in. We had changed direction, and the passenger coach was now immediately behind the engine. This meant it was noisier, and also meant that sooty clouds of diesel exhaust would drift in from time to time to add to the sense of adventure and to make breathing generally more difficult. On the positive side: With the lighter load of only three vehicles, the engine managed to build-up a speed that resembled the speed of a real train at last. It was exhilarating to hang out of the doorway with the wind in my hair and the coach lurching from side to side as we sped downhill towards the coast and into the night that seemed to fall very quickly. 
The passenger coach did not have any lights; just empty sockets where the bulbs had been. Even if there had been bulbs, there was no electricity anyway. So it just got darker and darker, until I could only see the vague outline of things by the light of a pale sickle-moon that flickered behind the trees.
Coatzacoalcos was quite a large place, judging by the amount of lights. We reached it in less than two hours, which was half an hour faster than the timetable showed for “El Meridano”, so we had made up some time. But that made-up time was instantly lost with some more shunting. I could not see what was being coupled-on this time, but the engine was no longer immediately attached to the passenger coach. Its unsteady growl seemed quite far ahead when we gingerly pulled out of Coatzacoalcos freight yard at about 20:30. 

From Coatzacoalcos to Campeche.   721 km

Thunder clouds accumulate
On the borders bright
Like frozen lightnings
Trees go black in daynight
Like nothing all man-made
In the shadow of nothing
But some high-rise mist.
Only words all this
Of some greater poem
Where a high-priest in gold
Performs the sacrifice
With the flash of a blade
Deep into an innocent heart.
Thunder explodes on the stage
Houses burn on the altar
Little people flee like spirits
A heavy rain of applause
And cries for more, more…
In the theatre of operations.

