Layne got a message from her nephew: “Did you stop at Maruata?” It seems he and his future wife exchanged their first kiss on a surfing vacation on the beach in Maruata. Clearly a special place for them; I thought it was such a pit I called “Veto” as we drove around looking for a mythical campground.
Layne to her credit has of course stuck to our veto agreement and has never reproached me for saying I wanted to leave but I must insist the town was ghastly. I could not bring myself to photograph the filth and misery and the worst mangy hopeless dogs I have seen in Mexico. I’d rather not say more except that I have no doubt the beach camping, had we found it, would have been a different world.
Maruata depressed me for a while especially as we had left a lovely beach and campground all to ourselves and we’re now looking for some place to stop that might get us back on an even keel. Highway 200 was a pleasant road to drive and I pushed my negative images to the back of my mind as we negotiated curves and glimpses a boiling ocean far below. The scenery was spectacular.
It felt much like a tropical Big Sur coastline, the noted Highway One in California, except here the sense of remoteness was far more profound.
There was no cell service of any kind for us. We kept a phone turned on but the signal indicator stayed stubbornly blank. And then we found an overlook, a cliff top restaurant with a hint of a signal. It was actually rather irritating because our wait for lunch was consumed by trying to send a message or three to the outside world.
Layne had shrimp and I had a fillet of fish and the food it has to be said was mediocre, but as we waited for our orders the scenery beyond our moribund phones was superb. No safety rails blocked our views. Two friends received brief text messages after repeated attempts and we lapsed into remote and awe struck contemplation of our good fortune.
We knew we were in a special place and we enjoyed every second of warm tropical air overlooking an extraordinary coastline.
Rusty eats a huge bowl of kibbles in the evening and enjoys treats during the day but his interest in food is pretty minimal. He would make an excellent open ocean sailor if only he didn’t hate water. Sitting in restaurants in defiance of US restrictions suits him just fine.
The had no “Coca Lite” and for some reason we find full sugar Coca Cola too cloying. Time to hit left field and drink those weird drinks we never normally have…Fresca is a favorite but Fanta reminds me of my childhood.
We found ourselves in a strange place, a moody and withdrawn area on the map. There were very few signs of commerce, depressed villages and everywhere we passed we saw people sitting in groups with nothing apparently to do. It was only later we discovered the Highway passes through an Indian reservation which is generally considered to be underfunded and pretty much ignored by the Federal Government. It sounds a bit like a page out of our own Bureau of Indian Affairs if you have ever traveled through reservation tracts in the West.
The amount of trash roadside was monumental, and it was everywhere. I mean there wasn’t a single pull out not knee deep in plastic discards. We used to call abandoned cars by the side of the road Puerto Rican parking lots after we drove that island and saw scenes like this everywhere:
Later we were told of a “friend of a friend” who was stopped at gunpoint around here and removed of their, I hope visible, cash. These two cars looked like a movie set of vehicles gunned down and what the actual story was, I cannot know but there they are:
Sometimes we are told the impoverished locals put up road blocks and demand a toll to pass, a matter of a dollar or two, and we saw one such Indian toll in a reservation further north. We dropped twenty pesos in the van held out in front of the official toll booth and consider ourselves lucky to be living on $250 a week or less in this extraordinary country. (Gas costs increase our spending in proportion to miles traveled but eating out lavishly and buying groceries and alcohol cost next to nothing).
These roadside shacks carry two fixtures on their roof: a water tank and a satellite TV dish. Look closely and you’ll see both above. On the subject of highway safety those that travel know not to get involved in drugs or the drug trade. Violence in Mexico is a thing between gangs and it is possible to get caught in the crossfire but I find so often those most skeptical of press reporting love to exaggerate and enlarge upon press reports of violence in Mexico. I was just about killed on my motorcycle a mile from home on Cudjoe. Should I have stayed home?
We tried to check out a campground enticingly known as the Beach of Love however the warning of a steep access road rather under stayed the level of difficulty. We walked a couple of bends on the dirt downhill track and realized we’d be winching ourselves back up most likely. I couldn’t even see any anchor points to try. We kept driving.
There were only two dangerous curve warnings on this stretch but we appreciated the irony of both, as they appeared before after and during an endless series of guardrail-free turns on the road. The surface wasn’t too bad with hand filled potholes interrupting smoother stretches of pavement. I couldn’t identify anything especially dangerous following the signs but this is sometimes the land of the inexplicable.
Drive far enough and you’ll see things change. By mid afternoon when we were creating possible back up plans for the night, mostly of the dreary Pemex truck stop variety near the city of Lazaro Cardenas, we saw a change in scenery after we stopped to try to gather some slight information from
our permanently offline maps.
What looked like the most luxurious convention center with lush gardens and even a glimpse of a church. In the middle of nowhere you can bring your bodyguards and clan members to celebrate family events of note. I thought Cosa Nostra style but shook off the thought as unworthy.
Later I was told the story of this patch of land just south of the Indian reservation. Apparently two brothers owned a huge ranch and sold it for two million dollars to a “business organization.” They moved their interests to developing coastal resorts and my informant hold me it was good for local people as they paid well and hired lots of people. Apparently that didn’t go over well with the business consortium in the area and the brothers were killed. Their ranch lives in in miles of perfectly farmed and irrigated and utterly dull mangoes papayas coconuts and bananas. I figured at the time the amount of work it took made them the most expensive fruit in history. But perhaps they are also a very effective laundry.
Things took an even more bizarre turn as we approached our next best hope of a place to stop and we saw two young people with surfboards sitting by the side of the road in a mango orchard. “Have you heard of Chicho’s campground?” we asked not expecting much. The man, a Che Guevara devotee with beard and fierce eyes said next to nothing, his blonde companion nodded and spoke with a Germanic accent in fluent English. “Yes,” she said. “Turn here and take either road to the end and there you will be by the river.” It sounded highly unlikely and we left them to their bus vigil in the dust.
Then we got passed by a frantic taxi with surfboards on the roof. I’ve never seen that before I remarked. Then the cab stopped suddenly in front of us and the driver got out and hugged a tree in time honored fashion. Unlike us he doesn’t have a toilet in his over equipped car apparently.
The surfers weren’t wrong. There were two streets which between them comprise all of Barra de Nexpa. And there was a campground on the edge of the Rio Nexpa and we parked down by the river. We had arrived.
