Mexico – A Year and a Day

Pacific Mexico Food Roundup

–by Arlo

When we left home, we left our favorite taqueria, Ramiro and Sons. I have always loved Mexican food in California. AInd though Mexican food in Mexico is very different from California’s Mexican food, it is at least as tasty as California’s Mexican food, and it has much more variety than what you will find in a taqueria in the Bay Area. Here is a roundup of all the Mexican food that we ate from Ensenada to Bahia Tenacatita.

As we walked up the streets of La Cruz, I was going crazy with all of the yummy looking taco shops on the street. What you come accross most of in Pacific Mexico is tacos and quesadillas. We have eaten fish tacos (pesca), octopus tacos (pulpo), shrimp tacos (camaron), and countless more. My personal favorite was from a resturant in La Cruz, called “La Silla Roja”. Not surprisingly, it had red chairs. Their street-side tables seemed like the best place to be in the world when you sat down at 8 p.m. as the heat of the day was turning into the cooler evening. Their best dish (in my opinion), was the “quesadilla mamalona”. This tasty morsel was 8 or 10 inches long and stuffed to the brim with your choice of asada, adobada, or chorizo. I tried all three, and they were all equally delicious.

The other thing which they have quite a lot of in Mexico is seafood. In San Quintin, we had fresh clams, and in San Jose del Cabo, I tried octopus in the form of the above mentioned tacos, and decided that it was a new favorite. Shrimp are plentiful, appearing everywhere from quesadillas to el “rollo del mar,” a bacon-wrapped fish fillet stuffed with shrimp and doused in rich, creamy, almond sauce. The Mexicans use spear, net, and longline to catch fish from their pangas, or fiberglass boats. It is a common sight in pacific Mexico to see the pangueros, or fishermen, walking up from their boats to a palapa resturant on the beach, and then cleaning the fish that you ordered right there in front of the resturant.

The food just got better and better as we went south, and when we got to La Cruz, we found a paleteria, or ice cream shop that we discovered to have very good ice cream cones as well as paletas, which this shop sold as a tasty combination of chocolate and ice cream on a popsicle stick.

With this much variety in food, I invariably ended up trying some new things. Some of them I came to love, like tomatillas, which taste like a sweeter green tomato, chayote squash, and octopus. trying some of these new things led to some of the best eating experiences so far on the trip. Some of the new things that I tried, I didn’t love quite as much, like de-spined, cooked, cactus, and some odd little seedpods that roadside venders were selling, called guamachiles. We came upon these little seedpods on a road trip to the mountain town of San Sebastian in a rented car. On the way up, our curiosity got the better of us, and we bought a big bag, full to the brim. We first disliked them, then we came to think of them as half-decent, and then they fell out of favor once more. But some of the new foods I straight up disliked, for some inexplicable reason, such as mole, an unsweetened chocolate sauce often served with chicken. Looking back at my whole food experience in Mexico so far, I am more than satisfied, but I would not go as far as to say that I am satiated, and I could probably handle a couple more paletas just fine.

Update from Barra de Navidad

–from Caitlin + Jason

We’re writing and posting this one from a cell phone, and we can’t figure out how to move the pictures to place them where they make the most sense. So they’re mostly clustered at the end. Please forgive/enjoy the randomness.

The 150 miles of coastline south from La Cruz in the Puerto Vallarta area to Bahia Manzanillo, where we will anchor in a few days, has more harbors than the entire 850 mile coast of Baja, and we’ve slowed down to enjoy them. Another reason we’re moving slowly is that there hasn’t been much wind. The forecast, predictable for this time of year here, is so often for light and variable winds.

All these days at anchor have been busy.

Caitlin & Alma repair a sail cover at anchor. Alma is doing most of the work, turning the handle on the hand-cranked sewing machine.

In addition to working on the boat—this is endless and there’s a long list of jobs to check off before we jump across the Pacific—we’ve been in the water, both intentionally (snorkeling) and unintentionally (flipping the dinghy in a botched surf landing), doing school work, kayaking, exploring a mangrove estuary (we rowed by a small crocodile!), eating at beachside palapa restaurants, fishing, cooking, visiting with other cruising boats, and swimming some more.

Tonight we are anchored in the shallow lagoon at Barra de Navidad. This is a domestic tourist destination, and the beaches and streets are packed with families from all over Mexico enjoying the santa semana. We joined the crowd ashore today. Tomorrow we’ll stay on the boat to celebrate Easter by painting the mizzen mast and sailing the dinghy.

