“Everything in Mexico tasted. Vivid garlic, cilantro, lime. The smells were vivid. Not the flowers, they didn’t smell at all. But the sea, the pleasant smell of decaying jungle.”  –Lucia Berlin 

We spent a week at our camp home on Playa Azul on the Michoacán coast. Three college students from Mexico City joined us for a few days. A steady trickle of visitors stopped by, bringing reefer to share, nimbly climbing the coconut palms, a knife in their teeth, to harvest cocos – a refreshing beverage in a green-husked goblet. The steep drop-off at the shore made this beach less popular with families and surfers, but the waves were fun and fierce for a novice body surfer. More than once I caught an incoming wave the same moment I was getting caught in the powerful backwash – it felt like 90 seconds in a washing machine. 

On Christmas Eve we went to town after dinner and took in the final night of Las Posadas, Mary and Joseph in search of shelter, the piñatas of Navidad descending until Midnight Mass in the tiny packed church, where gaiety mixed with solemnity. This marked a growing accord between Michael and me, a new bond of partnership. We talked of the spirits – fear and anxiety, resentment and regret, self and egotism, attachment and addiction, depression and despair – that haunted us and held us back. One evening two young men walked into our camp, sat by our fire, offered us drugs we had to refuse, and then silently moved on. After they left, we looked at each other, unsettled by the aura of malevolence, and silently mouthed in unison: Demons. I wrote in my journal:

and if angels sing in my head

if spirits stand over me

but pass on by

how can these be told?

On December 27 we moved down the coast, stopping in Lázaro Cárdenas for supplies and then catching a ride from two San Diego surfers headed to their friends’ house for a meal. We were invited to join them, so across the Río Balsas into the state of Guerrero, and twenty kilometers more to the beach town of Petacalco, where we met Russell, Carmelo, Sharon, Jay, Fred, all transplanted from Cape Hatteras, seeking a higher consciousness and the clean waves at El Faro in Lázaro. They rented the house and land from their friend Santiago, growing papayas, bananas, tomatoes, and beans. We set up camp in a coconut grove behind their house, becoming involved in the community and its efforts to achieve enlightenment by letting go of fears and egos. After dinner we’d all get high and engage in intense discussions on how to “be here now.” We contributed what we could, but they were on their own path.

One day we took an excursion, paddling surfboards across the mouth of the Río Balsas to an island where Santiago’s father, Samuel, farmed a paradise guarded by royal palms rising seventy feet in the air. He tended fields of maíz, jícamas, papayas. He harvested calabazas and camotes and treated us to plates of them, enmielados (boiled in honey). On New Year’s Eve we tried marijuana tortillas, then dinner at the house of Diego and Felipe, two local fisherman friends, and then back to the house, where the scene was lost in reefer, tequila, and rock ’n’ roll. On Sunday we made dinner in gratitude for our friends’ hospitality – tempura vegetables, gorditos filled with fried veggies, sweet creamy atole for dessert.

When we left on Monday, we took on new names to symbolize our new commitment. Reflecting on our experiences at Petacalco, we resolved to abstain from reefer, feeling it might be blurring our focus. I was now Marcos, and Michael became Miguel – one of the freedoms of traveling, because no one is qualified to contest the “truth” of your life. A fifty-kilometer ride took us to the pueblo of Lagunillas, where we stocked up and set off on a seven-kilometer hike down a dirt road to Playa Troncones, recommended by our Petacalco friends. The next day, searching for shellfish in the rocky shallows among sea urchins and mussels, a rainbow of fish darting in and out among the rocks, I was tumbled by the surf, receiving cuts and sea urchin spines I’d later have to extract. That afternoon a fisherman gave us a small shark he’d hauled in, which we then shared with the farmer whose land we camped on. After Miguel figured out how to skin the shark with the tools at hand, we grilled steaks.

We stayed at Playa Troncones for four days, the mountains a blue shadow at our back, the sea shimmering before us, sunsets glowing through the palm trees. We obtained drinking water and eggs from the farmer we’d shared the shark with, all the cocos we wanted when he harvested the grove, a feast of oysters one day from a man who dove for them. The Father provided for us.

