Mazatlan

June 14, 2017

In Mazatlan I’m staying at my first legitimate Traveller’s hostel.  It’s called the Funky Monkey and mounts its purple-and-yellow, bestickered presence topped by a homemade wooden watchtower in an otherwise quiet neighborhood of clean white houses along a cobblestone street hard by a park.  “Please Ring Here,” said the sign in English, painted under the doorbell with a little arrow, and once inside the white gate I was welcomed and given the tour by a willowy young girl in a tan and a tanktop from Poland who had stuck here as a manager; she led me up a flight of steps from the courtyard on which was painted: “Life is an adventure, enjoy it one step at a time.”  “We’re like a family here,” she said, pointing out the common kitchen, and within minutes I was introduced to my fellow bunkmates in the shared bedroom—one from Minnesota, one from Mexico, one from Colorado—and swapping travel stories.  In the back courtyard the sun beat down on a pool with an inflatable shark and an overhanging mango tree; in the sunken living room the big TV was playing Led Zeppelin videos.  I booked three nights.

It’s been quite a change from solitary hotel rooms.  

Perhaps a bit much?  Right now as I type this in the shade of the common room the rap music is blaring from the pool where the rest of the guests are whooping in unison, being at that stage of their beer pool party.  For a while I participated, but after my third beer and second swim the conversation changed to loud Spanish and I retreated from the sun.  It’s OK—at 7:30 we’re all going out to an all-you-can-eat chicken wings place near the Marina.

I was a mass of sweat when I arrived last night, courtesy of both the muggy air of the coast and the terrifying road from Durango to get to it.  The road, a relatively new one that rated its own mention in my Lonely Planet guide as an “one of the most scenic drives imaginable,” was certainly that, a swooping slalom through the mountains over modernist gorge-spanning bridges and through oval-shaped tunnels.  But in typical Mexican fashion it had no pull-outs where one could admire the scenery (I took advantage of the only one I saw, mainly for its porta-potty) and three tollbooths, each more expensive than the last.  

But when we went through an altitude of dense fog so that I could hardly see ten feet ahead, stuck behind 5-mph trucks that were edging right to prompt me to pass them downhill around blind curves into fog toward tunnels (well, okay, here we GO!), and when said modernist bridges had a lane closed for construction and said tunnels were sometimes unlit (time to use the brights) it made for a literally white-knuckled drive.

And Mazatlan appeared at the end of it as, to quote a favorite movie, a tarnished Xanadu.

Is it permissable, after untold miles of rural poverty where people live in half-collapsed block huts amid dust and litter, to revel in tidy streets with flowers in the trees and private homes that are clean and cared for?  If so, you pay for it when you follow the road down to the ocean a few blocks away.  Here the rich world you so admire has gone berserk, a beachside strip clogged with as many franchise restaurants and shops as a mall in LA, including many American ones.  I admit I took advantage of the Starbucks to send my last blog post, both for its AC and its wi-fi.  (Yes, I finally found the Starbucks I was missing in Utah: it’s in Mazatlan).

But as a beach town Mazatlan is not a typical beach town.  It has a whole other dimension: one of ruined grandeur.  Its resort heyday was in the 1950s, and much of its architecture is unpreserved since then, so that to walk the promenade at sunset is like walking through a stage set of a post-apocalyptic movie set in the Art Deco era.  I did that, last night after checking in, and watched the red sun set into the welcoming Pacific in company with mostly Mexican fellow strollers; and I had a shrimp taco dinner with a Corona in an orange-painted Moorish fantasy of a building with domes and three levels of patio tables. 

Today I took an excursion with Daniel—another Funky Monkey guest, and my first passenger in the Miata—to the heart of Old Mazatlan, where we walked the intensely crowded, traffic-jammed tiny streets of busy retail, almost like New York if shrunken and painted bright lime and peach.  In the middle of this living economic chaos rose the town’s cathedral, which was exquisitely beautiful inside, with pillars, statues, and arches almost to rival Rome; it was made even more so by the morning hour, which sent shafts of sun through the high stained glass windows to cast pawprints of color along the nave and catch rainbows in the chandeliers.

As the heat of the day rose, we decided anyway to hike out to the Faro Lighhouse at the far end of the far peninsula.  It was a long walk just to get there, followed by a steep hike up a switchback dirt trail—only to come across a construction crew two-thirds of the way up who told us the rest of the way was closed.  Back we walked—I was literally dripping sweat; I’d forgotten about muggy climates—and had a wonderful cooling lunch in the shade at a patio restaurant in the pretty Plaza Machado, with iced Horchatas and bountiful fajitas.

Tomorrow the hostel crew is mounting an expedition to a water park.  It doesn't seem to be exactly Mexico.  But it’s Mazatlan.