We had a bit of a change of plans earlier this month, shortly after we last wrote. The three or four days we meant to spend reprovisioning and working on the boat dockside in La Cruz turned into ten days when Jason landed in a hospital for surgery

to repair a hernia. Tuesday night he became aware of the issue, Wednesday morning he popped into a little farmacia to speak with a doctor, and by Wednesday afternoon, we had taken the bus to a hospital in Puerto Vallarta, where Jason was admitted

for surgery the following morning. There was no emergency, and we could only imagine how long the series of appointments and office visits would have taken to get the same surgery in the United States.

Jason’s surgeon seemed to run the hospital, and with his jeans, and shirt open under his blazer, he looked more like a Hollywood producer than a gastroenterologist. But Jason fared well under his care and is, just over two weeks later, all but back to full strength. It turns out Mexican hospitals do not, unfortunately, serve carne asada tacos.

To pass the time while Jason recovered, we rented a car and spent a couple of days in the mountains above Bahia Banderas. It was good to leave the heat of the coast and we loved the beautiful town of San Sebastian, where we stayed in a 300-year old adobe home and walked along ancient sunken stone paths through the pine forest. Getting to the top of the mountain above San Sebastian was more than our little sedan could take—the steep cobbled roads wound up and down improbably—and we gave up, likely just before the top.

Though we enjoyed the mountain excursion, the town of La Cruz, and new friends on other boats at the marina, we were relieved, finally, to take in our dock lines and to be on our way again. The sailing has been gentle, though sometimes through water stained a shocking deep red by plankton. We had read about a red tide but none of us had seen one. The ocean truly looks like its bleeding, and it leaves us feeling uneasy. But then the water is suddenly blue again. Or the light turquoise of water over sand

We’ll try not to post too many pictures of dolphins, but look at this guy.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll see friends and—mostly—work to prepare the boat for the 3,000 mile passage to the Marquesas. During the passage and during the six months we are in French Polynesia, we’ll be less frequently connected to the internet. Our friend Mark has kindly agreed to post messages to the blog as we are able to send them to him, though there will have to be fewer pictures. Whenever we do get internet we’ll look forward to hearing from you—in messages on the blog or by email.

Tomorrow we’ll find out if the Easter Bunny can find us on Debonair.

Rowing up a mangrove estuary just after dawn.

Alma gets to tend bar, yup, for real, at a pizzeria during our week and a half in La Cruz.

Mexico!

We sailed into Mexico this morning in the dark. Lots of vessel traffic in these waters—fishing boats of various sizes, a cruise ship, merchant vessels, and naval ships—kept us watchful. Ashore, a string of yellow lights, which we presume marked a border fence, crept up the hill and followed the contours of several hills beyond as far as we could see. And then the sun rose over Mexican mountains and the breeze began to fill in. After 6 days in San Diego, it was good to be underway again!

Sailing (and reading) wing-and-wing in Southern California. The windvane is steering.

The seal weighs about 4,000 lbs more than the dinghy.

Some of our favorite spots so far have been in the Northern Channel Islands. At San Miguel Island we anchored in a cove with about 3,000 elephant seals declaring all sorts of things loudly all day and through the night. I appreciate our friend Glenn pointing out the humor of the scene as we rowed up

and down the least populated section of beach looking for some real estate to land on that hadn’t been claimed by an elephant seal bull. On one end of the beach we realize that the gap between bulls at the other end of the beach is just a little bit bigger. Once we row back to the other end, we are certain that the gap we’d just left behind offered a little more space. But when we look again, it seems very tight and we think about trying the other end again Somehow we do get ashore alive—through the surf and beyond the bull seals. Of course, following a hike, we return to find one of the seals has up and moved his 4,000 lb bulk directly between our path and the dinghy. I appreciate Arlo for pointing out the humor in this moment.

Other highlights of these three uninhabited islands: tiny anchorages, whales and dolphins, tide pools and more tide pools, and several types of kelp, which Arlo and Alma identify and cook in a variety of ways. On the downside, it turns out that California has a mylar balloon problem—over the course of about 120 miles we spotted 14 mylar balloons floating in the waters between Los Angeles, the Channel Islands and San Diego.

San Diego was a world away from the Channel Islands, but we felt right at home thanks to friends of friends who hosted us and lent us their car and generally supported our week of logistics.

Water, diesel, propane, laundry, groceries, marine hardware, a dodger repaired, new foam for our bunk, miscellaneous galley items, and, maybe most importantly, Jason’s first pair of flip flops in years.

Our Mexican courtesy flag and the Q flag fluttering beneath it still have creases from being stored for so long. Tomorrow we’ll head into Ensenada to check in with customs and immigration and the Port Captain, we’ll find an ATM, some showers and I’m sure, as it turns out that we arrived during the week-long Carnival celebration, some music and tacos.

We all loved reading your kind words on our first blog posts. Thank you! Do feel free to send any questions you have—large or small—our way. And we’ll keep you posted.