Back to Coyoacan

My blog has fallen a couple of days behind, but such is my pace now that I’m on the move again that I’m several towns and adventures behind.  Tonight I’m in the mountain town of Jalpan, within the National Park known as the “Reserva de la Biosphera Sierra Gorda”; I’ve got a private room on kind of a dormitory hall in back of a restaurant (courtesy of AirBnb), with two beds, bare walls, and doors to a little balcony that I’ve opened to try to cut the sweltering heat now that the sun has set.  A thunderstorm has just passed off, leaving my floor wet where the rain blew in under the closed balcony doors; the air is still hot and humid.  This is the thick green wilderness region of San Luis Potosí.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to explore some of the Sierra Gorda; the next day I plan to visit the mysterious jungle art gallery of Las Pozas nearby.

So how did I get here?

First, let me catch up with some general thoughts and plans.  Since leaving Zipolite on the Northward turnaround I feel happier and happier with my decision.  I have an immediate goal: I’ve successfully signed up for the “Algonkian Novel Writer’s Retreat,” in Sterling, Virginia (just across the river from Rockville, MD), from Sept. 12-17, where I’ll be putting my unpublished novel’s feet to the fire of professional criticism.  The retreat cost about half of what it would have to ship my car across the Darien Gap.  To me it feels like the better investment, which tells you something about where my heart lies as well as the riptide of future financial reality asserting itself to reverse the momentum of the dream.  Driving North I feel on solider ground.

I’m also effectively commencing a whole new road trip, as I have a little over four weeks to get to Eastern Virginia.  Hence my pace upward from Oaxaca.  My plan is to swing through Monterrey, cross into the USA at Laredo sometime next week, and then, as I mentioned in an earlier post, explore my way East through the Mid-Atlantic States, the Blue Ridge Parkway, etc.

And I’m off!  From Acapulco, my next stop was back at Mexico City.  The drive up from the coast wound over mountains that were an exercise in changing shades of green.  Near the ocean the vegetation was so thick that the hills seemed to boil with it, but as we got higher the trees changed to a thin-trunked species with all the leaves at the top, so that hillsides looked like scalps of thinning hair.  Later were meadow-green mountains studded with gigantic boulders like necklaces of chunky jewelry.  Then of course came the urban sprawl and traffic of Mexico City, and I pulled right back into the friendly garage at good old Hostal Cuija in Coyoacan, where I had spent a month.  The staff all welcomed me and I felt right at home.

I was in Mexico City for two reasons, neither of which panned out.  I was checking at Hostal Cuija to see if my driver’s license (snail-mailed by Washington State DOL on July 18) had arrived; the staff was supposed to call me if it had, but I figured I’d check for sure.  Nope, still not there.  I was also thinking that maybe I could find a camera repair store.  At first I thought I’d struck gold, as a Google search pinpointed one right in Coyoacan.  But after a nice walk down gorgeous Avenue Sosa to find it, they didn’t repair cameras after all. 

So I just enjoyed a day in lovely Coyoacan.  It was strange to be back on streets that I knew so well, walking slowly and a bit light-headedly from the altitude.  I sat down at my favorite coffeehouse, Café Negro, to catch up on email, and ordered my usual latté and cinnamon roll; for lunch I had the good tuna panini sandwich at Café del Barrio with their wall of dozens of toy action figures; I strolled up to the local supermarket and bought fresh fruit to make a fruit salad back at the hostel kitchen where I knew where all the bowls and plates were.  I spoke to an Australian traveller at the hostel who had just come in, and was able to recommend good places in the city to see Frida Khalo works.

It was hard to believe I wouldn’t be staying a week or more.  But after one day I was saying goodbye to the staff and getting them to open their garage door for me.  I was back on the road. 

And it would be a road day like none other.  But that’s a subject for another post.

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.

