Hola Mexico

---

El Sauzal

I think it’s so cool that you can take a tram to Mexico!!! We arrived in San Diego early in the morning after a fairly restless night on a night bus (mainly due to an accidental overdose of caffeine, in my case), but luckily due to some fantastic online research on Elliott’s part, we knew exactly where to go and what to do, and within minutes we were on a tram heading to Tijuana. We’d heard a lot of stories about how bad it is in Tijuana; the LP claims you cannot pass through without forming an opinion about it, but to be honest, it didn’t affect me either way, except maybe surprise at how un-dangerous it all appeared compared to the stories… We got through the border formalities quite easily, with a nice stamp and 180 days on our visas. Off we went on a bus south in Baja Califormia to a little village called El Sauzal outside Ensenada, that we’d read about online as being a great place to kick back and plan our attack on Mexico.

I’m loving my new backpack on wheels - it was both very useful and appreciated when we were walking around the hill that El Sauzal is spread up on, next to the main road, looking for Hostel Sauzal . Maria, the owner turned out to be the nicest lady you could wish for as your host. We were the only guests, and she spoiled us. The $15 a night includes a home-made breakfast (different every day and so delicious!), but she was so hospitable letting us drink all the tea and hot cocoa we wanted and letting us use her oil, garlic and so on to cook dinner with. We even cooked together with her one night. She also took us for a walk to show us a route up in the hills behind El Sauzal where we could go running the next day. She even said it was too bad she had bookings the following week, because as I spoke Spanish, she would’ve been happy to let us look after the place for her for a while. Unfortunately, it’s not allowed for her to let others look after the place when it’s running, but if it had been ‘closed’, she could’ve gone off on holiday herself and look for a place for her to retire to that’s not as built up as El Sauzal has gotten during the 15 years she’s been living there… At least it’s nice to know we’ve got a place to stay if we ever need to.

It’s really nice there as well, weather-wise. The first sunbathing in months was well appreciated, sitting on the veranda in front of the bedrooms looking down over town and out over the Pacific. The wind was still chilly, though, I mean it IS winter, and the nights were actually cold. We had decided to stay for 3 days to sort ourselves out, but in the end, Maria had to almost throw us out…

So we took a micro into Ensenada, the thriving metropolis of Northern Baja, to sort out a night bus ticket to the Copper Canyon: Mexico’s answer to the Grand Canyon, with a train going through it. M$1950 we had to shell out for a 22 hour bus ride to Los Mochis, equivalent to US$153 (for the two of us). We had quite keen on going to the Southern part of Baja, where this time of year you can see grey whales and their calves hanging out while the babies grow big enough to make the migration north to their summer feeding grounds in the frozen seas of Alaska and Siberia. However, when we were doing our online research we came across some you tube videos of people who had done it last year, and it looked absolutely awful. A boat full of middle aged Americans making exaggerated statements about how wonderful it was, and almost falling out of the boat in their attempts to touch the whales and their babies, while repeatedly screaming: “I’m touching a whale!”. As Ell and I both learned to dive with a strict ‘look but don’t touch’ policy, even watching the videos made us feel quite ill at ease. So we decided to not spend US$100 each going down Baja and then another US$100 on the 5 hour boat ride to Los Mochis across the Sea of Cortez, and that’s not taking into consideration the cost of the whale tour etc. So all in all, although we missed out on whales and cave paintings, we saved a lot of money on our expensive bus tickets.

As for Ensenada itself, I don’t really have anything to say… It’s famous for its enormeous Mexican flag that apparently can be seen from space, but the day we were there, there was nothing but a massive flag pole…
Back at Maria’s, people started arriving, and although they seemed very nice, and one of them actually played the guitar and could’ve taught me a lot more, it was time to move on.

