July 21
Playa de Iguana to Punta San Juan de Lima. Adorable tourist town, especially this time of year with only Mexican tourists. After scanning for a cheap hotel we check in and walk to one of the half dozen bar-restaurants at la playa, we got to sit and watch three great scenes. Scene one was this old man sitting alone drinking a clear alcohol - slowly but surely. He had his cell phone with him on the table and it was blaring tejano music and he was smiling. I’ll say it again, Mexicans sure do love their loud music… Scene two was the VW bus driving on the beach selling… ice cream? Ice pops? Something that tourists would likely want but we didnt’ see them actually make a sale. We think it was ice-something because of the music blaring out of the bullhorn affixed to the roof of the van - that circus-kids-ice-cream-truck-kind of jingle. They weren’t having any luck so they (i.e., the two 25 year old hombres driving and selling the iced goods) seemingly decided it was time for a break. They pulled up under a palapa and there they hung for the next hour. And left the music playing on the VW bus. It would have been charming if it was our only auditory stimulus, but it was competing with the old man’s cell phone tejano behind us… And scene three was the family of ~12 next to us that had come to San Juan for the day or vacation and was all smiles. A super sassy and adventurous “Grandma”, her studly esposo the “Grandpa”. She rocked a bright red bathing suit and ran (literally ran) back and forth from the restaurant to the beach when she wanted to. He rocked original tinted aviator glasses - bright gold rim. No shirt, and just enough in and out of shape body to make it all look good. They had 2-3 kids, and each of them were with their esposos or esposas and with their 2-3 kids. And everyone was laughing and dancing (adults) or entertaining themselves with sand and waves (kids). The only time I saw anyone pick up their phone was for a photo. Happy peeps.
Oh and I guess scene four was the waiter himself. Early 20’s, tall, and perfectly asymmetrical. Over the top friendly and treated Ernie and I very well. I think we both ended up ordering food that wasn’t even on the menu (?!?!?). He was muy bonito.
We were quite hungry. Our last meal was Pepe’s tacos two days ago. Yesterday was fruit, nuts and chips and this morning we only had coffee. At this point it was about 4:30 pm.
SO - all of this put me in the mood for what I consider to be the big news of the day… I ate fish! I ate something from the ocean! I only tried it as it was Ernie’s dinner and he was hungrier than I, but after lots of questions, I took a large forkful and put in it my mouth. Mahi mahi. Dorado. Dolphin fish. I asked what I could to the waiter, then asked Ernie all I could about his opinion about its freshness and preparedness… Holy shit I ate fish! And it was good! I admit it. In fact, if I could go back and redo it, I would get what Ernie got, which was just grilled mahi mahi. Fresh, never frozen, nothing but heat and a bit of salt. And as Ernie said, “this fish has had a better life than that chicken”. And unless that chicken came from the San Blas chicken lady where the chickens lived happily in her house until she picked them up by the neck and then the next second (a dark poof), I believe that to be true. And yes, I need to have a full proper meal before I can call myself any sort of eater of things from the ocean, but it was a start. Eat local and support fresh sustainable fishing…. Woo hoo!
Post dinner we wifi-ed about places to stay as we are coming up to another tourist stretch - Zihuatanejo and Acapulco. We don’t want to repeat previous mistakes, but wifi is so weak we only had enough patience to book tomorrow. Looks like after Acapulco and into Guatemala we are going to lose camping… a few RV parks here and there but with no shade they are miserable and nothing we want to be a part of as this heat and humidity continues. I guess the tourist part of southern Mexico is north - Yucutan and the like.
A note about the drive today - miles and miles of bananas and/or plantains. Not sure how to tell a banana vs plantain as they grow, and it was likely there were fields of both as there were both for sale on side-of-the-road stands. It is fascinating to me how the micro differences in the (duh) microclimate visually translate as we ride by.
Oh - and the local salt! Sold by the white burlap bag. Wish I could send everyone a bag of central mexi sea salt… It is delicious.
