Every journey has an end.
The Mazatlan aeropuerto is small. U.S. Airways charges twice as much for a ticket as they should and the fact the airplane is only half full going down and three quarter full returning tells volumes about the state of tourism in Mexico. Years of gang killings, drug wars, and poverty in Mexico have taken a toll on traveler’s psyches. No one, except the most resolute, would venture across America’s southern border into a country that so many people die trying to leave.
A sign in the airport says, “End of the Road.”
Alan, Dave and I are waiting in shorts and T shirts to go back to the United States. Winter is going full blast there.
I can see why ancient tribes followed the Bering Strait into the America’s and kept moving till they found more hospitable places to live. Even then each journey had twists and turns and adventurous souls took chances for better results.
Mexico has become the third international ring on Scotttreks right hand but us travelers sometime have to go home to catch our breath.
Roots won’t keep me from packing my bags again when time, money, and imagination conspire.
We are flying back to Arizona where I drive back to New Mexico, Dave drives back to Colorado and Alan drives back to Texas.
Living far from friends and family isn’t a viable excuse anymore for not doing things together.
Our tour boat docks, by a grouping of mangroves,and we disembark into a thatched eating area where a local family will serve us lunch in a few hours.
While they prepare our tour’s meal, we are taken for a look at this island’s coconut farm, watch Polo skin a coconut using a metal spike stuck in the ground.
There are chickens roaming free around the homestead, pecking each other in territorial disputes. In one cage is a crocodile, and, in another, snapping turtles fight over fish in a small bowl.
When done watching the coconut skinning, a gray haired man in a ball cap loads our group into the back of a long wagon, with wood seats and a canvas top, starts his tractor, and we are pulled up a winding sandy path to the uninhabited beach on Stone Island.
“Be back in an hour,” Polo says to us, as we hit the beach, then he looks for a chair and a shady spot to talk with the tractor driver, a couple of young men renting ATVs, the skipper of our boat, and a few tourists who don’t care about seeing more sand.
The beach here stretches unimpeded for miles, in both directions, and coconut trees tower over all. It must have been what islands in the Pacific looked like to our father who fought in World War 2 , as a LST Captain. He didn’t talk about the war but I’ve seen old black and white filmstrips of action in the Pacific and it was never a tourist vacation.
Members of our group spread out along the beach according to their interests.
The island has been protected by an order of a past President of Mexico – Felipe Calderone. He decided that the island, once owned by a rich family, would serve the public interest by being left protected. This simple decision has probably had a more lasting influence on his country than some of his more lofty calculations. Presidents can do many things but not all of them are right, or necessary.
After our beach jaunt, we are taken back and have lunch on a big covered patio.
On our way back home, Juanito, Polo’s tame pelican, revisits us again on the Acutus.
It is a memorable expedition. No one gets lost. There are plenty of refreshments and diversions. The price is cheap, thirty U.S. dollars, our guide is informative.
It would be fun to spend a night on the beach and have a bonfire made of driftwood and listen to pirate stories.
I would pay to go on that one too.
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.
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.
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.
At dusk, clouds congregate on the horizon and cars exit Highway 303 at Bell Rd. to go to Surprise, Arizona.
It is quitting time for those who still have a job to go too.
In Surprise, brother Alan and I are staying at the Happy Trails Resort but it could just as well be Tumbleweed Acres, the Paradise River Resort, the Leaping Lizard RV Park, or the Frontier Horizons. There are plenty of places in Surprise for people to pull RV’s, buy homes to fit their budgets, or stay in planned parks with clubhouses, libraries, ballrooms, swimming pools and saunas. In the deserts of Arizona there are plenty of developer escapades to worry about ,and, according to a yesterday’s local news article, plenty of land fraud cases to keep a team of corporate lawyers busy.
On the off ramp at Bell Road, we are just another car in line, waiting to make a left, continue down Bell Rd till we see our Happy Trails Resort, stop at a security gate and get waved through by a security guard, a middle aged park tenant making extra money to pay his monthly space rent.
Sunset is on the way, and,as it spreads, the sky becomes streaks of pink with textures reminding me of Van Gogh;s ” Starry Night. “.
The End of the World has been on my mind lately.
