Sabancuy

We left Merida the next morning after breakfast and a little sightseeing. We had pretty fully recovered from our adventure in Valladolid the day before and Jana and I were looking forward to continuing on to Carmen. I had the movers arranged to come early the next day and I looking forward to continuing our travels without any more time restrictions or SLB related stress.

It was stepping out of the Cathedral in Merida that I received an email that suddenly changed all my plans. I had a job offer! I had taken the chance and flown up to Houston from Playa del Carmen the week before to interview on the off chance it might lead to something. Turns out I was exactly what they were looking for. I still had some negotiations to do, but an offer in hand less than a month after being laid off was a serious miracle given the times. They later told me they received around 750 applications for the position.

Job offer or no, we still had to head to Carmen and pack up my house. We said goodbye to Hugo and headed out, two American girls driving 385km to Ciudad del Carmen. We expected it to take about 4 1/2 hours with a stop or two. Instead we got stopped by the Campeche police at every damn road block on the way and the trip in it’s entirety took us almost 20 hours. 

At the first road block, they made us present our passports and visas along with the car registration info. My registration was terribly out of date and so I paid the ‘fee’ of 500MX ($35US at the time) that went directly into the pocket of the state policeman. On to the next stop. Once again, we had to present our passport and visas. At the previous stop I had just shown my FM3, as it’s my official Mexican state ID and proves I’m in the country legally. My passport doesn’t have a visa in it. This time I had to get out my passport even after explaining that my work visa was fine. I was already annoyed and so when they started telling me I had to pay a fee again, I got upset and yelled at them that I already paid a fee and they were only pulling us over because we were white. At that, they got defensive and finally let us go without an fees and a reassurance that they do not profile drivers. 

It was at the third one that we were about to lose our tempers completely when it turned out the officer had stopped us to warn us about a road closure. After asking us where we were going, he laughed and said ‘No you’re not! Not today anyway’. There was no way to get to Carmen that night. Still getting used to the accent of Campeche, it took him explaining a second time for me to understand. A fishing community had closed the road in protest. 

For anyone unfamiliar, I’ll explain about road closures in Mexico. Basically, a community will get upset about something. In this case, it was a community of fishermen in the town of Sabancuy upset over something the government had done or not done. With state elections coming up, it was becoming more and more common. I was more familiar with the community of Atasta getting upset about all the traffic on the road coming through and blocking the road from Carmen to Villahermosa. In this case, Sabancuy was blocking the road from Campeche to Carmen. The only way through was an 8 hour detour. Sabancuy is less than an hour away from Carmen.

I discussed with the officer the best course of action. He recommended to us waiting it out in Champoton which was the main town between Campeche and Carmen. I had stopped there a few times, always at the same gas station for a bathroom break and to stock up on snacks. We were stopped a 4th time on the way into town, again the officer explained to us the road block. This time with the additional information that they had opened it at 10pm the night before. Ah-ha I thought, we just need to wait it out! 

We hung out in town for a while and had dinner on the waterfront (Pulpa enomorado, which it turns out is terrible) then walked around. While we were sitting there a biker gang of over 100 riders turned up. We were a little nervous, but they refused to serve alcohol on the waterfront so that made us feel a little better. We saw some of the bikers taking part in a Zumba class right on the waterfront, also making us feel better.

At around 8:30, we drove up to a convenience store and bought supplies to go wait out the road block. Water, snacks, beer. We were set. Or so we thought. As I explained to Jana, if they kept the road closed completely, then the government will interfere and come open it up. If they’re smart, they’ll open it once a day and allow traffic through so they can be more disruptive over a longer period of time. This was a major road, it would be like closing I-10 or I-70. The government wouldn’t stand for the disruption for long unless they were letting traffic through. I figured we would just be waiting until 10 or 12 at worse. 

We drove up and sat parked in the car. We read, we watched movies. We listened to music and chatted. It was fairly pleasant actually. No big deal. Then we saw traffic moving. We got all excited and skipped ahead, thinking, this is it! No such luck. Just a few cars moving up to take the place of people who had given up. The problem was, now were on a bridge. Neither of us wanted to walk out into the dark alone off the bridge to go to the bathroom and we also didn’t want to leave the car. Now we had a definite breaking point. It was about midnight at this point and we decided to wait it out until one of us couldn’t hold it anymore. 

We rolled down all the windows and sat in the dark. It was dead quiet all around us, everyone was asleep. Being on the bridge we could hear the waves breaking below us. We reclined our seats and napped on and off. I was a little too stressed out to sleep. I was worried about what would happen if the movers arrived in Carmen the next day and I wasn’t there. Also, I had just finished reading a Walking Dead book and images of lines of abandoned cars with zombies in them kept running through my head. It gave the scene an erie edge in my mind. 

It around 4am when I heard a little movement around us. Nothing major, just a bus starting up. Then another one. I sat up to see if anything was happening. Looking out my rolled down window into the fog and darkness I began to see figures taking shape. Figures in full riot gear. With shields. And guns. I woke up Jana and we rolled up the windows and watched as hundreds of state police in full riot gear walking through the cars all around us, shining lights as they went. Carrying tear gas canisters and automatic weapons. Then big, American 4-door pickup trucks began driving down the empty lane, towards the road block. 

Soon after, cars began coming from the other direction. Another hour and we were moving. Very slowly, but moving. After about another 30 mins we passed the road block. I woke up Jana a second time so she could see what had caused all the fuss. As we drove through the road block, we saw a small group of men surrounded on all sides by police. We drove for almost half a kilometer with police lining both sides of the road. Shields up, pointing in. Protecting the road. 

It was and still is probably one of the more terrifying nights of my life, right up there with the night the Angolan civil war ended. The eeriness of it combined with the extreme show of government force will leave its imagine burned in me for a long time. 

We arrived in Carmen at 6am*. The movers were scheduled to come at 9am. We grabbed a little bit of sleep. I woke up to greet the movers at 9am, then promptly fell asleep on the couch when they were an hour late. They had also been caught in the traffic caused by the Sabancuy road block. 

By the end of the day, Jana and I were checking into a hotel and my house was all packed up, ready to ship to Houston! 

*As a note, I would never ever recommend driving on this extreme lack of sleep no matter the circumstances. Sleep deprivation is shown to delay your reaction time similarly to driving drunk. I felt comfortable doing it only because my years in the field has given me the ability to make quick decisions and stay alert even after several days of very little sleep.