Shout out to Hotel Maria Isabel in San Juan - to the owner and her son… we suck. Or more appropriately, we don’t know our numbers. We rolled into town and found your lovely hotel and your welcoming son to greet us (probably 13 and during the school year he lives in Dallas and during the summers he comes back to San Juan to help with the family business - nice kid). While he goes and gets his ma we sneak a quick picture of their living room (see Google maps), then the lady of the house comes out, greetings, etc. We thought she told us it would be $1400 pesos for room with AC, $400 without, and $200 to camp. We check out the campsite (which was meh to ick - not her fault but it is so thick with bugs and it’s so humid we don’t know how it is possible to be this humid and not raining) and then sneak across the street to another hotel. They tell us a room is $600 a night and we take it. When we finally get around to googling the price the Hotel Maria Isabel senora had quoted us because we were thinking we were wrong and… well we felt like jerks. We were so wrong! You quoted us $500! Especially after we entered your lobby and wanted to support your political and religious beliefs (see pic). So to you Hotel Maria Isabel - lo siento!
Quiet and early night. Ernie is playing guitar.
I ask Ernie for closing thoughts and he says, “the fish was very good.”
July 22
We probably drove the most beautiful road in mainland Mexico today. Ocean, jungle, cliffs, rocks, beaches, lots of changes in elevation via lots of twists and turns…. no development, no billboards. Stunning. Ernie and I didn’t talk much at all for about 100 km, in part I think because we were taking it all in. There is no picture that could capture its beauty, and no pullouts that would have allowed such a thing, so I’ll just post the google map windy bits.
Great animals today. One highlight was a big red crab (~6” carapace) walking across the highway (claws out, as if that would help with the oncoming car). And this was at probably 700 feet up! What was little crabby doing?!? So silly. And iguanas! Some dead, but lots of them alive. And 2 feet long. Great striped tails. Heaps of smaller lizards too, dung beetles, some skunks (all dead sadly). This giant roadrunner bird thing - we have to research and ID it, but we have seen a half dozen so far - very impressive. And other birds to research - the colors are their giveaway once we have enough wifi signal to research them.
And so many mariposas. Stupid amount of mariposas. It is like this part of Mexico is a snow globe of mariposas. I watched them dance around Ernie all day. I don’t know if it is seasonal or what… but how people don’t just come here to watch all the butterflies! They are outstanding.
Ideally the day would have ended around 2-3 when we finished that amazing stretch of Hwy 200, but tourist-hotel-camping-stuff is getting fewer and farther between, so we had another 75 km or so to go before the next town of Lazaro Cardenas. There are still quite a few RV parks around this part of Mexico, but so far experience had taught us that advertised RV (only) parks either don’t allow tents or don’t have any shade, which is straight up unhealthy for us PacNW gringos. We studied the map and thought we had a plan for navigating through this city, and ultimately we only got slightly lost and wound up at a cheesy tourist hotel... We hate being at hotels and we would rather be camping…. well, ok, I personally would like to have three conditions met if we camp: 1) bikes have safe place, 2) percent humidity is lower than human body temp, 3) ambient temperature is lower than human body temp. Ernie could probably sacrifice at least two of those...
I finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance last night. It has everything I would ideally like in a book. Motorcycles, road trips, a connection with Montana and the American West. The author is even an academic and has a few pretty awesome diatribes about teaching and research in higher education. A big theme is quality, and I often found myself nodding at his critiques of what is and isn’t quality. I got all the way through it, and ultimately - I didn’t like it. And since my Missoula days I remember “the cool kids” telling me how much I’ll love this book. I don’t. It is pretentious. And woo woo. And he rambles. And the whole Chautauqua thing… And I’m pretty sure he is bipolar - which is fine and all - but don’t expect me to find his bipolar ramblings deep and explanatory of the way things have and ought to be. In a sense it is two books in one (which makes sense if he is in fact bipolar). One book is the travel story of he and his son from Minnesota to California, and the other is his “back in time” reflections and yammerings of his time as philosophy graduate student and/or his time at the mental institution where he worked through whatever major question plagued his life. The authors name is Robert, but he refers to his younger self as Phaedrus (evidence of said pretentiousness). I really did enjoy his writing style about the road trip. I could visualize every part. I thought that part of the book was fantastic, and very real and personable. I could connect. But the woo woo part… maybe I’m just not smart enough or interested enough. Ernie is reading it now - I look forward to having a mini-book club about it with him.