There are enough bad toys around the world to exterminate us all.
Staying off the internet and staying uninformed is a smart thing to do.
When Rome burns, you want to be out of town.
Interstate 10 from Surprise to the Phoenix airport is slowed to six miles per hour at seven in the morning.
Our clock is ticking and our plane departure time is absolute.
Alan and I exit the freeway and head south to Buckhorn Avenue at 51st street, then east towards the airport. With detours, and uncertainty, we end at the airport and find the Terminal 4 parking garage, slide into a small space for my compact car that I drove to Happy Trails from Albuquerque, and get ourselves to the American Airlines check in desk. We meet Dave, who drove in from Denver, in the Phoenix airport, and board together a flight to Mazatlan, Mexico.
On the airplane, all the way to Mexico, there is the back of a head looking at me. I keep trying to visualize it with eyes, a nose, a mouth, a personality. But, it is just a thatch of graying hair holding up a set of earphones. To my left is a porthole window whited out by the sun.
Alan tries to catch up on sleep in the window seat. Dave is seated in the front of the plane. He hates flying and had to bring oxygen because of COPD.
After two hours we three land in Mexico and have to endure still another security screening.
This is a price you pay for being warm when back home people are wearing heavy jackets and shoveling snow.
Being deemed no security threat, we catch a cab to our hotel, change into shorts, and watch palm trees sway in the breeze above a cool blue swimming pool as babes turn into bronze statues.
Up to now we have just been talking Mexico. Now, we are doing Mexico.
Another foreign country is getting into Scotttreks, this time with company
Your chariot has to be tuned up to keep you in the Los Angeles race.
You aren’t going to get anywhere in this L.A. burg without a good set of wheels, a team of rested and well fed horses, and enough time to get where you are going through a maze of interconnected freeways, on and off ramps, incorporated towns that remind you of a patchwork quilt with each town independent but linked to the others to make a California dreaming quilt.
It is almost a forty minute drive to Los Angeles to reach Chris’s mechanic.
Ontario, where Chris and his mom live, is fifty miles from the Pacific Ocean, the Getty Museum, Staples Center, Sunset Strip, Hollywood, the Walk of Fame, and other landmarks. His car’s CHECK engine light is on and fan belts, recently replaced, are slipping and making a squeal..It isn’t something any garage can’t fix but when you get a mechanic you trust, you will grudgingly drive the hour to let him work his car magic on your car.
The Auto Care Center,when we pull in, is busting open at the seams with car hoods up, tires off, doors open, uniformed grease junkies busily removing and replacing parts, running computer checks, calling parts suppliers. It is the day before Christmas and cars are doing what they invariably do – break down.
Chris’s car belts are tightened and his check engine light turns out to be caused by not tightening down on the gas cap enough so a seal is broken and escaping emissions trigger a sensor.
On the way back to Ontario we stay off the freeways.
Chris, who cared for my dad and Roseanne, in California, was exceedingly fond of my Dad.
California was never a place my dad wanted to be, and, at the end, he wasn’t.
Chris and I still have plenty of J.L. stories, and all of them make us smile, to tell, even when they don’t have happy endings.
Half of the world is in winter with temps in the teens, or worse.
Here, it is seventies with humidity but the sun shines more often than it hides.
Jose, at the front desk, says it is busy in San Jose most of the year and his hotel has more visitors from France than anywhere else.This morning there is a large French group departing, part of a tour that will get on a bus and go somewhere else for a few days, then a new location, then another. Being a low cost provider, this hotel fills a need for tour generators who need to keep prices down to capture travelers and market share.
There is no reason this hotel formula wouldn’t work anywhere. You buy a few houses next to one another, plumb in bathrooms and other refinements, and presto – you have a hotel that is like staying in a house. The furnishings and decorations are colorful, indigenous, typical of Costa Rica. Even if you wouldn’t want to live in an old wooden house at home with bright paintings and door handles from the twenties, it makes perfect sense here.
If I could take this hotel home in my suitcase and get through Customs, I surely would.
It is simpler though to leave it and come visit when I have a hankering.
The perfect trip is where you return with less than you left with, have a full stomach, and don’t start something you don’t intend to finish.
If the grass isn’t always greener somewhere else, the weather is better.
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