Quite a few new passengers had joined and occupied most of the spare seats. They had just climbed on board in the freight yard between the shunting moves. If there was a passenger station somewhere, then I must have missed it  
Two of the newcomers took the seats opposite me. I was not sure if they were travelling together. Seated directly opposite me by the window was a fat guy in a red/blue chequered shirt. He did not really look Mexican; His pale face was clean-shaven and he looked more like the stereotype of a hillbilly cop in a Hollywood movie. He even had the gun to go with it: A big, crude-looking gun of the type with a rotating magazine that lends itself to Russian roulette. It lay beside him on the seat in a leather holster. The holster was attached to a thick, metal-studded, leather belt that sat so loosely around his waist that it could not be relied on for holding-up his trousers. I have a habit of giving nicknames to some people I see on my journeys; just in my head and not for them to know. So I nicknamed him “Bad Bill” because of his gun. The other new passenger beside him was a young woman. Both were almost invisible to me now that we were moving again, but earlier by the lights of the town I had seen her crossing the tracks towards the train. She had a thin, almost too thin figure and small breasts. Her face showed that attractive mix of European and native-Indian genes that makes for beautiful people all over Latin America. The dress she was wearing I thought might be traditional Mayan. It was mostly white with ornate patterns around her neck and band of bright colours somewhere at knee level. I named her “The Mayan Girl” because of her dress. She had one large bag made of that red/blue plastic material that is woven like straw, and a tough, leather shoulder bag that contained books. She tried to read in one of them, but it was too dark even before the train left. I thought she might be a student and I wondered if she spoke any English. I never got a chance to ask because Bad Bill did not waste any time in trying to win her charms from the moment they had got on the train. He was speaking to her almost non-stop and leaning gradually closer to her while she partly turned herself away. At some point she stood up and disappeared for while. When she came back, she sat down on the seat beside me instead of beside Bad Bill. Initially, she sat down on top of my near-empty bag of food supplies that was on the seat. When I quickly removed it, she whispered “gracias”. After that none of us spoke. Bad Bill lit a cigarette. He gave me a filthy look by the light of his match when I glanced sideways at the Mayan girl. She sat upright with her eyes closed and looked quite beautiful in the flickering light before Bad Bill dropped the match on the floor, where it glowed red-blue-ish for a few seconds and died.         
There is not much you can do to occupy yourself when you are on a train in the dark with no light and nobody to talk with. I did not attempt a conversation with the Mayan girl because I thought she might want some peace. It would also have been unkind to taunt Bad Bill in that way. And besides, he had a gun. So my only companions were my own thoughts. I pondered on the day’s events and on the journey that still lay ahead. We were entering the province of Chiapas, and from here onwards we would be in Maya territory. The ancient Maya civilisation had always fascinated me and I had read several books about it over the years. I suppose one of the things that fascinated me was the seeming contradiction: There were these refined, beautiful people that built great cities and obviously achieved a very high level of social order. Then at the same time, like the neighbouring Aztecs and Incas, they practised what seemed to me almost unbelievably barbaric rituals of human sacrifice. These rituals were part of their religion. In other words: They were just as accepted and legitimate as the rituals of any of today’s religions are now. So having nothing else to do, I tried to imagine it in my mind: Here we are in the sober interior of the Dutch village church where I was taken on Sundays as a child. Our tall, grey-haired minister steps down from the pulpit after reading from the Gospel according to Matthew. He surveys his flock with that friendly and reassuring face of someone who is always there to give comfort and who would never even harm a fly. He picks-out a young, nice-looking, female member from among the congregation. There is excited whispering and shuffling in the church. 
