The Gulf of Tehuantepec

 When we sailed Mexico's Pacific Coast the big unknown was a stretch of water called the Gulf of Tehuantepec. The Gulf is the body of water that curves around the coast at exactly the spot where Mexico become a very thin strip of land, mostly mountains and which blocks the arrival of strong east winds from the Caribbean, which path I have marked below with a thick red arrow. The orange line was our course on land this past week:

The mountains funnel the winds from the Caribbean across the spine of Mexico and they rush down from the mountains at impossibly high speeds with unnatural force. If you want to know why, look up "catabatic winds" and "Venturi effect" and you'll find out that constricting the flow of wind increases the speed of the breeze, and the reputation of this stretch of coastline is that of a hurricane alley. It's a place where powerful winds blow off the beach pushing incautious boats out to sea in maelstroms of hurricane proportions. It is extremely unpleasant they say and dangerous. Thus novice sailors approach the Tehuantepec crossing with their hearts in their throats. In 1999 we picked our weather and took off under power and motored in a flat calm for 36 hours boiling our brains out under the intense sun and glad to be past this nerve wracking spot. We hoped for the same aboard Gannet 2.

There have been instances where winds were so strong here they have to stop traffic, indeed 90 miles per hour is common when the winds blow, but for us the transit was a non event. Another joy of driving a van... we ignored any weather forecasts  and drove for a couple of hours and the Tehuantepec menace, such as it was, was history. I should also point out that sailors being the kinds of people they are, have a special name for these powerful catabatic winds. They call them "Tehuantepeckers," not surprisingly. Now you know. 

We started the day at our Pemex gas station and Rusty as usual got his morning walk, not a long one but enough to remind us both we had plenty of driving ahead. We were gone before 7 am. The road stretched out ahead and we had just crossed into Oaxaca State when we decided we were hungry. We saw a restaurant at a Pemex gas station so I made a U-turn and in we went. 

Jose-Manuel owns the place and we ordered breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions and beans and cheese on the side and we got  talking.

Homemade chips and spicy sauce to start. It was a good stop, at a gas station of all places.

He said he had passed us on the highway on his way to work and told his wife he wanted a camper like that as he drove by....so Layne showed him over the van. He was quite excited about it was Jose Manuel! .

He also showed me photos of the latest celebrities to stop by and film from his restaurant, hard to believe but out was Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman on their latest motorcycle ride on electric bikes north from Patagonia and up through South and Central America.              

He said they hired his place to feed the crew as the filming went by. I imagine they ate very well! I got to thinking what threadbare coincidence it was that we stopped and turned round and got to have that conversation with him and I wonder how many good chats we've missed as we move through Mexico.

Much waving and good byes and we were on the road again heading to the windmills of Tehuantepec and me feeling a bit Don Quixotish driving at random through the countryside. We had a debate about the last time we had seen a foreign flagged vehicle on the road and I think I won when I pointed out the Texas tagged SUV north of Mexico City on the Arco Norte ring road around the capital city. That had been weeks ago.

The road was a mixed bag of stretches of ghastly potholes requiring wild swerving and much cursing and then long stretches of decent smooth asphalt. The modern wind generating technology contrasts starkly with life by the side of the road in this area. An old fashioned and always vital tire repair shop:

There were quite a few trucks moving along the highway especially as we got into Oaxaca State, but the roads did not improve, potholes and patches, lumpy expansion joints on bridges and traffic slaloming in both directions to avoid the worst of it:

And the topes  ("reductors") were everywhere, especially where we saw a pedestrian bridge or white stripes painted across the highway. 

For the masses life moves at a different pace. The business owner dreams of a gabacho house on wheels and this guy, I wonder if he dreams of owning a tractor one day?

Our image of romance, the 19th century horse and cart is a survival tool for him, putting the world of the Internet out of reach. I watched the illiterate kids from the last campground watching Brazilian kids' soap operas (in Portuguese!) but unable to do simple math. They had a tablet provided by their parents and the children gave us the WiFi password the parents didn't quite grasp. 

And that is their reality and we drift through like ghosts, living another life, treating our dogs better than they can their children. And as we drive I hug Rusty closer.

