Cabo san Lucas

Each Mexican port experience has been quite different, and Cabo was no exception. It’s the last stop, and the only stop in Baja. There is no pier so early in the morning the Dawn Princess anchored in the Bay, near a Norwegian Cruise Liner. We had signed up for Zodiac whale watching. It is advertised as a rough trip, so I was surprised to find that many of the people signed up were older than us.

The Zodiacs were waiting at the pier when we got out of the tender. Fifteen of us got into each, putting our shoes and carry-ons in a waterproof chest on board. That seemed ominous for my camera, but I wanted shots of whales so I decided to risk it. The zodiac was fitted with handholds up and down the sides, so we grabbed on as it moved through the heavy traffic in the marina. Cabo is famous for its arched rock at the mouth of its bay. We went there, and came upon a herd of sea-lions sleeping on a rocky shelf. At that point my camera battery went dead. I managed to change about the time we left the sea lions. I did get a shot of the side of the zodiac however.

Then, to quote the Coasters, things got bad. The boat guy cleared everyone out of the front seats on the boat; we took off our hats, and held on. The whales are a bit out at sea – perhaps 10 miles – and we were not paying for the ride but for seeing the whales, so the boat blasted its way out those 10 miles. The sea was not rough but the swells were 5-6 feet, and the boat would roar over the top of one and slam down into the valley before climbing the next one. A couple of people yelled and laughed when this happened, but the rest of us were just being buffeted. You couldn’t talk, you really couldn’t even turn to look at another person, all of your attention was on bracing for the next hit. And the hits kept coming. It took about 20 minutes to get out to whale country.

We found a pair. When whales are near the boat stays still, so we could climb around, look and take pictures. Trouble is most of the time when whales are at the top of the sea, they are boring to photograph. They spout, blowing air and water up into the air quite a distance, and they are huge, but what you see is a black blob about 10 feet long sinking into the sea. It’s exciting, but it’s not photogenic. The whales disappear for several minutes, then resurface some distance away. We give chase. So do the other 3-4 boats there. I hope the whales don’t pay any attention to us, because we were stalking them.

After perhaps 20 minutes of this, during which time I shot several ocean scenes showing water that until I took the shot had whales visible in it, our guide got a radio call that a pod of 3 including a baby had been found some distance away. We took off for another 20 minutes of mind numbing battering as the boat raced through u pod was closer to shore but some ways to the south. It was easy to spot – just look for the other boats.

Aside from the cuteness factor, baby whales are more photogenic because they will leap up putting quite a bit of their body above the water. And sure enough the baby did that while the parents were just black blobs nearby. I got one good tail shot.

When we got back to the pier we went to Justo al Gusto for lunch. Recommended. Great waiter, great food. Then we walked around the part of town just behind the new marina front businesses. Heavy tourist shop area. There are tons of bric-a-brac. And every shop seems to have the same selection. There are also jewelry stores which are upscale. The stuff looks great to me, but I’m not into buying jewelry so I’m the wrong one to ask. Mary Alice wants a skeleton – they are popular here because of the day of the dead celebrations – and we ultimately find one she likes. The shop owner agrees to mail our postcards because the mailbox is a ways away and we have short time. Back to the tender with minutes to spare.

We never got into the town part of Cabo so I’m not sure what the place is all about, but there are many condos built or being built. The local paper in English, the Gringo Times, believes tourism is dropping off but can’t find any reliably statistics anywhere. Houses seem to start about $165,000 and run into the millions. Par for all the ports we visited. For some reason Cabo seems more than the others to be the town built to host condos rather than having any actual purpose – but we never got into the real town to see.

The water is still good, Id say Got a photo of a seal by the marina, pelicans everywhere, and the snorklers report lots of fish.

This is about it for the Mexican reports. When I get where I’m not paying 40 cents a minute I’ll see about photos. Via con Dios, Amigos!

Mazatlan

We’ve signed up for the walking tour of old Mazatlan, and it starts right at dockside. But it doesn’t start walking. First we take the free and compulsory tram from the boatside to the security area. Then we walk thru a building of shops selling tourist stuff, then as It turns out that building is the gateway from the docks to town we are ready to walk. Well, not quite. We are ready to take a cab to the point at which the walking tour will commence.
It seems that this tour will not be hard on the feet.

We start on the seashore road. Our guide, Carmen, has a portable, hand-held P.A. system, and we are looking at a statue two naked people in their twenties standing on a snail shell with a school of dolphins in the fountain arranged as if they were a dog sled team. It’s a nice statue but what does it mean? The snail shell is the spiral of life, the naked people are humanities youth, and the dolphins symbolize human domination of animails, says Carmen. OK, but I never would have guessed it.

Up the road a bit we find a statue of a prominent person being repainted. Carnival ended yesterday, that is the day before we arrived, and I have a suspicion that someone altered the prominent person’s statute during Carnival. Out on the rocks by the sea is a mermaid and her young daughter looking longingly at the land, and off to the left is a stairway leading up to a platform.

In Acalpulco we saw the famous divers. In Mazatlan we are going to see their famous divers. One of them climbs to the observation platform which overlooks a narrow inlet just as in Acalpulco, only not so far down. Perhaps 40 feet here. The diver gives us a hands clasped over head signal, and after a moment dives into the sea. The moment he starts to dive I click my camera. It is digital and digital cameras take a little while to actually take the picture. As in Acapulco I have a photograph of the diver almost in the sea.

His friends come and collect tips – the divers are not paid- and eventually he shows up also. We gave him a couple of bucks, as did most of the group. Its risky work, this diving into the sea for tourists. In America he would not be able to do this work, he would have to go on welfare, due to the danger, and the use of public property. Is that better?

Across the road is the devil’s cave where gunpowder was stored during the revolution, it now has a metal gate with he devil’s head on it. Then we pass the Canuck bar, the cliff recedes and we are in a business district. We are going to the Indio shop, where they give us a free drink (water, soda, beer – I had a beer) and we spend some time looking around. Lots of silver items, some quite expensive. Big sculpture of a jungle cat. Sculptures of mostly naked women symbolizing youth and beauty, an Aztec warrior in extacsy But the store also sells bottles of vanilla – this is a popular item at tourist areas. I can’t imagine why. And little $1 trinkets. Mary Alice finds something and buys it. (shhh, it’s a present).We leave.

Now we are in old town I don’t get a clear picture from the guide but I think that old town went into a long decline in the late 20th century and only in the past several years has serious restoration begun. It is all pleasant 1 and 2 story buildings on narrow but straight streets. Some empty for years, some recently renovated as houses. Nothing extraordinary, but in one of them we are shown a video history of the area. It has been a series of disasters. The French invade to support Maximillian in the 19th century. There is a yellow fever epidemic, there is bubonic plague, there is the left-wing social unrest of the 1930s which, according to the video, destroyed the main local manufacturing or processing industry which shut down or was abandoned, then there was a hurricane. And for some reason economic depression in the late 20th century. Now there are resorts, new money has come to town, old buildings renovated and once again in use. they have found a new industry. What is it? Tourism.

One house has been converted into a bakery. The front room is the sales area, lots of sweets. Deeper into the house we pass through two rooms filled with mementos of the owner’s long life, and then the kitchen with the baker hand rolling the breads and pastries. We get a canela and a cookie to eat as we walk along. The tour stops at a outdoor café for a beer and chips. A musician plays guitar and pan pipes, for which he uses a harmonica holder. It is very pleasant to sit outside in the shade listening to him while enjoying a snack. Birds drink from pools on the sidewalk. A breeze blows over us. I can see why people are retiring to this area, this has been an idyllic morning.

The tour ends at the cathedral, built in the eclectic style the guide says. We do not return to the ship but the guide makes arrangements for a cab to pick us and 3 others up at 3pm by the cathedral. Mary Alice and I head for the waterfront and the Shrimp Bucket restaurant. The outside tables are taken, but we sit inside next to an open floor to ceiling window overlooking the sidewalk and the sea. A breeze blows. Mary Alice gets coconut shrimp and I get bacon shrimp. My first bite is one of the most satisfactory bites of food have ever had. I can’t believe the flavors. Perhaps I’ll never eat another bite because nothing could surpass this one. Its all downhill from here. I take a second bite. Its true, it is not as good as the first, but its still really good so I settle for second best bite ever and carry on.

We recall seeing an art museum and wander the streets to find it. No one is out, no cars are visible. Perhaps it is siesta time. The museum is open and as we walk in a woman in uniform comes from the courtyard and says the admission is 10 pesos each. That’s about $1 each and I give it to her. The museum turns out to be fairly small, with a handful of paintings, and a small pile of dirt on the floor. We decide it is conceptual art. In the next room is a large pile of dirt with an electric fan next to it. I’ve got the photos to prove it. One of the paintings includes several men who seem to be giving gang signs. I photograph this to check with Montgomery when I get home. We wrap up with some crude drawings by an artist from Estates Unides. The woman in uniform is gone when we emerge. No one is there at all. Did we fund a beer for someone with a uniform or was that an actual admission fee? It’s a puzzle. We visit a department store by the cathedral while waiting for the cab. Motorcycles are on the second floor with a version of a Sedway for $999. Tempting but we have a cab coming. It doesn’t. The other 3 people do not show up either. Coincidence. I don't think so. We flag down another one and pay for the ride back to the ship.

Next stop Puerto Vallerta. No tour here because a neighbor has a house here and she and another friend of ours are going to meet us at the dock and show us around. They will be there at 9 a.m. we have arranged thru a series of emails. Trouble is that there is another cruise ship at the only dock big enough to handle them, so we anchor in the bay and tender in again. At 9 a.m. we can go to the Wheelhouse Lounge and get a tender ticket. Then we can wait until our tender ticket group is called. Paid tours are going first, it seems, and for the first half-hour no one is going. The tenders are the lifeboats and they are winched down into the sea, a docking station is set up on the 3rd or 4th deck of the ship, and then with the minutes ticking by, the loading starts. Eventually we are called, load, travel to the dock, unload and look around for our friends. Nada. Ok, we walk through the security zone to the gate. Nada. We go back and walk over to the second gate. There they are clinging to the bars like prisoners looking at sunlight. What an emotional reunion scene. We’re all excited to see each other, especially in this setting.

We are not going to be in Puerto itself. They live in, ready for this? They live in San Francisco – a small town about 30 miles up the coast. So we drive and talk. The road goes up the mountain into the jungle, and there are some amazing flowering trees, lots of coconut palms, vines, the whole thing. We don’t go to SF first, there is a smaller town just past it which has a market they thought we’d like to see. The town is just what you might expect a Mexican town to be. Real second world. Except for the streets being lined with fairly new vehicles, and the streets swarming with ex-pats. I never think of it this way but Mexico like most of Central and South America is as much European as Indian, possibly more. The Spanish, the French, the Italians, the Germans all came here and stayed. Now it is North Americans coming here and staying. There are resorts and condos going up along the beaches, but also folks coming, buying a plot of land and building homes.

The market is huge, very much like the Summer Arts Fair, only with goods that are considerably more interesting to us. Lots of jewelry, often offered by people who look like they winter here and summer in Humboldt, but who turn out to be hippies from South America, piercings and all. But there is lots of indigenous (looking, what do I know) art too. I buy a bark painting to put with my Chinese farmer paintings, M.A. gets a small turtle with a bobbing head to use as an earthquake detector. We shop for a few minutes and when we look up there are familiar faces. Familiar because they belong to people from Southern Humboldt, and there are several of them. At least 8. I don’t know what the odds are of meeting this many people I know in a small market in a small town in Mexico, but I wouldn’t have thought they were large. Its like going to heaven and finding that a few of the other people you know got there too.

Lunch at a local café, where the other Sohummer have also ended up. Service is slow, food is great, price is low. Then to SF to see one of our friend’s house – its taken a long time for them to build it but it is wonderful. Spacious, high ceilings, large windows, great ocean views – imagine what you can build when you don’t have to worry about the cold.

But then we hop a taxi and go back to the ship. We have a hour before the last tender, the ride is long, but getting out of town takes forever because the cabbie knows everyone and has to stop and chat briefly with various people he sees as we head for the highway. I adopt a zen attitude, or as the movie put it que cera, cera. On the two lane mountain highway with few passing points, traffic is crawling as a very slow truck labors up the mountain. Que cera. We make it with about 5 minutes to spare, walk right into the tender and off to the ship. Have we reentered the real world, or just left it? I’m having trouble determining whether the global civilization is real, or the underlying civilizations are. No doubt it’s both but I’m still working it out.

Tomorrow Mazatlan.

,

Sorry to be putting days together but its been a whirlwind somehow despite being a leisure cruise. In Zihuatenjo we signed up for the kyack and snorkel tour, in tribute to our whitewater days, I suppose.

The Dawn Princess anchored in the bay and we took tenders to the dock. This sounds like fun the first time, but it uses up about 1 hour each way and that cuts into the time available to actually do something at the stop. As soon as we got to the dock we were loaded into the tour company’s small boats and went back across the bay, passing very close to the Dawn Princess. I was happy to see a lot of pelicans around the beach at the town dock – a good sign the water wasn’t polluted. The birds tend to settle in a flock on certain small boats which are at anchor, a strange sight.

We got off at the beach dock opposite the town and walked over to a outdoor restaurant on the beach, shaded by a thatch roof – there were many thatched roofs in the towns we visited. I suppose they just replace them after a wind storm. Kyacking first for Mary Alice and I, two to a craft and smooth water in the bay. I associate kyacks with technical whitewater running, but these were a piece of cake. We paddled round about half the bay stopped at places for our guide to tell us what we were seeing. Like most guides he was excited about big expensive hotels going in. I’m not so sure in the long run that this is a great as the locals believe, but time will tell.

Then snorkeling. I don’t believe I ever did this before. There is an astounding world just below the plain surface of the sea. We were swimming round a rocky breakwater in water that was 3-10 feet deep, and the tropical fish were amazing. It actually was very much like an acid trip (if I remember what acid was like all those years ago, and I think I do). You paddle along and suddenly you are in the middle of a school of iridescent fish, who do not react to you at all, they just pop up, then vanish. Lower in the rocks are larger yellow, and blue fish, swimming in and out of the encrusted rocks. Each fish is a beautiful surprise. The key is to keep breathing.

We did this for an hour or so, then back to the table for a beer and some chips with guacamole (every time we entered any restaurant in Mexico we got chips and guacamole), wash off the feet, help the lady at the next table find her watch (fell out of a hole in her purse), retrieve my watch from the waterproof pocket of my brand new swimming suit bought for this very tour to find that 1) the pocket as applied was not waterproof, and 2) the watch is. Look at the parrot, and back into the boat, back to the pier, back into the tender, back to the ship, pass security and we’re off to dinner again.

We are on a 10 day cruise round-tr-p from SF to “the Mexican Riviera” as they call the collection of resort towns on the West Coast of Mexico from Acapulco in the south to Cabo San Luca in the north. Many people from Southern Humboldt spend part of the winter, ie the rainy season, in or near these towns. We’re hoping to connect with some friends living in Puerta Vallerta on this trip. Judging from the on-shore tours offered by Princess, the line with whom we are touring, there is little to do other than beach stuff. Many of the shore-tours offered are tours of luxury resorts. Mexican history appears to be inland – we had signed up for the pyramid tour but it was cancelled when the cruise ports were rescheduled apparently because there were so many cruise ships due in one port or another that congestion was a problem.

There is nothing to do on a cruise ship at sea, in a way, which is the appeal of days at sea rather than days in port. I don’t mean absolutely nothing. There is eating, for one thing. Much of the day revolves around eating or recovering from having eaten by excercising. Yesterday I got in 3 miles of deck walking. So far today just 1. I sat in a deck chair for about 20 minutes prior to lunch and watched other people walk by. I got my new photos in order in the computer, edited them, titled them and got them ready to look at. I have finished the Portable Chaucer and am half-way through the Decameron.

Now its later. We have been to Acapulco, which is a huge city of some 2.5 million people. Instead of the pyramids inland which we signed up for, we toured the city by bus, because the pyramids were cancelled. In the tour guide version it is like Beverly Hills. A number of movie stars, mostly from the 40s and 50s, built homes there which are very big. Sylvester Stallone is the most recent famous large house builder and we could see part of his house from the bus. Eventually we got out to the southern part of the city where enormous hotel resorts are being built.
.
We went to see the famous cliff divers, who do pretty spectacular things and probably have more sports injuries than football players. They don’t dive into the broad Pacific Ocean. There is a very narrow inlet with almost sheer walls and they dive there. They start on the left side, dive in, climb up the right side some 100+ feet, and dive from there. I didn’t see any stairs, or even a trail for them to ascend by – it looked like free climbing. The whole thing is somewhat casual. They do dive on some sort of schedule - like middle of the morning, or late afternoon, and the tour busses all deliver us tourists on that schedule. But once they start the process there is lots of standing around, waving at tourists, visiting the shrine at the top of the cliff, and what looks like general psyching up. Most of the tourists are much higher up the hill than the point from which the divers dive so you don’t get the amagesty of them sailing overhead – in fact they are far enough away that you see them but its almost like 50’s TV. It is still awe inspiring and seems to be the one thing in Acapulco every visitor should see – and you will certainly get the chance. I would guess 20 cab drivers offered to take us to the divers – even at hours during which no diving was taking place. Its strange that these 20 or so people are the most famous attraction in a city of 2.5 million. There’s a lesson in this, isn’t there?

After our tour we decided to forgo dinner on the ship in favor of trying our luck at once of the streetfront restaurants near the dock. Good move. First we visited the silver store. Silver is expensive. Want to eat with a $100 fork? Get one made of silver. Other items showing up widely include small boxes with very plain interiors, but which have silver or gold worked into the decorations that cover the outside. Formalized skulls are big. We got some gifts for people but I can’t reveal what until we get home and distribute them. Hint: Some are silver, some are paper machier.