Living in Mexico: Closer to God

The tragic event in Eloxochitlan, Mexico, in which a mudslide took too many bus traveler's lives on July 5^th, 2007, reminded me of the times I've been in Mexican cabs and buses when traveling on back roads that twist and wind up and down rain-soaked mountains. At the writing of this article, 32 bodies have been recovered from a muddy tomb. Rescuers fear more to come.

I never fail to feel the closest to God when I crawl into the back of a Mexican cab or onto a bus. Particularly, it is the buses that tend to make me very prayerful. Especially when it is the rainy season and we are traveling to a town requiring a mountainous ascent and descent.

Once, we were heading to Dolores Hidalgo from Guanajuato, when I swear I thought the bus was on autopilot and the driver had left. I kept trying to look in his rear-view mirror to see where he had gone off to but to no avail.

Though some of the drivers of these conveyances should indeed qualify for immediate admission to an insane asylum or a jail cell, it is the rainy season that offers the most potentially dangerous scenario.

The rainy season can be perilous. This is what precipitated the mudslide in Eloxochitlan.

I remember three seasons ago when a house in Guanajuato came loose from its moorings and part of it slid down the mountain. It was perched on the side of one of the city's mountains. The mountain simply gave way under the rainy onslaught. The owners eventually rebuilt that section of the house on the exact same mountainous perch.

We tend to wait out the rainy season before traveling. The rains come towards the end of May and last through September. October is when we mount a bus and head off for new Mexican adventures.

Mexican bus travel is safe. But, to be sure, to be extra sure, we stay out of buses during rainy season.