CHAPTER 2
The good ship Chihuahua Star, the ferry we were on from La Paz to Mazatlan, slowly lowered its ramp down to the waiting pier. Watching this as we stood on deck in the pale morning light gave us time to consider our decision. We had had the option of taking a shorter ferry, a 6 hour crossing instead of 12 hours, to Topolobampo, which would have been cheaper, and easier on our bodies and minds: our last 12 hours consisted of trying to sleep curled up in seats not much larger than you would find on an airplane, while hordes of seemingly parentless children ran around the ship like it was on fire and the life rafts were the seats right next to yours. Not only were the seats small, but it was blatantly obvious, by look and smell, that the last 1000 or so lucky passengers who had the pleasure of seats 556 and 557 were as hot and sweaty as we were. All of these things considered though, our choice to go to Mazatlan was probably for the better- taking the other ferry would have meant getting into an unfamiliar city at 1am instead of 7am, would have meant 6hrs more of driving down the Mexican coast, and even though it was about $100USD cheaper, the cost of an additional tank of gas or two and possible a place to stay would have negated any real savings.
The truck rumbled down the ramp, and we were off. After a brief stop in the centro (the city center) to check out the cathedral, we headed south. Our destination was San Blas, a small sea side village with good surf. Surprisingly, we had a rather difficult time finding a good place to stay. We wanted to camp on the beach which had been our usual practice on the Baja Peninsula, and what I had expected to be the norm in a laid back surfer hangout, but as far as we could tell, there wasn’t anywhere to do it in San Blas. We settled for a nice little RV park, Los Cocos, which was basically a sprawling grass lawn with dozens of giant palm trees spread about to give it some shade. No sooner did we park the truck, than we grabbed our boards from the back, and walked the 5 minutes down to the beach.
We may have looked like surfers, but we are the farthest thing from that in reality. I have had two brief attempts at surfing in the past which ended with me being tired and bruised, and never setting a foot on the top of my board. Kacey has been a few times before with much greater success, but we are still definitely what you would call newbies (though there is probably some surfer term for the same thing that I’m sure we’ll learn when we aren’t them anymore). The two things we have on our side are determination and 10 thousand miles of coast line to learn on. We have two 7’-2” boards that we picked up from the great guys at Hansen’s Surf Shop in Encinitas, California- we know, we know, it is much easier to learn on a long board, but, if we wanted to learn at all, that meant bringing our own boards with us, which in turn meant that they had to fit in the camper of our truck- we weren’t going to risk storing them on the roof rack for 20,000 miles, inviting undue attention, and every light fingered hombre from here to Honduras to come look in our windows, they probably wouldn’t have made it past Tijuana.
After a few lazy days on the beach in San Blas, some good attempts at surfing and some good new Mexican friends, the heat and the mosquitoes were starting to get to us, so we packed up and headed south for Puerto Vallarta. Reading our guide book, we knew that Puerto Vallarta had more history than Cabo, but we were pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful old city, with a long beachside malecon (boardwalk) that curved around the east side of the large Bay of Banderas. We drove around looking for a nice, cheap, hotel, but everywhere we stopped seemed either over priced, or dirty- so we went to an internet café to do a little research. Turns out that when you search for “hotel” and “Puerto Vallarta” in google, all of these resorts pop up, some with some pretty good vacation getaway deals… and before you knew it, we were pulling up in front of the Canto del Sol Spa and Resort! It sounds a quite a bit shnazzier than it really was, but at $45USD a night it beat out every other option in town by price and cleanliness. We didn’t spend much time at the resort though: for one, we passed on the “all-inclusive” option, and two, the downtown was filled with dozens of great little shops and restaurants that we wanted to check out.
After walking the length of the beach, we stopped at a bar on the sand close to a long pier that was crowded with people. As we drank our Pacificos and the sun set, we watched all the activity on the pier and tried to guess what was going on. There were hoards of kids diving off a half demolished concrete stairway (the rest of it looked ready to collapse at any moment), and playing in the shallow water. And on the end of the pier, it seemed that all the parents were jostling elbows for space and throwing things into the water. On top of this, there were dozens of large pelicans circling above, occasionally (and what seemed to us somewhat maliciously) dive-bombing the kids in the water, though the kids didn’t seem to mind too much. Then we saw it, a man on the side of the pier pulled a large fish from the water on the end of a hooked line. Ah ha… the parents were all out there fishing, albeit without poles, and the pelicans were trying to get in on the action, while the kids entertained themselves waiting for dinner, though I swear that some of them almost became dinner for the pelicans- the giant birds would crash down into the water from an easy 50 or 60 feet in the air, coming within feet of the would be shish-kabob children.
We used our time in Puerto Vallarta too take care of some errands that we had been putting off, we finally got our GSM cell phone to work with the Mexican SIM chip we had bought in the Baja, did some laundry, and caught up on some emails. Puerto Vallarta was immeasurably more enjoyable and welcoming than Cabo San Lucas had felt, and we had a fun couple of days, but the sea had quieted its beckoning call for us (at least for the meanwhile) and the cool mountains of central Mexico were there to be explored to the east. Our next stop, the historic colonial town of Morelia.
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