February 2022
What is one piece of advice you’d give to someone traveling on the TMC ferry? A week ago I’m sure id expect a sensible answer, like “Get there early!” or maybe “Ask to be on the top deck!” Now? DO NOT WEAR A SKIRT. yes it’s sweltering hot, yes I understand you’re minimizing sweat stains and inviting breeze, but no, not unless you want to become very popular with the ship’s crew every time you walk up and down the perforated ladder/stairs.
This faux pa aside, the ferry was the perfect bookend to our time in Baja, it was a little messy and disorganized but with all the fun, unfettered hallmarks of a true adventure. Of course, it helps that Mako is literally the perfect vehicle for ferry sleeping, once I got used to the rocking I was out like a baby in a cradle. 14 hours later we arrive at the port in Mazatlan, bright eyed and bushy tailed, raring for our first day on the mainland. As we pull into port our overlanding ferry neighbor makes a friendly wager with one of the ship hands, Marcello, about how long it will take to disembark. Boarding had taken 4 maddeningly long hours, despite this, Marcello insists that our exit will take no more than 15 minutes. Today, Marcello is 20 pesos richer, with our disembarkment clocking in at 9 minutes.
Normally, driving into a city eases at you, a few houses, a restaurant or two, buildings and foot traffic gradually growing in size; not if youre coming off a boat. Take a left out of port and bam, youre in the city center trying to find parking on streets not much wider then you are. Owing to the high prices of campgrounds in Mazatlan, we choose to squeeze a weeks worth of tourist activities into one day. Visit the worlds highest lighthouse, walk the Malecon, check out the bright yellow Cathedral of immaculate concepcion; check, check, and check. We leave the expensive snowbird nest at first light and begin the 3 hour drive to San Blas.
To this point I’d been automatically comparing each interaction I had with the locals to what I’d been told to expect, no one we met was overly friendly, rather I thought they had the mildly irritated air of people who hate that they HAVE to be nice to the foreigners. Resentful of the hordes of shallow tourists that flood each gimmicky shop and restaurant with easy money. It’s an attitude I know to be shared in parts of Alaska, having worked with a cruise line, I’m more familiar with it then most, and I didn’t hold it against them. It also occurred to me that my over-analyzation may be unfairly coloring my opinions, so I shoved my critical thoughts under the bed, and ignored them. Or at least I tried. There is just something about being yelled at by handsy police that make you reevaluate your life decisions, particularly the decisions that led you into their clutches.
Do we look like the kind of people who buy and sell drugs? This is the question I asked myself as one of the six agents inspecting us ran her hands over my bra and then my waist. Austin meanwhile is trying to answer aggressive questions he has no hope of understanding “how much is your car?” “Where did you come from?” (I’d already answered this twice) when one of them starts checking his pockets, grabs his wallet and starts pulling cash out, asking “how much” over and over as if it’s an interrogation. We get everything back, answer more repeated questions, and thirty minutes later they finally let us go. Now a little shaken, we take the next exit off the toll road in an effort to skip around the next checkpoint but we’re soon lost in a maze of single lane farm trails. At first I’m thinking “okay cool part of the adventure” until we detour through our first small town, El Tecomate. People’s stares turn rigid, we smile and wave at everyone but not one person returns the gesture, children playing in the streets literally stop and go inside.
I think back to the Baja locals who’d told us that the mainland is not as friendly, that we’d need to be careful, were they right? At the time, I’d brushed the warnings off, remembering all the people who’d said similar things about Baja, but our reception here had been far from amiable. An hour’s detour, and we hit pavement again, pulling into Tecuala tentatively. The contrast in reactions is stark, I feel the tension ease out of my shoulders at the sight of friendly and welcoming faces, this is more like it.
Our first night in San Blas, we fall asleep uneasily, waiting for the swarms of sand flies to visit their wrath upon us but instead wake unmolested to brilliant sunshine. We drive under the shining sun up to the Cocodrilario and pay MX $60 to walk around and get an up close look at the crocodiles that reportedly rule the La Tovara wetlands. Our first zoo in Mexico, I was kind of expecting small habitats, and agitated animals that made me feel a little sad and wasn’t disappointed.
To be honest I have more fear than love for the crocodiles so I hardly spared them a thought, it was the pacing jaguar, regal even in distress, and the sweet little pigs, eyes a little glassy as they approached the fences. On the other side of the coin, everyone who working there was friendly in the extreme, they clearly took pride in giving the animals the best care they could afford and teaching us about them even through a language barrier. The crystalline swimming hole, like something out of a jungle eden, is an instagram models dream, worth the visit all on its own.
Emerging from the jungle and back onto pavement, we pull over for an equally magnificent find: fresh baked banana bread. Walking up to the stand and taking in the options, a man next to us excitedly says in spanish that this is the best around. Not knowing how to respond with “it smells amazing” in spanish, I mostly smile and nod. At that cue the stranger, obviously assuming I know zero spanish at all, has a short side-bar, spanish, conversation with the man behind the counter, the gist of which is:
Stranger: “show them what you have, they will buy a lot”
Banana Bread Chef: “but they are english”
Stranger: “so what, your english is good, tell them how great you are”
The man behind the counter then turns to us, grabs a muffin, and invites us to sample it, he goes on to explain that everything we see here was freshly made this morning, showing us each of his 12 variations on banana bread and describes the deals he runs, which muffins are his favorites, and which sell-out the quickest. The stranger was right on all counts, his english is good, the bread is fantastic, and we did in fact buy a lot.