Two church elders in black take the girl to the altar where she prostrates herself. The atmosphere is dark and smoky. Only the scene around the altar is brightly lit by the flames of numerous torches. After a few moments the minister emerges from the shadows. Instead of his Sunday-black suit, he suddenly wears an ornate, multi-coloured robe and a gold mask with feathers and grimacing teeth. The elders take a firm hold of the young woman’s arms and legs. This is for her own benefit, lest the darts of satanic doubt made her waver in her religious steadfastness at so crucial a moment for her soul. But she just lies still with her eyes closed, pristinely wrapped in the flower-pattern of her best Sunday dress. Only her chest moves as she breathes rapidly and anxiously. The minister raises his obsidian blade and holds it high for dramatic effect, casting its shadow like the fang of a giant serpent on the wall behind him. The crowd is spell-bound even though they have seen it all many times before. In silence they watch the sacred knife plunge down and disappear between the young woman’s breasts. Then as always, their faces light up with childish glee at the startling-red fountain that erupts when the blade finds the main artery while her death-scream still echoes through the nave of the church. The minister proceeds calmly but swiftly, like he does every Sunday, with carving and ripping-out the young woman’s heart. Blood is splattering everywhere, quickly drenching her clothes and spilling down the rough altar-stone onto the floor of the church where it makes a dark, glistening pool.  
In some other churches they collect the blood of their Sacrifice in a special cup. At the end of the service people then queue-up to drink the blood. They also eat a thin slice of the Sacrifice’s flesh. Fortunately our Church is modern and rational, so we don’t do anything weird like that.  
At last the great moment has arrived that we were all waiting for: Our triumphant minister lifts up the detached vital organ in all its bright-red, slippery wetness for everyone to see. It is fascinating to see how the heart still beats although with ebbing strength; blindly spurting and spilling the girl’s precious lifeblood as the most supreme offering to the Lord Almighty. The congregation briefly claps and cheers at the sight of yet another young heart being offered-up for man’s salvation. The church organ pipes-up a low, dignified drone. A few people turn their heads to look at young woman’s parents, who happen to be the local baker and his wife. Three male volunteer helpers of the Church with their black suits and gorilla postures are standing behind them, just in case they needed support. The couple watches how a dozen small choir boys remove the slaughtered remains of their one-and-only daughter, carrying her like ants in charge of a much larger prey. But their faith is strong, as are their minders, and God is merciful: Look how these brave souls are both smiling through their tears. They know that their pride and joy is safe in God’s Heaven and that this separation is only temporary. The old lady who used to teach Sunday school is already down on her knees beside the altar with her bucket. She is scrubbing-away with intense vigour because, as she always says, cleanliness is next to godliness. Then the sound of the organ swells, and the congregation begins to sing in pious unison; hymn 616 this week: 