After we crossed the potentially windy bit we climbed back up into the hills for one last mountain climb before our destination of Huatulco. This would be another nostalgia stop, the place we anchored before we leapt off to cross the Gulf of Tehuantepec on our way by sailboat (a Gemini 105 catamaran if you're interested) to Puerto Madero in 1999.

It was a long winding drive down the hills to Huatulco and had there been a place to stop I might have chosen to hole up for the night but there were no apparent wild camps, no campgrounds, no tourist infrastructure of any kind, and we drove the winding road through bone dry forests ready for rainy season.

There were pink salt pans behind the sand dune barriers, evaporating under the tropical sun. It was a 90 degree day, not humid but desert dry, the sun twinkling on the Pacific in a most inviting sort of way. I wanted a beach and we were going to get a beach.

Huatulco is a complex of villages created by the national tourism development agency called Fonatur. The word means tree worshippers of some such in the Indio language of the region but these days it might better mean "money worshippers" given Hutaulco's sole function is to attract visitors, a job it carries out with great success.

The government laid out a tourist city forty years ago along a stretch of beach filled with lovely bays and indentations with superb crescents of perfect golden sand. A holidaymaker's paradise. Which is what it is become. 

My photos of the town of Crucecita are I'm afraid rather crap so you will have to imagine streets filled with parked cars, touts selling tours and restaurant meals and hotel rooms. 23 years ago we anchored off the beach at La Crucecita and brought our dingy to the fishing pier and walked our dogs around a town that could best be described as "in progress." To us in 1999 it felt like a ghost town, a place we could own for an hour or two a day walking the streets lined by white walls promising stores and attractions yet to come. In the middle of it all was a little bandstand, and under the bandstand was a nice lady who sold coffees so after Emma and Debs were walked we sat and drank cappuccinos and couldn't believe our luck. Delicious coffee ina. seaside ghost town! The bandstand is still there, half buried by development:

We drove by and Feld back to the highway, across wide sweeping avenues with huge medians and giant kapok trees spreading shade. Puerto Madero is a dusty backwater of squalor and La Crucecita has been developed to death. You can't win for losing! 

We found our beach campground further up the coast. And quite the spot it turned out to be, as we shall see.

Puerto Madero, Chiapas

Nostalgia, as the saying goes, ain't what it used to be. I keep butting up against that saying every time we hit a moment of memory on the road. Our latest failed effort to conjure up happy memories took place this week when we arrived, our of the mountains of Chiapas back onto the Pacific coastline.  23 years ago we sailed into Puerto Madero ready to file papers to exit Mexico and sail to El Salvador, four days away, to the port of La Union on the mythical Gulf of Fonseca. This week we went back to see what we might find.

We drove out of the mountains planning to find a surfer's campground reportedly in Puerto Madero on the beach. We reached level ground and drove into the largest city in this corner of Mexico, Tapachula, a city of 150,000 they say, half an hour from the Pacific.  Rusty was running out of food so that emergency had to be handled swiftly.

While I walked Rusty after the long drive Layne took the time to pop across the street and pick up some fruits and vegetables. Soriana is home to dog food for Rusty, loose dog food for street dogs, and cheap wine.  We were ready to camp by the beach.

We took the highway out of Tapachula toward the beach. We actually traveled part of that road when we were last in the area as sailors. To check out of Mexico boat travelers had to hitch a ride to Tapachula airport to have immigration stamp them out, and I remember a group of us hired a collectivo to do the job, a twenty minute ride. It was exciting to go inland and I was sorry when the ride was over. The insurgency was at its height at the turn of the century and I wanted to see more of Chiapas. Tapachula airport wasn’t enough! Now, 23 years later I got to see more and that was more than enough. 

It's just another highway. And Puerto Madero, a town I remember as vibrant and alive, a place where we hired a Guatemalan immigrant to pedal a tricycle taxi for us to go into town to eat tacos on the street. Time has not been kind to Puerto Madero whose name is being changed again, this time to Puerto Chiapas. 

