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Tour Journal Revisited
Hookaville '96
by Holly Goodman - (Hgood421@aol.com)

I'm sitting on the beach in Oaxaca, about as far south in Mexico as I ever manage to get before these hammocks suck me in and the mota doesn't let me up. I've been six weeks South of the Border with my honey, a couple of backpacks, and a laptop that should remind me to check on things back in the real world. Here in Zipolite there is no real world. There are boatloads of fresh fish, herbs and cakes, milk from the coconut, empanadas, mangoes, and papayas. There are cabanas full of travelers lounging along on the Gringo trail, but there are no phones, and my motivation to find one fades further each time the ocean thumps the shore.

This trip came on suddenly. Ten days of number crunching and Scott, my aforementioned honey, had a plan that got him 15 hours of anthropology, computer design, and astronomy credit--with South Puget Sound Community College bankrolling our wanderings for two months. Before we left, I let a few editors know I could be reached only through e-mail, but it's 1996 and not everyone is paying attention.

Puerto Angel is the nearest village with telephones. In my best Spanglish I explain to the woman selling long distance time that my computer needs to use her phone. Try explaining, in a language you can barely speak, that your computer needs to make a call. Never mind that most people here don't have a phone, let alone a computer that needs to use it. Pachutla is 45 minutes inland, but its larger and the French shopkeep isn't afraid to let us jump online to find out that High Times wants me to be in Ohio in three weeks to cover Hookahville. Stick with me here, because this is where things start to spin. It's May 7, Hookahville is May 24-26 in Ohio, our car is in Olympia, Washington, our flight to Seattle is leaving May 27 from San Diego, and our budget says we need to be in Alaska by mid-June. But everything inside me says I need to be at Hookahville. I've known for two years what it will take High Times Editorial Director two more to discover: "Hookahville is the coolest place on Mother Earth." Check out the map. Trace your finger from Puerto Angel to Olympia and tell me when you hit Columbus, Ohio. Exactly. We can leave now, make San Diego a few weeks early, fly stand-by and get our case of glass, but the car won't go 20 miles which still leaves us broke and transportationless 2,400 miles from Hookahville. Faith will get you anywhere, so I just keep knowing I'm going to get there. Tao, the cabana where we're staying, is a microcosm of the beach. Travelers from Italy, Israel, the United States, Canada, and Mexico hang in clumps under palm-leaf umbrellas, talking, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes and joints, and playing naked in the surf. A skinny, sunburnt Canadian kid named Chris is always the first to crack a beer in the morning. "Cristobal Cervezas?" the cabana manager asks when he hears Chris stirring. Chris has been volunteering at an orphanage near Mexico City for a year, and this morning when we roll out to the breakfast area he and most of our neighbors are planning to head back there. He has to be there tomorrow and back home in Toronto next Monday. Check out the map. Trace your finger from Mexico City to Toronto and tell me when you hit Columbus. Exactly. This kid has to drive almost right through it. The back of Chris's truck is larger than some of the hotels we've crashed in. We toss our stuff in the back, sending it ahead with all the Tao kids to Mexico City and stay to watch the rains roll in before meeting a few days down the line.

Mexico City: Thursday, May 16, 1996. Scott and I settle into the back for the ride. We sleep days and drive nights and keep going straight on through til Columbus. Er, well, we go straight through until the truck overheats, which is usually about every six hours. Give her some water and a rest and we watch the Mexican countryside turn from mountain to farmland to industrialized desert as we near the border. Those beef-feed boys at the Brownsville international line are a little camera shy and completely devoid of humor. While the dogs frolic about the truck, the border boys busy themselves with backpacks and camera bags and hip-packs until they find something of sufficient interest to run a name.

"What do you use these for?" Billy Bubba Joe prods Scott, waving a pack of Club rolling papers at his face.
"Tobacco."
"What kind do you smoke?" And the questioning goes like this until federal agent Billy Bubba Joe slips a crisp $50 bill out of the pack.
"What's this for," he smirks.
"In case I run across any federalize collecting for the Mexican Policeman's Ball."
And the border guy starts to slip the whole thing into his pocket.
"You can have the papers," Scott tells him. "But, I'll need the fifty."
Welcome to Texas.

Texas isn't such a bad place. Sure, we get pulled over twice for driving without license plate lights, but it's nothing that can't be fixed with a couple of warnings, two mini mag-lights, some duck tape, and ingenuity. We buy the family value pack of batteries and stop often to change them.

The cops here don't mind Chris and Daryl pounding Molsons in the back or Scott's expired license and lack of insurance. They send us rolling on through the south to a junkyard outside of Houston where we overheat. "Red"--we'll just call him that for the color of his neck--is standing in a fortress of cardboard and all we need is one small slab for Chris to put between himself and the road. "We ain't got nothing here for You." He says it like we have the longhaired plague and were about to let it loose on Houston. Don't Mess With Texas, hippie scum. I brace for the blast of a shotgun that never happens.

Now our mission is to survive the South and have these boys knocking back shots in Toronto before last call on Sunday. We make it past the death stares in Tex-Arkana and stop in Memphis to send Elvis postcards from a truck stop. Tennessee is easy and Kentucky's almost home. By Cincinnati, Scott's mom has dinner on the stove. If we can eat fast enough, they'll be drinking before close.

We still have this slight transportation challenge. We're in Ohio, our flight departs from San Diego, and our dead car is in Washington. By the time Scott gets off the phone with Southwest, we have a $200 voucher and the ticket agent is flying in from Mississippi to check out Hookahville.

By the time we leave Ohio, Scott's parents have donated a Honda CRX that's been keeping snow off the driveway for about two years. ,p. Memorial Day Weekend, we are home grooving to Percy Hill, Acoustic Junction (now Fool's Progress) and HOOOOOOKKKKAAAAHHHHHH with a few thousand people in a place we call utopia, and a place that High Times calls the coolest on the planet.