To thee, O Lord, our hearts we raise
In hymns of adoration
To thee bring sacrifice of praise
With shouts of exultation
… 
God looks down from His throne high in the clouds. He is pleased and satisfied, and decides to postpone that planned flood-disaster and the onset of nuclear war for yet another week. 
Such was the level of my ponderings on board that Mexican train as it rolled deeper and deeper into an impenetrable night; dark, cynical ponderings that would come back to haunt me before this journey was over! 
I remember thinking how vain it was of me as a European to condemn those Aztec and Mayan rituals, while at the same time in Christian Europe the burning of witches was all the rage.  
Well, let’s just say that religion everywhere seems to have moved on a bit from there. But even though human sacrifice is fortunately a thing of the past, religiously-motivated killings are not, and religion is still essentially about sacrifice. Modern-day sacrifice usually means giving up aspects of our material well-being in return for a better, more permanent reward in some kind of afterlife. We also find ritual acts of self-harm in certain Muslim festivals, and perhaps there is symbolic cannibalism in the partaking of Christ’s body and blood in Christian Communion.  
But before you get the wrong idea: I can testify with my hand on my heart (which is still there) that the Netherlands Reformed Church has never practiced any rituals of human sacrifice. I just borrowed some of its imagery when I tried to imagine what it would have been like if such practices had been part of my own experience of religion. The truth is that as a child I very much enjoyed going to Sunday school at that church. I suppose the Bible stories that I learned there are still part of the furniture of my being today, as is the case with many people of my generation. 

At the time when I made my journey on “El Meridano”, I was already deeply concerned with the state of the world. In particular the destruction of the world’s environment worried me greatly because it seemed to me that there was a risk of irreversible harm. Most other ills of mankind, horrendous as they were, at least left the door open for future recovery. Fifteen years later, evidence begins to show that the damage we have done to the Earth may now be pretty much irreversible on any timescale that we can oversee. So it does not really matter anymore how many virgins we sacrifice to the gods. But even now, if we could just sacrifice some of our material comforts and luxuries, we might just scrape-away with a future environment that still sustains human civilisation, though probably not as we know it. But perhaps that’s a good thing….  
In the 1970’s and 80’s, caring about the environment automatically meant you were a crank and a tree-hugger. By the early 90’s when I made this journey, people would no longer call you a crank to your face, but probably still behind your back. By then it was seriously un-cool to care about anyone or anything at all except your own self-interest. Yet some governments in their perceived, indirect, sort-of self-interest, began to do small, token things about the environment. Decisions that really mattered were of course, as they still are today, firmly based on what our leaders call “The Real Word”. What they mean with “The Real World” is the fetish-worship of the Economy; that inferno of greed that we must continue to fuel –so we are led to think- by half the world wasting ever-increasing amounts of the Earth’s wealth on ghastly excesses while the other half starves to death.  

Back then, I had already concluded that a self-limiting of people’s material desires was the only answer to the environmental crisis, and probably to most other crises of our own making. So under the motto of: “Better world wanted; all offers considered; will travel”, I had set out searching for systems and organisations and “-isms” that might offer some hope of getting people to self-limit their wants and desires. I liked the idea of communism at first, but I wrote it off after visiting a few places that claimed to practice it. I then turned my attention to several brands of religion. They seemed far more promising because they recognised the need for sacrifice, which I agreed with in essence. Unfortunately, when I looked more closely at the mainstream religions around me, the beautiful ideals of their teachings did not seem to translate into any practical solutions to the problems of the modern world. 
The religious group that hosted the conference in Yucatan was called Brahma Kumaris, an offshoot of the Hindu religion as the name suggests. I did not know much about them except that their headquarters were on a mountain somewhere in India, but they seemed to have a fresher outlook on the world than the more traditional faiths. I also liked the positive spirit with which they welcomed frank, open discussion. 