After hiking back to the highway, we caught a ride in the back of a pickup to Zihuatanejo, a resort town rimming a beautiful bay. A string of hotels along the beach, a marina where yachts of all types docked, beaches populated with rich Chilangos and English-speaking gringos of all stripes – Murricans, Canucks, Brits, Aussies. After slurping down a bowl of pozole at a street stand, we hiked away from town to the other side of the bay, where we camped by a house owned by an absentee American and cared for by the Mexican family living next door. We quickly became friends with the caretaker, who invited us to attend a meeting for worship with his family, my first experience with a Jehovah’s Witness service. On Monday we exchanged dollars for pesos and treated ourselves to a lunch of hot tortillas fresh from a tortillería, bananas, and crema de cacahuates (yup, peanut butter).

We continued southeast along the coast toward Acapulco. Within a hundred kilometers, we hopped off the road and hiked five kilometers to a spot beside a swift-running stream near the pueblo of Santa María. We camped on a sandbank by the stream and slowed down for a couple days, fasting, reading the Bible, lazing in the sun, slipping into the stream to cool off, comfortable in the stillness. I wrote in my journal: 

Friday morning, we were back to the blacktop and sticking out our thumbs for Acapulco. We got one ride, then nothing for hours and miles until three vacationing students from Mexico City stopped to deliver us to six p.m. downtown Acapulco. We soon met Antonio and Francisco, kids living honestly on the beach. They led us to Playa Caleta, the only Acapulco beach one could sleep on. Near the mouth of the bay, far from the glitz of el centro, we’d sit in the relative quiet and comfort of hotel chairs and enjoy a late meal. At dawn, we’d rise as the workers rushed through straightening chairs and raking the beach. We checked out the city, the glaring contrasts of wealth and poverty, the tapestry and travesty of the tourist trade, and the humanity that exists in spite of that.

Los Ángeles de Acapulco

every Saturday

the children of Acapulco get a bath

and as evening comes

the plazas and calles

become filled with the perfume

of jabón and champú

from the anointed heads

of children at play

We had success at the Mexican Immigration office, extending our tourist visas for three more months. We enjoyed Acapulco beach life for the next few days, relaxing under the sombrillas when the chair-ticket guy was not around. Our little beach urchin friend Manuel would bring us leftovers from his daily hustle of the tourists – hot cakes and pastries in the morning, steak or fish and bolillos in the evening. We chatted with some of those tourists – a retired German diplomat, a restaurant owner from Blackpool, a retired British civil servant – but our patience was tested by overheard conversations that revealed how oblivious they were of the world around them. On Friday we took Manuel to a dentist to have his teeth looked at and bought food for the next leg of our trip. 

The next morning we took a bus through the part of Acapulco we’d avoided – Pizza Hut, Shakey’s, Denny’s, Big Boy, Colonel Sanders – and then got a ride in the back of a camioneta climbing the cliffs overlooking the bay and then south. The road was quiet, but we caught a ride from a crazy young busdriver who burned through his route and then talked with us at its end, sharing his pan dulce. A traveling salesman took us to Pinotepa Nacional in Oaxaca, along the way turning off onto a dirt road to a beach restaurant and a delicious fish dinner. And finally to Puerto Escondido, a fishing port turned surfing and hippie hangout. We scoped out the town, full of hip young gringos, trailer park offering campsites for 17 pesos (85 cents) a night. We hiked down to Playa Zicatela and made a quiet camp in the scrub woods away from the beach. The surfers would come out our way to wrestle and ride the waves, the beach strewn with self-absorbed kids getting high or tan or both. We befriended a Belizean and Canadian couple who had met in Escondido. He was nursing a knife wound suffered at the hands of her enraged former boyfriend, but we admired how completely in love they were.

We decided to bid adiós to the coast and head north toward Oaxaca City, bypassing the Yucatán and Guatemala for now. Over three months in Mexico and four months on the road, we moved slowly but deliberately. Miguel and I still had our differences, but they were the healthy, normal consequences of traveling together. I was asking questions whose answers strengthened my convictions, eased my doubts, and filled me with peace and equanimity. My apprenticeship was coming to a close.

Glossary

Las Posadas - Literally, the inns. A nine-day reenactment of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging, which ends on Christmas Eve. A popular processional ceremony in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

jícamas, calabazas, camotes - Jícamas and camotes are root crops. The jícama has a sweet, nutty flavor, crisp like a water chestnut. Camotes are in the sweet potato family. Calabazas are in the pumpkin family.

Chilangos - Residents of Mexico City or Mexico, DF (Distrito Federal). When used by those from other parts of Mexico, it can have a derogatory meaning. Citizens of Mexico City often use it as a point of pride.

pozole - A traditional Mexican stew of hominy and pork or chicken, often garnished with shredded lettuce, onions, garlic, chili peppers, avocados, and fresh lime juice.