Heat Wave

One of the lessons you learn early on about living in a tin box on wheels is that your life becomes weather dependent. It’s not like boat living (and traveling) where every move is a chess game predicated on wind direction and strength but your quality of life in a vehicle is dictated by the seasons. 

Winter in Mexico is ideal as it is the dry season -we’ve had three days of rain in five months and night time temperatures tend to drop low enough for good sleeping even after a long hot sunny day. However it is almost June and things are heating up. This weekend coastal Sonora is forecast to have daytime highs well above 100 degrees and the lab rats aboard GANNET2 are looking around trying to find a way out.

After a week wild camping at the beach we went into town yesterday and loaded up with food and fuel and water in Guaymas and pondered our options as we had fish tacos for lunch. 

Guaymas isn’t so much a tourist town as it is a port and transportation hub. It has a rail line, 

…and a Pemex fuel distribution center with a heap of tankers coming and going,

And a rather uninviting waterfront which we made an effort to visit so we could fool ourselves into thinking we had taken the full measure of the town. 

Neighboring San Carlos provides the upscale resort to the practical

commercial offerings of Guaymas so tourists and snowbirds flock across the bay to San Carlos where bilingualism is the order of the day. Guaymas is a Mexican town infiltrated by Walmart and Home Depot while retaining its commercial core.  

None of this contemplation of the usefulness of Guaymas solved the essential dilemma of what to do with ourselves this heat wave weekend. Over all our deliberations lies the inevitable return to the north, so we are also forced to consider how we will wrap up this six month tour of Mexico.

Because it’s the weekend our wild camp will be invaded by picnic loving Mexicans and their delightful competing musical boom boxes to enjoy the peace and serenity of this superb beach so a strategic withdrawal seems a good plan. 

Last January we were told of the delights of the small town of Alamos (“poplar trees”) and on our visit there we discovered a pleasant little town that seemed to have closed down. We wandered around disconsolately and left. We felt as though we failed to give it a chance to impress us so we decided over our tacos yesterday to take a three hour drive and have another go. 

Alamos isn’t high enough in the mountains to be any cooler than the beach but there is a well shaded campground apparently with a pool and we can use that as either a hideaway from the heat or a base from which to try to discover more about the town every American snowbird loves to visit. 

We will return to the beach at San Carlos in a few days and make an appointment to buy new tires at the Michelin dealer in Hermosillo where we had the tires aligned recently. The rough roads of our winter drive have played havoc with our alignment and we have some hidden tire wear so we will buy five Michelin Agilis tires and have them

installed in the land of inexpensive labor. 

Then we will be ready to go north. Meanwhile we have this heatwave to get through, this portent of the summer to come. There’s no point in having a home on wheels if you don’t use them.  We’d better get rolling. 

Beach Humans Being

We are making the most of our last days in Mexico. It’s funny because we have up to a month left on our tourist permit, more than a working family’s vacation, and yet it feels like we are running out of time. 

We swam at seven in the morning before the breeze came up. The dolphin swam away chasing breakfast but we enjoyed the water anyway. We then returned to GANNET2 where I picked up the camera and took Rusty for a walk. 

The day drifted away with books, tea, naps, snacks and eventually we got to afternoon exercise time which became an afternoon swim after we were finished with the weights. Vinnie was sitting at the beach and he remembered us from our January visit. “You’re the cold water swimmers,” he said from his beach chair. 

He’s lived in San Carlos for seven years but his wife doesn’t like the ocean so he comes out to the beach with his dog and umbrella and watches the sun sparkle on the water. 

He talked about the building boom consuming San Carlos. He likes the idea of his home’s value going up so when he dies his wife can get more for it and move to the mountains. He had a wistful time thinking of the “good old days” of less development. All of us seem to feel that way about the incessant development that surrounds us.  

Then we have dinner and the sun goes down in spectacular style. 

Layne gets creative as evening approaches with the Instapot, the toaster oven and the induction burners as well as the microwave, all powered by our battery bank. Last night we had tomatillo chicken and beans, the night before we had breakfast for dinner, hash browns and soy chorizo scrambled with eggs. I enjoyed that with a glass of wine.

We live well in the van, the comforts of home in the desert.  

And the day is done. 