The point I illustrated somewhat graphically with my imagined church-service from hell, is that religion can have a very strong hold over people. I have always been amazed how easily religion vilifies the most beautiful things in the minds of its believers. The natural world with all its wonders becomes an enemy for man to fight, rape and plunder. The human body becomes a bag full of sin and vile secretions that similarly deserves to be degraded and punished. At the same time, just like love, religious faith can make even the ugliest scenes appear beautiful. Examples of this are: Torture and mutilation associated with martyrdom, human sacrifice as already mentioned, and of course the mass murder of innocent people in a “holy” war. 
Just think how today in the Middle East, some parents rejoice at their children’s “martyrdom” as suicide bombers. The reason they can take this seemingly incomprehensible attitude, is that their religious faith somehow overrules their normal instinct of preservation of self and family. It seems to do that in three ways: Firstly it gives the golden promise of an afterlife so that death does not matter quite as much. Secondly, it promotes sacrifice as a means to improve the world. Thirdly, it succeeds in replacing people’s conscience by the presumed will of God as interpreted by His presumed-infallible agents on Earth. In the case of religion-fuelled terrorism, I think the latter is an important factor. I also think it is terribly wrong.
But what if the same, tremendous power of religion, the power to overrule base instincts, could be made to work honestly and for good? Then we would be able to conquer human greed and save the world, wouldn’t we? Saying this today in 2006 makes me even more of an idealist crank in people’s estimation than being a tree-hugger in the 1980’s. But to hell with that; I’m saying it anyway, even though it may just be an impossible dream. But let’s go back to the story of my train journey in Mexico, which is just about to turn into a proper and very possible nightmare.

It had gone even darker than dark. The train seemed to move inside a tunnel of tall trees. At one point there was a clearing, and by the diffuse starlight I saw my first Mayan village: It consisted of rectangular houses with thatched roofs that were made of straw or cane. The houses were grouped around a large, open space. Some of the windows showed light. It was a weak, yellowish light that perhaps came from candles or oil lamps rather than electricity. The village looked like a hand-drawn illustration in a fairy-tale book, somewhere long ago and far away. It looked serene and peaceful beyond words, the way it lay sleeping in the light of myriads of stars. Never mind that this was not the most comfortable of journeys. How many people got to see things like this in their lives? 
I became aware of a warm heaviness on my right shoulder. It was the Mayan girl resting her head, presumably having nodded off to sleep. I wondered what Bad Bill would make of this when he would strike a match for his next cigarette. On the other hand, I did not want to wake her up by pushing her away. So I sat still in the dark, resting my own head against hers and feeling almost comfortable on that hard, upright seat with the rocking motion of the train. I liked the smell of her hair; not perfumed but natural, with the scent of woman and a hint of some exotic spice.

We were standing still in the dark under the jungle canopy. I wondered if there was a problem with the locomotive again: It made a kind of dry, crackling noise at unpredictable intervals. It struck me how irresponsible it was to send a train into remote jungle with such a wreck of an engine. I really hoped that they could fix it like they did the last time, because I was getting seriously worried about my supplies of food and water, and even about arriving in Merida so late that I would miss the beginning of the conference. The atmosphere was humid and stifling. The thin sickle of the moon had appeared high over the trees, and I could see the outlines of things again. There seemed to be a road or a track between the wall of vegetation and the railway line. The shape of a truck lay slewed-over like in a ditch on the other side. There were people outside, and they were speaking in agitated but hushed voices. Their steps were rushed as they disappeared ahead into the direction the train was going. I suddenly realised that the Mayan girl had disappeared from my side. Bad Bill was still there opposite me, slumped sideways and apparently asleep. I sat listening the sound of the idling engine for what seemed a very long time. It still gave an occasional rattle, but less and less often. Whatever the problem was, it must have cleared because suddenly without warning, the train began to creep forward and resumed its journey. It did not gather any great speed, but anything seemed better than just standing still in the dark in the middle of nowhere without knowing what was happening and without knowing for how long. Glad to be on the move again, I closed my eyes and dozed on and off for a while. 