It started out as Puerto Benito in the 19th century and was planned to be Mexico's southern bulwark on the Pacific, about 25 miles from the river separating Guatemala from Mexico. I remember sailing close by the coast and spotting a tall tower sticking up from the foliage, a pale blue and white horizontally striped tower marked the start of Central America. I sat in the cockpit of my boat and wondered where I was going. I had far fewer such feelings on my return.

We drove the Main Street and turned left at the waterfront, past crowds of waiting tricycle taxis, now equipped with motors and steered by young Mexicans otherwise unemployed in this dead end town. I found the lighthouse of fond memory, below. 

23 years ago it was not cut off by a wall so we walked up through the sand and met the keeper who showed us a tree we have managed to never forget. I had no idea cashews, those most delicious of nuts, grew  individually on a tree, hanging from a fruit that looked to me like a green bell pepper and this one nut was the sole product. I was amazed at nature's effort to put out a delicious cashew and I have tried ever since to eat them individually with respect.

We drove the back streets of Puerto Madero in an effort to find the campground but the streets were ruined and as we lurched we got more and more depressed by the filth and sense of post apocalyptic abandonment. We called it quits after we got stopped by low hanging wires and low hanging mangoes and narrow streets with badly parked motorcycles and so forth. 

It seemed like Puerto Madero's march to insignificance has not been changed by its new name, as pointed out rather ruefully in a commentary I read on line (love the Internet!) written by a Mexican scholar. The harbor too is closed now to the public and where we anchored is barely visible except as a slice of water and a buoy, spied from the street.

We haven't had much luck revisiting old haunts, Tenacatita Bay has been ravaged by lawsuits and Mulege is a fashionable overcrowded resort compared to my wife's fond memories. Like Puerto Madero, San Blas further north has been left to sag gently into dust and obscurity by the passing of time.

We fled back up the road to the airport and Tapachula beyond and started to plan where we would sleep. Needless to say nostalgia took a bad hit here and we left town thinking more about our immediate future than anything to do with the past.

We always try to plan a back up if the campground or resting place listed on the Internet or in a guide or by word of mouth doesn't work out. In this case we had planned to stop at a Pemex gas station for the night. However by the time we got back to Tapachula it was still 90 minutes till dark and we prefer to coincide with darkness when we arrive at a gas station and ask to spend the night. So we drove on, and as we drove we reminisced about our sailing trip and the places we had seen and how time ravages all of us in one way or another. I nixed the first several Pemex gas stations as too close to the city, then we were out in the country and darkness was falling and there was nothing anywhere. We made a U-turn and drove into one lonely gas station. The employee at first ignored us and when he approached he was so shifty we just said thanks but no thanks, took no gas and drove off.  

Highway 200 passed through the town of Acacoyagua where we saw another Pemex, not in our favorite location, a noisy town but with some room for us to park even though it was not large enough to serve as a proper truck stop. Nothing ventured nothing gained so we asked if we could "dejar" (stop) for the night. The employee pointed out a far corner I promised no mess and no fuss and we filled the tank with $75 of 87 octane Magna gas. Prices in southern Mexico are a little higher than the northern states but prices are regulated and there hasn't been the sort of gouging seen in the US. In Mexico regular gas costs a little more than $4 a US gallon. For us the price is immaterial when we are traveling. We burn it and we pay for it. However our night's sleep was free and very comfortable. Our van has excellent insulation and outside noises are very muffled.

Rusty and I went for a walk but we didn't go far. He wasn't in the mood for ambushes by street dogs and he was tired after a long day of keeping his balance as we drove and pretty soon we were tucked up and watching TV lost to the world outside. Van Life: sleep as you are.

 

Mountain Drive

The kids, the campground, the waterfall, it all had to end and we packed our van and took off, out through the village and through the cornfields to the main road. Our next encounter was not photographed  for a very good reason so here I have a picture of the cornfield with some fertilizer advertising.

