Technical Note: In this post we have uploaded some video clips we took while playing with our camera. They take some time to download. Let us know if you find them more of an annoying hog of bandwidth than they are amusing!
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To put this portion of our trip into perspective we should
explain a little bit about the phenomenon of Semana Santa. Semana Santa means the week between Palm
Sunday and Easter Sunday, an important annual event in the Christian
calendar. And in a country where a large
portion of the population self-identify as Catholic, Semana Santa is important as a religious celebration. But the term Semana Santa is also used to refer to the combination of Holy Week
and the week following (Semana Pascua)
as a period of secular holiday-making. Everyone
in Mexico who is not employed in the tourist industry goes on vacation during
this period. We’ve been told that the
first week (Semana Santa) is the week that workers are given off
and Semana Pascua is when management
vacations. Schools and universities are
all closed during this two-week period.
Our observations are limited to Semana Santa beach activities, so we do not have the full
picture. But at the beach Semana Santa something like a combination
of a family reunion, 4th of July party and spring break – On
Steroids.
And it’s fun.
But, unless you’re looking for a crowded, busy and noisy vacation
or are interested in doing a sociological study of Samana Santa celebrations, we recommend that non-Mexican tourists skip
these two weeks. It’s fun to watch the
party, but there really isn’t any room for us.
Literally. Mid-way through Samana Santa we were told that no tables
were available at an enramada (an informal
beach-side restaurant) in Bahia
Santiago. In our collective decades
of travel in Mexico, neither of us has ever been told that a beach restaurant is
full. This is the land of the
entrepreneur: there’s always another plastic table that can be dragged from the
back and set up on the beach, one more fish to put on the grill and more beers or
Coca-Cola in the refrigerator. To be told
that there was no room meant that the enramada
system had been stretched beyond capacity.
So – enjoy visiting Mexico, but check your calendar before
you book your flight and skip Semana
Santa and Semana Pascua!
Ensenada Carrizal – March 25 – 29
Notwithstanding our dire warnings about Semana Santa, we were able to find one spot of relative quiet -- Ensenada Carrizal, a lovely little bay
twenty miles south of Barra de Navidad.
Our trip to Carrizal wasn’t
all that pleasant because we had to use the motor for much of the trip due to
low winds and high-ish (6 foot) swells.
But the trip had exciting moments: We
saw two orcas (killer whales), a mother and calf, shortly after leaving Barra.
Orcas aren’t often seen this far south, but we are sure of what we saw as their black and white markings are very distinctive. Of course, like most of our sightings, you’ll
have to take our word for it. By the
time we scrambled for a camera . . . they had swum gracefully past.
Less thrilling but still exciting to us was the container
ship that came within 2.5 miles of Abracadabra. Container ships up close are really big, and
because they are less agile than orcas so we got a picture of the one that came
so close:
 |
| Really Big. Close Enough. |
We spent four nights at Ensenada
Carrizal as the only full-time resident boat, but we didn’t feel
lonely! Carrizal is a destination bay for snorkelers, so from morning to
dusk we shared the bay with from two to four small boats delivering snorkelers
from hotels in nearby bays.
This prompted Molly to go snorkeling -- declining Bryce’s offer to row her to the snorkeling
spot because she thought it would
be fun to swim to shore. Unfortunately
she failed to fully appreciate the effect of the current (against her) and forgot
the truism that the shore always looks closer from the boat than the boat does from
the shore (we’re not quite sure why this is, but it is true). In ignorant, amnesiac bliss
she struck off . . . and after about half-an-hour of making little headway against the current
and sucking down an unpleasant amount of salt-water
she came to the realization that she isn't really a very strong swimmer and that she wasn't going to make it to her destination. The next realization was that her options were to let the current drift her to a rocky shore from which it would be difficult for Bryce to retrieve her, call for help, or drown. She chose to call for help and her knight in shining t-shirt mounted his
poly-vinyl-chloride steed (the dinghy) and rowed to her rescue. Totally humiliated, she was too tired to
climb into the dinghy and had to cling to the transom while Bryce rowed her to Abracadabra.
The next day Bryce taxied her to and from the snorkeling spot in the dinghy and she took along a floating boat fender for floating assistance. She saw lots of very pretty fish and sucked down very little salt water. Lesson learned. Our shopping list now includes a boogie board
to be used as a snorkeling float.
We decided we should head further south in order to meet the schedule(ish) that we had set for ourselves, so once the weather promised a good sail we left Ensenada Carrizal and sailed the six miles to the anchorage near the Las Hadas resort in Bahia Manzanillo (famous as the location of the movie Ten -- remember Bo Derek?). We planned to anchor there because of the glowing reports about the location we had received from other cruisers. Maybe it was the Semana Santa crowds – maybe we just have a different perspective – but after motoring around in circles trying to dodge power boats and jet skis and find a place to anchor we decided that there must be a better place for us to spend the night!
Bahia Santiago -- May 29 to
30
We back-tracked about four miles to Santiago Bay. We’d initially decided that Santiago Bay was likely to be too crowded due to the holiday crowds, but after the buzzing crowds in the small anchorage off of Las Hadas it looked just fine.
We spent the day wandering among the crowds on the
beach. The crowds were ten-people deep in
the water, and as noted earlier, we could barely find a place to eat. We ended up eating in the back of an enramada further along the beach from
the one that was full, squeezed with other late-comers into the area at the
back usually occupied by the person machete-ing coconuts and the staff’s children. The area was still being used for the
machete-ing of coconut and the staff’s children – we were all just squeezed in
with them.
Our day at Santiago
Bay was fun in the way that going to a big fair is fun. The guys that run the tourist boat ride
concessions were totally cool about helping us maneuver the dinghy through the
crowds of swimmers and onto and the off of the beach. Beach walkers were universally friendly,
wishing us buenas tardes. Vendors were everywhere: elaborately carved
fruit on skewers, platters of sweets, bathing suit stores on wheels, piles of
blown-up beach floats, ice cream carts. . . etc.. There were strolling musicians, kids at play,
and ongoing family dynamics (apparently if a male member of the family becomes
too inebriated, one cure is to bury him in the sand and let him sleep it off).
We were still enjoying the holiday spirit when we returned
to Abracadabra. We drank
a beer and watched various banana boat rides (those long floats that are pulled
behind power boats carrying up to ten screaming people) whip by or, on occasion, not:
and waved to the crowds on the rock-n-roll blaring tour
boats
and the few intrepid (in that crowded bay!) paddle boarders.
We even waved to people on jet skis (even though they consort with the devil . . .).
But after a while we tired of the competing wakes these boats/jet skis
created, and began to pray for darkness, assuming that the concessionaires
would quit renting jet skis and taking crowds on banana boat rides.
Darkness finally fell and the holiday activity was limited to the
beach. The waters of the bay became smooth. We were tired enough that even the competing
music venues on shore didn’t keep us awake.
The next day we decided that, though we think we would like Bahia Santiago in a less-frenzied time,
we didn’t want to stay longer. We departed
on one of our longer passages – 189 miles to Zihuatanejo. More on that in
our next post.
