March 2007
Disheveled and tired we made it back to our apartment in La Paz and I decided it was apropos to partake in the local custom of siesta – an all day siesta. Josh went about some sort of business and it was decided that we should leave the next day, a Sunday, for the mainland via either the ferry to Mazatlan or the more fun to say Topolobampo. It being a Saturday night when I awoke from my siesta I didn’t take too kindly to waking up supremely early and dealing with immigration/customs/and ferry personnel. So I reasoned with my brother and told him I wasn’t leaving the next day (I know that’s not reasoning but that’s how things work with Josh) and he said that he was and that he’d meet me in Mazatlan. We were in accord, at this point we needed a bit of space from each other anyway.
Josefina and Juan were throwing us a going away party that night so we made our way over to their house after Josh had packed up his kit (that’s for all of our British/Kiwi/Aussie reader’s out there). They’d prepared a feast of empanadas, tacos dorados, taquitos, guacamole and salsa, and a celebratory cake. Even more of the family came this time as spouses and cousins and their kids came to meet the gringo part of the family before they left. Everyone was ravenously starving and as soon as the big cardboard box soaked from the grease of the empanadas arrived it was gone in a matter of minutes. Everyone was very happy to have seen us again and made us promise that it wouldn’t be another twenty years before we, or our parents, returned. As the cake was polished off Marisol invited me to go out with her friends to the dance club – I told her I would join her later once my hands were colder (mas mano fria). As the party winded-down Josh and I made our gracious exit and headed home; he for sleep and me for a change of clothes.
I walked the mile to the malécon and the row of bars that included Carlos n’ Charlie’s, The Jungle, and some other third thing in this list*. After a very uncomfortable swing around The Jungle in which it was difficult to move at all let alone dance I found Marisol with her girlfriends in the VIP section under the cover band’s stage. I crossed over the velvet rope and tripped- an excellent entrance if I do say so myself. She was with five or six beautiful girlfriends from school that were muy agradable (very friendly/agreeable). We sat and yelled at the band in between songs – they knew the singer so it wasn’t obnoxious – to play a cover of Radiohead’s I’m a Creep which he didn’t do. So we drank and danced to the tunes that he was choosing – Guns ‘n Roses, U2, some Mexican song that included, “Chinga Los Gringos” (Fuck the Gringos) – until closing time came around and Marisol’s curfew was coming up. But then their friend Juan, the singer, began the opening bars to I’m a Creep and everyone left in the bar started singing along with the unity that only a song that asserts the singers own debased nature, non-belonging, and wish to be something special when in reality he is merely a creep. Very-sing along. As the last bars fade away and Thom Yorke intones, ‘I don’t belong here, I don’t belong here,’ the bouncers nod in agreement and we file past.
The next morning by the time I woke up Joshua had left for the ferry terminal outside of town so I meandered about my daily tasks free from the confines of having anyone to tell me what to do or by when to do it. I spent part of the day walking around the streets near our old house before making my way over to the kindergarten that I went to and hanging onto the fence for a while. It was strange to think that I had been confined in this little rectangular building and the tiny playground replete with tractor tires painted bright colors for a formative year twenty years ago. I didn’t remember the days spent inside so well since Joshua and I would cut school just about every day to go and play in the streets or at the beach playground. So the nostalgia was short but sweet.
I crossed the street to Humberto and Betty’s house for an early supper and some mano fria. We were all sitting at the table on the front porch discussing Joshua and I splitting up for a bit and how he’d fared with the ferry when Marisol came home from school and said, “I just saw Joshua’s motorcycle on the malécon in front of a coffee shop.” So we decided that we’d all hop in a car and go down and surprise him on his ‘ferry trip.’ We piled into the aunt’s Volkswagen Bora with the girls and headed for a cruise down the main street (not unlike Duval Street with the endless supped-up cars driving back and forth all day since they have nothing to do) but the girls weren’t ‘dressed’ for the malécon so they refused to get out of the car lest they be seen by the bevy of boy suitors. So I hopped out of the car to find Josh coming out of the coffee shop with a smile: “It’s Sunday, it’s very hard to do immigration things on a Sunday in Mexico.” I smiled too and we laughed like at the end of a cheesy sitcom.