I saw a group of people standing around two vehicles up ahead alongside the stalks of corn just like those above, but they weren’t farmers.  The figures were dressed in black and the vehicles were painted in camouflage designs, one a Suburban, the other a pick up with a machine gun and shield on the back similar to, but entirely different from the official Mexican military. One of them started to flag us down and I saw a red skull and crossbones painted on the black machine gun shield above the truck. Zapatistas, known variously as freedom fighters, guerrillas or terrorists take your pick. The guy standing in the road telling us to stop changed his tune suddenly and waved us on. Why? I don't know, perhaps because they realized we were foreigners though Layne thought word of our bicycle buying had made the rounds possibly beyond the village and we were not going to get dinged for more money thanks to our charitable act. I took no pictures as you might imagine. Further up the road we met two more Zapatistas  shaking down a truck driver. I saw 50 pesos change hands while the child possibly 14 years of age carrying a machine gun and talking into a radio but wearing no mask apparently got orders to let us through. And that was that. No drama. No shots fired, no shakedown even. We drove on.

Our route for the day was a drive down the Guatemala border, through a valley filled with curves and villages and never ending topes (speed bumps), and traffic that was almost all public transport and thus in a hurry to make money. I like driving but this was a tough day and we (I) did happen to miss a few speed bumps which we jostled over rather horribly. But the scenery was something else.

We twisted and turned for hours, passing over bridges with mountain streams bubbling over rocks far below, there were dramatic peaks and plunging cliffs and canyons for hour after hour. The road itself was actually quite pothole free, except for the damned topes, half a dozen or more at a time in every village, in front of every hovel, all the damned time.

I was exhausted after half a day but I couldn't believe dry season mountains with hardly a drop of rain for months. It put me in mind of Central Asia, a region high on my list for travel by van. And yet this was Mexico, all the way to the top of the mountains on the left where Guatemala begins.

Scenes from the road, Highway 190 from Frontera Comalpa to Huixtla:

Rusty doesn't enjoy van travel too much but he likes arriving, anywhere. As soon the van goes into park and the key goes to off he's at the side door ready to sit outside and watch the world go by.

You can imagine what kind of cell phone signal we got on this part of the trip! Chiapas is a poor state so you'll see lots of dogs in the villages, lots of kids working adult jobs. In the bigger cities there were youngsters in school uniform after they got out of school walking home in groups with backpacks on like students anywhere. The rural kids don't do much school usually too busy helping their families make some money. It doesn't make us feel great to see youngsters helping dad shovel dirt or standing at the roadside selling fruit. "Everything happens for a reason" is a saying you can believe in only if you don't travel outside your first world middle class bubble. In these impoverished areas  there is no rhyme or reason for institutionalized lack of opportunity.  Crushing poverty is a fact of life. 

We stopped to buy some red fruit that Layne had seen in passing. We have no idea what it's called but it has a big pit and soft flesh that tastes somewhere between a kiwi, a cherry and a plum. You pop the whole thing in your mouth and try to scrape the pit clean before ejecting it. There; now you know as much as I do!

The homes are scattered down the hillsides. Imagine living here, with some running water if the tank (or the bath) on the roof is full, an outside toilet and electricity if you can afford it. Everything happens for a reason and if you get sick there is free health care in Mexico. Doctors pay the government back for their training by working a couple of years in free rural health clinics. People here line up to be vaccinated if Covid vaccines are available and usually they aren’t while vaccines go to waste in the US. Everything happens for a reason. 

The poverty in this area is a product no doubt of the lack of soil to farm and no other resources. How do you get a job or make a living?  Chiapas is crying out for tourists and the state has incredible scenery, with absolutely no infrastructure. I'm no businessman but I can see too many lost opportunities here and no one is going to invest in a tourist economy if the Zapatistas are causing chaos. They don't blow things up any more but their reputation isn't going draw foreigners to Chiapas. 

In Mexico if you don't finish construction you don't pay property taxes so if there is rebar sticking out of the roof its either a tax job or a long drawn out project. 

I missed a turn while I stared at the scenery and we ended up accidentally taking aim at the border with Guatemala. Fortunately I spotted my error before too long and we turned back, probably to the surprise of the military post at the intersection who watched us come and go,  and got back on track to drive south towards the coast.

We made it to the coast without drama but that's another story. That was Wednesday, and tomorrow it will be the story of seeing the coast we saw 23 years ago and how it's changed. Puerto Madero to Huatulco, and a few name changes along the way. The route: