Mazatlan has the virtues and vices of any tourist destination. But all the bad stuff – or good, depending on how you plan to spend the evening – is buffered by the decency and solidity of a working town. Unlike the hotel cities dreamed up by governments beholden to tourist dollars, Mazatlan, the second city […]
Continue ReadingWe try to travel to Mexico twice a year, for a week or two at a time, packing just one carry-on bag each. This limitation is absolutely necessary when our two kids go along, because more than four carry-ons won’t fit in a taxi. We head directly to a bus station, and take off for […]
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When it’s winter up north, the skimboarding season is in full stride along the Pacific Coast beaches of Mexico. This is when the best talent goes head-to-head to determine ultimately who will make it to the world championship in Laguna Beach, California, where the sport was invented. It’s a sport that has not attained the […]
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Tomorrow’s champions are at work here, at Bahía de Navidad. In the hot afternoons along the wave-thumped beach of Melaque, lithe brown bodies dash along the alternately stirred and subdued sand and launch themselves at the sea. The steady winter sun descends in its unwavering plunge into a horizon washed faithfully by varying hues of […]
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It is more than Mexico’s constant sun and the bewitching landscape that entrance us. It is the people. October is revival month. We are at the tag end of six months in Canada the province of British Columbia to be precise — and joyfully are getting organized for the trip south to Mexico where the […]
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I tell my friends that the only thing I have had stolen by Mexicans was my unwavering fealty to Canada: I have even considered living full-time in Mexico. We are approaching the border crossing about half a mile off. There are no distinctive markings to the terrain to define it. There is no checkpoint. No […]
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Roads in Mexico should display this warning: Use at your own risk. This country has one of the most extensive highway systems anywhere, providing convenient and indispensable connections among villages, towns and cities. In a nation where a minority of people owns automobiles, almost everybody depends on buses to get around. These vary between long […]
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The tehuano endlessly blows where North America stops. The tehuano, the unforgiving forever wind of the Isthmus of Tehauntepec, ceaselessly scours a path through the wide gap where the continent of North America ends and Central America starts. We entered this maelstrom upon leaving Highway 200 and departing the State of Oaxaca on one of our journeys to […]
Continue ReadingMany of the things we take for granted today didn’t exist in the last century. A case in point is the railroad from Manzanillo to Guadalajara. The grand celebrations for the inauguration of this line, completed in 1908, were among the finest ever seen in Colima. The Mexican President of the time, Porfirio Diaz, attended […]
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We were snapping wedding photos in the atrium of the church – that’s the big square in front of old Mexican churches where the Indians gathered to hear Mass – when the “next” bride and her wedding party arrived and politely shooed our party away. We couldn’t complain. “Our” bride had shooed off a “previous” […]
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