One inspiring part I can share is a passage early on that describes traveling via moto. So for those who may not have any sense for why we are doing what we are doing the way we are doing it, he captures it well...
“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observe and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
(Pause)
“Ernie, do you have a thought you would like me to include?”
“The fish I had yesterday was very, very good.”
July 23.
Jesus Cristo. Dios Mios. We can do everything right and still have it all come out wrong. It is too long of a story to write it all out as I wish I had the energy for… as there would be some kick ass adjectives…
1 - we book a hotel in Zihuatenajo (Z) based solely on location, as again, we are done with the stress of navigating the bikes in tourist towns
2- we have a nice ride from Lazaro Cardenas to Z… still lots of mariposas but not much for view, crops, smells, etc. A few iguanas to keep us company. We also now know the great bird we are seeing is some subspecies of chachalaca (bird we had to ID from a day or two ago). So great!
3 - we arrive in Z at 1 pm and successfully navigate to where expedia.com map said our hotel should be. Clearly, there is no hotel anywhere…
4- to avoid the madness we see signs for the airport - lets just go to airport and catch a cab that is returning after dropping off travelers and pay him to have us follow to the hotel
5- we (stupidly) tell cab driver whole story and show him our map where hotel should be but isn’t. He says he knows where this hotel is now. How much to take us there? 200 pesos (~$10).
6- he takes us there. Hotel is on a crazy crazy sloped hill. Oh my gob the slanted streets and insane slopes here that just merge with traffic… makes San Fan look like the midwest.
7- E deals with bikes as I deal with hotel. Both are difficult (E has to unpack the bikes to park them properly without them tipping over, and I have to have a broken spanish conversation with two desk peeps). Long story short, this is NOT our hotel, we are far away from our hotel, but desk peeps feel bad for sweating broken spanish gringo and help us. Shout out to Arena Suites. [email protected]. Highly recommend - looked like an amazingly beautiful place (albeit out of our budget). By now its about 2 pm.
8 - they draw us a map to get out of this part of town and to our hotel. We contemplate just not going to hotel but we’ve given our credit card info to Expedia, and we paid extra to be on our highway for ease of getting out of town tomorrow… i.e., we felt we already paid an idiot tax and didn’t want to pay it all for nothing.
9 - we follow map. Map leads us up this INSANE HILL OH MY GOD. There is no keeping the bikes upright at these intersections. We abort. We get lost. We both almost drop the bikes. We sweat more than is possible without any food or water in our systems.
10 - a super swell random Mexi dude tries really hard to convince us we can make the sketchy ass hill and turn. We still don’t think we can do it. We abort. We get lost. We both almost drop the bikes. This one part with this tour bus and then the bus backing up… dios mios.
11 - We get out of there. Chinga!
12 - we pass swell random Mexi dude and he’s still parked at the top of the sketchy hill. We honk as we ride by and he laughs. It is now about 3.
