taco de pescado

hola comprades

[in a typical pickles blog worm hole of the universe, i wrote this on the beach last week, though now we are in loreto, a small town further south in the baja, sorry for the confusion].i have managed to drag myself away from the taxing lifestyle of swimming, kayaking, sunbathing, eating fish and reading books to bring you this week’s blog update. i hope you appreciate what an effort this is. we have been here on the beach south of mulege in baja california sur in mexico for just over a week now, in a little community of rvers and campers which i can’t imagine leaving it has become so much a home in that short time. there are some here who come each year for the winter from north america and canada (snow birds), and some passing through for shorter times, like us. life has gone back to basics and consists of getting up with the sun, drinking coffee whilst looking at the calm flat sea, noticing any differences from the day before, perhaps a bit more wind, or a higher tide, or fewer or more seagulls and pelicans flying around. around lunchtime it always tends to get breezier and we might have to move further back up the beach, or if it gets really gusty, into our little palapa shelter next to monty’s nose, to continue reading or contemplating life. we swim, i have been running up and down the beach on the harder sand behind monty and the other campers, we have kayaked out to see islands full of birds - blue-footed boobies (tee hee), cormorants, pelicans, an elusive peregrine falcon (as yet unseen), ospreys, seagulls - and looked at angel fish, parrot fish and the ubiquitous sergeant major fish. we go visiting the other campers on the beach, and discuss things about the beach and other subjects. and we go back to bed as the sun sets, and i don’t remember ever getting this much good quality sleep after such perfect days. if any of you have read anything by magnus mills, this is what this reminds me of though i can‘t remember which specific book just a general feeling he creates, which is that of living in a kind of microcosm of the real world outside, where small things become big topics of conversation and things move slowly and gently. funny how your parameters diminish and increase at the same time as you slow down and take everything in much more deeply. i suppose what i’m trying to do is put a philosophical and meaningful slant on essentially being a beach bum in mexico, so bear with me…

so we arrived here to this beach last saturday, before which time we had had nearly a week in ensenada, a larger town in the north of the baja. we crossed the border into tijuana (experiencing no drug related shootings or kidnappings, contrary to expectations), on nov 14th, just as we were supposed to, as that was when my US visa waiver expired. given the cross questioning i’d been subject to at LA for arriving without my return flight out of the states, i had printed out my tickets home to england and got all my stories straight in my head (not that they’re not straight anyway but you know what i mean), and was ready for any customs related questioning. typically, nothing happened, we sailed through mexican customs, got 180 day tourist cards for mexico, and were about to be on our merry way until we realised we hadn’t seen the US side. so we trotted over the bridge and found our way to them, i asked a guard stationed there and he said we didn’t need to see them. but what about my little green card i’ve had stapled in my passport for the last 3 months. oh you can just throw it away. hmph. or if you like i can collect it from you. yes please, i would feel better if you did that. so i gave it to him, so essentially he could throw it away for me in a more official way i suppose. and that was that, and there we were back in mexico, the land of colour, corona, cactuses, seemingly endless photo opportunities (often involving those first 3 things), hats, tacos, and those foreign and interesting things: mexican people.

a giant tecate beer can in the reserved parking spot. wonder if it got a ticket.

on crossing the border here were my feelings. it is such a visual shock arriving in tijuana, mexico from america, by road. suddenly the land, that same land you were looking at just 50 miles north in san diego, all manicured and healthy green looking and neat and tidy and ordered, is brown, dirty, dusty, barren, chaotic. houses here are shacks in slums by the road, sprawling around each other like sealions on the beach, roads in the suburbs are not paved but dust, cars are broken, back windscreens replaced by blankets and cardboard. the highways cut through dusty pale brown banks of earth, mexican workers and earth moving machines standing around. cracks in the road reveal the earth below. the earth is everywhere, it isn’t covered over with gardens yards pavements golf courses picket fences garages full of cars and boats, it is just there, visible under half finished houses, bits of glass, chickens, corona bottle tops, children: children out touting goods, selling trinkets, foodstuffs, juggling with painted faces to earn a peso or two. their counterparts north of the border are surfing with their dads, riding shiny new bicycles, being taken out for all you can eat dinners, or shopping for shiny new things to maintain their continuous entertainment. i realised i would rather be this side of the border than that.

