2012 Mexico - Melaque

Hi, I'm back.  That was an interesting 2-week hiatus.   My fancy-shmancy Nexus 7 woke up dead the morning we went to Guadalajara, which is about 2-3 weeks ago.  I thought it might be in a coma, but now I'm pretty sure it's stone dead.  Either the charging-thing inside the machine is hooped, or all the magic drained out of one of the slots overnight.  That puts us down to one machine, and Deb is hooked on a new game.....  grrr.  The Nexus is still on warranty, so no worries.  It quickly became apparent that I was going to have to call (on the telephone) to get anything started on a replacement.  That's always fun for me, but with just one hearing aid it's absolute bliss.  Eventually I got Omar from Iran, who is the warranty guy for the Chinese tablet sold by an American company to a hapless Canadian.  After I finished explaining my situation to Omar he said 'no worries, just give me the serial number off the box that the tablet was s...

Some general notes about the city for those who haven't been here.  Guadalajara is Mexico's second-largest city, located in the Central Valley which is in the mountains at 5,200 feet.  This gives it a terrific climate, with 9 months of the year in the mid-20s and 3 months around 30; overnight lows vary from 10-15 degrees.  In other words, it's spring/summer pretty much all year.   It was founded just under 500 years ago, and has a magnificent historical section and is loaded to the gunnels with art and culture, which of course is pretty much wasted on me.  But the buildings are cool.   The scale of this place is also pretty daunting.  If you took all of the people living in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Yukon, the NWT, and Nunavut, you could put them into Guadalajara and have room left over.  Of course you'd have to take all the Mexicans out first, but you get what I mean.  It's big.   Today was Shopping Day, as Deb had h...

Well, the last week has been extremely eventful and not without its stresses.   Last Monday night I was off with my buddy Bob playing Texas Holdem with 9 other like-minded snowbirds.  Bob won, again, but that's another story.  Whilst I was there my left hearing aid started acting up, with the sound cutting in and out.  By Tuesday morning it was completely verlumpt.  This is bad, as I have a tough enough time with TWO hearing aids, so getting it fixed became the immediate priority.  No problem, I thought; I'll just get someone in Manzanillo to fix it.  Not!  OK, how about Puerto Vallarta, which is a mere 4 hours away by bus.  After a day or so of searching, it turns out that there are two places there and they both send their stuff out of town to be fixed.  OK, how about Colima, which is 2.5 hours out past Manzanillo?  I found a guy, but he sends his stuff out of town too.  So, where do these folks all send their stuff to? ...

Humanitarian aid is a pretty big deal amongst the long-stay snowbirds (is that a redundancy?) in most places, and that's certainly the case here!  Our friends Cheryl and Kelly have been doing work down here for 3-4 years, and this year Deb and I brought down 3 - 50 lb bags of food, clothing, shoes, etc whilst Cheryl brought down 10 bags!  The target for all this largesse is the Indios, the Mexican first nations.  They are truly a breed apart down here; the adults are often under 5' tall, they are very poorly educated, and their only employment options are stoop labour in the fields and perhaps selling trinkets on the street or the beach.  With the ongoing lack of education, future generations are pretty much screwed as well.   Our friend Chuck, who is from Indio, California (rather droll, don't you think?  From Indio, working with the Indios?  Sigh.  Never mind then.), is a Rotary Person and he raised a bunch of money up north and brought it ...

Deb and I were muttering to each other a few days ago that we were long overdue for an adventure.  We were chatting idly about taking a bus to La Manzanilla, which is a pretty little town about 30 minutes up the coast, when our friends Cheryl and Kelly overheard us and said 'hey, we haven't been there for a while either!'  So of course next morning Cheryl and Kelly showed up in their trusty jeep, and of we went to La Manzanilla.   One would be tempted to think that it's just another Mexican beach resort with cheap food, cold beer, and miles of pristine beach.  Well, yeah, it has those too.... (perhaps the best beach in Mexico!) but La Manzanilla has crocodiles!  When we were here 8 years ago there was a bayou (river that is turned into a lake because of a sand bar at the beach) that was just full of honking big crocodiles and caymans.  There was a 3-foot chainlink fence keeping them off the street, but they could still wander onto the beach and spoil y...

Our beach here is quite nice, and it is framed by rocky headlands to make a very pretty bay.  The north end of the bay also has a malecon (sea-side walkway) which is backed by steep hills and/or cliffs, and is therefor completely undeveloped.  We have discovered that it is home to at least one troop of coatimundi, which are new world simians that are racoon-sized and have ringed tails but have fox-like faces.  Very cute, and definitely opportunists.  When we were in Costa Rica some years back we had lobster dinner in a palapa restaurant in a wee beach town south of Puerto Limon.  There was a wild coatimundi lurking up in the eaves, and he'd steal your lobster right off your plate if you weren't paying attention.  Going for a whiz definitely entailed posting an alert sentry!  We've seen these little boogers on a couple of occasions; they hang around on some very steep cliffs just underneath where the cormorants roost.  One of the babies was clearly...

December 23 is my birthday, and about a week before we had discovered a beach-side terrace restaurant that has live music in the evenings.  Dec 23 was listed as blues night, which is my favourite, so our plan was to spend a quiet evening together over dinner, drinks, and music on the beach.  But first we thought we'd spend the afternoon walking around Barra, and mayhap having a beer at Popeye's, which is a nice little bar/restaurant just on the edge of the Malecon.  It was a beautiful day, and reminded us of why we like Barra so much.  Whilst sitting in Popeye's drinking a beer and watching the world go by, we heard a shrill whistling and Santa rode his bicycle by!  He was headed for the malecon, and had 3 little nosepickers just digging to catch up with him and be the first on his lap.  Well, we definitely had to go and watch this for a bit.  Turns out the emerging Mexican Santa trope is the full traditional Santa costume plus a shiny whistle....