The Rogue Wave of Puerto Escondido

Puerto Escondido was supposed to be just a stopover, a little coast city a couple of hours up the shore road through the jungle from Zipolite, to put me in range of the bigger drive the next day.  But having checked into the hostel early, found a cheap lunch on the city streets far inland, and whiled away some hours, I figured I’d walk down to the beach in the evening light.  It was a long walk, and I’d certainly had my surfeit of beach evenings in Zipolite, but Puerto Escondido’s was supposed to be a favorite spot for surfers, and I’d yet to bag any surfing photos. 

In fact, this was a beach of a different order.  Here’s a shot to set the scene:

The Playa Zicatela runs the entire arc out to the far headland, a distance of a little under two miles, all in a smooth toe-tactile slope of golden sand.  As with all beaches it was fronted by various little restaurants on the dry sand at the back with tables set out under umbrellas, and in the other direction were, sure enough, a few dots of surfers bobbing far out at sea.  And the waves coming in under them were simply monstrous. 

The sheer walls of water arising to loft their expectant bodies high into the sky above the beach were on a vertical scale that water shouldn’t be able to assume.  And indeed in that moment the water looked unnatural, a stretched iridescent emerald painted with tan veins of spouted-up sand like the opening neck of an enormous angry cobra, on whose hood expectant fleas were proposing to ride.  Of course the fleas had to be in the correct position, which they mostly weren’t, but it was mesmerizing enough just to watch such cobras strike, still far out from the beach, in hissing, cutting, straight or side-biting stoops to transform wholly into explosions of foam, criss-crossing each other and tossing festive spouts of spray as they tangled in a deep soapy surge up the long slope against the undermining suction of their predecessors.

 I didn’t evny the surfers just setting out, who had to fight through them.

In the end some of the patient fleas teasing the erratic wrath of the ocean were in the correct place, and at long last I got me some surfer shots, albeit at the furthest murky range of my zoom lens.  And yes, I’m posting two version of the same shot below—surfing happens fast and I only snapped a few.

As I’ve hinted, my delightful hours at Playa Zicatela were spent with one eye glued to my viewfinder.  And therein lay my doom.

I was, of course, stationed far back from the water, up on the dry sand at the back of the beach; nevertheless there were times when the foamy smother of monstrous snakes at the water’s edge resolved too easily and a remnant wave would dart deeper inland, as if making one last push with a flick of its tongue.  Twice I had to suddenly snatch up my sneakers, resting at my feet, and backpedal hastily out of the way. 

I was positioned, then, just about as far back as the restaurant tables when the rogue wave hit.  I had just enough notice to snatch my sneakers and see in a split second of regret that I was going to get my ankles and pant legs wet, when the water struck.  And it did so with no intention of stopping at my ankles; suddenly I was belt-deep in delicious warm water, and the unstopppable push was such that it knocked me down.

I was up again in an instant, soaked from my T-shirt neck down, with time to brace myself and feel the backwash dig ankle-deep hollows around my bare feet underwater, seeing the wave swirl even around the legs of the tables, dragging the hanging tablecloths, starting female diners up from their plates with their long dresses soaked dark.  In the next instant it was gone, skittering strangely back over the sand in a thin percolating mud like a million brown insects running toward the sea.

For a brief giggly moment I took stock of my clothes, as drenched as if I’d been pushed into a swimming pool, and my precious sneakers, still in my hand, now heavy with salt water and sand.  Then it occurred to me to check my camera.

Dead.

And then it occurred to me to check my cellphone, in the back pocket of my pants.

Dead.

And so concludes the cautionary tale of the rogue wave of Puerto Escondido.  Beware, O man of electronics, when trying to waylay monsters made of salt water!  I took a taxi back to my hostel (it was too far to walk in squishy shoes) and on the advice of some folks there put my camera and phone in bags of rice overnight.  Alas, to no avail. 

