One of the prime reasons behind travelling alone for the first six weeks of my big journey is to find my "style" of travel. Do I sleep cheap, and eat pricey, or vice versa? Do I prefer interacting with locals or other travellers? Do I like small towns or big cities? The answer to these questions, I'm discovering, is one word: yes.
Traveling isn't governed by style; it is governed by cycles, and there are a range of them. You go from heartbeat to heartbeat; from needing a breath to taking a breath to not needing a breath and back; from comfort to discomfort and with a shift in your chair you are comfortable again. Waves crash, endlessly, and sometimes you're bored and sometimes you're not, and sometimes in the midst of being not bored you find yourself being bored and then you look for something else to do; from hungry to full to hungry to snacking to hungry to full again; from darkness to sun to shade to sun to darkness. These are the cycles that govern daily life.
These same patterns manifest themselves on a grander, more subtle scale. There are times when I want a hotel with a private bath; there are times when I want a hammock under the stars. Times when I want gourmet meals, and times when I want street food. Times when I crave the exotic, and times when I crave the familiar. Times to be alone, and times to be with friends. The list goes on, and my mood changes with the waves, the sun, and the moon. So go ahead, ask me my style of travel. I'll just respond with a smile: "yes, I'm travelling."
An interesting aspect of travel is how the formerly exotic becomes comfortingly familiar. Tortas, a kind of Mexican sandwich, are now my comfort food. But today, I craved something really exotic. I craved a steak. Not just beef, but a steak, and not thin leathery carne asade, which can be delicious in its own right, but wasn't quite what I was looking for. I wanted a thick chunk of of beef, medium to medium rare, juicy and chewy tender in the fine way that beef is. To all my vegetarian readers, I apologize.
A bit of searching led me to a restaurant in one of the upscale beach hotels, and when the steak arrived, it looked almost perfect. It was filet mignon, and it was wrapped in bacon and covered in mushroom gravy (both unnecessary acoutrements, in my opinion). It was tasty and filling in the way that only meat can be (and again, to my vegetarian readers, I apologize) but the baked potato, while definitely baked and definitely a potato, tasted strange. It tasted vaguely Mexican, not in a bad way but in an unexpected and different way. This subtle way that local cuisine influences foreign cuisine is the reason that I'm eagerly looking forward to try sushi in Japan.
I wandered out of the beach restaurant and back to the Adoquin, the touristy pedestrian mall behind the thatched eateries, feeling vaguely overstuffed from my steak dinner. I was wondering what to do, thinking of perhaps turning in early after a day on the bus, when I heard the distinctive pounding of a bass drum ahead. At the end of the Adoquin, a parade had formed.
I quickened my pace and caught up with the marchers. At the back were the regular folks -- a mixed bag of families, teenagers, old folks, and the odd drunk. Next were the dancers, for this parade was a traditional one to kick off a dance festival. All the dancers wore traditional white -- the men with straw hats and black sashes, the women with coloured ribbons braided into their long black hair and baskets of bright paper flowers on their heads. Smooth cocoa skin glistened with sweat in the humid night. My long strides carried me past the dancers, shuffling in smiling unison up the winding street, part the two giant puppets that lead the dancers, and the banner carriers, and I caught up with the band.
They were a ragtag selection of brass instruments and drums, mostly old men in sandals and straw hats, barely playing in unison but playing with gusto. By moving forwards or backwards in the parade I could listen to each instrument -- the drums and cymbals keeping time in the back; the saxophones and clarinets in the middle playing melody and harmony; the trumpets adding embellishments and flourishments in front of them; and the tubas at the front, providing the bass line. One old man was hunched over his tiny tuba as he walked, and he only knew part of the song, and his instrument would suddenly belch to life for the first few bars of every chorus. The musician with the largest tuba was in his own little oom-pah world, wandering ahead of the rest of the musicians, and soon passed the standard-bearing parade leader, and was making a move on the police escort when we came to a red light. We'd reached highway 200, the main and in some cases only road connecting the towns of Mexico's southwest coast, and a small but dependable stream of buses, camionetas, car and trucks rolled by.
The light changed and the parade slowly rolled back into motion. The band had barely made it to the middle of the intersection before the light was red again, but the parade kept coming, blocking the traffic, until the dancers reached the middle of the intersection, and then the parade stopped. In the middle of the intersection. The lead trumpet played his intro, the band kicked in, and there in the middle of the most important highway on Mexico's southwest coast the people started to dance.
