18-20 October, 2000

Beeebee never knew Mexico could be so green. From Las Glorias (a little less than half-way between Los Mochis and Culiacan on the Pacific Coast) to Culiacan the vegetation is simply lush. Fields break up the wildness of it now and again, dragon flies abound and so do mosquitos. That leads us to last night. Remember that terrible night we spent in Mulege? Last night wasn't as bad, but now ranks as our second worst night of camping. Ever. We took a wrong turn into a little fishing village which cost us a precious hour or so late in the afternoon (the rule is never drive in Mexico after dark) so we hurried on to Las Glorias in the dusk. As we approached, we oohed and ahhed over the beautiful sunset reflection in the pools of water by the road. From now on standing pools of mosquito heaven will warn us of imminent misery. So we drive on, not thinking, and arrive at Mr. Moro's Hotel and RV "Resort". Tee hee. The place was riddled with mosquitos, i.e. inside the bar with two small windows open, about 10 mozzies were on each of us at any given time. Steve had to assure a very unhappy Beebee that this was about as bad as it gets. So we scarf our dinner between swatting and shooing mosquitos and follow the guy out to the room where we get to shower.

Catch this: The hotel is not full by any means. With our $150 pesos ($15 bucks) for an RV space, we get to take a shower in one of the rooms. They'll leave it open for us all night. We offer to pay an extra $5 bucks to just stay in the room -- which is otherwise going to remain empty, but unlocked, just for us. The owner says no. Uh huh. Turns out we were better off in "the condo"- the room was a swarm of mozzies by early morning -- Beebee unfortunately found this out as she used the facilities in the wee morning hours. At least the shower was hot and felt wonderful (between swatting bugs).

Speaking of this morning- Steve exited the tent around 4 a.m. and was eaten alive- no less than 15 bites in the brief time it took him to get back inside (not long!). After Bb's mozzie-filled trip to the room she suggested to Steve that after a sleepless night of mozzies, noseeums and her coughing (oh yeah, Bb's got a cold), they should pack up and get out. Steve, though reluctant to go out in the cloud of little vampires, agreed. You'd have thought there was a fire, or we'd robbed a bank. We lathered on the Deet, covered ourselves in clothes, cranked down that tent faster than we thought possible -- watching as at least 50 mozzies clung to the canvas(and that was just in back!) while the other 200 or so tried to bite us (with some success); scrambled into the car, lit a mosquito coil, and drove off- whacking at the dozen or so that tried to join us for the trip. Total damage so far: we killed a couple of mozzies, Steve got bit (as best we can count) one-hundred forty-seven times. Yep. 147. Fun night. Mind you he was wearing long pants, socks, long-sleeve shirt and mozzie spray (both the natural stuff and also Deet) and sleeping inside of a screened-off tent. Most of the carnage was from arriving, changing, showering, and his ill-fated 4 a.m. "adventure".

How's that for our second night in Mexico? But since we started at the end, let's backtrack a bit. Back in Tuscon, we woke to Darren making us an incredible breakfast burrito. We updated the site, emailed, called our folks, called some people who aren't our folks, putzed around with last minuted packing crap and headed out late -- around 1 p.m. and needing lunch. We made a few stops in town and about a mile from the border realized there was no way we would make it before dark to anywhere we could safely spend the night. A helpful citizen of Nogales, AZ informed us that a state park with a pretty lake lay just up the road a half hour or so. And she was right. Steve took some pictures, Beebee played with her paints, we had beans and rice for dinner and were off to bed by 8 p.m.

Finally, finally on Wednesday we crossed the border at Nogales. And it was just that easy: we literally drove right in and never got stopped. We had originally planned to cross at Aguas Prietas and spend four or five days touring Copper Canyon. We wanted to do this on the way down as it's about 700 miles from Guadelajara and we fear we won't go back all thay way, but it just was not time-smart to take the time right now. The drive down is fairly inland, but pretty, with lots of little rivers, and many, many oak trees.

Wednesday night we stopped in San Carlos, a sweet little gringo town, where we free-camped on the beach next to a very nice couple in an RV. They gave us some tips, including the one on Las Glorias (we're guessing it wasn't so wet when they were there, or else they got a good laugh!) and were super friendly and helpful. We had a lovely evening on the beach, slept incredibly well and woke to a startlingly beautiful sunrise. Oh! and for all the cruiserheads reading the site, Beebee spotted a pretty decent looking 55 parked on the side of the road in San Carlos.