The train was still crawling along. There was an eerie glow by which I could make out the interior of the carriage. The same glow, between orange and yellow and unlike any light of day or night, was casting ghostly, flickering shadows in the jungle outside. The strange light got brighter and the source of it seemed to lie ahead. Then the jungle opened out into a scene that no words can describe. It was a Mayan village like the one I had seen already, but now the thatched roofs of the houses were ablaze and feeding continuous columns of dazzling, bright-orange sparks that rose in rapid swirls, up and up forever into the dark forest canopy. Back-lit by the burning houses was an open space that was strewn with what looked like bundles of rags; some white and some coloured, some heaped together. Like in a dream when you know it’s only a dream, I watched with fascination how the bundles changed into human forms that lay all twisted and sprawled-out, blood-stained and dead. The strange thing is that I felt no shock or revulsion. On the contrary, it seemed intensely beautiful and dramatic; like the torch-lit stage in some Wagnerian play where the actors had died. 
One white bundle changed into the Mayan girl that had sat beside me on the train. She lay still on her back on top of several large flour-sacks like a broken doll. Her thin legs were spread wide and her dress pulled-up, obscenely exposing her private parts. Her head lay tilted back, resting at a strange angle in the dark nest of her hair. She stared up at me with wide-open, startled eyes. Suddenly the magic had gone. I kept looking at her, my heart wrenching with horror, until she disappeared out of view and the train rolled away into that same, eerie glow through which it had entered. I got a strong smell of smoke and burning, and the orange glow began to flicker. I suddenly became aware of the interior of the railway carriage and of the dying flame of a match in the hand of Bad Bill opposite me, who had just lit a cigarette. He looked at me. His eyes were not hard like earlier, but almost friendly. “Did you see that!” I exclaimed. He shrugged his shoulders and reached over with his packet of cigarettes, gesturing me to take one. I declined and he withdrew into the company of his smoke, leaving me alone with the nightmare I had just woken from. Everything seemed normal. The train moved steadily. Apart from Bad Bill and me, the whole carriage seemed asleep and completely at peace. I reached for my water bottle and took a good few gulps. The water was lukewarm with plastic-taste, and there was not much left of it. After that I watched the glowing point of Bad Bill’s cigarette. Each time he moved it to his mouth, it brightened and moved a bit closer to the shiny skin of his face, until it was finished and he crushed the last glowing sparks of it on the floor with his boot.
We stopped a few more times in the dark. I drifted in and out of a feverish sleep, waking suddenly each time the train jolted or when people shouted outside. I have no idea how long it was before the first light of dawn touched the world and began to dispel the fearful images of that night. We were still travelling through dense jungle. The track was particularly poor and the carriage wallowed dangerously from side to side, making me think a derailment was all we needed now to make this travel experience complete. Fortunately that did not happen. I noticed daylight at the rear of the coach. So we were once again the last vehicle in the train. Leaning out of the glassless window as far as I dared, I discovered that the train had grown overnight like a worm that regenerates itself after being cut, back to about the same length it was on departure from Cordoba. No tanks or ammo this time; just one string of reassuringly-boring, rusty-brown boxcars.
I went to the rear end of the coach and sat down on the floor, my legs dangling over the edge above the half-open fist of the coupling mechanism. The rails unrolled from underneath me at a stately pace; two wobbly lines of a darker shade in the grassy  vegetation, the rails not even visible except immediately below where the wheels had just gone over them. The jungle covers things very quickly. How many lost cities and villages lay drowned at the bottom of this ocean of impenetrable green? 
I went back to my seat and ate the last small piece that was left of my bread. The cheese was already finished, as were the oranges. A small handful of left-over mixed nuts would make-up my emergency rations. I had no water left, and no opportunities seemed to present themselves to get any more water.  
There was no doubt that the train was running seriously late. It was now 9:30; roughly the time at which I should have arrived in Merida according to the original plan. Looking at the position of the rising sun, the train was undoubtedly heading north, which was the right direction. Half an hour later I got a proper fix of my position: Escarcega; 277 kilometres from Merida. That seemed not too bad. A modern train in a country where railways mattered would have covered that distance by lunch time. However, this was a different game altogether. So I calculated the average speed of the train since leaving Coatzacoalcos: 555 km in 12 hours. That worked out at roughly 46 km per hour. That included the prolonged stop in the middle of the night. But then, prolonged stops appeared to be a feature of this journey. So if I assumed a similar rate of progress from now on, we would reach Merida by about, let’s see… 16:00. The decision I had to make was whether or not to break my journey at Campeche; the last major settlement before Merida and probably the last place where I could get water, food and some form of onward transport. The train pulled into Campeche station at about 13:00. This is where Bad Bill left the train. He shook my hand with a grin on his face. Perhaps he was not really that bad at all. 
I was surprised that I felt alert and rested, and neither hungry nor thirsty. Yet I had slept only a few hours in the last two nights. With only a litre and a half of water passing my lips in as many days, I must also have been quite dehydrated by then. But with perhaps about three hours left to go, breaking my journey at this point seemed not worth the trouble. It’s just that my estimate of three hours would prove to be a little optimistic.  

