The journey from Oaxaca back home to Oaxaca is long enough but this time a little civil unrest stretched the trip out by another five hours. We stopped for a lunch at a little blip on the road called Jalapa for half an hour, pushed on through Salina Cruz and came to a full stop about 20 minutes later. Locals from some place even smaller than Jalapa had made a roadblock of trees and were stopping all traffic in both directions.
I walked up to the front of the line, less than a mile up the road, to check the stiuation out. I think we would have missed the show entirely if we hadn’t had that lunch stop.
The trees I’d heard about were little more than large branches, more of a symbolic roadblock. There were enough of us trapped there to have pushed our way through but everything was peaceful . The military sent a couple of representatives and negotiations began. When we finally got through, they were letting 15 vehicles at a time go every half hour, just like real hostages. By that time the traffic may well have been lined up all the way back to Salina Cruz.
It felt good to be home. My sympathy went with the group of young volunteers I met from England, operating on very little sleep to begin with and pushing on to Puerto Escondido.
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