Mexican Beach Life

We spent a week at Playa San Carlos in January. It was the beginning of our six month winter journey around Mexico and it was also the place where we learned to enjoy cold water swimming thanks to the gentle encouragement of fellow van traveler Ron from Iowa. In that week we were hardly alone as there were perhaps a dozen other RVs parked among the bushes on the beach. 

Now as we close in on Memorial Day we are alone on the beach during week days. In the evenings one or two cars come out to enjoy a sunset at the beach after work and on weekends Sundays are packed, the sole day off in Mexico. 

The cultural differences between “gabachos” (a not entirely polite term for foreigners) and Mexicans are highlighted on Sundays. Mexicans don’t have the same view of personal space as we northerners do. They celebrate time off with ear splitting music and if their neighbors are playing a different genre, never mind song, that’s okay. You can hear thumping tubas rappers and seductive ballads all together in one unholy racket on a Mexican beach on Sunday. Fun eh, gabacho?

Mexicans don’t do it to be annoying or to invade your space or send you a message. It’s simply a celebration of life and their families. You will see vast elaborate picnics with three or four generations sprawled on a blanket. If you see a couple walking along a beach by themselves chances are they are gringos. Not always but most often. If you see a couple with children they are Mexicans. Obviously I’m generalizing to make a point. But the way Layne and I travel and camp at the beach is weirdly unnatural to family oriented Mexicans. This is not a country that sees school shootings. Children are cherished. 

We respect the local traditions on Sundays because they have one day to be at ease and we have seven. We plan our weeks around where we will be on weekends and we prefer to be traveling if possible. I hate noise especially when I’m in nature and I struggle with my gringo moments when bird song is smothered by boom boxes. 

But here’s the great thing about these Mexican wild camps, you are free. I don’t just mean there’s no charge to camp, but you are free to live as you please. Play music, be silent, do yoga, walk your dog off leash? No problem. Rusty doesn’t even wear his collar here: he’s nekkid! 

So with freedom comes responsibility as we have been taught. Except that freedom doesn’t quite get the respect it deserves in these places. The question is: can you handle it? Freedom is often quite messy. 

If you can handle loud music once a week can you handle trash distribution all over the place? We in the north have been trained to twitch any time we see someone dumping trash in our presence. It’s second nature after a life time of recycling, composting, and the “reduce reuse and limit packaging” training. Can you suppress your own gringo moments in the face of this? 

Or this, a classic home made porta potty abandoned and up ended in a parking area? 

If this abandoned land contested by rival developers were in the US it would be fenced locked and liability laws would require everyone be kept out. In Mexico it is a public access area with no facilities, no fees and no promises of future accessibility. If you hurt yourself here there’s no one to sue and no one to blame but yourself. You need to be a grown up if you want to beach camp in wild Mexico. 

In the US this might be a state beach with paved parking, with fees, rules and rangers to enforce them. There would be trash cans and toilets but in Mexico a sheet, some buckets and toilet paper scattered to the four winds does well enough. If you wonder why we don’t park in the shade now you know.  

This isn’t Bureau of Land Management  camping either. There are no 14 day limits. Come back next year and the land dispute may be settled and the property may be locked and guarded. Or it may be just as it is today.  

When we plan wild camping anywhere we always try and sort out a back up plan in case the target destination doesn’t work for any reason. If this place were closed we have a nearby truck stop we can use for the night, for instance. 

Often iOverlander user reports will mention trash at the site and sometimes our estimate of trash disagrees with previous visitors comments.  In any event I expect to do a little clean up if we are staying somewhere wild. To that end I have my grabber from my time in the rehab hospital. 

The orange bag is our waterproof trash bin. If we are wild camping for a while we put our trash bags in the smell proof, fly proof orange container for proper dumping later. I have also added trash I’ve picked up around our camp site. You could fill a dumpster with the trash here so we can only grab what we can. In winter when there are a lot of campers all on trash pick up for their own spaces, the place is much cleaner in our experience.  

It is possible to keep your space clean. 

As long as you are patient and appreciate these free open spaces for what they are: yours to enjoy as you please courtesy of your easy going, if cheerfully noisy Mexican hosts. 

And after next Sunday it will all revert to its normal state. If we are here I’ll be out with my grabber.