Bilbo, Fear and A Lesson about how Watching too many Series about Narcos can Warp your Perceptions

I feel like Bilbo when he first set out with the dwarves. I don't want any adventures. They're too uncomfortable. And I've experienced something Bilbo never had to deal with: sometimes I make my own adventures with fears and tears, when there's a valid reason for what I'm dealing with -- but I just don't know what it is. 

So, here's the story: I booked a very expensive tour for a week, where the travel is between the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua, along a 400km track. I took the first class option one way and the executive option for the return trip because there was no first class option coming back. It cost nearly $3000 for the week with all hotels, transfers and some meals. That was fine. I have already told the story of the difficulty I had paying for the tour in an earlier blog entry. 

Then, after being in constant contact for a number of days with my agent, Yumi, where she was attentive to my every question, with replies of "We're here to serve you, whatever you want", etc, etc, ad nauseam. So, it seemed to me, that after they'd got my money, I didn't hear any more, though they did say I would have all the necessary information a week before my tour started. Well, my tour starts Thursday. I fly to meet the tour on Wednesday. It's now Monday. And nada!

I had a troubled sleep last night thinking about how I didn't know what my hotels would be, what my seats on the trains would be, and it is three days before the trip starts. I decided to send a message to WhatsApp to Yumi as soon as they started work today at 9 a.m. No response. It's like the WhatsApp number had died. 

I started to think: S.C.A.M (or E.S.T.A.F.A. en español). $3,000 down the drain. 

I asked Eduardo, the receptionist if he'd try to contact the company. I tried calling their landline. Cut off three times. No response from Yumi via WhatsApp. No response to my email. I had the office address. I decided to take an Uber there and find out what the bloody hell was going on. 

I arrived at what looked like a prosperous house in a residential suburb. I saw a bell and rang it. A nice-looking, muscly, young Mexican man came out. He asked me what I wanted and I told him about my "paquete" on El Chepe. 

This is where all the Narcos episodes I'd ever seen, and also all the series about Pablo Escobar, all came flooding into the front of my brain. I was there alone, the young guy invited me in to a house that appeared to be empty, and I was terrified. He showed me into an "office", which really looked as if no office work had ever occurred there. There were no post-it notes, paperclips, no pictures of workers' families on desks, no papers anywhere. Everything was clear and clean. I couldn't even see any computer screens or a printer. The only thing that made it office-like was the big desk I was sat at. 

Another man came in and spoke to me in English: a young man, strangely enough, called Eduardo. (80% of the young men I have met on my travels, are called Eduardo.) I was in contact with Eduardo at reception in my accomodation via WhatsApp at the same time. (I'd wanted someone to know where I was last seen, should I become a desaparecido; I'd told Alex, but I thought he might be too far away to do anything to save my life, should it become necessary.) I connected Eduardo, the hotel receptionist, with Eduardo the El Chepe Xplora agent on my phone.

The fight or flight response was still pumping cortisone throughout my body at this stage and I was extremely agitated. Don't know why I accepted a glass of water from Eduardo. I was damn sure that I wasn't going to drink it because I suspected it would be drugged. He did look at the untouched water in the glass quizzically before I left.)

Anyway, I waited in the office while Eduardo went off at various times to get the printout of the tour that I was after. (I was right. There was no printer in that "office". It seems that the printing had been done somewhere else and Eduardo had called for a courier, or someone, to bring the documents.) 

So, then it was out onto the street again with a sheaf of papers in my bag, to call another Uber to bring me back here to the hospedaje, all in one piece, but still shaking like a leaf.