Acapulco Part 3

This was the sunrise I got every morning from my hotel room:



Sigh. I miss it. What I also got before sunrise ever thought about happening was the insane traffic noises of Mexico. It was something I had forgotten about that came flooding back when I reentered the country. Mexican drivers are in-fucking-sane. Lanes and lines mean nothing to them. They honk as a way of communication. **honk** "I'm cutting you off." **honk** "Get a move on, the light turned green a millisecond ago!!" **honk** "Hey, you're a bus! Look at me, I'm a cab." **honk** "Woot, white women." **honk** "We're in a car. Whee." There are always tires screeching. Somehow, nobody manages to get into an accident. If you're a white tourist looking to cross the street, you'd best embed yourself in a group of natives and use them as an convoy. Because otherwise, you're dead meat. I saw four lanes of cars, buses and other bizarre vehicles crammed onto two lanes of road. And they all worked it out somehow. The taxi rides were always fun. And by fun I mean you thanked a minor deity you could get out of the car again without any broken bones.

The hotel I stayed at is actually in this picture. If you follow the line straight up from the corner of the brick wall in the bottom of the picture, that's more or less where I was. Whee! That one clipper-looking ship you see in the bottom right side is their "navy." At night, the lights come on and it looks like a disco ship.


Of course, our keen ability to get into trouble kicked in immediately. As we were walking up the beach, we saw in the distance a kid playing with a wooden box. The kid gets up and runs away from it. It was a nice box, we thought he left it behind on accident. Director/Buddy gets the box from the bay and carries it up onto the beach for the kid. Immediately there's lots of yammering and pointing and freaking out. We back away slowly. Turns out that was somebody's goddamn cremation box. Apparently, people go out onto the Pacific and cast the boxes into the ocean. This one had floated in with the tide. There wasn't anything in it. But leave it to us to desecrate somebody's tomb on accident. Sigh.

This picture makes me hate my camera. At my shoulder line you should see Pacific Ocean for miles and blue sky. Turns out it's just haze. Grr. My hat, clipped from my Navy Buddy, saved my bacon from frying on numerous occasions.



I love Mexico because it is a land of intense contradictions. And a sort of intensity that I like. Gorgeous homes will sit right next to tin shacks. Preteens walked the beach with beer bottles in hand. You could totally tell which part of the beach was the public part versus the privately paid for part. The growth in Acapulco is almost 100% related to tourism--giant condo complexes going up right and left. There's plenty of room for someone afflicted with a social work gene. But only a few streets away, the real Mexico still goes on, with its mangrove swamps and just that electrified charge in the air. I love it.

-- Virgil