El ultimo dia

Today was our last full day in Mexico. We leave tomorrow morning. Pretty soon I’ll be back checking homework and preparing lessons. Sigh. Spring Break needs to last longer. 

We met up with Bob for breakfast at our hotel. Yvonne and Lori joined us for some tea. Bob was interested to hear Lori talk about being in Guadalajara for two weeks back in the 1970s and how much the city has changed. Yvonne was interested in all the things Bob knows about tropical plants like heliconias. We made plans to meet Bob and Luis later for lunch.

John and I went with Yvonne and Lori over to the plaza. Bob had suggested that we might find a couple stalls in the market where we could find decent handicrafts. We looked first in the official handicraft market behind the cathedral. These shops are in a couple big white tents. 

There was some nice stuff in there, but nothing that would easily fit into luggage to take home. We stopped by the opera house again

and this time it was open. What a grand old theater!

We continued on to the market, but it was claustrophobically crowded and mostly consisted of clothes. Nobody wanted to search all the different levels of the market in search of elusive tinware or blown glass. We needed to get back to Bob’s place. I was all for taking a cab, but Yvonne wanted to try to get there in a horse-drawn carriage. I was sure that the hackman would turn is down, but he agreed to it.

Back at Bob’s place, we discussed going to lunch at a hacienda outside of town. Bob warned us that our route would take us through the ugliest parts of the city. John and I went with Luis and Bob while Yvonne and Lori followed in their rental car. It took a while to arrive, but it was worth it! The hacienda is a beautiful neocolonial building

with a dining room on one patio. 

The pool is quite sweet, but the real attraction here is the amazing view of a nearby gorge.

The food was good quite good. Service, even by the normally languid Mexican standards, was deliberately slow. So everybody walked off at different times to explore the grounds. There is a chapel here

and no doubt weddings are the bread and butter of this place.

It was too soon time to get back into the car and drive back to our hotels. Our flight is incredibly early tomorrow morning. I’ll have to get to bed before nine if I have to get up before four in the morning tomorrow. Adios, Mexico!

Guadalajara, Guadalajara!

We spent a lot of time in the car today. We pulled out of El Encanto just after breakfast. Christian and Natasha will be staying for a few more days, but the rest of us will spend a night or two in Guadalajara before flying home. We packed the car and we all hugged Jim, thanked him, and said goodbye.

And then we drove. And drove. There were many times I wanted to utter that plaintive cry of every child, “Are we there yet?” But somehow it seemed like every time we checked our progress on Google Maps we still had an hour and a half left to go! Mike drove the whole way, but he seems to like to do that. We finally made it through some dense traffic in the city and dropped the car off at Hidalgo Airport in Guadalajara. And we took a cab from there to our hotel. 

We are staying at the Petit Hotel Casa Pedro Loza. Our friend Bob Clarke recommended it. It is a beautiful boutique hotel in an old colonial building not far from the plaza and the cathedral. The rooms are quite elegant:  we are definitely having a more formal experience here than El Encanto! But like a stage set, the room looks better from a distance. 

It also has a rooftop bar with an astonishing panoramic view of the city.

We all took a quick nap after our long drive and then we went in search of our friend Bob. He is difficult to reach by telephone and he has several properties in the area. We stopped by one which he now rents out to female art students from one of Guadalajara’s many post-secondary institutions. A older woman stopped by to check out what we were doing, and her suspicions were allayed when she remembered John from his last visit. She is one of those people one finds in a number of Spanish-speaking countries who keeps the street clean, watches over everybody’s property, and seems to have keys to every house. She walked us over Bob’s house. We sat around the pool there for a few minutes until Bob arrived. He’s the one in the center in the picture below. 

Bob was perhaps the Bay Area’s foremost garden designer before he retired a decade ago. But you can see his skill in the wonderful designs he makes for his own home. 

In the evening, we went out to eat with Bob and Luis. This was not an easy thing to do. Today is Good Friday and in honor of this solemn day most of the shops and restaurants in the city are closed. Bob likes to remind us that Guadalajara is perhaps the most Catholic of all Mexican cities … and the one with the most gay bars, too. We found an Italian place. Ellen discovered that Italian food in Mexico involves some hot peppers. She ate one, thinking it was a sweet peperoncino. It was something much hotter and she nearly went flying up through the ceiling!