The men shuffled and strutted with heads high and hats in hand, while the women responded in kind, and pairs of dancers slowly circled each other. The buses and trucks began to build up along the highway, but there was not one honk, not one yelled complaint. The men and women continued their dance as the band played and the rest of the marchers looked on by traffic light and street light and head light and moon light, and the dancers faces were wide and smiling and glistening in the lights. Traffic came to a standstill on highway 200, and the dancers danced.
The band hit the chorus and kicked it up a notch, and the old man with the tiny tuba belched out the only part he knew, and the dancers began to spin at a feverish pitch, paper flowers and glistening skin and wide white smiles all flashing in the headlights of the cars stopped along highway 200, and it was all I could do to keep from weeping at the beauty of it.
I walked into the open lounge area at the hotel at 9am and confronted the bleary-eyed strangers that were accumulated there. "Okay," I said, "who wants to enter a sand sculpture competition?"
With only a minor amount of cajoling I assembled a team and we went down to the beach to claim our plot and get to work. The sand sculpture competition is an annual event in this town, coinciding with the sport-fishing tournament and the festival of dance, and there were about twenty other teams entered in the various age groups.
At the beach I described my vision for our sculpture, and we started digging. We shoveled and moistened, raked and carved, patted and heaped and molded and scooped, and two sweat-drenched, back-breaking, sun-burning hours later we'd modeled a half-eaten, 3-meter-long huachinango (red snapper) on a plate with lemon and seaweed garnish. It was a brilliant masterpiece, replete with comedy and tragedy, realism and surrealism, and was clearly the best heap of silica on the beach. We completed the sculpture a few minutes early and then stood expectantly beside it, waiting for our prize to be awarded. Most of the other sculptures were by children, with marine life being the dominant theme. There were turtles and whales and lizards, but none were such staggering works of sandpail genius as our own half-eaten fish.
After a while the prizes began to be awarded, starting with the children's divisions, and we continued to wait by our sculpture. The judges, with their accompanying gaggle of onlookers and reporters (the sand-castle building competition was a big deal here in Puerto Escondido) meandered from sculpture to sculpture, and an occasional cheer went up as a trophy was awarded.
It was with one of those cheers that my heart broke. The judges had awarded first place in the adult category to a crude rendition of a seahorse -- notable only for its innovative use of chalk colouring -- whose proportions were entirely all wrong. It was probably the best among the rest, but better than mine ... err ... ours? Somebody had some explaining to do.
We continued to stand next to our sculpture, guarding it against stray dogs and sunbathers. Perhaps there was another category, like "best overall" or "best we've ever seen", that we'd won? But no, the judges eventually stopped by and awarded us second prize. It was a lightbulb. Yes, a lightbulb, but not just any lightbulb: it was one of those fancy ring-shaped flourescent models that lasts eight years, and it was clearly the stupidest sand-sculpture competition prize ever, although I may be misunderstanding something significant about Mexican culture.
I and my cohorts continued to disbelieve the atrocity we had just witnessed, and soon developed clever conspiracy theories to explain the theft of our first-place trophy. The most plausible is thus:
Another plausible theory behind our loss was that we were all gringos, and no way were a bunch of gringos going to win their contest. Finally, there were some suggestions that maybe the other sculpture was actually better, but those notions were quickly put to rest.
Later in the evening I asked the hotel owner how we could possibly have lost. She explained that first of all, we'd created a fish, and everyone does fish, but they'd never seen a seahorse before. And secondly, the team that made the seahorse had consisted mostly of children, and those bleeding hearts on the judging team thought they'd make better winners than us. Okay, I'm willing to concede the second point.
I spent the day hanging out at the beach with the sand-scuplture crew. It's an interesting group, low key and fun to be with. It's disturbing to me, though, how little of the local culture they experience. Their days and nights are filled with beaches and bars. This is fine to an extent, but as my experience on Friday night showed, there's a whole freakin' country going on around them and they don't seem to notice.
I was up early, went to the beach, had some breakfast, and checked my email. I watched the surfers plying their wakes on Zicatela, Mexico's most famous surfing beach. Breakfast was some kind of breakfast torta that was that was that particular combination of gringo and Mexican that never comes out right. I caught up with the sand sculpture crew again, spend some time in the waves, enjoyed a gelato, and generally just wasted time.
