As our tour boat moves slowly through the water, paralleling Stone Island, we see mangroves form a wall to our east. We leave the marina and head north past large shrimp boats, tuna ships with miles of net piled on their decks, one of the largest fish canneries in Mexico, the Pacifico beer bottling plant, some ship repair yards and ocean going vessels in various shades of rust.
Rounding the northern tip of the island, we head now, towards the south, on the opposite side of the island from where we began. You can look further south and see breaking waves as waters of the Pacific meet waters of this estuary fed by rivers. Mangroves grow where salt water and fresh water meet and they are crucial for this aquatic environment.
While we chug along, a pelican flies down to the deck at the bow of our boat and looks at Polo, our guide.
Pelicans are odd looking birds with huge beaks, beaded eyes and bald heads, huge jointed wings. This visitor’s webbed feet splay out on the deck and he isn’t going anywhere.
Polo reaches for his microphone and tells us a story.
“This is my friend Juanito,” he begins. “He comes and joins us on most of our trips. I will give him fish later for a reward …”
“Some years back,” Polo continues, “we found this pelican who was covered with oil and couldn’t fly. So we wrapped him in a coat and took him home and my family cleaned him up and fed him till he could fly again. We had him at home a year before we brought him back here and let him go. His home is over there …”
Polo gestures at the mangroves.
“He joined us on a tour one day and now he always comes to see us. He is a very smart bird. When I feed him he knows which fish to eat and which fish to leave alone.”
After telling us about the value of mangroves to the ecosystem, and stressing the importance of fishing to the local economy, Polo feeds Juanito his first treat.
For a bunch of tourists, on vacation, Juanito is a high point.
It isn’t every day you are visited by a Pelican and get to watch him grab a fish in his beak, wiggle his long neck to get the fish down to his stomach, then look back at you with contentment and anticipation, as his friend, Polo, reaches into a white five gallon paint bucket for yet another snack.
Juanito takes this fish gently from Polo’s hand, and swallows.
He has become, and he knows it too, our official trip mascot.
Back in the day, after school, our tribe would gather around the new black and white television in the family room and watch TV serials.
There was Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Little Rascals, Gene Autry, the Three Stooges, and Tarzan.
One of the pleasures of childhood was watching Tarzan, live in the jungle, free from teachers, swinging on vines, communicating with a grunt, fighting evil men stomping through his jungle with guns on their shoulders and gold on their minds. Every show a lion would get one of the slave traders and make him lunch, which brought cheers. To be able to swim every day in crocodile infested waters and pal around with Cheetah,who was always the middle of mischief ,was the greatest luck.
This morning, our expedition is going to Stone Island outside Mazatlan, visiting a beach with no hotels or development, having locals make us lunch, then taking the long boat ride back home.
Around nine in the morning we board the Acutus, following Polo, our guide for this trip.
These tours are a mainstay of a vacation. You take them for the tidbits they bring, and, over time, you accumulate insight into a place from someone who lives here and knows it.
Life here follows tides, seasons, weather.
Chugging around Stone Island, we become just another piece of the Mazatlan puzzle – a small tour boat in the lower right hand corner of a colorful jigsaw puzzle, a slow moving excursion boat with sun burned visitors wearing baseball caps and straw hats.
Every night, downstairs, the Hotel Playa offers entertainment.
It is sometimes a DJ spinning tunes. Sometimes it is a duo of classical guitars. On certain nights you can hear song smiths warbling out popular melodies. This particular evening we get flashy dancers in the restaurant (La Terraza) performing for elderly guests who are in town for a bridge tournament.
The four dancers, two male and two female, wear sequined outfits and very little fabric.They are as lean as you can get and from staff we learn they are part time employees of the hotel who are paid to perform at night and practice for pay during the day.
For old men these are young women with good figures and for older women these are young men who wear frilled outfits, have good physiques and lift the girls easily over their heads. One supposes the male performers are gay but these days, considering the proclivities of show business, it doesn’t matter. The girls carry the show from where we sit.
Full of energy and movement, the dancers perform as a quartet, a duo, and even solo. Stage lights change from red to blue to green and at the end of several numbers the dancers run off stage and go back to a little room for a quick change of costume.
The dance revue, Alan, Dave, and I agree, is entertaining and we stay the whole show. We hope we see the women on the beach tomorrow but agree that that probably won’t happen.
Lifting even these light girls into the air while doing dance steps is no easy task and it isn’t something I could handle on even my best day.
