Acapulco Part 2

A good chunk of our beach day was spent doing this:



Interestingly, the local activity directors' jobs seemed to include humiliating themselves for the amusement of white people. They were quite entertaining, I'll have to give them that.

Of course, when we go on vacation, we still have the social worker gene (the propensity to solve problems, gather information and combat social woes whether anyone wants you to or not) going on. So, we were full of atypical tourist questions. We were taken on tours of the neighborhood of the rich and famous. I spotted one gorgeous white mansion overlooking the bay on our drive into the city and I asked our driver "Que es?" "Oh, senorita, that Sylvester Stallone's house. Ees for sale: $10 million." Sylvester Stallone filmed Rambo II in Acapulco, and everyone wants to make sure you know it. That's all you ever hear about is how he shot Rambo in the lagoon and how Humphrey Bogart filmed the African Queen in one of their lagoons. We were more interested in the following:

What does a gallon of gas cost? Turns out around $6.
What's the high school graduation rate of the people here? Turns out about 20%. Yikes.

Some of the activities we did including horseback riding on the beach (not really all I thought it would be), a visit to see their turtle protection program, a tour of the city, an accidental tour of the real city when I got us lost trying to get a luchador mask for Dante, and boating through a lagoon and seeing all sorts of wildlife. But part of the joy (and pain) of travelling with Director/Buddy is that she has her own bizarre sense of what interesting things to investigate are. She is utterly fascinated with convenience stores. What sort of junk do other countries consume? She went in *every* convenience store and fingered nearly *every* item. Not to buy it, mind you. Just to examine it. Then she'd trot us next door into the next one to see if it had anything different. She had to shop in their Sam's Club (Acapulco had two of them) just to see if her card would scan. She took great pleasure in this. Any buddy other than me would've probably been ready to kill her. We burnt up a lot of shoe leather. But I'm an easy-going travel partner like that. I mostly thought it was funny. I wish I had video of her going through the convenience stores saying "Huh!!" every 15 seconds and turning things over and over.

Oh, and there was kayaking with pretty little Mexican boys. Of course, we totally ignored their commands and made like hell straight for the open sea and thought we were going at a good clip until the guy caught up with us and basically corralled us into doing the accepted version of the kayaking part. I'm deathly afraid of water, so going out on the bay in a stupid kayak was a pretty big deal for me.


-- Virgil, survivor of kayaks