After dinner the group decided to get some culture and went to see a Cuban band play at the municipal center. It was pretty good, for a free performance. When we returned to the hotel at 10pm I hoisted my bags, said goodbye to everyone, and trudged up the hill to the bus station.
Despite the presence of a comely french woman to my right, the night bus to Acapulco was as tortuous as ever. We were spared a late-night video, thank god -- sleeping is difficult enough without the strobe lights and throbbing beat of "Mortal Kombat" poking at you. I dozed and waked, watching the clock slowly drift forward in half-hour increments, and when the sun came up and my body decided that snoozing was no longer appropriate, I'd barely slept more than a few hours, total.
In the outskirts of Acapulco I saw an American fast-food restaurant for the first time in three weeks: a KFC.
We arrived in Acapulco mid-morning and I bought an onward ticket for the next bus to Zihuatanejo. It was crowded with seats, but not passengers, and during the four-hour journey I managed to sleep just enough to get a sore neck but not feel refreshed
Zihua is an ugly town. An acquaintance in Puerto Escondido had recommended it for its lovely beaches, but on the merits of what I'd seen so far, I made plans to leave as soon as possible. Granted, I was tired and crabby, hot and sweaty, and sparring with a head cold. But my hotel had mosquitoes, a leaking toilet, and windows that would not close. The beachfront restaurants were grossly overpriced and served the worst Sopa Azteca ever. There was a "tourist's market", full of indigenous women fanning themselves while they waited to return the shiny beads to the colonists. Even the presence of a french bakery with decent croissants, and cheap, air-conditioned internet access could not change my mind. I was leaving town.
The astute among you will note that I haven't written positively about food in quite a while, and the empathically astute might surmise that I've been gastronomically unimpressed. This, sadly, is true. For my entire stay on the coast, I've encountered nothing that inspired poetry.
The food here is, in fact, excellent. Fresh seafood, this morning's catch, abounds. You can have red snapper, grilled whole; tuna filet, sauteed in garlic; or just about any seafood combined with just about any method of preparation. Shrimp coctail, octopus, ceviche, seafood soup -- these are the culinary delights of the coast. And I'm just not a fish person.
Today, however, my palate was re-inspired. I'd just enjoyed a delicious, if ordinary, tuna filet, and asked for the check. The waitress, a sparkly-eyed teenager, instead returned with a suggestion. "We have flan for dessert," she said in spanish, and I agreed to a sweet piece to cap´my lunch. Flan is the national dessert of Mexico, a heavy custard pie soaked in an intoxicating thin caramel. I was served a thick wedge and devoured it, happy to rediscover an authentic taste.
I am not prone to exaggeration in my writing. This tale, of an adventure I had this morning, is entirely true.
I awoke early, had some conchas (sweet buns) for breakfast, and then wandered to the edge of town, where Jungle Jack lived in an old shed. He is a weathered man, not old, with a great brown sponge of hair upon his head. He is American, and instead of drinking coffee he chews old grounds like tobacco, occasionally spitting gritty black juice which also occasionally drips down his chin.
He gave me a bike from among his modern but well-ridden selection, and his helper boy inflated the tires to the best of his lungs' ability. Digging around behind some broken surfboards, Jack found an old piece of parchment with some hastily etched directions. I inquired about visiting a town a little to the south; he said no and thrust the paper into my hands. "This ride is interesting," he said. "Go here."
It began innocently enough, grinding along a uniform brown dirt road parallel to the sea. I passed innovative and expensive retreats, cabanas, hideouts, and drug-lord party-palaces, all clearly not Mexican owing to the fact that their final floors had all been completed. A true mexican builder always leaves optimistic rebar protruding from the tops of cement walls.
I entered a small village, dominated by locals, which stank slightly. Chickens and pigs and half-naked children roamed the streets wildly. Moving on, I bounced over rocks and ruts. It was hot, but it is always hot, so I didn't notice. I followed the directions on the old parchment and plunged into an obscure path through a haunted coconut plantation. Lizards rustled through the leaves and executed dares beneath my front tire. A turtle, caught by surprise, turtled. The bush closed in, grabbing me, launching stingers and thorns and barbs and ticks, and I contracted Lyme disease. The path ended at a river, where locals bathed and fished. I pedaled in, straining through the current in slow motion, and then hit a rock or sandbar or crocodile and fell in. I carried the bike to the other bank, while leeches gorged themselves on my ankles and freshwater snails introduced hordes of schistosomiasis parasites onto my skin. Fish darted innocently between my legs, although I believe the larger ones were trying to eat my toes.
