We arrived in Mazatlan rather early and headed straight for the waterfront with Katie, Damon and Kyle. It was beautiful. A lovely ocean pool enticed Damon for a swim and despite the beckoning of breakfast at the ocean front cafes catering for western tourists we chose to press on and find something just as delicious for half the price a little out of town. We ate barbecued pork tacos from a busy roadside stall and made the plan to carry on along the main road until it gets close to the coast. We had a quick stop for fuel and one to fill our propane tank, a few others for toilet stops and to purchase much needed cold drinks. The humidity of the mainland was just so contradictory to the dry desert of the Baja. We drove on through green trees and up hills into jungle like terrain, getting stuck behind terribly slow trucks meaning that in old Maggie with no air conditioning, if you are not moving it’s like sitting in a car shaped sauna! After a long, hot day we reached the small coastal town on San Blas and drove a teeny bit further south to camp out on the beach. We parked near all the local beach-goers and hit the water immediately. It was a strange beach. There was a beautiful promenade (perfect for Hayden to enjoy an evening skateboard), a new pier in the midst of construction, some strange looking lifeguard towers, a fancy toilet block that was complete with everything except running water (which unfortunately hadn’t stopped people from using it), and an outdoor gym. All of this and hardly any buildings, all the seaside plots were completely empty or in various states of disrepair. I believe there was a hurricane a few years ago, but it was bizarre to see the contrast of the attempt at modernising the beach but with no one there to enjoy it. A possible answer to this came at dusk in the form of a severe sand fly infestation. It was even worse first thing in the morning. Damon and I must have nasty blood, Hayden and Kyle’s hairy legs perhaps offering them some protection, but poor Katie was covered in bites! The number getting to over 200 before we lost track of which ones we had counted!
We planned to head to the town of Sayulita, about 100 kilometres south and in a popular surfing area. What we didn’t know was that Sayulita was the destination for about a million other tourists. It was a little bubble of English speaking people, bars and restaurants advertising ‘American comfort food’, white people walking around releasing their inner-hippy and everyone just seemingly trying to outdo each other on how uber-cool they are. In all honesty it was beautiful. Old cobbled streets and lots of lovely shops, it just didn’t feel like Mexico anymore. We made use of some wifi and a lovely lunch and then decided to head out of town to camp on the beach and avoid paying tourist prices. Our first beach option didn’t work out so well, a large gate prevented us from getting close to the coastline (the security guard relaxing in the nearby hammock attributed to this), but we found heaven at our second destination. We had driven to the beach at Higuera Blanco and saw a sign offering parking for 50 pesos per car in a beachfront lot. There was nobody there but we figured someone would come out to see us when we tried to drive in. They did, and we paid 100 pesos for the two vehicles and that was that. The guy we paid took an interest in our two strange vehicles and it turned out his English was pretty good – he could even recognise that we had different accents! The days went by and we just paid him another 100 pesos each afternoon when he came to sit on the beach for a few hours around sunset and we were all happy.
In the week that followed there was surfing, swimming, spearfishing, walks, yoga, kite building, slack line walking, coconut cutting and for Damon, palm tree climbing! Hayden spent one morning making his own body surfing board for his hand and was extremely successful! We had noticed that there were some in one of the shops in town (no where near as nice looking) for $100- on sale! We encountered tourists from the all-inclusive resort further up the beach enjoying their horseback beach rides which gave us the sneaky idea of trying our luck at a few free cocktails whilst swimming in the pool…
Mainland Mexico