After dinner, Luis dropped us off by the cathedral we walked around the plaza. We met up with Yvonne and Lori. We had some coffee in a little cafe in the Teatro Degadillo, Guadalajara’s opera house. And then we found our way back to the hotel and went to bed. Before doing so, we said goodbye to Ellen and Mike who will be leaving early tomorrow morning. 

Real Mexico!

Today we bid farewell to many of our friends. It’s hard to believe how closely we feel bonded to each other even though some of us have known others for only a few days! Ellen and I had some visitors on our rooftop patio in the morning. 

After lunch, John and I tried to get some pictures of everybody. Christian and Robin hit it off:  she has a granddaughter Josephine’s age.

Jill had to pose with the “there’s a ham on my head” pig that Ellen found for her. 

Rochelle overcame any shyness in front of a camera!

 

Tom Giles, ever rock-solid, watched all this from the safety of a pickup truck. It seemed like the perfect prop for him, too. 

And all the women wanted to get a group shot. Girl power!

While Jill and Robin were riding back with Sherry and Giles, Rochelle and Rebecca went to Puerta Vallarta in a cab. 

At the gate, Jim, our host, bid everyone adieu. 

After most of our group had left, we were left wondering what to do without ourselves. Jim suggested that we might want to check out El Chaco, a nearby beach. (Some of our number kept calling it El Chapo, but that’s a part of Mexico we would just as soon not experience!) It was an amazing experience, though not one I am sure I want to repeat.

Holy Week, Semana Santa in Spanish, is a Mexican national holiday. Not only that, but camping on the beach, usually forbidden, is permitted or at least allowed this one week of the year. So when we arrived at this beach, just south of the center of San Blas, we found tens of thousands of people already there. It is a long flat stretch of sand. A couple dozen long palapas lined the beach, generally two deep. Each was split into twenty or thirty little stalls. Most people simple drove their cars — or more frequently pickup trucks — to their spot and unloaded everything. We found one of the last few unclaimed stall and just to feel like we fit in, we drove our rental SUV up to it as well. Having found a spot, even if it did not have a particularly good view of the water, we watched the beach with fascination. Vendors walked up and down the beach selling food and trinkets. And groups of musicians did as well. The family in the stall next to our hired these a brightly-clad group to perform for them. 

Elsewhere on the beach, were at least a half dozen brass and percussion ensembles. As you walked up and down the beach the sound of one blended into the music of another in a cacophonous layering that perhaps only Charles Ives could fully appreciate. 

We had also purchased wrist bands for a few pesos which allowed us to use the pool at the nearby restaurant. Poor are great for kids, and Josephine loves to go to the pool. Not surprisingly, she made herself the queen of the chlorine even without speaking a word of Spanish.

It was a fascinating afternoon, but we all felt a bit exhausted by the experience. So we came back to the hotel where many of us took naps and even relaxed on the patio.

In the evening we had our final meal together in Jim’s lovely communal dining room. He made the most incredibly delicious shiitake mushroom burgers. Better than beef, by far! And afterwards, everyone gathered around a campfire. 

Tomorrow most of us leave for Guadalajara.

Secret Beach

Mornings are pretty relaxed at El Encanto. Everybody is up pretty early in the morning because without television nobody stayed up too late the night before. And early mornings allow some time for getting to know each other. Here Christian and Giles chat while young Miles attentively observes.

Jim’s breakfasts are wonderful. And he always has some hardboiled eggs and a couple other things to eat out before he formally starts serving at 8:00. Lori appreciated that !

Lori was a new friend for this trip. She and Yvonne have known each other since junior high school. Oddly enough, she now lives only a few blocks from our old house in Long Beach. Definitely small world. 

Speaking of things small, Miss Josephine make sure that we always knew where she was and what she was thinking at every moment. And when sheer volume was not enough, there was always the creative us of make up to create a presence at the table. 

After breakfast, John and Sherry went off to San Blas to go shopping. Sherry wanted to cook one of the meals here and decided that given the local ingredients Shrimp Creole will be the perfect choice to bring a bit of Loo-ze-anna to Nayarit, Mexico. 