From Campeche to Merida.  111 km, 8 ½ hours (!)

In the jungle of Yucatan
Beautiful people wait in white
and beams of golden sunlight
support a heavenly canopy

A single track hides waiting
In lush green and red flowers
The distance lies shimmering
for an un-measurable time

The train stops massively
between the tiny huts of straw
Even its rusting carriages
gain grace in this blessed spot.

Waving children run along
in heavy clouds of diesel smoke
until this week’s train has gone
and flowers hide again its track

After Campeche the jungle became less dense, but the state of the track became much poorer. The train seemed to have lost all its will to get anywhere. We stopped at more Mayan villages, sometimes only for a few seconds, and sometimes for half an hour without apparent reason. The villages looked as idyllic by day as they had done by night, and now they were full of the colours of flowers and populated with beautiful people. I drank in the scenes of this different world where time seemed to have stood still.  I still felt o.k. despite not having anything to eat or drink, and the lack of progress of the train did not trouble me, at least not until it got dark again. 
My nightmare of the burning village did not trouble me anymore either. I was used to having nightmares and I could easily see how this one had come about: First there were the images of tanks and soldiers of the previous day. Then there were my own, rather dark musings on the topic of religious ritual, followed by a much-disturbed sleep. Simply mix-up these ingredients, add an ounce of over-lively imagination, and then simmer in a medium-hot Mexican railway carriage until tender. To finish, add a pinch-or-two of Freudian-style repressed sexuality, and hey-presto! One perfectly-cooked nightmare! 
Another nightmare was what this train journey was now beginning to turn into: Going into the third night of this journey at perhaps about 20 km per hour when moving at all, and with Merida still somewhere over the horizon, I began to feel a bit despondent about ever getting there. I had eaten my last few nuts and raisins hours ago, and I really longed for something to eat. 
During the day, the train had filled up with Mayan people. Some made short journeys between villages, while others seemed prepared for a longer journey, perhaps all the way to Merida. I did not see any of them eat. Did these people perhaps live of thin air? Their white robes and dresses were spotlessly clean, even their children. There were quite a few children of all ages, and all of them were well-behaved. Some looked at me with large eyes; not with fear, but as if this foreigner was something curious they had not seen before.  
Finally by about 20:00, four hours later than journey’s end according to my calculations that morning, we seemed to enter a more built-up area. There were numerous electric lights dotted around nearby and in the distance. It could only be Merida, or at least the outlying parts of it. About half an hour later we stopped. Perhaps 6 or 7 passengers clambered down from the carriage and disappeared into the night. But most of them stayed and did not make any move to suggest we had reached the end of the journey. It was another freight yard of course, but I had no way of knowing how far it was from the centre of Merida. Safer to wait. So I waited…
It took an hour of shunting to uncouple and group all the boxcars from our train into their respective sidings where they would sit and languish at least till the morning, if not till the end of time! 
It was at this point that my patience was finally stretched beyond breaking point, so it snapped inside me with a crack of anger that nobody around me was in the slightest aware of. The delays up until now, all eleven hours of them, could be explained by external circumstances and by lack of maintenance, lack of money, lack of organisation, etcetera. All these things are to some extent understandable in a world that doesn’t care about trains anymore. But what I have never had, and never will have understanding for, is sheer bloody-mindedness. Admittedly, a certain amount of travel-fatigue may have clouded my judgement, but if the responsible piece of slime of an official would have been delivered to me at that point, I might well have been writing this story in a Mexican jail on a life-sentence, which at that precise moment would have seemed infinitely better to me than spending even one more minute of being shunted around someone’s playground while in view of my destination! 
At last there was nothing left, except one wreck of a locomotive pulling one wreck of a passenger coach with its human cargo; pulling us further and further away from the lights where I thought the city centre might be. Then we stood still again with the engine idling. For another hour? For the rest of the night perhaps? Why not forever? See if I care! Almost imperceptibly, the locomotive began to propel the coach in the opposite direction, very slowly, and into the dimly-lit station where it rolled-out to a half-hearted halt a few metres short of the buffers. I grabbed my belongings and made for the exit. A small queue had formed as people were climbing down the steps, and a fat guy with one of those ring-beards and a grubby white shirt got there just before me. I remembered him joining the train at a village just two hours earlier. He said to me in English: “You people always rush. In Mexico (pronounced Meh-heego) we have time; relax; not like United States”. I am not proud of my reaction, but he did ask for it in a way. So I said “Oh-  fuck off!” while pushing him aside and taking a hold of the handrail to climb down those crooked steps for the very last time. It was 21:30, just over 48 hours after I had left Mexico City, and 12 hours after I should have arrived in Merida according to the timetable of “El Meridano”. I can’t remember how I found my hotel, except that it was about a 20 minute walk through some dark, mean-looking streets. If there were any muggers about, then the force-field of my unquenched rage at this journey and everything Mexican must have kept them well out of view. What I do remember is my first glass of water; the subtle feeling of that heavenly liquid un-shrivelling my body like a withered plant. Although it was a luxury hotel, they never batted an eyelid at my crumpled appearance when I checked in. The sudden change from ruins to luxury was like a fairy tale. And I was young then: A good night sleep, a sumptuous evening meal and breakfast, oh, and soaking myself in a gigantic bath with gold-plated taps, was really all I needed to shake-off the dust of the journey and to feel completely refreshed. 

