Tongue Twisted Traveler

It was the fall of 2000, but it was spring in Santiago where I was visiting the Chilean capital to do a piece for a British magazine on the lasting effects of privatization at the country's ports a decade on. I was to visit Valparaiso and San Antonio, some 90 to 100 miles away along the Pacific coast, but first I was heading to the small municipality of Conchali, in the northern section of Santiago, to pick up a friend of mine named Humberto, whom I met while living in Miami Beach in 1996. From El Centro I drove my match-box of a rental car across a low-lying bridge spanning the Rio Maphocho and north on Recoleta. The lower middle class neighborhood of Conchali is tucked humbly away and neatly hidden from the rich upper suburbs of Las Condes in the east, just across a small unpopulated ridge at the back entrance of the Parque Metropolitana. A small working class barrio, or comuna, that was spurred by a public housing initiative in the mid 1920s, there are small farms there, but ...

After the plane landed in Mexico City's main airport I had no idea what to expect. This was my first flight to another country. I'd been to Mexico before, but only to the border city of Jaurez and never into the heart of the country. It was the summer of 1998, and I was just graduating from a small university in western Pennsylvania, traveling to Cuernavaca for a course in advanced Spanish grammar and Mexican cultural studies. Cuernavaca is a city that lies on the southern slope of the Sierra Madre mountains, just across the continental divide and an hour south of the capital. It's usually called the city of the eternal spring for its normally temperate climate. But when I arrived the land was arid and smoke filled the air for miles in all directions due to out-of-control brush fires that had been set by farmers trying to clear small plots of land for planting. As the bus descended into the upper part of the city, passing a roundabout featuring a noble statue of Emili...