Weighed down with enough banana muffins to feed a family of 6 (reinforcing American stereotypes one Mexican town at a time), we pop into the parking lot of a business we’d heard offers boat tours through the wetlands. I was sold before we even glanced at the prices. The harbor looked like it belonged in a cheesy movie about solving murders in the everglades, no one bothered with life jackets, and all the boat captains had about them that easy confidence of men who know their shit and do it well.
20 minutes and two muffins later, we are gliding through the green, mirror-like waters, ducking under mangroves, bridges, and birds, stopping for crocodiles and pointing excitedly at the basking turtles as they slide into the water. Yesterday we wondered aloud why we should be here if no one wanted us, today we soaked in the reality of what it means to travel, of everything we learn, we dwelled instead on the positive interactions and accepted that we’d need to take the good with the bad. If only we’d known then just how far our new policy of elective optimism would be tested, perhaps we would never have left San Blas.
We woke in the morning with a plan to knock out 3.5 hours solid driving to get to Guadalajara, intending only to skip around the MX $385 toll. We are thwarted when the route around the toll comes to an 8 foot tall locked, wooden gate. Reroute. Option number 2 asks that we force our way down a crowded one-way road full of people gaping at us as though they’ve just witnessed the dumbest foreigners of all time. Reroute. At a grand total of 5.5 hours confused driving in scorching heat, we decide then and there that tolls are a necessary evil, for the sake of our sanity, it’s time to loosen the purse strings.
The campground we settle into is just outside Guadalajara and, kitty-corner to the Rio Caliente, a hot springs river, will be remembered as one of only two things we actually enjoyed in Guadalajara. I set both our alarms and lay out our swimsuits, determined to be the first at the Rio Caliente, my preparation pays off as we approach the gloriously empty river, I prance like a child to the waters edge and dip my toe in, a river can’t possibly be hot can it?
Next to the brisk morning air It’s like dipping a limb into lava, I yank my toe out and excitedly strip to my bathing suit, claiming this pool as our own. From this moment on, our lives take a nose-dive, very little happens our first day in the city, the traffic is murder no matter where we try to go and in the end we only walk around a mall with our friends before heading back to the campground. A commute that took twenty minutes city-bound miraculously stretches into two hours inching forward in bumper to bumper traffic before finally returning to the campsite.
That the formerly empty campsite is now packed with people this time around doesn’t bother us, a bit of noise is comforting, that is until the noise abruptly quite’s at a woman’s desperate scream. The campsite is bathed in the light of a dozen flashlights, more and more people are taking up the same call, a name I realize. We wonder if they’re all searching for a dog and consider asking if they need our help when an approaching siren and the accompanying blue and red flash announce the arrival of police. There is no way this is about a dog. The screaming is becoming more ragged, taking on the mournful tenor of loss, we step outside of Mako where we’d been watching the scene unfold and ask the nearest flashlight what they are looking for. “Una nina” I don’t know enough Spanish to be consoling and just tell him that we will help look, what is her name?
“Ayariti!” we join the chorus of voices screaming into the black forest, headlamp in hand. Our 30 minute search comes to a happy finale, we hear triumphant shouting and nervous laughter, the police man is trudging back to his car and we intercept him hoping to clarify that she was found. She was and while I’m dying to know what happened, to know where she could have been for the last hour and a half, I know i probably couldn’t form the questions in Spanish, and it’s none of my business anyway.
The next afternoon we step into Super Tortas Ahogadas Rober’s a shop locally famous for their perfected technique on a regional specialty and infamous for being the only other positive experience to come out of Guadalajara.
The Torta Ahogada or “drenched sandwich” was born and raised in Guadalajara, created by happy accident in the early 1900’s when a vendor accidentally dropped an entire sandwich into the salsa bowl. Cranking out drowned sandwiches since 1978, I am so glad we trusted Robers to pluck our tortas flower, they run this restaurant like a well oiled machine, a little like being at ahogada subway, but infinitely tastier. I nearly swooned at the first bite, it was like the punch packing southern brother of the sloppy Joe, warm, messy, and full of flavor.
Ironically, as we munched on the ultimate Mexican comfort dish we were a mere hour away from our worst experience in over 8 months of travel.
We had just walked around the corner from our hotel, where Mako was parked safely as we explored the incredible Plaza de Armas and the Templo Expiatorio del Santísimo Sacramento, it would be a day filled with walking and architectural photography. We round the corner of Parque Expiatorio and I nearly gasp, the templo is so exquisite I’m not even watching where I walk anymore, I’m stepping forward trancelike and pull my phone out for what I’m sure will be the first of many photos. I’m just about to click the first shot when I hear a loud revving and “excuse me” from way too close behind, I take a step back to make room for the pushy motorbike, never breaking eye contact with the templo, when in one seamless motion, the man on the bike rips my phone from my unsuspecting hand and roars away, burning rubber as I impotently cry out. The next few hours are a blur, we race back to the hotel but by the time we get a hold of the police, my phone’s location, which Austin had been tracking, has disappeared and, from my computer, we discovered that all traces of my phone’s existence had been wiped clean by my calculating theif.
I felt vulnerable, and fragile as glass, it wasn’t the loss of a possession that had been taken from me, it was my stubborn refusal to be suspicious of others, to believe that anyone would willfully do me harm so long as I treated others with respect. The naievete that had acted as my armor against fear or apprehension as we blazed into new countries, that had allowed me to scoff at warnings and admonitions. I’d heard the stories, but they never felt real, mere anecdotes on a scale struggling under the weight of so much kindness. Now, I avoided eye contact, conversation, and connection, dreading our imminent departure from the safe walls of hotel San Isabel.