Pretirement

now that that’s out of the way, here’s what’s going on. mazatlan seemed alright. lots of mexican tourists and an expensive american zone with all the restaurants we love from home like…dominos. you could walk down revolucion in tijuana or through the zona dorado in mazatlan and you’ll see the same thing: enormous dominos signs towering over the handwritten menus on taqueria shacks, garish glossy plastic decked out in red, white, and blue. this is the worst pizza on the planet and we all know it but after three days of not speaking english you’ll see it and at that moment you’ll know this is the real american embassy.

actually mcdonalds is probably a better example but i love my double cheeseburgers.

it was a lonely couple days though in mazatlan. i was on the malecon, an enormous boardwalk with an amazing panoramic view, and a woman asked me how far it was to the mcdonalds. i hadn’t heard a native english speaker’s voice in three or four days and i pulled out my guidebook with its sad little map and charted out exactly how far it was to the mcdonalds and how long it would take her and sincerely wished her a good lunch and a fun vacation.

was it then that i knew it was time to leave? lonely is one thing, but lonely on new years eve sounded awful, so i took a risk and went to san blas because i knew there were a couple hotels there with at least a communal kitchen, and i didn’t make reservations because i’ve had no problems so far, and i got up early and took the five hour bus ride to tepic and…jesus, that was beautiful…i’m in the jungle now and everywhere you look it’s mountains one way and sea the other and jungle all around…and a woman and her little boy at the tepic station saved my ass in a big way and i got to san blas with no trouble, five in the evening, standing in the small town zocalo armed with a pocket full of hotel recommendations.

the first place was full. the second place, right across the street, also full. that’s it for my guidebook. i bounced around town for an hour and a half checking seven hotels before i found a posada with a tiny, sort of smelly cinder block room and it was…perfect…because jesus at least i can put my pack down.

and as luck would have it i made friends the next day with two guys on break from school in mexico city and a wacked out beach bum from so cal. carlos and mario, if i didn’t tell you already, you saved my new years.

we did a whole lot of nothing on the beach. i got to speak my primitive spanish all day. i got so confident that when carlos told me about the rufino tamayo museum i tried to explain what it is about staring at a tamayo that makes me excited for the future of modern art. writing it now i realize i should probably try to form the words in english first…

but they cooked a three course seafood dinner like nothing i’ve ever seen and we partied in the square all night long and it was good, really really good.

those guys left and the mexican tourist season is basically over so there aren’t any tourists left but me and steve whose mind is almost completely gone and the surfers down on the beach. the jejenes and the mosquitoes are biting and so is the travel bug, and after i do some surfing tomorrow and eat some of this menudo i’ve been hearing about, i’ll say goodbye to the beach for a few weeks and get on the bus to guadalajara and the mountains of central mexico.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 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.