Ack-Upulco

Two books I’ve read recently have advised travelling without a camera, books as different as “The Old Patagonia Express” by Paul Theroux and “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” by Henry Miller.  Both writers seem to prefer trusting their own eyes and memory to gather impressions.  Well, since my camera died, I will try to emulate them, at least until I get the hang of taking pictures with my iPad.

I spent one night in Acapulco on my way North -- fabled Acapulco!  I chose a big city because it was easy to find a cheap hotel, and because I needed to buy a new cellphone; the glamour of the name meant little to me.  My guidebook said the city’s glory days had passed, but that didn’t daunt me; the same was true of Mazatlan which I’d found charming in its retro seaside decay.

Acapulco, however, on a first and brief impression, struck me as a bloated old whore of a city, sprawled in her mottled cellulite across a divan in a wrinkled dress, smoking cigarettes and stubbing butts on the floor as she regales you in a scratchy voice broken by coughs of days gone by.  The route to my hotel in the Old Town took me around the ring of the great bay, through an endless march of sad, boxy, run-down department stores, in chaotic taxi-choked traffic filling the air with a steady cacophony of honking horns.  Long police buildings and warehouse-like institutes blocked a view of the water, the gaps giving glimpses of dozens of speedboats moored on a light chop.  Above and around the city the green mountains were half consumed in ugly pink-and-white stone buildings like a spreading fungal growth up their sides.  When I found my hotel the area in front was quadruple-parked in vans, police cars, taxis, and other cars; I had to swing wide and take a side street down a slummy block of road construction and gaping iron-grilled storefronts to find a parking garage.  It was a sweltering ninety degrees in thick humidity as I walked back under an arcade where armed policemen stood alongside homeless people sleeping in the corner.

My hotel, the Hotel Oviedo, was shown on the web as a grand historic building, a big rambling affair on the corner with terraces and awnings, and to its credit it was easy to spot at a distance (not having a cellphone I was navigating old style, with paper maps).  But though I recognized it, I felt like I was seeing its faded photograph in an album whose plastic covering bore coffee rings and smudged cigarette ashes.  The high-ceilinged lobby halls were dim and dirty, with locked gates at the far ends; a jerky elevator took me to the top floor where an outdoor hall surrounded an interior courtyard of monotonously repeating doors at each level, at the bottom of which was a strange trash of discarded advertising cloths with huge letters.  But the room had that most magical of amenities: an air conditioner!

Full disclosure: it had been an eight-hour drive with my sneakers still wet (well, I can’t work the clutch in flip-flops); I hadn’t had lunch and I had a splitting headache.  In short, I’m sure Acapulco has more to offer—somewhere.  What it offered me, waiting for my oven-stuffy room to cool down while I downed aspirin and wondered WHERE I might find a Sanborn’s store to buy a new cellphone, was a look out the parted curtains, to see a giant lard-colored slab of a windowless building across the street—with a Sanborn’s logo.

So I spent my scant evening hours in Acapulco buying my new cellphone, having dinner in a nearby plaza (where a madly amplified voice was trying energetically to sell something in Spanish, not good for my headache), and going to bed in my mercifully cooled room.  All in all the evening was a perfect success!

But my favorite part of Acapulco was the Maxi Tunel, a mile-long, ruler-straight, modern and well-lit highway tunnel that shoots one on a slight upward angle out of the center of town.  It felt like the old whore’s spotless ivory cigarette holder.