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Sunday, March 28, 2004

 
Things I'll miss

Today marks 8months out from the UK for me on this trip... and I only have 8 full days left in La Paz before I set off to head home....

Oddly (well maybe not so odd) having been homesick off and on for months I know I'm going to miss La Paz... There's a lot of good aspects to the place... for instance for the last couple of weeks pretty much every sunset over the bay has been a fantastic display of horizontal bands, fading from the deep indigo of the night sky thro' the rainbow to red at the horizon (the black line of the low penninsula that juts into the bay) followed by the sea reflecting the deep dark blue of the sky... If you saw it on a postcard you'd think it had been retouched...

The air itself is pretty clear and reltively unpolluted, despite the efforts of the small oil refinery/electric plant across the bay... So at carnival we had folks out in the street with top notch telescopes, selling folks a peep at the incredibly bright full moon for 5pesos a pop (25p)... First time I'd seen the moon in that much detail, they're out there again tonight, looking at the planets this time, I'll see if I can get a look on the way home....

La Paz is subtropical, we're on the same latitude as the Carribean which is a 2 or 3 thousand miles east across mainland Mexico and the Gulf... I did drive the hour or so southwest to the pacific beaches at Todos Santos once, which is just under the Tropic of Cancer....

It's true that as my mate Corey said; it is "City of Cement".... Virtually everything is built from reinforced concrete and breeze block except: the library, cathedral, and the government building which are older places done in this wierd crumbly-looking pink volcanic stone... oh and of course there's the odd shack effort built out of wood offcuts tin and carboard.... But this is nowhere near as grim as it sounds, 'cos altho' Mexico has been run almost completely by the PRI for the last 70 years (making it the longest running 1 party state in the world since the collapse of the USSR! When Vincente Fox was eleted in 2000 he became the first "opposition" President elected since the 1930s!) it didn't end up with the kind of state prescribed grimmness that my mate Gary Brooks describes in his letters from Siberia (no really)... nope, y'see the thing about Mexico's corrupt politicos is they spend all the tax money making themselves uneqally happy, rather than making everybody else equally miserable! And folks respond to this in 2 ways, 1) they dodge taxes as much as possible. Mexico has the biggest economy in Latin America and 22% of that is tax dodging... 2) when they build a place they paint it bright and cheerful colours (mostly)... you don't get the big plastic pre-made signage you see in the USA/UK or much in the way of printed billboards, what you do see is loads of hand painted signage on walls everywhere, some if it artwork in it's own right, and a lot of it cheerfully flouting copyrighted trademarks... Disney lawyers would shit themselves!

...another thing that keeps La Paz from being a grim concrete wasteland is the trees... it's weird to stand on the roof and look up into the cactus spattered hillsides and then down again into the town and see green everywhere - 40ft high palms that look like skinny dudes with big hair, fig trees, orange trees and lime trees... in people's yards, lining the streets and along the malecon (seafront)

And in quiet moments in the day when the traffic noise stops, the bloody dogs stops barking and the cocks quit crowing you can hear loads of songbirds twittering away (especially when I'm trying to sleep, you little bastards!)... I've seen a few hummingbirds at the Nopali cactus flowers here, some minature pigeons which are a lot prettier than the flying rats we get at home, and of course shedloads of sparrows...

But the most spectacular birds swoop around over the beaches and mountains: white and grey pelicans that flop graceleesly into the water after fish, the great black sillouettes of frigate birds that knife through the air like so many pterodactyls (cheers to Corey again for that very accurate mental image), black and turkey vultures spiral up on mountain thermals and every once in a while you'll see an osprey... at night you can see the delicate snowy egrets and their bigger cousins - the plain old grey herons picking around in the shallows and fishing... not to mention the time we saw a raccoon pursuing the same gig!

I was doing a translation for my mate Edgar who works for an ecotourist agaency and read about the coral reef at Cabo Pulmo, southeast of here, having nailed the journey up Highway1 to Lopez Mateos to see the whales I thought I'd have a go at this too. I bought a snorkel and set off... unfortunately I took advice on journey time from Gofer, who's a good bloke, but a king stoner and (had I thought about it) obviously a mental driver (he told me about driving from San Diego to La Paz in one day... I plan to take 3 going back and consider that to be pushing it)... Gofer said it was less than an hour... Well, two hours of hairy switchback driving up and down mountains I made it as far as Buenavista... chatting to some folks on the beach there I learned it was another hour to Cabo Pulmo... it was too late to get there and back to La Paz that day, but I thought I'd come back another time, until they mentioned the 12miles of dirt track... I've a 1993 Ford Taurus which is a low clearance estate (station wagon) and being as I plan to drive it 1200miles to San Diego/LA the last thing I want to risk is a broken axle or punctured sump on a potholed dirt track... bollocks...

Still, I took my snorkel and drove the 20minutes to Balandra instead... To get there you drive out through the grey rumpled desert hills that'd be right at home in Arizona, past the refinery and then Pichilingue ferry port (that takes folks to Mazatlan on the mainland), past a few smaller beaches, lagoons and what I'm pretty sure are mangrove swamps...

Balandra is a collection of salt water lagoons and bays with clean turquoise water and white sand beaches, and more mangroves fringing the landward edge... It's only a klick from Tecolote which is the beach I swam from at Xmas, where you can see clear across to Ilsa Espiritu Santo... thing about Tecolote is you have a few restaurants right on the beach and on a weekend the whole of La Paz drives up there and parks their bloody cars right on the beach! Turning the whole place into a giant sandy car park!!! There's no buildings at Balandra and a steep drop to the beach keeps dicks from driving on it....

I always walk on past the first 2 or 3 bays where you generally find a dozen or so people and keep on over past the rocks at the point... the rocks themselves are weird, and not just the famed "Mushroom rock" there's a twisted black lava bed that shows through at some points and at others is covered by 5 or 600foot thick of conglomerate which has broken off into office block sized chunks, and where those have been undercut by erosion desk-sized rocks stick down from the overhang like big grey teeth (I nearly knocked myself out on one of the bastards the other day, 'cos I was watching my footing at the time)... just as yuo think the rocks go on for ever, you squeeze through a gap between fallen giants and right in front of you is a perfect cresent of white sand, hidden from the world by the hills, and very rarely is there anyone else there, sometimes I meet 1 or 2 other beach bums and once there was a family in a panga (fishing boat)... Last wednesday I had the place to myself for half an hour while I snorkelled aruond the rocks and saw shoals of black and yellow striped angel fish... the water's a lot colder now than in winter (I guess it lags behind the air temperature changes) and that seems to have put paid to all the bloody jellyfish, so I didn't get stung at all... great stuff...

But it's not all roses here... just this p.m. 3 arses in the back of a pickup passed me on the Malecon and shouted "Pinche gringo Mother****er" (*** for those of you at work) which roughly translates as "Stupid F***in' American Mother****er"... this annoyed me, not least cos I didn't have time to answer with my best Mexican slang "Chinga! No soy Gringo! Pinche babosos!" (F***! I'm not american! F***in' morons!) and had to content myself with flipping them the finger...


Cheers
from
Jon
:)