A beach to ourselves

Josh and I just returned from a three day trip to San Blas, a small town on the Pacific Ocean, about 150 kilometers north of Puerto Vallerta. It was such a great experience. To begin, we made it out of the city safely in a rental car. And we retraced the route that we had gone a few days prior with Annie and the family, through Tequila and westward. I do not think I could ever bore of staring at this landscape... much like southwestern United States, the mountains and canyons are huge and seemingly uninhabited and composed of beautiful-colored rocks, dotted with agave and nopal cacti.
As we neared the coast we dropped in elevation a great deal and the temperature, flora and fauna reflected this change. We nearly missed both a lemur and iguana (exclaiming "Oh my god. Was that a lemur?") as we drove through the jungle (selva) and on to the coast. There were banana plants and mango trees and fields of sugar cane. As we drove through dusty little pueblos it was interesting to see that people were not living off of much, yet there seemed a never-ending supply of produce.
We made it to a small hotel in the early afternoon and began to explore. We did not know this before we arrived, but in October 2002 Hurricane Kenna hit the pueblo with 140 mph winds and a 16 foot high storm surge. 95 % of its buildings were damaged. Though wikipedia.org notes that the town has rebuilt, there are still a great deal of abandoned businesses and little houses throughout the town. And when we went to go to the beach we found an enormous stretch of beach with hardly a soul on it. We body surfed the waves until the sun began to set. Then we took a long walk. Sounds like the perfect date, I know. We just could not get over how few people there were, and felt like we had discovered something largely unknown. But this could not have been the case, as there were chairs and chairs and little cabanas lining the upper stretch of the beach. But for three days in a row, we were some of the few people swimming in that stretch of the ocean.

We did find plenty of people in the main plaza of San Blas. They were there to celebrate Mexico's Día de la Revolución with music and dancing and a parade that went on for hours with little kids dressed as soldiers, little girls dressed as indigenous women, trumpeters and drummers, more kids in costumes...


The nearby town of Sauta (that Josh had previously visited for a story two years ago) was also celebrating with a band and rodeo. We watched a few hombres get tossed around on the bulls (I was secretly happy that they got tossed off) and danced a little before returning to the celebration in San Blas.
Earlier that day we went out on a boat with a few other couples and a guide through canals in the jungle. Along the way we saw crocodiles, egrets, turtles, and so many other birds. We swam in a section of this canal that was free of crocodiles, where the water was clear and warm.



On our drive back to Guadalajara we stopped in another small pueblo on the beach called Platanitos where we ate grilled fish on the beach.


It was a weekend to experience being tourists in this country, and I have to admit, I really enjoyed it.