Mexico City & the World AIDS Conference

The World Traveller Series — Special Edition

by Brett Hayhoe

The Journey

A maiden voyage on Air New Zealand in Premium Economy — and it set the bar high. Superb service, superb aircraft, superb destination. The conference itself, held at a racecourse, matched the ambition of the trip: grand in scale, impossible to overlook. The kind of event that reminds you why these gatherings matter.

A Rude Awakening

Those sporadic sounds on arrival — the old cars backfiring, surely. Mexico City is full of them, rattling cheerfully through streets that predate the motor vehicle by several centuries. A reasonable assumption.

Twenty-four hours later came the correction.

The trip had coincided with open warfare between Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, ignited by the assassination of the city’s chief of police. The police were hunting cartel members through the streets — lights only, no sirens — shooting on sight. The backfiring was gunfire.

The Gay Quarter

The city’s gay district was within walking distance of the hotel — several blocks of clubs and eateries that needed no introduction. The atmosphere was, shall we say, emphatically itself. Joyful, loud, unapologetic. In the middle of a city crackling with tension, here was a pocket of the world doing exactly as it pleased. VERY GAY — and all the better for it.

The Pyramid

The day after the conference, a small group set off on a tourist excursion — destination: the second largest pyramid in the world. En route, lunch at what Mexico would generously describe as a restaurant: tables outside, food simple and honest, and for at least one member of the party, a first encounter with a toilet unbothered by town sewage. A bucket of water stood in for plumbing. It does the job.

What nobody at the table knew was that the person sitting among them had been discharged from hospital just two weeks earlier, following a heart attack.

The pyramid, when it came into view, was every bit as enormous as its billing. The group began to climb. Slowly, deliberately, one step at a time — no announcements, no explanations, just the quiet private business of putting one foot in front of the other and refusing to stop. The heat. The altitude. The sheer verticality of the thing. None of it, ultimately, was negotiable.

At the top, standing in the sun with the whole of the surrounding landscape spread below, there was only one reasonable response: pride. Uncomplicated, well-earned, and entirely personal.

The descent was made just as slowly. No drama. Nobody needed to know.

At the base, the street vendors — easy to dismiss at a glance as hawkers of trinkets — turned out, on closer inspection, to be selling genuinely beautiful goods at prices that were more than reasonable. A lesson in not walking past things too quickly.

It was, without question, the highlight of the trip.

An International Incident — Narrowly Avoided

En route back to the hotel one night, a brief stop behind a structure to relieve oneself. Two police officers materialised immediately. Passport confiscated. Arrest threatened — unless a specific sum changed hands.

What followed was somewhere between negotiation and theatre: half an hour to an hour of back-and-forth that went precisely nowhere. Every argument met with the same unmovable proposition. Eventually the deal was done — all available cash for the passport, a perfunctory lecture thrown in at no extra charge, and release into the night.

A reminder, if one were needed, that not every encounter with authority in a foreign city ends with a handshake.

The Ambassadorial Function — and the Uncomfortable Truth

An evening function required travelling from one part of the city to another. The transition was gradual, then suddenly stark. The have-nots gave way to the haves with a clarity that left little room for comfortable interpretation.

Green lawns. No sewage smell. Vast homes set behind towering iron fences, armed guards patrolling the perimeter, floodlit hedgerows concealing lives of considerable ease. Mexico City, it is said, has no real middle class — and in that journey across town, the logic of that observation became viscerally apparent. The status quo maintains itself when there is nothing in between to push against it.

By nature a conservative person — but this was too much. The discomfort was genuine, and it sat heavily.
By the third glass of quality French Champagne, it had somehow become more bearable.
Shallow, I know.

Conclusion

Mexico City does not reveal itself gently. It arrives all at once — the scale of it, the noise of it, the contradictions of it — and gives you very little time to find your footing before the next thing demands your attention.

In the space of a few days: a world-class international conference held with the grandeur it deserved. A gay quarter alive with the kind of freedom that feels hard-won everywhere and especially here. A pyramid climbed in silence and in secret, for reasons that belonged to no one else. A passport held to ransom on a dark street. A car ride across a city that lays its inequalities bare without apology or embarrassment.

That is Mexico City’s particular quality as a destination. It will not curate itself for your comfort. It simply is what it is — magnificent, chaotic, troubling, and completely unforgettable — and it asks you, somewhere between the gunfire and the champagne, to decide what you make of it.

I still haven’t entirely decided. Perhaps that’s the point.

The World Traveller Series is published in Q Magazine plus a blog and podcast on ‘Ask Brett’. Next: Thailand — another slight tangent, but one place that played an integral part of a life lived at full stretch.