13 - We think we find our hotel, but it is spelt a little differently… We ring and ring and ring the bell. Chinga! We ask. One lady says “yep, thats it” Another says “nope”. We are sweating more than possible without any food or water in our systems. Tara is sniffling to herself… “I did everything I could think of to do to make this a reasonable experience…”
14 - We walk (as there is no more getting on the bikes - i hate the bike at this point). Talk to super cute chica with a parrot. She has a hotel. She tells me where our hotel is. I believe her. I decide we are going to our original hotel and telling them “hi and bye - we are going to stay with nice parrot chica”. We do that and of course the man running the hotel is soooo nice and friendly and supportive. He wants to hear all about our adventure. We visit as long as we can knowing our kevlar pants will turn into chastity belts if we dont’ get them off soon. So shout out to Villa de Arco. If you can get there, they are really nice people. Back to chica parrot where we had our fastest bike unload yet. Its about 4:30. So three and a half hours to get to Z and find our hotel.
15 - We used our first pool today. It drizzled on us as we let it go, talked it out, and became a better couple.
16 - head to la playa for comida. Despite the tourismo and the music and crowds, dinner was excellent. Mahi mahi and beef kabobs. Lots of great people watching. We are the only gringos outside of one California dude selling CD’s. Gracias Zihua!
Other notes of the day:
Free breakfast at the hotel. An old man in suspenders, an open fly, and an I heart NY tshirt requested a change in the TV station. Cue Fox Family - some coverage of Justin Beiber (sp?) and his concert in Madison Square Garden. There were ~20 people in the hotel breakfast area - all glued to the Beebs? Beibs? Biebs? Whatever - 12 year old hair boy band boy. There were fingers bopping to beats. All while eating toast and bananas and Mexi corn flakes and cheap hotel coffee. Surreal.
Got more shout outs today than any other day so far. Random cars passing or traveling the other way - seeing us with our motos and gear and giving a honk and a peace sign or a hello or a smile. I know I don’t need it to keep going, but I like it.
Zihuatenjo has come a long way since Andy and Red worked on their boat on this beach. I would have liked to have seen this place decades ago.
Next stop is hopefully our last big tourist town for a long time - Acapulco (which we have no interest in “doing”). I just booked us a $32 hotel that is supposedly east of town (so we can have our drama before the next day) and right on the highway for easy access. I hope that it is there. I hope that it is on the map as the map says. I hope that it is as shitty as it is in my dreams. I hope
July 21
Playa de Iguana to Punta San Juan de Lima. Adorable tourist town, especially this time of year with only Mexican tourists. After scanning for a cheap hotel we check in and walk to one of the half dozen bar-restaurants at la playa, we got to sit and watch three great scenes. Scene one was this old man sitting alone drinking a clear alcohol - slowly but surely. He had his cell phone with him on the table and it was blaring tejano music and he was smiling. I’ll say it again, Mexicans sure do love their loud music… Scene two was the VW bus driving on the beach selling… ice cream? Ice pops? Something that tourists would likely want but we didnt’ see them actually make a sale. We think it was ice-something because of the music blaring out of the bullhorn affixed to the roof of the van - that circus-kids-ice-cream-truck-kind of jingle. They weren’t having any luck so they (i.e., the two 25 year old hombres driving and selling the iced goods) seemingly decided it was time for a break. They pulled up under a palapa and there they hung for the next hour. And left the music playing on the VW bus. It would have been charming if it was our only auditory stimulus, but it was competing with the old man’s cell phone tejano behind us… And scene three was the family of ~12 next to us that had come to San Juan for the day or vacation and was all smiles. A super sassy and adventurous “Grandma”, her studly esposo the “Grandpa”. She rocked a bright red bathing suit and ran (literally ran) back and forth from the restaurant to the beach when she wanted to. He rocked original tinted aviator glasses - bright gold rim. No shirt, and just enough in and out of shape body to make it all look good. They had 2-3 kids, and each of them were with their esposos or esposas and with their 2-3 kids. And everyone was laughing and dancing (adults) or entertaining themselves with sand and waves (kids). The only time I saw anyone pick up their phone was for a photo. Happy peeps.
Oh and I guess scene four was the waiter himself. Early 20’s, tall, and perfectly asymmetrical. Over the top friendly and treated Ernie and I very well. I think we both ended up ordering food that wasn’t even on the menu (?!?!?). He was muy bonito.