The End of the Journey

At about 9:00 the next morning a minibus came to collect me and a few other people –whom I would get to know later- from the hotel. The conference was held at a tourist resort just south of Merida. My train must have passed close to it the previous night. Across the road from our accommodation was Mayan temple complex of Uxmal with its pyramid. 
I soon got to know most of the other delegates. As I had expected they were a mix of scientists, writers, industrialists, and generally influential people in their respective countries. One of them was an astronaut who had been to the moon on one of the Apollo missions. I also remember having discussions with a recently retired member of the board of directors of a multinational chemical company. To my surprise he shared my concerns about the world’s environment, and he was as knowledgeable about it as any Greenpeace activist.   
The conference programme was a mix of “workshops” in groups of about 5- 10, and all-of-us-together sessions in the open-air auditorium. The latter looked like a super-large, rectangular bandstand with a Maya-style thatched roof. It was open to the soft, cooling breeze and you could hear the singing of tropical birds in the trees and shrubs all around. 
When I arrived, the buzz of the conversation was all about the latest news headlines. I learned that Civil war had broken out in the neighbouring Chiapas region, the very same region I had just travelled through on my train journey. It was quite serious and apparently hundreds of people had already been killed. People at the conference were worried that case military action might spill-over into Yucatan. From the reports it seemed that fighting had broken out around the time I had left Mexico city. A Mexican doctor with whom I had lunch confirmed that I had indeed travelled right through a war zone! He was surprised that my train had got through at all. It would have been a prime target for the Zapatistas; the rebel militia. Over the following days the civil war was downgraded to an “uprising” and gradually suppressed by government troops. I never mentioned my nightmare to anyone. Horrific events like the one I dreamt (or did I?) allegedly took place during the conflict, but in the aftermath I never found any news-coverage or indeed any reference to a village massacre in that precise area. In any case it does not matter. Things like that continue to happen routinely, even now in the 21st Century: Villages are burned and innocent people wantonly slaughtered. We don’t really care, do we? Until we recognise a face… 
It was to questions like this that I hoped to find answers at the conference in Yucatan. After all, here were the people with brains, the people with influence in the world. I had wanted to meet and confer with them, not because I wanted to rub shoulders with the high and mighty, but because I thought they might have some answers to questions that were troubling me. And yes, I did find answers, but not the ones I wanted to find. The first thing I learned was that I was fully equal to them. My contributions to the proceedings were as good and as well-thought-through as theirs and taken just as seriously. Furthermore, we were all equally helpless and powerless in the face of the challenges facing the world and the suffering that man causes to his fellow man. Only the ones who belonged to religions appeared to have a wider perspective, even a hopeful perspective sometimes. And yet I could not bring myself to join any of them, not even the Brahma Kumaris who had laid-on this gathering so generously and so selflessly. In case you wonder: Of course the conference was a recruitment drive for their movement, but never at any time did I feel under any pressure. Their heaviest weapon was the early-morning meditation. This took place shortly after sunrise in the flower-scented freshness of the open air auditorium. There was music and there was a voice but there is no way to describe it, except that it was so pure and beautiful that it carried me away and did something deep inside me. I think it has been the only time ever that meditation has really “worked” for me. 
So why did I not join this religious movement that seemed to have the answers and that seemed so beautiful? I suppose at that time I simply had neither the love nor the courage: I could not bring myself to surrender my heart and hold it up all torn and bleeding as a sacrifice to whatever it is; that great unfathomable Entity or Being that we sacrifice ourselves to for a better world. 
In fact I did take the plunge a few years later, and surrendered my heart to a Faith that I had come to believe in, and then life really got complicated but that is another story.  
I will always remember the few days in paradise that I shared with those beautiful people. Wherever I go in this life and after, their spirit will travel with me. Perhaps it is my fate to always be the outsider looking in, or else forever to be the one who sees the world fleeting past like through the window of a train. This detachment makes me a potential dissident and subversive to any cause, so perhaps they should be glad they didn’t get me. But it also makes me a writer, and although painful and lonely at times, it lets me see many truths that others cannot see. But in Yucatan I was just a young idealist wanting a better world. Do conferences and other enjoyable events where people talk make a difference?
I can’t remember a single word from the talks given by all those very important people at the Yucatan conference. On the other hand, I vividly remember the meditations and the times of silence and gentleness among people from all countries with the birds singing in the trees. Perhaps that made a difference.
On either the third or the fourth day, we were all asked to go about our business as normal, but without speaking for an hour and a half. There were no workshops during that time, just free time followed by lunch. Instead of the murmur of voices that is normally there but that you don’t notice because you are used to it, there was just bird-song and peace. We smiled at each other when we met each other on the paths, and everything worked with silent gestures of hands and eyes. I thought with some irony how I had just spent two days travelling a thousand miles like that, without words, but of course not in such beautiful tranquillity and peace. 

After the conference I took the opportunity to explore Yucatan a bit further in the company of several people I had met at the conference. We travelled by car and I remember visiting some of the more famous Mayan sites at a leisurely pace, and stopping to sample local delicacies in road-side restaurants . One image that stays with me is that of children having great fun with flying kites that they had made from twigs and used carrier bags. The kites flew very well. I can still picture them soaring towards the sun above some ancient pyramid that was dotted with visitors. To me they seemed like quivering dashes of colour and hope in the deepest blue of the Yucatan sky. 
Mexico and its people were wonderful after all. Far too soon I found myself soaring into that sky myself on a two-hour flight back to Mexico City. I could of course have taken the train back to Mexico City. It would have been very cheap and no-doubt much more environment-friendly, and perhaps I would still have been on it now!