The next day, in Acapulco, I bought a new cellphone (the second new cellphone of this trip).  But as for my precious Canon T6i DSLR, well, I will try to find a camera repair store on my way through Mexico City,  but this post may well contain the last photos it ever took.  I can’t remember whether I bought the warranty, but if I did the stores that would honor it are in the USA and the paperwork is in Seattle.

At least it died in the line of duty.  It got me some surfer photos.

Zipolite and Turning Northwards

I haven’t fallen off the ends of the Earth; I’ve just been sitting on the edge for a while.

Zipolite is known as a beach where one can do nothing, and while I haven’t been doing exactly that, I’ve been enjoying the outward permissiveness of immobility to full effect.  For the last five days I’ve simply sat still, lulled in the hypnotic breath and thunder that goes on softly and constantly in the background, printing my brief footprints back and forth in the firm golden sand between sweeps of the warm erasing waves, a familiar at the shaded patio tables with the rainbow-striped cloths where my round glass seems to hold a creamed distillation of the ocean’s colors before their sunlit bars of broken sapphire and foam.  After two nights at the Hostal Teresa I moved my Miata fifty feet down the single road to a private room at the Posada Mexico hotel, a tidy room just big enough for a mosquito-netted bed, a little sink, a swinging rattan door to a tiny bathroom, and a miniature little writing table under the ceiling fan.  I’ve spent most of my days right there.

I’ve been working on another rewrite of my novel, and working also on the big decision of where to go from here.  And I’ve decided to turn around and begin a slow return Northwards to the States.

It’s a little humiliating to renege on the great goal of the trip (and the name of this blog, which in its silent way made a strong appeal to continue), but in various ways recently I’ve been confronting the fact that I’ve bitten off more than I could chew.  Looking at what would have been my next destination Southward, San Cristobel de los Casas in Chiapas, I was unwontedly dismayed to find it an eight-hour drive away, with a blank map of unknown small rural Mexican towns between wherein I would have to find lodging.  Scaling that reluctance outward into South America I realized I’d be into post-Jovian distances between bright points, the important matter being that I’d lost a certain thrill in the notion of the passage itself. 

In short, while I would still love to pull my Miata up at the end of all roads in Tierra del Fuego—and will regret not knowing that last, great press of the brake pedal—when I asked myself how I would most like to spend the last three and a half months of my midlife vacation, other possibilities arose.

On the basis, as I said in an earlier post, of reasons both practical and shameful. 

The practical side is uninteresting, and consists of things like the daunting cost of shipping my car around the Darien Gap (perhaps $2,000), and the prospect of losing my Miata at the end (if I even could, Argentina having strange prohibitions about importing foreign cars). 

The emotional side, though, is where I feel a little exculpation is in order.  Basically, I’m homesick.  (Yes, I realize my home country is currently threatening to launch a nuclear war for, apparently, fun, which makes it perhaps not the best time to come back, but I can’t help it, I miss the USA anyway.)  Now, it’s particularly shameful to call oneself homesick while sitting at a beachside restaurant on a glorious day in the cool and humid breeze off the ocean while nibbling at a delicious plate of cold salami and cheeses alongside my laptop.   And Mexico has many glorious places that have been joyful and important to explore.  My feeling gets back to the enjoyment of the places between.  Mexico, it turns out, isn’t the best place to have a road trip—in a way that I think projects to other Central American countries. I imagined that I’d be driving a lot back roads (it’s a Miata, after all), which is precisely what I CAN’T do here, both because of the road conditions and because, quite honestly, I don’t feel safe there. 

The other day, driving through the outskirts of Oaxaca City, someone on an overpass threw a full beer bottle to explode on the hood of my car.  Now, while 99% of the people in Mexico I’ve met have been friendly, kind, and generous, I couldn’t help feeling like that greeting was an announcement of a 1% that also projects forward into areas that are even less stable in their remote regions.  I’d be lying if I said it didn’t play a role.

Like I say, shameful. 

