Jan asked me if I wanted to go with him and a few friends to a place called Cuatro Ciénegas. Spring break is right around the corner and I’m trying to save a few pesos for my trip, so I did a little skeptical investigating to see if this place would be worth visiting. Here’s a little info about Cuatro Ciénegas, written by me.
Cuatro Ciénegas is beautifully situated between two large cities – Denver 1,ooo miles to the north and Mexico City 1,000 miles to the south. It offers a wide variety of attractions (three different ones) that draw people from all corners of the map (no one besides us). There exists in 4Ciénegas a great balance between the hustle and bustle of a blossoming city (the visitor’s center for a pond, which is one of the three attractions) and the calm of the Mexican desert (too windy to be calm, ever).
I decided that it sounded great, Jan assured me that it could be done quite economically, and next thing I knew, I was in a rented Volkswagon Pointer headed northwest on a highway out of Monterrey. At some point in the journey, I made it into the driver’s seat, where I observed a few things about Mexican Highways. First, although it would appear that there are only two lanes on the road, there in fact exist anywhere from three to five. These lanes exist more in concept than they do form, as the reality of the situation is that as long as you are not currently colliding with a car coming from the opposite direction, you are in a lane. Also, I’m quite ignorant as to the actual velocity of “Kilometros per hour”. This made it hard to invoke my usual rule of ten miles an hour over the limit at all times, so I decided to move with the flow of traffic. Then I realized that we were in the middle of nowhere and there was no traffic, so I changed my plan to “see how fast the car can go.” Francois sat rather calmly in the front seat, reading a newspaper whose front page article featured perhaps the most gruesome picture I have ever seen of a man who died because he was driving too fast.
When we rolled into Cuatro Ciénegas, we got out of the car, and I told Jan to stop whistling. He said that he wasn’t, at which point I saw the back right tire slowly deflating. This was bad news, but nothing to be too worried about, we would just change the tire and continue merrily on our way. We opened the trunk and took out the spare only to find that it had been worn to the metal strip and was deflated as well. Luckily, we were not far from the local sears auto service center, so we took the car there for a little lovin’. 
A couple of pesos later, we were well on our way to the real destination, an oasis about twenty minutes outside of the town.
We first headed to the Poza Azul, a pond that comes from an underwater spring that boasts amazingly clear water. Because of this, one can see down into the cave-like aqueduct that is the mysterious origin of the water, which creates a deep blue color that screams “please swim in me!” I tried my hardest to satisfy this request, but my efforts were stifled by rules and regulations aimed at the preservation of the water’s crystal-clarity, which made me hate the rules just a little less. In all reality, the Poza Azul was a pond with a radius of about twenty feet in the middle a most dry, most arid place. If you stand facing the pool and rotate 360 degrees, you see absolutely nothing but desert and mountains. But if you concentrate on the deep blue of the pool while standing under the hot, hot desert sun, its easy to convince yourself that you’re in the Caribbean. 
After seeing this and whining about not being able to swim in it for a while, Francois, a french travel companion who bears a striking resemblance to Lebowski, aka “the dude”, told me that we were about to hop in our honeywagon and drive to our campsite on some part of a desert Oasis. We drove a solid fifteen minutes on a dirt road and, 45 pesos of admission later, we arrived at our straw roof situated on some body of clear water in the middle of the desert.
Sometimes, when I travel, I wonder what people would think of a particular place that I am in. Being in the middle of the desert drew me to thoughts of my parent’s reactions upon arrival. I would venture to say that the reactions would go something like this:
Dad: Cool. Look at this. We are in the middle of nowhere. This is cool! There’s no one else here! No email, no computers, no phonecalls, no bothers in the world at all. Just ourselves and the big wide open. The roads run straight for as far as you can see. Cool. Its hot as hell. Cool. I’m going for a run.
Mom: Charlie, I’m not so sure about this. We are in the middle of nowhere. I’m worried. There’s no one else here. Where are the other people? We can’t email anyone, call anyone. What if we get stuck out here, just ourselves and the big wide open?
Although I carry chromosomes from both parents and am like each of them in different ways, I definitively side with my father on this one. Because of this, when we arrived at the campsite with the sun beating down harder than ever, I did what any normal person would do – laced up my shoes, took off my shirt, and went for a 45 minute run.
The camp site was beautifully simple. It consisted of a man-made island of sorts with a small roof, space for grilling / building a fire to survive (more on this later), and a ladder for pulling oneself out of the water. After the grand “you can’t swim here tease” that was the Poza Azul, I was pretty excited to be near un-regulated water, as the Mexican desert sun was playing to win at the time. It was everything I had hoped it would be and more – cold, clear, and clear of other humans.
The day passed without much to report – that is to say that it passed ideally – and after a great steak and tortillas dinner with friends, the sun was on its way out. Jan had told me that I could expect it to be significantly colder at night than during the day, so I came prepared with my 80 peso plaid Mexican fleece-like pullover and my most trusted pair of jeans. It got a little nippy, so I donned my clothes. Then the wind picked up even more and it was legitimately cold. Then it got really really dark and really really cold. Then it got antartically cold. Then I was fighting for my life against Madre Nature with a blanket I stole from my house and the few hairs on my chin that I call a winterry beard. Then this happened:
Then I tried to sleep in the tent, but couldn’t because 1) Francois wouldn’t cuddle and 2) it was really, really cold, and we couldn’t put the nylon top over the mesh windows of the tent for fear of it blowing away and landing us in the only place more desolate than the one we were in – Kansas. Following my impaired, sleepy, somewhat angered logic, I deemed it a good idea to cram all six foot two of me into the not six feet two inch wide backseat of our rental car. This was less cold, but perhaps more miserable. I slithered over to the door and slowly began leveling my eyes with the glass with the high, high hopes of seeing a tranquil landscape free of wind. Out the window I stared with beady, afraid little eyes, and much to my dismay I saw wildly bending blades of grass that looked as cold and alone as I was. It was then that I decided, in a moment of clarity, to accept the earlier advice of the sage frenchman Francois and embrace that “cold is just an idea” and headed out in the elements to sleep in the hammock. As I was moving, the sun was starting to come out and stood on my toes to try to catch a little bit more of its warming, loving, cuddly mexican rays. I laid in the hammack until my toes thawed and I was sweating, something that I could not have been happier to have been doing, glad that I had survived to live another perfect day in the Mexican desert.
randallbourquin
Mexico, Dude. 
God, you seriously look like a homeless Russian in the Siberian winter. Glad I could not see that because the wind was blowing pieces of fire into my eyes. And dirt. There is a lot of dirt in the dessert.