we cruised down highway 1 for another few hours, bert let me drive monty again. i felt he needed a break and the road wasn’t actually busy, or dangerous, i made sure i stayed around 50mph. i feel slightly out of control if monty gets above this, plus the road was fairly curvy and to the right was the sea which i didn’t want us to end up in. there are billboards alongside the road advertising new beachfront lots, live on the beach, amazing new beach homes, etc etc. yet another striking juxtaposition are these swanky americanised condos and housing developments all down the coast, on large tracts of land on the beach, next to the mexican casitas and crumbly houses. funny - they have pretty much the same view. we rolled into ensenada that saturday night and found an rv camp just north of town, called king’s coronita. we met the lady who ran it - dolores -, her father’s surname was king, and coronita means little crown. she was half italian and from la paz, further south, and we got to know her during our stay there. she had a big framed photo of the pope on his 5th visit to mexico, right on the wall when you went in her little house at the top of the campsite, so i felt he was watching all our visits to her. we made sure we were very polite, just in case there’s anything to all that religious stuff, and also because she was a very polite upright lady. she gave us a mexican sweet one day called a gloria, kind of sweet milk with sugar in it. she told us how much ensenada had changed over the years, and how whenever she goes there she makes sure to only visit the same streets and shops for doing her errands, so as not to risk becoming lost in the metropolis. she told us her cousin is a concert pianist, and another cousin also very good at the piano. she had a piano in her living room, just to the left of the pope, and i wished i could remember how to play the piano so i could have played it for her but i really can’t.

we went in to town a few times, on the mini bus with the michael jackson soundtrack, that picks you up on the dusty side of the highway. ensenada means bay, it is on the sea, and is a large port. there was a huge cruise ship in whilst we were there, and we found after our first visit that there was a whole area of town that catered for cruise ship passengers, ie it was swankier and more expensive. in the real (non cruise ship) part of town, we found the best ever fish tacos and gorged ourselves on them - at 7 pesos a taco (around 30p), how could you not. we went to a cool bar with almost a sawdust floor, and lots of mexican type pictures on the walls, a shoeshine man came in and looked at people’s shoes. bert had on non shinable shoes sadly, but the man shone some other people’s shoes. a mexican man at the bar was wearing a hat just like bert’s cowboy hat he got in chetumal last year, they gave each other a nod. people kept emerging from a strange back room, perhaps it was a gambling den, or drug cartel headquarters, or brothel. we never figured it out, nor did we see people going in, only coming out. then we went to a more american bar over the road and watched a boxing match on tv. i’m not sure why we did this, i have never watched a boxing match ever, i guess it’s because it was on all the screens and everyone was watching it so we just followed suit: it was usa versus mexico, the mexican won. it wasn’t very nice or interesting, and i can’t understand the desire to take part in it as either a boxer or a spectator, but there you go. having said this, the next day on our way to the hotel next door to get a beer, we had a boxing match against each other. bert is very nippy and would be a formidable opponent i thought for any real boxer. we didn’t really hit each other, me because i wasn’t fast enough, and him because he won’t hit a girl, even just for fun. the guard at the hotel laughed at us and asked us what we were doing. we boxed his ears. (not really). the hotel bar had little aquariums, one of them had a lion fish in it, it is stripy and barbed like a lion. i tried to take photos, but it kept moving and blurring them.

we ate about 5 gallons of lime flavoured peanuts and watched costa rica v uruguay in a world cup qualifier.

a taxi driver complimented me on my spanish, he said felicidades en su espanol, es muy bueno. we laughed heartily as we fell out of the taxi - i didn’t know they did sarcasm in mexico. in the sawdust bar in town i had been telling bert that cuanto es means how much is it, and donde esta means where is it. he repeated each phrase over and over so they stuck in his head, then turned to the barman and said donde esta por favor. he was so proud that i didn’t want to tell him he’d just asked the barman where is it instead of how much is it. the barman was obviously used to incomprehensible requests and produced the bill nonetheless. one day we went into town to get some screws to hook up the solar panel to monty’s battery, so i learnt how to ask for screws (tornillos), nuts (duercas), and the piece that connects one bit of wire to another (terminales cerrados para conectar un cable con un otro). it took about 2 hours and seemingly the 20th little electrical store until we found what we needed, every store either had the wrong size, or only in bulk amounts, or none at all, and all of them were really helpful in telling us where there was another store we could try, and weirdly always told us a whole new place, never doubling up any previous advice on where to go. it began to feel like some strange treasure hunt, we knew there had to be what we needed somewhere in ensenada, and that somebody somewhere knew where it was, and that through my broken spanish and our hard work pounding the streets and asking all and sundry, we were capable of finding it. imagine our immense satisfaction when we walked into autopartes las rojas, and asked our question yet again and he rummaged around in the dark shelves behind the desk until he found a bag of about a million terminales cerrados for us. we bought the 12 we needed for just 48 pesos, 4 pesos a terminal, and went off to get the bus. we got on one bus we thought was ours, and asked for our desination, the driver told us this wasn’t the right bus, and drove us to where the right bus stop was and didn’t charge a peso for the favour. all in all a pretty good day.