Once again, the story took me away from a point I wanted to make. In the fishing village of wrong turns mentioned earlier, we saw poverty like Beebee didn't know really existed. Of course you know these things, but seeing them is a much different proposition. (These two pictures are of the same place: the top one taken by Steve from the driver's side of the car, the picture on the right, by Bb on the passenger side). Picture lots of scrawny, shifty dogs in the street, which is dirt, of course; fires burning -- garbage and bug prevention we assume; little hovels of metal and wood and carts of steaming, smoking food for sale.The strangest thing though, was the children in fastidiously clean, Catholic school uniforms, running around in the street -- many of whom where incredibly pretty young girls. Beebee was uncomfortable to say the least. She felt very obvious, very examined, very, very wealthy and unspeakably lucky.

Note: These incredible, big, fat, splatty rain drops fall from the sky down here. Fantasic! Note 2: Mexican do the craziest things in the middle of the highway: ask for donations for the Red Cross, graze cattle, stop, haul shrubbery …

The drive was relatively easy and we took the free roads for most of it to save some cash and to see a little bit more of the local flavor. One of the interesting things about driving in Mexico is that you are presented with two options to get from place to place: the Cuota (toll road), or Libre (free road). The Cuota is often very high quality, four-lane, concrete road that bypasses towns and is fairly expensive. In contrast, the Libre, or free road, is usually choked with trucks and winding, and passes through every town possible. Most Mexicans can't afford the Cuotas so those roads are typically quite empty, whereas the Libres slow down to a crawl in town and can get very congested due to breakdowns and Topes (VERY effective speedbumps). Seems that on the Cuota you make good time, but miss out on seeing much in the way of people, whereas on the Libre you sometimes get the feeling that perhaps you've seen enough people for a while (and definately enough fume-belching trucks).

We enjoyed our slower drive on the Libre and arrived in Mazatlan in the afternoon. We spent some time looking around for a place to stay- compared a few trailer parks on the outskirts of town and finally settled on a hotel (Beebee needed good, cool sleep). We found a great one called Apartmentos Fiestas. Tucked at the end of a street in the corner, this little place is overgrown with lovely green plants, palms and flowers. A neat, curving inner garden with nooks for tables begged for a cup of cafe and a book, but things were a bit wet- there was much talk on the radio about the fact that it had rained very hard that morning. The second story apartment we rented was huge and with a full kitchen and very clean bathroom, as well as a sitting room and a king-sized bed. There was A/C, but we didn't need it, as we enjoyed the ceiling fans instead. At 250 pesos (about $26) it was a good deal. The wonderful Señora that runs the place was very chatty and even brought us some fresh fruit so we could try it. Don't recall the name exactly, but it was something like guayabana. Yummy. We gave her some cucumbers (Steve bought a huge plastic bagful at a gas station for five pesos and we are now quite sick of cucumbers). A neat bonus to the room was a little Gecko with which Bb just fell in love- it was no bigger than her pinkie finger. After watching (and probably scaring half to death) him for a while, we walked onto the main street to make some phone calls, and do a bit of food shopping.

Seems we were there in the off season, as most restaurants were empty and not many people were out, even though the weather was perfect: balmy and warm but not uncomfortable. We enjoyed strolling around but didn't feel like hitting the bars and discos so we headed back to the hotel after a brief phone call to the States (we got cut off after about six minutes) and a better call to our buddy Doug, who lives in Guadelajara. We slept well, hearing occasional rainstorms throughout the night and woke to more of the same.

At 7 a.m. it was quite literally pouring rain so we didn't brave a trip out to the car with our stuff. Bb was enthralled by this, her first genuine tropical rainstorm. It was raining so hard that when she stood by the door to take pictures the raindrops were splashing up to her waist off of the concrete outside! By ten it was still raining, but lighter, so we dashed out and started packing- only to get chased back inside by the rain. Finally it let up enough for us to get on our way- we were still hoping to make it to Guadelajara by nightfall and the map said it should take about eight hours.

Didn't take long for us to realize that we weren't going to make Guadelajara. Mazatlan was flooded. The main street lay a few feet under water in some places and at least 10 inches on most streets. As we left town we drove through one or two spots that had Steve thinking that maybe it is time to hook up the snorkel after all. But Sandy did just fine. On the way to the freeway, as we drove through the poorer end of town, we saw some awful flooding- homes and cars were mostly submerged and they were evacuating people by boat and by a hook-and-ladder fire truck. Really quite tragic. Of course the Mexican drivers just took it in stride- when one side of the street floods they simply drive the wrong way on the other side- at one point there were cars driving at us on both sides of us- all in "our side" of the road!

After taking an hour to drive what took five minutes on the way in, we were back on the freeway where the rain finally let up and we headed onward to Tepic- the capital of the state of Nayarit. Tepic is nice enough, but not really a destination unto itself. We found RV Park Los Pinos and paid 80 pesos to camp with use of a room's bathroom and toilet (sound familiar?). The woman running the place was a bit wacky, but nice enough. She tried to tell Steve that we could just ask her to open the room whenever we needed access but Steve laughed and politely demanded the key. Apparently she was worried we might sneak in and sleep in the beds or something.

