sarahsnowchic

This day began like many others. Glimpsing through a cracked bus window...or trying not to (are they bullet holes?!).. peering past the swinging rosary beads towards a hillside landscape sometimes dense with coloured concrete shanty houses, today with thick luscious jungle foliage intersperced with cornfield and farming plantations.  We'd descended a couple of thousand metres toward sea level into the tropical, humid Chiapas and a thick fog set an eerie presence as it circled and nestled into the surrounding mountains.  There was also something else a little different about this particular bus ride. A spanish-speaking seemingly local guy in a cowboy hat up the front of the van was passing back a bag of dried chilli grasshoppers and offering swigs of the local spirit "Mezcal" (thankfully no worms inside) which the driver was relishing in a one-for-you-one-for-me type fashion which proved quite disconcerting as we careered around the narrow corners often toward...

Thus begins a story from the road...contemplated while driving south on Highway 395, an almost 1000 mile feat since we left San Francisco all those days ago.  This journey took us from Lake Tahoe California into Nevada and back to California through Yosemite National Park, onto Mammoth Ski Resort and eventually into Los Angeles.  The rugged snow-capped mountains of the glacier-carved Sierra Nevadas formed an epic and impressive backdrop to an otherwise vast open plain where true to form tumbleweeds certainly did blow in the wind.  The landscape reminded me of No Country For Old Men... so i guess i was glad i wasn´t.... at times like an old Western.... a little bit Dances with Wolves..and as we chanced upon the number of Native Indian/American Reservations dotted along the way, you´d be hard pressed to miss them with the accompanying massive Casino and little else. maybe a $4.95 rib special.  But for the rest of the time a...