one day we cycled to the shop nearest the campsite to get some supplies. en route, my lovely old 10 speed falcon bike decided to break - somehow the back derailleur got tangled up in the spokes of the back wheel. this was quite perturbing, but fortunately i didn’t fall off as we were going slow enough along to not be too startled by this turn of events. we carried on pushing our bikes, and found a fresh chicken shop and a little supermarket, so got our things, and bert pushed me along on the broken bike back to the rv site which was mostly downhill on a quiet road. this is a shame and i can’t decide whether to give up on the falcon or hang on to it and get it fixed. so far i’ve done nothing to rectify the problem other than look at the derailleur a bit now and then which hasn’t changed the situation.

one day in town whilst having (another) taco, an old almost toothless mexican came over with his violin, wanting to earn a few pesos by playing us a song. he was sweet, so i told him to play us whatever his favourite song was. he thought for a while, then off he went, after what i presume was some tuning up but it could have been part of the song. afterwards he said it was called dios nunca muerte, which means god never dies. i think on listening to this rendition, god might indeed have keeled over and died, but i told senor violinist it was beautiful, and thanked him and told him i am learning the cello. (he really wasn’t that bad, but i couldn’t resist the joke, sorry). he was really happy to speak to us and i felt we had cheered him up in some small way, as i don’t imagine he makes much money or has much interaction with people.

back at king’s coronita, we put monty’s awning up and admired her and took photos of her amongst her little palm tree friends. we sat under the awning in our chairs and drank tequila shots and corona and watched the sunset from the rocky promontory nearby - not exactly a picture postcard mexican beach, more a potential deathtrap if you don’t watch where you put your feet on all those craggy rocks. it adds to the charm, i find. we exclaimed at how much we loved mexico and how glad we were to be back - our last time here was our big road trip to the yucatan peninsula in march/april. i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again - the picture you get of mexico in the news and in films is just not a balanced one - yes there are huge problems here, but you don’t get involved in them, and as a tourist you are welcomed here by the extremely friendly and hospitable and unpretentious people. there are numerous military stops along the highways, and it can be unnerving seeing them in their camouflage uniforms with large machine guns, but seriously they’re not going to shoot you (they build little hide outs with sand bags and netting, kind of fox holes - errr hello do you think we can’t see you in there, amigos). they are only ever looking for drugs and guns, so guess what, don’t bring drugs and guns on your mexican holiday and you’ll be fine. the most trouble we’ve had so far is having to hand over 2 oranges and an apple when crossing from north to south baja - some kind of pest control - the other 2 apples we ate then and there having checked with the officials we could do that, and the remaining vegetables in the fridge i didn’t mention, as i wanted the courgette and onions for pasta sauce for dinner.

as it happened, and the reason for our prolonged stay in ensenada, the huge off-road desert race of all races - the baja 1000 - was starting in ensenada that very week. the town was preparing for it, and the rv site was half full with off road race cars and huge truck/motorhomes that house both the cars and their drivers and support teams and crates of beer. bert was overjoyed to be there for that, with all those engines and horse powers and suspension systems and tires and gps systems to look at. i myself wasn’t what you would call overjoyed but i was joyed that he was overjoyed, and i guess it’s not everyday you get to hang out with teams of baja 1000 racers and learn about all that kind of stuff. some of them were sponsored by honda, who i have heard of, and was therefore impressed. we hung out at their trailers a few nights, and bert talked that weird talk that only men know how to do, that is about technical car related matters.

i felt like the only girl in a bunch of men and cars, which is exactly what i was. they were all generally really nice men and interested in our lives and what we were doing, and they loved telling us about the race and the cars. one of them had some pretty disparaging things to say about a trip to london he once took, so when he asked me if i’d enjoyed my time in america, i said umm i suppose it was ok.

one of the cars they had was worth around 3 quarters of a million dollars. wowsers we said. i figured monty is worth 6.5 one thousandths of a million dollars: it doesn’t sound so impressive so i didn’t mention it to the men with their cars. on the thursday of that week, they have the contingency, which is where all the cars in the race have to be checked for their specifications and all that technical stuff, so they get in a big long queue down town in ensenada, and you can wander along through the queue and look at the cars and take pictures and talk to the drivers, and hear the engines revving up. we got a few freebie stickers, and a map of the route, and bert got in a scuffle for a free honda cap that the honda people were throwing into the crowd - he won the fight in the end, against a mexican man. they shook hands after and smiled and laughed and everything was great, and bert had his hat, and told me not to call it a fight if i wrote about it on my blog. it was a scuffle, readers, not a fight. and there were other scuffles going on around us.

and that was the end of our time in ensenada - on thursday 19th november we packed up monty and headed back to highway 1 to get to our next destination, mulege, about 300 miles further south. more to come on those 2 weeks soon readers. adios for now.