Once John and Sherry came back, Jim piled us into a couple vans — Mike drove one — and we went off to the “secret beach.” It’s not a secret, of course, but it is far enough off the main road that we had it to ourselves even during this busiest beach week of the year. As you can see, it is a beautiful swath of golden sand.

Everybody wanted to get their feet wet as soon as we arrive. 

John, always thinking about other people instead of himself, helped Jim to put up a big parachute for a beach palapa. 

After everybody had been in swimming, we had a delicious lunch of ceviche on a huge avocado half. 

Miles particularly enjoyed his meal. He is such a fantastic baby.

The waves were not the best for surfing, but Natasha brought her board along anyhow. 

Weirdly enough, even though nobody else was on the beach, all of a sudden this pink car came driving down the sand … selling ice cream. Rats! The one time John did not have a single peso on him.

But after a few blissful hours it was time to pack up and go. Josephine hitched a ride.

But the rest of us just trudged sadly away from the lovely spot, wishing we could spend a few more hours there.

Later, after dinner, John and some of the ladies went into town to check out a local festival. 

Tomorrow many of our party will leave to return to the United States. What a great time it has been!

Jungle Boats

One of the best things about El Encanto is the whimsical artistic sensibility that Jim brings to the hotel and the gardens that surround it. Take this bench, for example.

Of course, I am a soft touch for any canine, and Jim has some wonderful dogs, all rescued. I am here with Sugar, a Pit Bull and Dalmatian mix.

Our second adventure here in Nayarit was a little bit nostalgic for John and me. We had come to this part of Mexico about 25 years ago with John’s dad. We were staying at a friend’s house in Puerto Vallarta, and we came north in a roofless Volkswagen bug to look at the towns on the Bahia de Banderas and along the Nayarit coast. I am not sure how we knew that you could take a boat through the mangrove swamps just south of San Blas, but we did so. I think there were only a couple boats there and we just parked along the side of the road. 

How things have changed. Today that wide spot in the road boats a couple dozen shops and restaurants and there is a boatman’s cooperative that operate the rides through the jungle. There is a upside to all of this:  we had a fight with our boatman twenty five years ago when he tried to tell us at the end of the ride that the price was five times more than we had agreed on. Today we just went to the office and bought a ticket and climbed into the boat.

I am not sure if this was here when we were here last, but I think it dates from the early nineties. It is the remains of a movie set build here for what I think was a Sylvester Stallone film. Maybe one of you gentle readers has actually watched one of those films and might remember which one it was. 

They promised us on our ticket that we would see “cocodrilos” and sure enough we spotted an alligator about five minutes into the ride.

We also spotted a number of birds, but the boat operator did not slow down enough for me to get a photograph of any of them. After riding for about twenty minutes we came to a small zoo in the middle of the estuary. There were a number of somewhat depressing pens there, particularly a smallish one where a lynx was pacing back and forth. The ones with the alligators seemed to have the most contented inhabitants. I suspect alligators are content to do nothing if they are not having to hunt for themselves. 

There was also a little swimming area, happily caged off from the rest of the estuary. Miles enjoyed the warm water. He is such a happy little baby. 

On the way back, Josephine took charge, as she often does, placing herself in the bow.

After the boat ride, we went into San Blas for a bit. John knew a small hotel there which supposedly had the “best burgers in San Blas.” As it turned out, the restaurant did not open for about 45 minutes, but they were kind enough to let us use the pool.

When they finally did begin to serve lunch, some of our party, the ones in the wet swim trunks ate outside while others of us ate indoors. I am not sure about the burgers, but the comida mexicana was quite good. We had a really absurd conversation about how you could say “I have a ham on my head” in a variety of different languages. I think we figured it out in eleven! At the end of the meal, they surprised Jill with a birthday cupcake.

Back at the hotel most everybody rested until dinner. I did a little work on this blog. 

Today was Jill’s birthday, and Jim provided a carrot cake for the occasion.

Ellen surprised her with a small gift:  a ceramic pig to put on her head. Oh, how did I forget to take a picture of that!