Life As Canvas

We stayed two days in Manzanillo and didn’t find much to hang aroud for. Walking down the longest beach just outside of town, the locals were a little less than friendly towards us. This was there beach, no gringos to hike up the prices and ask them for hamburgers (as did one man in a remote island beach off of Zihuatanejo). They stared when we sat down to lunch and I quickly put my shirt on over my swimsuit. One man selling things in a large basket walked past and, without stopping, said to me “You wanna work?” with a quick fondle of his crotch.

In town the biggest attraction is a blue metal statue of a sailfish, two times taller than any of the buildings in town. It was hot. And also really hot. So far the beach of dreams had evaded me. So, another night bus it was, to Zihuatanejo (or as the locals call it, Zihua). The name itself seemed promising. It rang familiar to me and I realized I had heard it in a film. One man escapes from prison and tells his friend to meet him in Zihuatanejo when he gets out, which he does, and in the end we see him walking up to his friends boat on the beach and we know they’ll life the good life from here on out in Zihuatanejo.

It’s a magical name. It seems to mean escapism. If life were something to escape from, Zihuatanejo would be the recurrent dream, the shangri la, the holideck, something caught between purgatory and utopia. It’s definately the kind of place one could loose track of oneself for a veritable eternity. But eternity suggests time and there is no time here.

My skin itches where little things have bitten me and my face is slippery. The hotel shower offers only cool water, which shocks at first, then warms as it runs down my sizzling skin. By the time it hits my fingertips, it’s as warm as me. I let it pour over my face, the back of my neck, and hope it will chill my skin enough to last a few minutes once I dry off. Ants live in the toilet but I don’t care, I live at the beach.

I’m slowly turning tan. My skin is shocked, it can’t believe there was a pigment in there all along. I’m getting blonder by the day, and maybe even lazier. Yesterday I tried surfing only to roll around in the sea a whole bunch and clean out my nose with salt water. This is a slow life. It shushes around at about the same pace as the waves or my flip flops hitting my heels as I look for the next taqueria.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.