One 0f the few things I hate about traveling is having to get in a car. While I resent the often high price of a taxi, I’d much rather pay someone who knows the roads of a given city than try to navigate them myself. That’s how I found myself waiting for a cab on a warm morning in Guadalajara with my friends. The sun was already getting hot, much to the contrast of what I’d been told about winter in Guadalajara. Dogs were already barking and the constant hum of the city’s busy roads was building steadily. I’d been told the buses in Guadalajara were something of an adventure so we’d opted for the taxi option on this particular morning. All I was thinking about was soccer.
At my insistence, we were on our way to see Guadalajara’s cherished ‘Chivas’ play. I had to settle for a friendly game because the season wasn’t actually on but it had always been a dream of mine to visit a large soccer stadium. Estadio Omnilife has a capacity nearing the 50,000 mark and seemed a good a place as any to make my dream happen. The stadium, like so many, is out in the middle of nowhere. But back to el peri. My friend Chie had arrived that morning, I having already been in Guadalajara for a couple of days.
Which is where we meet: Periférico, or simply just ‘el peri’ (yes, as in “peril”). El peri is an oddly beloved and mostly feared highway that runs a crooked circle around the city of Guadalajara. The butt of endless jokes, it’s a sweat-inducing drive even for locals. Unfortunately, to get quickly (if not slightly dangerously) most places in the city, you need to be on a multi-lane highway. So in the cab we pile, the brothers Castillo, myself and a slightly jet-lagged Chie. The ride to the stadium started out innocuous enough, me mostly content to watch out the windows and marvel at Guadalajara’s stark income disparity. Literally on one side of the road you’ll have gated, colonial style homes, painted in bright hues, while across the way there will be literally crumbling mud brick bungalows with tarps hanging loosely as roofs.
About twenty minutes in and a drive up to the top of a very large hill where there seemed to be essentially nothing save for a few kids on bikes and dilapidated neighborhood, we realized we had just got taken for a ride. Politely reminding our cab driver that we were in fact headed to a different middle-0f-nowhere, we resumed our course. Eventually getting back onto el peri, we begin to catch glimpses of what is, in any normal person’s view, a large space-age toilet bowl in the middle of a desert valley. This is where the sports happen. We pull in to a massive parking lot, like something out of a Midwest Walmart, and park suspiciously far away from the stadium. To this day I’m not sure why taxis have to park nearly a quarter of a mile from the stadium but I was too excited to care. We (meaning our hosts) paid the cab driver and began our trek up to the mighty toilet bowl.
Climbing into the guts of a massive stadium is a bit like being sucked up into a spaceship-it’s a bizarre out-of-body experience that is designed, I believe, to give you sports feelings. Coming out of narrow corridors and climbing long concrete ramps until you are ejaculated out into a swirling atmosphere of cacophonous noise, this is why people go ape-shit at sporting events. Unfortunately, this was a friendly in December play Estudiantes(?), so roughly a thousand or so fans sparsely occupied the stands. We grabbed seats and watched probably not the most exciting match I’ve been to. In all honesty, I spent more time watching the die-hard fans waving flags than I did watching the game. After we woke Chie up, we departed the less-than-scintillating 2-2 draw. Whatever. One more thing crossed off the bucket list.
Sojourning back out across the now very hot parking lot, there were luckily a few cabs waiting. I can’t emphasize enough how out in the sticks this stadium was. A valley that was apparently meant to be filled up with sporting complexes, in late 2011, it was merely the home to one very lonely toilet bowl with a parking lot seemingly built for 747s to land on. We piled Chie into the taxi and began our day trek back into town. Apparently to see a mall. This is where the fun began.
Maybe it was our sprawling country drive to get to the stadium but Periférico seemed ready to teach us a thing or two about Mexican highways. Remember, at this time, my entire worldview of Mexican highways were of bodies (or parts of them) being dumped to intimidate local powers. But the real thing to worry about is the highways themselves. There’s a certain rhythm and life to Mexican driving that takes some getting used to but starving and sun-baked, I wasn’t exactly “getting it.” For starters, if you need to get into a lane, the Guadalajara maneuver is to pull as quickly and as blindly into it as possible. As you’re doing this, all manner of vehicles will zip in and out of the narrowest margins of life and death, vying for the enviable position of… closer to their destination? As yet another pickup truck with 6 or 7 men sitting in the back holding vaguely on roared past us, I began to feel a strange thumping coming from the car floor. This was really not the time nor the place for the taxi’s transmission to fall out. As we swerved around a funny beeping vehicle carrying a the tail end of an enormous section of concrete overpass, I felt something pressing on the back of my seat.
That’s when I heard the nervous laughter through faintly muttered “Jesus!” exclamations coming from behind me. Finally overtaking the who-knows-where-bound overpass section, I turned around to see Chie stomping furiously at the floor of the taxi. As we came dangerously close to rear ending a dump truck I felt the pressure again as my friend searched madly with her foot for her backseat break pedal. White knuckled and sweating (I’m sure just from the heat), I told her to relax and enjoy the experience. We hurtled down el peri for what I’m sure was felt like an hour for Chie but was in truth not more than ten minutes, and screamed into the palatial parking lot of some high end mall crammed into a modern looking housing development shaped like a shorn-off piece of pyramid. We took the speed bumps like challenges, catching air more than once. Delicately, our driver pulled up to the curb.
We had survived. Blood pumping furiously and hearts in our throats we had endured the trials and potholes of Periférico. To go shopping.
For more travel stories, watch for my upcoming book on yet-to-be had adventures in Hawaii
Nick Thornton 