Mi Cuñada

Despite the recent flu scare, my sister-in-law Emily "braved" the elements and is here visiting from New York for the week. Though we have not actually been wearing masks here, it was fun to pose with Madero above.


We spent part of our time on the coast back in San Blas, one of Josh and my favorite beach destinations thus far. The beach is lengthy and the sand is white and fine. It is also shallow for quite some distance, and this in turn makes for 'sweet' body surfing. We used kick boards to help propel us around 75 yards at times. We even made an attempt to get surfing lessons, but the instructor told us the waves just weren't right at that moment.
On our second evening we drove down the coast to revisit San Francisco, a town that Josh and I went to with my parents back in March. We were determined to eat at one of the best restaurants we have eaten at in Mexico, La Ola Rica. Before dinner we walked down by the beach and watched the surfers for a while.

Los Surfistas from Melissa Warp on Vimeo.

During our drive back to Guadalajara we were stopped at a roadside inspection where they inquired whether we were sick, and where we were coming from and going to. We dared not mention the "F" word (it's the "I" word for Influenza if you speak español). We also stopped over in a little town called Magdalena to look at opals, and hit the town of Tequila to buy some agave syrup. The drive into and away from Tequila is something to be seen, comparable to driving through rolling vineyards or orchards. The agave plants seems to dot every hillside in that region and have a blue glow when seen in vast numbers.

It is hot, hot here in Guadalajara now. Tonight it rained for the first time in months and it felt cool and wonderful. We spent a good portion of the day indoors taking care of computer work... then later in the day we ventured to Tlaquepaque, a town that has become merged with Guadalajara and is known for its pretty central plaza and stores selling locally made ceramics, weavings, tin ornaments, beaded jewelry and more. Josh and I were giddy about purchasing a quilt made in Guatamala, something we saw when we first arrived here and finally decided to buy. We also purchased a mirror decorated with tiles portraying luchadores (infamous lucha libre fighters) that I wish I could show, but is packaged for travel. I hate to disrupt it.
This evening we are wrapping up a relaxing week with a home-cooked dinner as Emily is cooking chicken with Indian spices. We have enjoyed our time with her and will probably go through some withdrawl after she leaves, as she is our last guest after a series of weeks with visitors.

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.