We then headed off to downtown to browse the shops and see the central plaza that has a beautiful cathedral and some fountains. There was a wedding in progress (it was Saturday, after all) so we didn't get to look in, but the outside was pretty. Downtown was a fun change from driving- we got to stretch our legs and eat some good street food before returning to our campsite for a pleasantly cool (low 50's?) night.

The night after we left Doug's we stopped for the night in Tecuanillo and on Beebee's first black-sand beach. The heavy, humid fog and thick cloud cover gave it an eerie feeling- the complete lack of other tourists contributed to the feeling of emptiness as the town's sole reason for existence appears to be to cater to the tourists who come the beach there. It was hard to be too terribly worried- we were camping about 50 feet from a Marine outpost and the Marines were friendly. Once you get over the initial impact of 17-year olds with heavy machine guns, it is very comforting to know that there were there. After enjoying a few cold beers and some truly fantastic ceviche at a local beachfront comedor we took a dip in the ocean and watched a beautiful sunset before turning in, fairly exhausted from a long day of driving. For a good example of the confusion of driving in Mexico, click here.

	Playing computer	Doug's Apt.
Tecuanillo	Tecuanillo	Marines	Beebee and Steve

We got up early (many kilometers to cover) and headed along another sinuous coastal road with fabulous vistas and the occasional cow or horse grazing in our lane. We drove about eight hours and spent the night on a beach that came highly recommended in a couple of guidebooks- Playa Ventura, where Steve befriended a really nice local family and we spent a cool and bug-free night on the beach in front of their home. We would love to spend a week there… but Antigua beckons. Maybe on the way back we'll stop in again. Steve was very pleased to meet a young man (Nicolas) who showed him a local turtle-rescue program that consisted of digging up fresh nests and re-burying the eggs inside of a fenced-in enclosure until they hatched and were released. The idea is to prevent poachers and predators from eating the eggs before they can hatch. After speaking with the young man for a while Steve learned that the average wage for a day of physical labor is about 50 pesos- less than the hourly minimum wage in California- yet the six people who help run the turtle-rescue program all do it as volunteers and the Mexican government supports the program only in that it seems to think it is a good idea. Financially the program relies on volunteers and a little bit of support from a university in Mexico City. Regrettably, Steve was too exhausted to stay up and prowl the beach, despite Nicolas' invitation to do so and so we turned in to a surprisingly (yet very pleasantly) cool evening. Another interesting tidbit that Steve learned is that to buy a 20m wide by 100m deep beachfront lot runs about $6,000 US, but you only get it for 30 years if you are a gringo. Sure seems like a good way to spend $6,000!

The morning came all to early and we were on our way shortly after sunrise- stopping only to take a photograph of the family and to give the two little boys some sparkly pens that Beebee had brought with her for just such an occasion. The younger boy seemed particularly excited about his new pen. Steve tried to pay the kindly woman who had let us camp on her beach and use her bathroom and water to wash up but she refused our pesos. We finally pressed a dollar into her hand and told her to keep it as a souvenir.

The ridiculously curvy road continued southward and the weary travelers pushedonward through Acapulco- a seriously overdeveloped but otherwise beautiful bayside city that looks just exactly like every other over-developed tourist trap that we've ever seen. Good place to go if you want to strenuously avoid contact with locals and drink yourself silly every night. We kept driving.

As the road curved inland and straightened out for a little while, we were surprised at how much the countryside reminded us of California with scrubby, rolling hills rising into a blue sky in the distance. Of course, the lush roadside vegetation and occasional coconut-palm made it easy to remember that we weren't actually in California.

We accidentally blew right through the town of Tehuantepec, where we had planned to spend the night and ended up 26km away in Juchitan. Juchitan is a small city of about 60,000 people that most of our guidebooks describe as not really worth stopping for but ok if you get stuck there for a night. It was ok for us to be stuck there for the night. The guidebooks listed two or three hotels as $15-20 and having parking. They were more like $30 so we convinced one of them to let us camp in their parking lot for 50 pesos (about $5). Then we headed off into town to enjoy a neat open-air market and then a great pizza dinner at Pizzeria la Vianda. Ok, it wasn't exactly pizza by US standards, but it was delicious and we got a kick out of watching Mexican MTV for a little while. The waiter was fantastic and we felt like spending a few bucks on eating a somewhat-fancy meal was much more worthwhile than paying for a room at the hotel. We also figured that we would be on the road very early so that we could arrive with some time to sightsee and take care of border crossing preparations in Tapachula, the southernmost city in Mexico, before we crossed into Guatemala on Sunday.

A pretty butterfly	Red Sunset	Looks like CA

Reflection	Playa Ventura	Playa Ventura	Pizza! In Mexico!