When the show is over, it is past eleven and sleep hits me over the head.
Not much of a dancer myself, I can still appreciate someone else’s talent.
Fortunately and unfortunately, we don’t see any wardrobe malfunctions.
Walking streets in the historical district of Mazatlan, before people wake up, photo ops pop like bubbles from a glass of champagne.
Inanimate objects are posing and don’t require permission to photograph. With people there are always questions of privacy, vanity, and personal space.
This morning the sun is bright and it is easy to back out into quiet streets to catch the right picture without being challenged by red taxi cabs.
The old city of Mazatlan is slow to wake and people, who have strayed late into the night, are still under sheets smelling of liquor and perfume.
There are two city zones that tourists see most in Mazatlan.
There is the Zona Dorado where newer hotels congregate and bars and discos service night crowds. The beaches are here as well as ten taxi drivers to every tourist and street vendors selling hats, sunglasses, ironwood carvings, jewelry, fruit snacks, hair braiding, whale and dolphin tours and anything that will make money.
Then there is the Zona Historico where you find old adobe homes built by the city’s founders, chic art galleries, restaurants, bars, shops, and boutique lodgings for visitors with money who like to sit on balconies reading French existential novels and sipping red wine.
In the plaza just north of the historical district, where our taxi driver drops us, we discover a map of the Zona Historico on a wood sign.
Guarded by two pigeons, the mapa gives landmarks, streets with names, shows compass points, and points us in the right direction.
All we have to do to get where we had wanted to be dropped off in the first place is go a little more to the south and west. In guide books it is mentioned that the Zona Dorado and Zona Historico are safe parts of Mazatlan for visitors from the north.
Dave takes a picture of it with his I phone and keeps us where we want to be the rest of the morning.
What did the world do before I Phones?
On a tip from Pat, at seven thirty this evening, Alan and I pile into a pulmonia and tell the driver – “Dolphina’s por favor …”
We are taken, for fifty pesos, to distant communication towers rising into the sky to the south of us. During the daytime these towers are unlit and stick up like red toothpicks waiting for a green olive. During the night their flashing red lights serve notice to drunk ship captains that land and rough rocks are waiting if they don’t leave women alone at their helms.
We don’t know where the dolphins are but you have to trust your driver in a foreign country. Our driver is a short man with glasses and a military haircut. We round the south side of a rock fist, partially hiding the towers, and see dolphins illuminated on the Malecon.
“When you go back?,” our taxi driver asks.
“Un hora.”
“I pick you up.”
The dolphins are spectacular with lights and jets of colored water sprayed the length of the pool. Mexican families are posing for pictures and street vendors are cooking by the roadside. A kid dressed in a clown outfit entertains a loud attentive crowd by the dolphin fountain. His shoes are ten sizes too big and he wears a little green bowler hat that goes with the bold colors of his green outfit. The audience laughs at his chatter and that is his claim to fame. If you can’t hold your audience you have to get another line of work.
Seeing another crowd forming, we walk towards a tall rock by the ocean’s edge and watch a young man walking on top of a fence railing .
An English speaking Mexican promoter jumps on a wall in front of us and introduces his friends – cliff divers traveling to Acapulco.
While he promotes, a second tiny diver ascends stairs to the top of the rock, takes the single torch from his friend already there and lights another for his left hand. He then walks on the fence railing using both torches to guide his way. He creeps to the edge of the railing, stops and balances himself, then finally jumps out into space, holding his two arms out with a torch in each hand.
He disappears into the dark water, out of our sight. We look for him to surface but don’t see him as the crowd disperses when the dive is over.
The next time we see this performer, he is wrapped in a towel on the street asking for donations from a busload of gringos.
True to his word, our taxi driver is waiting for us when we start looking for him.
Divers and dolphins, on the same night, is two for the price of one and a reliable taxi driver, in Mexico, is almost an oxymoron.
There are several marinas in Mazatlan.
The northern marina tends towards pleasure while the southern marina gravitates towards work.
This Sunday the only event that draws skippers off their boats are NFL playoffs on high def TVs in bars and restaurants close to the water.There are security gates at each boat ramp that lead down to slips where boats small and large are tethered. On Sunday, yacht owners aren’t busy. Some of the sailing craft here, be they sailboats or yachts, cost in the hundreds of thousands.