We were quite hungry. Our last meal was Pepe’s tacos two days ago. Yesterday was fruit, nuts and chips and this morning we only had coffee. At this point it was about 4:30 pm.
SO - all of this put me in the mood for what I consider to be the big news of the day… I ate fish! I ate something from the ocean! I only tried it as it was Ernie’s dinner and he was hungrier than I, but after lots of questions, I took a large forkful and put in it my mouth. Mahi mahi. Dorado. Dolphin fish. I asked what I could to the waiter, then asked Ernie all I could about his opinion about its freshness and preparedness… Holy shit I ate fish! And it was good! I admit it. In fact, if I could go back and redo it, I would get what Ernie got, which was just grilled mahi mahi. Fresh, never frozen, nothing but heat and a bit of salt. And as Ernie said, “this fish has had a better life than that chicken”. And unless that chicken came from the San Blas chicken lady where the chickens lived happily in her house until she picked them up by the neck and then the next second (a dark poof), I believe that to be true. And yes, I need to have a full proper meal before I can call myself any sort of eater of things from the ocean, but it was a start. Eat local and support fresh sustainable fishing…. Woo hoo!
Post dinner we wifi-ed about places to stay as we are coming up to another tourist stretch - Zihuatanejo and Acapulco. We don’t want to repeat previous mistakes, but wifi is so weak we only had enough patience to book tomorrow. Looks like after Acapulco and into Guatemala we are going to lose camping… a few RV parks here and there but with no shade they are miserable and nothing we want to be a part of as this heat and humidity continues. I guess the tourist part of southern Mexico is north - Yucutan and the like.
A note about the drive today - miles and miles of bananas and/or plantains. Not sure how to tell a banana vs plantain as they grow, and it was likely there were fields of both as there were both for sale on side-of-the-road stands. It is fascinating to me how the micro differences in the (duh) microclimate visually translate as we ride by.
Oh - and the local salt! Sold by the white burlap bag. Wish I could send everyone a bag of central mexi sea salt… It is delicious.
Shout out to Hotel Maria Isabel in San Juan - to the owner and her son… we suck. Or more appropriately, we don’t know our numbers. We rolled into town and found your lovely hotel and your welcoming son to greet us (probably 13 and during the school year he lives in Dallas and during the summers he comes back to San Juan to help with the family business - nice kid). While he goes and gets his ma we sneak a quick picture of their living room (see Google maps), then the lady of the house comes out, greetings, etc. We thought she told us it would be $1400 pesos for room with AC, $400 without, and $200 to camp. We check out the campsite (which was meh to ick - not her fault but it is so thick with bugs and it’s so humid we don’t know how it is possible to be this humid and not raining) and then sneak across the street to another hotel. They tell us a room is $600 a night and we take it. When we finally get around to googling the price the Hotel Maria Isabel senora had quoted us because we were thinking we were wrong and… well we felt like jerks. We were so wrong! You quoted us $500! Especially after we entered your lobby and wanted to support your political and religious beliefs (see pic). So to you Hotel Maria Isabel - lo siento!
Quiet and early night. Ernie is playing guitar.
I ask Ernie for closing thoughts and he says, “the fish was very good.”
July 22
We probably drove the most beautiful road in mainland Mexico today. Ocean, jungle, cliffs, rocks, beaches, lots of changes in elevation via lots of twists and turns…. no development, no billboards. Stunning. Ernie and I didn’t talk much at all for about 100 km, in part I think because we were taking it all in. There is no picture that could capture its beauty, and no pullouts that would have allowed such a thing, so I’ll just post the google map windy bits.
Great animals today. One highlight was a big red crab (~6” carapace) walking across the highway (claws out, as if that would help with the oncoming car). And this was at probably 700 feet up! What was little crabby doing?!? So silly. And iguanas! Some dead, but lots of them alive. And 2 feet long. Great striped tails. Heaps of smaller lizards too, dung beetles, some skunks (all dead sadly). This giant roadrunner bird thing - we have to research and ID it, but we have seen a half dozen so far - very impressive. And other birds to research - the colors are their giveaway once we have enough wifi signal to research them.
