Another weekend in Tepic, fabulous metropolis of Nayarit. We enjoyed the festivities of the Feria Nacional de la Mexicanidad 2010, a four week fair to celebrate Mexican culture. It was of extremely high quality, with display tents of technology, health, agriculture, culture, local goods, endless rows of carnival games and vendors, a livestock show, and bears riding motorcycles. You may be thinking that forcing bears to travel the country riding motorcycles is cruel. You would be right. It was also slightly fascinating. We also witnessed a traditional ritual of four men jumping off a 50 foot high pole and winding around and around it upside down until they land on the ground. It was hard to take it really seriously, as it occurred directly prior to the dancing bear show. Once again, we spent our time with Miguel and his family, our Spanish teacher. It was exciting to see our progress in Spanish, as it was much easier to communicate with Miguel's wife this trip. It's difficult to believe that we get almost no opportunity to practice our Spanish, and we live in Mexico, but it's the truth.
The plan for the next morning was to head to San Blas, a coastal town with mangrove swamps. The mangroves grow in a unique acquatic ecosystem, as they grow in saline water, and in some mangrove swamps in Mexico live manatees and sea turtles. San Blas also has an interesting colonial history, as a Fort for keeping marauders at bay (hehehe).
Miguel and co. showed up an hour later than planned, but as there was no clock in our hotel room, it didn't phase us a bit. We loaded up the car and headed out. Abotu ten minutes into the trip, Miguel's wife (I apologize for not knowing her name) yelled out to him, he slammed on the brakes, and we crashed into a pickup which was in the intersection. Miguel's daughter Paula was sitting on her mother's lap with no seatbelt and hit her face against the dash, loosening some teeth. Everyone was generally fine, and we stayed the rest of the day in Tepic, taking a Turibus around the city, and to a village where only Huichol people live (the local natives). I bought a beautiful beadwork bracelet there from a woman who spoke both Huichol and Spanish (sidenote - Tepic also produces a picante salsa called Huichol which is my favorite, and they make little Huichol style dresses as bottle covers which are adorable). We also went to a really nice museum which had ancient artifacts from all the peoples who had lived in the area. The artwork was absolutely intriguing and up to 10,000 years old. We only got to see the beginning of the exhibit, but I was amazed by the details and the imagination involved.
In the evening we caught Alicia en el Pais de Marvilloso (Alice in Wonderland) in 3D and Spanish, which was a challenge but fun. After attending Mass the next morning, we headed home.
The following weekend, after the arrival of Denny, a retired Political Science professor from Hastings College, we headed to San Blas again. After some lucky hitches and a loooooong wait to transfer buses, we made it to that quaint town I discussed above. The birds, turtles, and crocodiles in the refuge were beautiful, and the boat ride through the glades was thrilling. We saw crocodiles from 1 foot long to 12 feet long. It is one of the best things I've done in Mexico! They also had a crocodile nursery, which turned out to be more of a zoo, although they do release about 100 crocodiles into the wild every year. And we're not talking Henry Doorly here, these animals were in small pens with no attempt at natural wildlife, tamirs, deer, macaws, and lots and lots of crocodiles. We took the tent with us, and Sascha and I made a go of it on the beach. We didn't stay in the designated camping area so we wouldn't have to pay, and had no problems except for SWARMS of mosquitoes and noseeums which violently attacked us as soon as we opened the tent doors in the morning. We were scratching all week.
I met an interesting girl in the plaza while enjoying Harry Potter y la Camara Secreta, a Nova Scotian named Gabby. She had been staying on Stone Island off of Mazatlan, north of here, and had spent time in a Canadian volunteer corps. We exchanged pleasantries about food sovereignty and politics and then went our separate ways.
After waiting two hours for the bus, we began our journey back to Litibu. Half an hour into the trip, as the bus sat in the left turn lane of an intersection, a young kid in a pickup truck sideswiped us directly under my seat. The bus was barely damaged but the pickup had a harder time, and the driver's brother showed up at the site enraged and had to be detained by the police. The bus waited for two hours while three different types of police showed up, and as far as I could tell, mostly directed traffic around the accident site. Finally another bus on the way to Puerto Vallarta showed up, and we got on the road again. The final bus from Bucerias had a crazy driver, and we were able to fear for our lives once again before finally and exhaustingly arriving at our own house and going to bed.
Two hectic weekends and two too many car crashes. After I told Miguel what had happened to us, he informed me that he and his family had ALSO been in another car accident that weekend, and also a mutual acquaintance of ours, a teacher from Higuera. It would make one skeptical to travel in Mexico any more!