Los Mochis

Just very quickly about Los Mochis: It’s a lot more expensive than the LP says, and apparently the trains are on a very different schedule from what is printed in the book. There’s a first class and an economy train that are supposed to run every day. The book says to ask the locals, so when our admittedly drunk hotel concierge told us that the economy train only runs 3 times a week and the next one wasn’t until 2 days later, we decided to believe him. Now the problem with this, for us, was that the first class tickets are twice the price of the economy tickets, and we’re on a tight budget - so a difficult decision had to be made: Should we stay or should we go? As it felt like we’d been haemorrhaging money in North America, we decided that although the canyon would undoubtedly be spectacular, the high altitude, cold nights, and expensive tours (although bad excuses) made it easier to save the extra US$300 and just head further down the Pacific coast where sand and sunshine come for free.

Mazatlán

The semi-resort town of Mazatlán is only 5 hours from Los Mochis, so we arrived in the early afternoon. As many of the Pacific coastal towns, it’s spread out quite a long way around a bay, with a historic centre and various ‘zonas hoteleras’ where tourism is centred in big scary hotels. We went to the old town where we had read there was a cheap-ish hotel on the waterfront where John Wayne used to lay down his six-shooters. After some negotiations and the promise of staying for 3 nights we got the price down from M$550 to M$400 pr. night, but something about how easily the concierge gave in, made me think we could’ve made a better deal if we were cheekier folk… Oh well, it was still a fairly good deal for a big room with a balcony overlooking the malecón (seafront promenade), a little beach and the Pacific for the perfect sunset view.

Mazatlán has a lot of character, I think, with a cute old colonial centre laid out in the typical grid pattern, with multi-coloured town houses, little restaurants and street stalls, and a great central market where you can buy anything from fruit, juices, tacos, fresh meat and fish to new clothes and household goods. It made for really cheap living for us. We bought some ‘toronjas’ (grapefruits) and bananas to have for breakfast before/after our morning runs along the malecón, and I had bread, avocado and tomato sandwiches for lunch. We would read our books while recovering from the hot morning run, then slap on some factor 30 to brave the beach with our winter-white bodies and jump in the cold Pacific waves.

Towering over the low buildings in old town, were two massively tall cruise ships docked in the harbour on the other side of the point that old town is built on (unfortunately, our ‘last’ camera had broken by then, so we have no photos to illustrate…) I’ve seen cruise ships on Bornholm, but something about being able to see them from so far away, just highlighted how big they are. Massive glass and white structures that have lost most of their resemblance to ships altogether. Apart from the happy cruisers, Mazatlan also has a considerable seasonal population of ‘snow-birds’: pensioners with unfathomably tanned bodies fleeing the cold of North America to hang out playing chess, smoking, or chatting on the beaches. Apart from the locals, we felt like we were the youngest people in town by at least 30 years…

Manzanillo

Now we’re on our way further down the coast, to a place in the middle of nowhere called Maruata, which only has like 100 inhabitants, no electricity and only two concrete structures. The rest is beach, cabanas and tents. So we’ve stopped in Manzanillo to charge our batteries, stock up on groceries and get clean laundry before heading into the unknown. We only meant to stay here one night, but as it was Sunday many things were closed, including the laundry place, so we’re here for another night. It was kind of fun to be here on a Sunday night, though, as there is a weekly ‘ritual’ of families and Mexicans of all ages congregating on the plaza around the big blue swordfish down by the malecón to eat ice cream, listen to music and apparently to paint plaster of Paris sculptures. Very funny 😊 We found a cheap place to eat, played some canasta and then walked around with all the locals eating very weird, slightly salty ice cream, and enjoyed the dusk settling around us.

Today we’ve been productive, getting ready for our excursion; later we’re going running, then another cheap taco/tortilla dinner, and tomorrow we’re off on our next adventure! 😊

Love, Kristine

---

Photos

The veranda in front of the bedrooms
with a view of the Pacific

Sunbathing for the first time in months
Tentatively, though, due to a chilly wind

Sunset over the Pacific
Not the greatest we saw, but our camera broke :(