Dodging Bullets in Illegal Mexican Border Crossing Amusement Park Experience Paula Froelich - Yahoo Travel
go to original January 22, 2015

Border Crossing Amusement Park Experience (Yahoo! Travel)

By day, the Parque EcoAlberto is an amusement park run by the local Hñähñu community in Hidalgo, Mexico. It offers ziplining, kayaking, and water flumes. The park contains several pools, a restaurant, and a bar, and in the evenings, couples stroll the grounds and canoodle in the shadows. But every Saturday night, EcoAlberto holds a truly bizarre, immersive experience — the “Caminata Nocturna” — a border-crossing simulation.

The experience was started by Freddie Agustin and a group of other locals who had crossed the border illegally multiple times and were trying to convince other people in the Hñähñu community — which has an obscenely high unemployment rate and an absurdly low average annual salary of $10,000 — to stop going north to seek employment.

“We started this because so many of our people were dying while trying to cross the border,” Agustin told me. “We needed to show the young people who wanted to cross what it would actually be like and to stop them from taking the trip.” While it may have started as a unique public service, the Caminata Nocturna is now being offered to tourists as the ultimate local experience.

Read the rest at NYPost.com

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