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.
Our original trip concept was to take RVs to Mexico, stay on the beach a month, drink beer, and check out bikinis.
Our original destination was to be San Carlos, Mexico – up the coast north from Mazatlan. There was a RV park already picked out. But things change, all the time and quickly, so that trip idea turned and became a different animal.
Because diesel fuel is of a lower grade in Mexico, Alan didn’t want to drive his RV to San Carlos. By the time we three figured the cost of fuel, insurance, space rent ,it was going to be cheaper to take a traditional vacation to a hotel with hot water and maid service so we dropped our idea of a RV caravan.
On a morning walk, Alan and I discover a RV park in Mazatlan where we all might have stayed if we had brought our RV’s. It is on the beach, in the middle of the Zona Dorado, and affordable. Seeing these big rigs pulled in between palm trees on a dirt lot and old guys in shorts riding rusting bicycles to the front doors of their luxurious motor homes, brings a fuzziness to my heart. The snowbirds carry English newspapers in little wire bicycle baskets and will spend this afternoon working on a crossword puzzle because it is too hot to go fishing.
Jose, the park’s maintenance man, waves when we knock on the closed office door and we talk with him in broken Spanish, enough to understand that it costs five hundred dollars a month to stay here and you pay for your electric. This park is right on the beach and some patrons come down for months. The office is closed but this park doesn’t need much management with these old guys taking care of most nuisances themselves.
In a place like this you want to live quiet, economical, and simple. You want to have a few friends you can count on and buy lots of shrimp on the beach from fishermen who just come in. A couple of beers in the evening to calm the mind are good, and reading ” Old Man and the Sea ” puts your mind in the right frame.
Here, in Mazatlan, we all have time to savor our time.
Hotels and restaurants dot both sides of the street that takes you from the Mazatlan historical center to the marina at the north end of town. If each hotel was represented on a map with a red pin, and each restaurant a blue pin, you would have a long
row of pins. You could climb up on the head of one pin and walk all the way to the marina without ever touching the road.
A half block down the calle, in front of the Hotel Playa ,is a colorful eatery that calls itself the Gringo Lingo
A kid in front of the eatery, holds a menu, stands on the sidewalk and talks us inside for a meal and a Pacifico beer – one of Mazatlan’s gifts to the world. There is world class fishing in these waters that drew Hollywood stars in the 50’s, taking time off from the rigors of stardom and Los Angeles. You see photos of John Wayne and Robert Mitchem in travel brochures in local shops and huge marlin dangling from the end of ominous hooks connected to dock scales.
This evening the three of us are enticed into the Gringo Lingo complete with bright primary school colors, hanging potted plants, and an extensive menu of Mexican and American favorites. There is only a handful of patrons when we enter and only a few come after we find a table. It is early in the evening and people are still recovering from sunburn and too many afternoon margaritas.
This evening we try tortilla soup and chicken wings. Ordering food is a tricky business in Mexico even though menus show pictures and have food descriptions written in English as well as Spanish.
Dining tonight in the ” Golden Zone, ” we eat what tastes good to us and look for movie stars.
Mazatlan, in it’s day, was where gringos went to speak their lingo to the ocean sunsets.
Mazatlan, today, has lost some of it’s charm. Now, it feels like a big marlin that has hung a bit too long from a big hook on the pier.
If places could just remain the way they used to be,mostly natural and undiscovered, we travelers would all be the better for it.
While the places I visit are new to me, there is no question that I have been preceded where I go by many.
If going someplace no one has been was my goal, I would never get out of my house.
In the morning, before ten, the beaches are empty except for romantics, beachcombers, and elderly walking their dogs.
Around this place, people stay up late, dance into the late hours, have a few too many drinks, keep everyone at the hotel awake as they stumble down hallways with all too many doors looking the same.
The Malecon is a wide sidewalk that runs from Valentino’s to the Centro of Mazatlan. It parallels the beach and gives ample room for bicycles, walkers, joggers, hand holders, pet walkers, photographers, street hustlers, tourists and locals. The thoroughfare is level, the potholes far and few between, and, if you wish, you can take concrete steps down to the beach and feel sand between your toes. It reminds me of the Rambla in Montevideo though the sunlight in Mazatlan is more intense than sunlight in Montevideo.
At breakfast, our conversation is about re-locating to Mexico from America, and Americans.
“You don’t want to be around Americans,” Dave insists.
What he says is understandable, but we are Americans. It sticks on us like a glove. You can change your clothes, work on your accent, hang out with the locals, smoke non filter cigarettes and eat shrimp till your eyes bulge,but you will always be a gringo.
You can take Americans out of their country but you can’t take America out of American’s.
Being an American doesn’t prohibit you from enjoying Mazatlan for as long as you want to stay. As long as you are spending green dollars, there is tolerance here for you.
People here might not like Americans, but they love our American money.
The Mazatlan geography is flatand vegetation hugs the ground. The predominant building material in town is cement and tile is used prolifically because it is easy to wash, mop, clean, and maintain.
Around us this afternoon are T-shirts aplenty in storefronts, caps and sunblock, numerous watering holes for an ever thirsty clientele. Street vendors get ready for evening when people come out to play and this well known city has miles of beach for para sailing, kayaking, swimming, body surfing and building sand castles. There are places here you can eat famous Mazatlan shrimp or Carne Asada with jalapenos and onions.
Mexico remains Mexico – loud, bold, in your face. After your first day you realize that it is you who must adjust, slow down, turn over, and not be in a hurry. There is plenty of time to do what you think needs to be done, but you first need to think about whether it really does need to be done. This is a place that doesn’t always reward the ambitious.
With the sound of waves ever present, this afternoon is spread out like a beach towel waiting for a warm body.
The Seashell Museum offers shells from around the world.
A group of girls practice volleyball kills across from a beach bar.
Senor Frog greets guests for casual shopping and a local eatery entices with fake margaritas displayed on a table on a sidewalk in front of a bar.
A pit bull looks down on his street from an upstairs window and barks at everyone while thirsty bikers sip whiskey and talk about Harley’s.
We have all landed.
Mexico will have its way with all of us.
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