Juarez

I looked at my boarding pass. It said we were flying to Benito Juarez Airport. For a fleeting second I thought I had made a mistake with the booking and that we were flying to Ciudad Juarez. Juarez is the border town where more than 15,000 murders are believed to have occurred in the past 2 years. Don’t panic. Benito Juarez is also the name of the airport in Mexico City and where we were headed. I have since found out that every town has something named after Juarez as he was quite a hero (I looked him up) - he’s the dude who kicked out the French and was elected president in 1867.

I slept most of the flight and we landed in Mexico City after only 4 ½ hours. The descent was impressive. First we flew over an area of drained lakes. Then the city started – a vast built-up area beginning along a straight line where the lakes ended. There were multi-coloured low-rise boxes for miles and miles and even spilling up the mountains in the distance. We landed among them as the airport is right in the city. I could even see people through their kitchen windows cooking tacos as we landed.