I emerged on the other side undaunted, refreshed even, and continued my journey, plunging back into the jungle. More ticks, more strangling vines, and although there were no mosquitoes I'm quite sure I contracted malaria. I merged onto another dirt road and increased my speed. Large insects kept pace, hunting me for sport, or else buzzing alongside and taunting my lack of an exoskeleton. I entered another village and a pack of dogs took up the chase. I pedaled furiously, but seeing that I could not outrun the bounding horde I instead braked, and leapt gracefully from my steed, and then with a single baskervillian howl of my own sent them all yelping for the shade. An old witch was selling moonshine nearby, and I took advantage of the interlude to enjoy some refreshment. She paused to silenty lay a curse upon me before handing me my drink, and then charged me several times the normal price. I responded with some well-chosen profanities in the local dialect, then thanked her and continued on. The jungle engulfed me once more, and lizards scattered leaves in their haste, and the insects were in a frenzy about me, and the snakes, confident of their place in this world, slowly, serenely, slid into the underbrush.
I took a wrong turn down a poorly marked trail and encounted a well armed guard and a patch of broad, healthy, cannibis plants. After a few tense moments of overt inspection courtesy the muzzle of his machine gun, I had no choice but to unleash my martial arts upon him, and with a single elegant chop I simultaneously disarmed him, knocked him out, dislocated his shoulder, and set the injury so it would heal flawlessly in a week's time. Returning to find the correct path, I traversed another coconut plantation while a freak wind dislodged the huge seeds, causing them to fall like mortars around me.
Finally arriving at my destination, a fine beach with a reputation for excellent waves, I found the surf to be too small for proper exploitation, and in any event I did not have a surfboard, and furthermore I don't know how to surf, and so I turned my bicycle around and merrily pedalled back home.
The owners of this hotel are great. They keep lowering the price -- from US$35, to 30, and now to 20 if I stay for an additional night, and just now the guy has offered to bring over his guitar in case I'm interested in some idle strumming. Ah... sun, sand, relaxation -- why didn't it seem appealing before?
Insects. I don't like 'em. They make me panic. They make me fling my arms about randomly. They drive me nuts. This hotel has 'em.
First, there are the mosquitoes, which aren't existent during the day but are pretty sneaky when it's cooler. I opened up my bag this morning and a whole cloud of dark demons ambushed me from it. My bed has a mosquito net, so I retire into my cocoon of safety early every night.
Last night I was using the toilet, and I felt something hit my toes, and I thought maybe I'd peed on my foot since I wasn't really paying attention. But no, my aim was good, and looking around I saw an oily brown cockroach, two inches long, flailing about on its back. Ugh. Nasty. There were a few others in the corner, so I quickly finished my business, discreetly shut the door, and retired to my gauze fortress. As I was leaving I heard something loudly munching beneath the sink.
There are ants everywhere, but they are small and don't bother me. A big flying leaf thing pops up occasionally, and something occasionally hovers about one of the patio posts that looks like a bee and sounds like a bee but that is easily three times the size of any bee I've ever seen. I'm covered in insect bites, from the mosquitoes and the sand fleas, but the itching isn't too bad. This morning the skeeters were feasting on my ankles and so for the first time in three-and-a-half weeks of travel in Mexico I actually put on some repellent. The bugs are really the only thing I dislike about this place. Other than that, it's an expensive rural paradise.
My culinary experiences have improved since I've been here. I had an expensive tuna filet at one of the established restaurants for my first meal, but since then I've been having lunch and dinner at a little family cookout near the corner stores. The food is cheap and pretty good. First I had enchiladas and tacos; then chile rellenos with rice and beans; then chicken tamales with atole; then today I had seafood soup. The chicken tamales (corn meal paste, stuffed with chicken, then steamed inside of corn husks) were okay, but a little on the dry side, and they didn't have any salsa. The atole was a strange drink -- hot, syrupy, sweet and slightly sour, and made from more corn flour. The seafood soup was good: a spicy broth containing half of a small lobster, some shrimp, some fish, and an entire small crab. It was also a frustrating meal, with all the fish bones and tasty crustaceans still locked inside their shells. I ate it in the middle of a long table while the locals talked and laughed and ate around me. I don't think they were talking about me...