And so many mariposas. Stupid amount of mariposas. It is like this part of Mexico is a snow globe of mariposas. I watched them dance around Ernie all day. I don’t know if it is seasonal or what… but how people don’t just come here to watch all the butterflies! They are outstanding.
Ideally the day would have ended around 2-3 when we finished that amazing stretch of Hwy 200, but tourist-hotel-camping-stuff is getting fewer and farther between, so we had another 75 km or so to go before the next town of Lazaro Cardenas. There are still quite a few RV parks around this part of Mexico, but so far experience had taught us that advertised RV (only) parks either don’t allow tents or don’t have any shade, which is straight up unhealthy for us PacNW gringos. We studied the map and thought we had a plan for navigating through this city, and ultimately we only got slightly lost and wound up at a cheesy tourist hotel... We hate being at hotels and we would rather be camping…. well, ok, I personally would like to have three conditions met if we camp: 1) bikes have safe place, 2) percent humidity is lower than human body temp, 3) ambient temperature is lower than human body temp. Ernie could probably sacrifice at least two of those...
I finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance last night. It has everything I would ideally like in a book. Motorcycles, road trips, a connection with Montana and the American West. The author is even an academic and has a few pretty awesome diatribes about teaching and research in higher education. A big theme is quality, and I often found myself nodding at his critiques of what is and isn’t quality. I got all the way through it, and ultimately - I didn’t like it. And since my Missoula days I remember “the cool kids” telling me how much I’ll love this book. I don’t. It is pretentious. And woo woo. And he rambles. And the whole Chautauqua thing… And I’m pretty sure he is bipolar - which is fine and all - but don’t expect me to find his bipolar ramblings deep and explanatory of the way things have and ought to be. In a sense it is two books in one (which makes sense if he is in fact bipolar). One book is the travel story of he and his son from Minnesota to California, and the other is his “back in time” reflections and yammerings of his time as philosophy graduate student and/or his time at the mental institution where he worked through whatever major question plagued his life. The authors name is Robert, but he refers to his younger self as Phaedrus (evidence of said pretentiousness). I really did enjoy his writing style about the road trip. I could visualize every part. I thought that part of the book was fantastic, and very real and personable. I could connect. But the woo woo part… maybe I’m just not smart enough or interested enough. Ernie is reading it now - I look forward to having a mini-book club about it with him.
One inspiring part I can share is a passage early on that describes traveling via moto. So for those who may not have any sense for why we are doing what we are doing the way we are doing it, he captures it well...
“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observe and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
(Pause)
“Ernie, do you have a thought you would like me to include?”
“The fish I had yesterday was very, very good.”
July 23.
Jesus Cristo. Dios Mios. We can do everything right and still have it all come out wrong. It is too long of a story to write it all out as I wish I had the energy for… as there would be some kick ass adjectives…
1 - we book a hotel in Zihuatenajo (Z) based solely on location, as again, we are done with the stress of navigating the bikes in tourist towns
2- we have a nice ride from Lazaro Cardenas to Z… still lots of mariposas but not much for view, crops, smells, etc. A few iguanas to keep us company. We also now know the great bird we are seeing is some subspecies of chachalaca (bird we had to ID from a day or two ago). So great!
3 - we arrive in Z at 1 pm and successfully navigate to where expedia.com map said our hotel should be. Clearly, there is no hotel anywhere…
4- to avoid the madness we see signs for the airport - lets just go to airport and catch a cab that is returning after dropping off travelers and pay him to have us follow to the hotel
5- we (stupidly) tell cab driver whole story and show him our map where hotel should be but isn’t. He says he knows where this hotel is now. How much to take us there? 200 pesos (~$10).