Monday seemed like a better day to deal with these cosas, things, so we headed back to Casa del Diablo for a bit before saying our goodbyes since we’d be leaving early in the morning. The next day we went looking for the immigration office – harder than it seems – to finally have our passports stamped and receive visas for our stay before heading to the ferry terminal. We found the office and started the proceedings which involved Joshua walking for half an hour to a bank in order to pay the fees, me going to a small tienda a few blocks away to buy the necessary papers to fill out, and asking for our passports to actually be stamped before we were able to race the five miles to the terminal to be able to check-in in time.
Buying the Immigration Papers from a tienda.
Securing Las Motos for the trip across the Sea of Cortez(notice Elmo).
After a very fast and beautiful ride we made it to the terminal in time to see sixteen other motorcycles being readied for the crossing. After a few SNAFU’s like the power going out, we received our Temporary Import of a Vehicle certificates and made our way to buy tickets to either Mazatlán which was going to take eighteen hours or Topolobampo which was more of a straight-shot on a newer ferry and would take seven hours. We chose the one with the better name. After securing the motorcycles in between the other sixteen motorcycles, BMWs incidentally, we made our way to the passenger decks which were seriously opulent. They even had a pretty good fish/chicken taco buffet that was included with the crossing. As we pulled out of the harbor; a large task since this ferry was probably carrying upwards of 250 tractor trailer trucks, we were waved away by a lone seal basking on one of the channel markers.
A Loose Seal named Lucille Wishes us a Bon Voyage.
We made friends with a family that was traveling home in their van to a small village north of Guadalajara as well as befriending a polish guy who was traveling for the first time in his life and had randomly chosen Baja California as his destination but we made sure to avoid the other biker’s since then it would just be talking shop and that’s not usually the most interesting thing to talk about… I taught the family’s youngest son, who was skating around with those shoes with wheels on them, how to count to one hundred, say his ABCs, and tell his mother and father that he now speaks English for a while and Josh was on the deck for a whale of a whale sighting: for more than an hour a whale had been jumping fully out of the water and then ‘sailing’ with one fin out of the water behind the ferry. All I saw were some jellyfish and a lone sea turtle when I went on deck.
The ferry pulled into the pitch black harbor with only the smallest of a sliver of moon surveying the wind whipped bay. I walked out onto one of the decks that housed the rescue boats which were lined up and ready for a sinking and sneaked in between a couple and watched as the deft dance of docking took place. Pangas scurrying from mooring buoys to pilings as lines were thrown to them from the deck and they puttered out to secure them. It was slow motion until all the points met and everyone began to line up at different exit points. Since we were on motorcycles we were told to go first since they put them in the commercial traffic hold so he headed for our line and told the Polish guy that we’d meet him outside and give him a ride to town since it was five miles away. We headed into the container hold and took off all the tie-downs that we’d strapped around them and made our way out to the mainland of Mexico. Josh and I switched bikes since I didn’t want to ride someone else and we met up with the Polish guy to give him a ride to a hostel. We figured that we might as well share a room for the night to keep down on costs.
After a hellish ride on Joshua’s motorcycle that really doesn’t have much by the way of a headlight we made it to a hotel by midnight but there wasn’t any off-street parking which meant; unsafe for motorcycle in big city. So we looked around on foot until we found another around the corner which would allow us to park the two motorcycles in the lobby (a tiny, tiny lobby). We maneuvered them into very tight spots and asked about a taco stand in the vicinity.
Our Motorcycles in the Lobby of the Hotel. (Later in the morning when Josh moved his bike outside Elmo was stolen within minutes off of the back.)
We went and had some vampiros and gorditas with jamaica (haa-my-kah) juice and learned that the Polish Gentleman needed to make the one and only tourist train in Mexico the next morning at the Statione de Ferro Carrils on the outskirts of town. Early in the morning. I decided that this was a job best dealt with by Josh so I was polite at six in the morning when they woke me up to say goodbye and Josh rode him to the train station for the next leg of his journey.
Our Polish friend leaving for his Grand Tour through the French Riviera.
*The one and only reference to the Spongebob Squarepants Movie and the best joke in it.