I returned to the water with my rented boogie board for a final time and, for the most part, had a pretty good time of it. I practiced the fine art of catching a wave, where timing -- delicate, fragile timing -- is everything. Too soon, and you tire yourself with futile exertion. Too late, and the wave crashes on top of you with dire consequences. I played among the middle-sized waves, staying cautiously in the foam when the larger waves appeared, and had some good rides.
The anatomy of the ride is thus: generally, I'll see a wall of water building before me, and I'll try to determine from size and slope whether this one will pass harmlessly beneath me, or break too far out, or perhaps kill me, and if its intent appears to be none of the above then I'll attempt to position myself for a ride. The mound of water approaches, hissing as its slope becomes critical, and I'll kick up a fury as I try to match my speed to that of the wave. I will rise, kicking, as the wave starts to launch forward beneath me, and as I hang on the lip, floating in the air, there will be a critical moment. Perhaps I will not catch this wave after all. Perhaps, despite my flailing legs and best intentions, this wave will go about its business without me. If such is the case I'll pull up, and turn around, and prepare myself for the next rising crest.
But if this is the one, if the ocean grants me the thrill, then, as I hover on the brink of the curl, with the smooth face of my ride stretched out for miles beneath me, I'll hear the building foam hiss "yesss..." and I'll drop, down, down, flying, gliding on the glass, while the wave engulfs my legs like a monster trying to devour me, but I race on ahead, turning this way and that, and soon the wave gives up its chase and decays into dancing, sizzling foam, and the foam giggles about me, whispering "just kidding" over and over, while I ride into the shore, milking every last watery tumble, although the moment was gone before it even began, long ago, when I lay atop the crest and saw, glowing before me in the brine, the potential for The Perfect Ride.
(I can't believe the above paragraph was just one sentence.)
The scenario would repeat itself over and over, as I came in with the waves and retreated with the waves. Sometimes I'd grow tired, and sit on the beach for a while, and one time while I sat on the beach I dug a hole. There was no particular motivation behind this, other than perhaps the understanding that when one is sitting on the beach, digging a hole is an important thing to do. The hole was a good one, maybe a foot deep, and the opening was as wide as my sandy clenched fist, and at the bottom the sand was soupy. Eventually a wave came and my hole collapsed, for nature abhors a hole in the sand almost as much as a vacum. I was left with a paella-pan of a dip in the beach, so I ceased my excavations and returned to the sea.
Some surfers had arrived now, and I soon found myself out past the breakers, among them, and found out what it is they do out there. They bob up and down, as is obvious, and paddle about, but they also hoot and holler and talk about waves: waves they want, waves they should've taken, waves someone else should've taken, et cetera.
Although getting out past the breakers is easy enough, getting back in is another matter entirely. The waves one encounters are much bigger out there, and after foolishly trying to catch one but missing it, I found myself in the line of another that was set to devour me. I swam toward it, hoping to avoid the worst, but saw that I'd have no choice but to duck under. I frantically tried to wrap my hand in the loop of string in the middle of my boogie board, but in my increasing panic, my hand got confused. The wave came, a seething monster, and as it opened its jaws I grasped my board tightly in my left hand and tried to duck under the foam.
The monster swallowed me and my board, but found the latter inedible and spat it out. It threw me around with its tongue, drenching me in foaming salty saliva, chewing me with long, ponderous strokes, and I rolled about in the monster's mouth for long, helpless seconds before it decided that I, too, was inedible, and I surfaced admist a puddle of the demon's foamy spit.
I was still a long way from shore. I could not touch bottom. My board floated ten feet away from me, and I swam for it, my strength waning, because it is exhausting to just stay alive while the monster eats you. Another wave came, so I gave up on the board and sank again down into the ocean. This time the monster's jaws roared by overhead, and I reeled in the turbulence of its passing. I broke the surface again -- still alive! -- and with an outstretched toe felt cool, reassuring sand. I struggled forward, craving the shore, and another wave came, and I let if propel me shorewards. I was on solid ground now, and yet another wave came, and this time I stood my ground and let it engulf me, and it broke its molars on my back. A family had retrieved my board for me, and I took it from them, feeling despondent. The one thing that I crave, the one thing that I believe every wave-rider craves, is this: that the last ride be the best one. Defeated, I walked up the sand, back to my room, and had a shower.