Villahermosa and the Grijalva River

It was December 1979. My brother and I had just landed in Villahermosa in the State of Tabasco. It was a humid tropical evening, and the Grijalva River was in flood. At one point, I saw the bodies of cattle that were drifting by in the rushing current. I had never before experienced such humidity.

Villahermosa—“Beautiful City”—was anything but. It was a city located in the middle of an extensive swamp.

I had planned a trip that roughly followed Graham Greene’s itinerary in Journey Without Maps, starting in Villahermosa and heading over the Sierra Madre to San Cristóbal de las Casas and thereafter to Oaxaca and back to Mexico City.

Only I hadn’t planned for Villahermosa. At a local eatery, my brother ordered shrimps that were delivered to the table partially coated in tar. We didn’t have a hotel. It didn’t take us long to discover that all the hotel rooms were block-booked by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), as we were near the Cactus oilfields of Tabasco.

All we could find was a small Casa de Hospedaje (guest house) where we spent a restless night. My bed had a lateral groove in the middle, whereas Dan’s bed had a vertical groove down the middle. And the beds felt wet with the humidity. We were near the cathedral, where the bells chimed every quarter of an hour. That was not the worst of it: There were chickens on the roof, and the rooster among them crowed every few minutes through the night.

When we woke, we found that the shower head was directly over the toilet, which we had to straddle to wash ourselves off.

Dan summarized the experience by referring to the place as the Casa de Hopes-You-Die.