On a window near the bar where Alan, Dave and I have lunch, there are For Sale notes for more modest craft. Someone looking for a cheap place in Mazatlan can buy a 30 foot Bayliner with a diesel engine for eight thousand and park in a slip for twenty four cents a foot per day year round. You have it all – security, socializing, proximity, alcohol, sun, and surf.
All in all, this marina leaves the impression that some people have too much money and it needs to be distributed. That thinking, though, needs to be scuttled.
It is bad policy to worry too much about what other people have, and how they got it.
Only politicians keep sipping from this straw.
Back in the 1950’s, after WW2, most people headed home to raise families.
Men were tired of shooting bullets and women were tired of making them. Instead of killing humanity the focus became re-populating humanity. An era of big bands was coming to a halt and an age of rock and roll, beat poetry, and abstract expressionist art was coming into its own. Jazz, an American art form, was in ascendance and its emphasis on rhythm, dissonance and drugs were a premonition of things to come.
Jack Kerouac, one of the beat generation’s shining stars, made a trip down to Mazatlan in the 50’s in an old bus, camped, and immortalized this place as one stop in his epic rollicking novel “On the Road.”
On a wall, by The Shrimp Bucket, is a plaque placed by the Mazatlan Historical Society to commemorate the exact point in place and time where the bard stopped roaming, drank beer, hung out with the locals, and dreamed of the proletariat overcoming. He looked for pleasure and put his stories down in long winding sentences where he only stopped writing to take a breath. His novel was new for its day but old in concept. He was the hero of his own epic Homeric poem. He was a tumbleweed travelling to new ports with his only home the inside of his bus or a bedroll spread out in some flophouse. His friends were fragile poets traumatized by war, big business, and moral restrictions.
Sitting in The Shrimp Bucket, you can look at a little hill that must have made Jack nostalgic for San Francisco. Even if you can’t agree with Kerouac’s self destroying lifestyle, you can understand why he was here, by the water, drinking beer with limes, almost naked bodies dancing in the surf and fishermen spinning stories of great marlin battles.
Kerouac would have turned sentimental at the marlin story telling but Hemingway, if here, would have relished each twist of the hooks.
Kerouac was beautiful in his willingness to edit nothing.
.Hemingway was beautiful in his willingness to cut everything to its heart.
They are both masters of prose storytelling.
I would have loved to be drinking at the next table to them, at the Shrimp Bucket on any starry Mexican night,listening to them talk poetry.
Down near the radio towers, at the south end of the Malecon, is an eatery called the Shrimp Bucket.
It is right on the road and if you stick your arm out from a table closest to the rail that separates you from the road, a car will take your arm off your shoulder.
From our table Alan, Dave and I can see the Malecon, the beach, a rock hill where San Francisco type homes rise to give the grandest view for miles. After an appropriately long wait in a place where time itself is on a holiday, a waiter brings us a menu that is the same as it was in the 1950’s. There is, after all, no reason to change your Menu when everything on it is something someone once paid money for.
The marlin stew catches my eye.
After a large hotel breakfast, a bowl of stew is enough for lunch and if it is good for hangovers it will also be good for a travelers malaise that strikes at some point in every trip where sun, surf, new surroundings, different language, lack of sleep begin to take a toll.
Marlin stew is pungent and Mexican. It is packed with peas, carrots, onions, cabbage, green olives, and small reddish bits of marlin. The marlin has a distinct flavor and its taste is softened by queso piled on top of the soup and crackers broken and dumped in the bowl like you did when you were a kid. The stew is hot and spicy and comes with a cold local Pacifico beer.
After I finish lunch I want to cross the road, descend concrete stairs to the beach, lie down on a bench under a thatched shelter, take a long siesta, and dream of long winding Kerouac sentences that get lost in their own waves.
Us English majors have a thing for well turned sentences, short or long.
Walking the Malecon, visitors come upon palm branch topped beach shelters that provide protection from the sun and are places to gather. The shelters line a sea wall and their tops look like giant Chinese coolie hats.
This morning a crew of workers are re-thatching a roof on one of the palapas. A helper on the beach hands a palm frond up. A hatted worker on the roof takes and positions it across the joists of the shelter’s roof, careful to overlap other branches already laid down. Then he uses wire to tiie the palm leaves to the joists. As the project is completed the bones of the shelter roof disappear and it shows a new thatch of green hair that will turn brown in time, like the older ones.
Other workers are erecting huge statues for a Mazatlan Carnival in February. That is the event that has pushed this thatching to top priority.
Work occurs here each day.
It winds its way through all lives here and ties people, weather, time and space together.
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