6- he takes us there. Hotel is on a crazy crazy sloped hill. Oh my gob the slanted streets and insane slopes here that just merge with traffic… makes San Fan look like the midwest.
7- E deals with bikes as I deal with hotel. Both are difficult (E has to unpack the bikes to park them properly without them tipping over, and I have to have a broken spanish conversation with two desk peeps). Long story short, this is NOT our hotel, we are far away from our hotel, but desk peeps feel bad for sweating broken spanish gringo and help us. Shout out to Arena Suites. [email protected]. Highly recommend - looked like an amazingly beautiful place (albeit out of our budget). By now its about 2 pm.
8 - they draw us a map to get out of this part of town and to our hotel. We contemplate just not going to hotel but we’ve given our credit card info to Expedia, and we paid extra to be on our highway for ease of getting out of town tomorrow… i.e., we felt we already paid an idiot tax and didn’t want to pay it all for nothing.
9 - we follow map. Map leads us up this INSANE HILL OH MY GOD. There is no keeping the bikes upright at these intersections. We abort. We get lost. We both almost drop the bikes. We sweat more than is possible without any food or water in our systems.
10 - a super swell random Mexi dude tries really hard to convince us we can make the sketchy ass hill and turn. We still don’t think we can do it. We abort. We get lost. We both almost drop the bikes. This one part with this tour bus and then the bus backing up… dios mios.
11 - We get out of there. Chinga!
12 - we pass swell random Mexi dude and he’s still parked at the top of the sketchy hill. We honk as we ride by and he laughs. It is now about 3.
13 - We think we find our hotel, but it is spelt a little differently… We ring and ring and ring the bell. Chinga! We ask. One lady says “yep, thats it” Another says “nope”. We are sweating more than possible without any food or water in our systems. Tara is sniffling to herself… “I did everything I could think of to do to make this a reasonable experience…”
14 - We walk (as there is no more getting on the bikes - i hate the bike at this point). Talk to super cute chica with a parrot. She has a hotel. She tells me where our hotel is. I believe her. I decide we are going to our original hotel and telling them “hi and bye - we are going to stay with nice parrot chica”. We do that and of course the man running the hotel is soooo nice and friendly and supportive. He wants to hear all about our adventure. We visit as long as we can knowing our kevlar pants will turn into chastity belts if we dont’ get them off soon. So shout out to Villa de Arco. If you can get there, they are really nice people. Back to chica parrot where we had our fastest bike unload yet. Its about 4:30. So three and a half hours to get to Z and find our hotel.
15 - We used our first pool today. It drizzled on us as we let it go, talked it out, and became a better couple.
16 - head to la playa for comida. Despite the tourismo and the music and crowds, dinner was excellent. Mahi mahi and beef kabobs. Lots of great people watching. We are the only gringos outside of one California dude selling CD’s. Gracias Zihua!
Other notes of the day:
Free breakfast at the hotel. An old man in suspenders, an open fly, and an I heart NY tshirt requested a change in the TV station. Cue Fox Family - some coverage of Justin Beiber (sp?) and his concert in Madison Square Garden. There were ~20 people in the hotel breakfast area - all glued to the Beebs? Beibs? Biebs? Whatever - 12 year old hair boy band boy. There were fingers bopping to beats. All while eating toast and bananas and Mexi corn flakes and cheap hotel coffee. Surreal.
Got more shout outs today than any other day so far. Random cars passing or traveling the other way - seeing us with our motos and gear and giving a honk and a peace sign or a hello or a smile. I know I don’t need it to keep going, but I like it.
Zihuatenjo has come a long way since Andy and Red worked on their boat on this beach. I would have liked to have seen this place decades ago.
Next stop is hopefully our last big tourist town for a long time - Acapulco (which we have no interest in “doing”). I just booked us a $32 hotel that is supposedly east of town (so we can have our drama before the next day) and right on the highway for easy access. I hope that it is there. I hope that it is on the map as the map says. I hope that it is as shitty as it is in my dreams. I hope