So my plans right now are to work my way back up Mexico on the Eastern side, through San Luis Potosi and Monterrey, and enter the USA on the Atlantic side.  I have my eye on a writer’s workshop in Virginia in September, which would give me a lovely excuse to wend through the back roads of the Mid-Atlantic States: Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia.  And then, probably, continue up the East Coast to visit family.

On the Beach

As of yesterday I’ve been a beach bum.

From Oaxaca City I took the road south to the Pacific coast (Mexico is starting to swing to an almost east-west angle down here), where the State of Oaxaca has a line of famous beach towns.  It’s the first time I’ve been out of major cities since—well—I want to say Copper Canyon, though to be fair Tepoztlán was really a big town.  At any rate I’m now far from any urban center, in the scratch surfer town of Zipolite, here for a few days with the sand, the pounding surf, the palm trees and the margaritas.  I’ve had to fish out my shorts and swim trunks from the bottom of my pack, and buy a pair of flip-flops and bottle of sun screen at the little shops. 

And remember how mesmerizing it is simply to sit and watch the huge rollers come in, rear up in great foam-tongued pipes of coral and lapis, to crush themselves tumultuously in thunder and hiss and mob up the golden sand.  It’s a good place to sit for a while.

This may be the southernmost point of my drive.

I had a devil of a time trying to book a room here.  My ideal was a little private bungalow on the beach where I could sit, listen to the surf, and work on a couple of sticky points in my novel.  But I spent hours on my laptop in Oaxaca City, scouting up and down the line of beach towns from Mazunte to Puerto Angel to Huatulco, unable to find anything available on short notice.  I had to compromise: I found a bungalow in Zipolite available in a couple of days, so I booked the first two nights at a hostel just down the street.  Oddly, now that I’m here, the town seems largely deserted; I’m the only person at the hostel.  Mysterious...

Zipolite, the town, is a single small strip between the beach and the jungle, a nicely paved street lined with little hand-lettered restaurants small cottage hotels.  It can be walked from one end to the other in a minute or two.  The great attraction is the beach (it’s actually known as a nude beach destination, but I’ve seen little of that), which runs its heavenly golden ribbon in a mile-long arc between surf-misted headlands and rocky outcrops foaming at the base. 

Behind the scrim of tourist amenities is a fly-blown rural Mexican town—enter a patio restaurant from the street and you’ll see the dirt-floored back room with the family squatting amidst unused lumber and propane tanks—and in fact one could say that the charm of Zipolite consists precisely of its unschooled attempt to mimic a tourist beach town.  The bungalow cottages have adopted the Polynesian thatched roof, often in witch-hat peaks, but above a base of naked cement blocks.  My hostel is a three-sided box of cement, two stories high and half-open in front, with a roof of corrugated tin panels on slanted steel beams; my room upstairs is a cement-block cell, badly whitewashed, barely big enough for the bed of hard foam, and lacking an electric socket; it does have a private bathroom, but with no hot water.  And yet Omar and his wife, the elderly couple who run the place, are sweet beyond measure: seeing me writing in the common room (where there’s one electric socket, reached by my extension cord) he urged me not to work so hard and shuffled over to bring me a tiny glass of anis.  Later I had a beer on the beach and a margarita with dinner, and started to adapt my expectations, which I set down here for the benefit of the unwary.

For various reasons, some good and some shameful, I’m thinking that this is where I’ll turn back North.  Further south awaits Chiapas and Guatemala, Belize and the Yucatan—for which many well-meaning people have excitedly prepped me with guidebooks and destinations—and beyond that runs the long, long road to Tierra del Fuego.  All I shall say at this point is that my enthusiasm for it has waned.  Later I’ll perhaps add more detail. 

Northwards still leads into a multiplicity of potential plans, some of which I’ve already mentioned.  I haven’t yet made up my mind between them.

But for now I have a couple of days here.  I think I’ll apply my suntan lotion, put on my flip-flops, find some breakfast along the strip, and head down to the beach.