Viaje En Coche (Road Trip!)

We bought this little Honda Fit because our Puerto Vallarta neighborhood is a warren of narrow cobbled streets jammed with SUV's and pickups.

For zipping around town it's great, and we figured we'd make cross-country trips by bus or plane. But the tiny Fit has such a surprisingly roomy and comfortable interior that we decided to give it a try on our recent trip to Guadalajara, Morelia and the butterfly sanctuaries further east. We weren't sorry.

Here's Elizabeth enjoying a roadside vista while perched on the little portable throne we occasionally need to deploy between stops with plumbing. The Fit is aptly named. We had plenty of cargo space for all our gear and amenities, including E's folding bed, carriage and comfort station, and never felt cramped ourselves.

So we picked the right car for touring Mexico in the way we usually make our best choices, which is by lucky accident. Other travel wisdom, we picked up the hard way.

Asking Directions

Mexicans are generally helpful and hospitable, so if you ask them for directions they will give you some, even if they have little or no idea how to get where you want to go.

And even when they do have a clue, their instructions often tend to be vague and general, with usefulness further degraded by the language barrier. Estimates of how long it will take you to get to any given destination are likely to be severely understated, again in the spirit of helpfulness.

Route Markers

And yet, the need to ask for directions is often acute and unavoidable. You may follow one of the largely unmarked state highways into a town along your way but then find yourself unable to identify the way out because signs and route numbers don't appear when they're needed if at all.

There are sometimes two ways to get from A to B, the way you want to go and another way. There may be a sign with an arrow for getting to B, but it is sure to point you to that other way.

Maps

I pored over maps for days before we left, but they turned out to be about as useful as directions from strangers.

In Guadalajara, for example, we wanted to see the vast area called Tlaquepaque, where arts and crafts of all kinds are made and sold. We used our densely printed city map and our iPhone to navigate to this famous place. All indications were that we got very close, but I blush to confess we never found it. (Friends have since told us it happened to them too.)

We had similar trouble getting to our hotel, stymied as we were in Tlaquepaque by street names that didn't match up with the map and by a conspiracy of no-turn or one-way thoroughfares that kept us from reaching the place even after we finally had located it.

Next morning, after we had actually spotted our breakfast stop, it took us another 15 minutes to get to it because the streets that led there were one-way toward us and we got disoriented looking for one that wasn't.

"Topes"

Pronounced TOE-pays, these are speed bumps, but not like any you've seen unless you've driven around here. Some are big enough to be nearly impassable for a small car like ours. They often come without any notice or any contrasting color that would let you see them before impact.

Topes can appear at whatever spots people or creatures are likely to use for a crossing place, which means practically anywhere, in town or out. We encountered a couple on the main freeway through Guadalajara next to a big open-air chicken restaurant with tables set out practically on the shoulder.

"Autopistas"

Speaking of freeways, there is a pretty good network of them in Mexico if you're willing to pay the shockingly high tolls. There are fuel and bathrooms at reasonable intervals, although the only food service is convenience store snacks.

One odd feature is frequent placement of non-potable water for overheated radiators. But it was reassuring to see closely spaced emergency phones for calling in the free road repair and tow service that's included with your toll payments.

Watch out on the steep descents and curves though. Mexican engineers are apparently an optimistic bunch when it comes to driver prudence and skill.

Signs suggested that we yield right of way to trucks without brakes. Hard to imagine who needs such advice, but we twice came along just minutes after big rigs had slalomed to grief on a downslope.

Money

In cities, most businesses accept credit cards, and ATM's ("cajeros") are as ubiquitous as they are in the U.S.

But better not head for smaller towns or rural areas unless you're sure you're carrying enough cash. We got caught short and twice tried to ask directions to a cajero with all the difficulties described above, only to find that it was either out of cash or out of service altogether. By the time we finally located a working cash machine, we had scrounged pesos from the depths of every box, bag and seat cushion we had.


So altogether, I guess I'd have to say that getting there wasn't half the fun. But I add with haste and pleasure that the people and places at the end of our road each day more than took up the slack.

Fellow Travelers

We've never been able to get Elizabeth onto a horse, not even when the creatures only plod in circles like pit ponies in a Nova Scotia coal mine. So when we started planning our trip to visit the monarch butterfly sanctuaries in Michoacan, it wasn't good news when we read that the recommended way to reach them was on horseback.

Ordinarily Elizabeth is a smiling dispenser of pixie dust. But in the face of anything she sees as an existential threat, such as confiscation of her iPad or a pony ride, she manages all at once to be an irresistible force and an immovable object.

Nevertheless we decided to pull up our socks and give it a try. For a week in advance of the trip, we talked up horses and their many reassuring qualities. They are trustworthy, we said, as well as loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.

Maybe we laid it on a little too thick. But it seemed to work. When we described to her how she would sit in front of me on the saddle, she didn't object. I hummed bits of "On the Trail" to give her an idea of the easygoing pace we'd be setting. We interpreted silence as acceptance.

But when we completed the arduous road trip to lofty Sierra Chincua, the last mile almost too much for our little Honda Fit, and approached the stables with our guide, Adolfo, it looked like we might be in for trouble.

"I don't like horses," Elizabeth said flatly.

What to do? Pam and I looked at each other and shared a moment of despair. Then we wordlessly agreed the only way to deal with it was to pretend we hadn't heard anything. I handed Elizabeth to Adolfo, swung myself awkwardly into the saddle, reached back down for my little partner and held my breath.

Maybe she was just so ready to escape the arms of a stranger that she was willing to overlook the inconvenient fact that her familiar and beloved granddad was sitting on a horse. But whatever the reason, she came up without another murmur. Adolfo donated his sweater to make her seat behind the wide vaquero saddle horn more comfortable, and off we went.

After a few minutes she asked me, "Do you like our horse?" I said I did.

"I like our horse too," she replied.

The rest of the day was like a dream. It took the better part of an hour to get close to the small area of steeply sloping forest where the monarchs clustered, and then we had to clamber along a treacherous footpath to reach a spot where we could really see what we came to see.

They filled the chilly mountain air in thousands. Millions more massed together for warmth in enormous clusters suspended from the branches of the tall firs that surrounded us. Adolfo told us as much about them as he could without overtaxing my limited Spanish, using dead specimens picked up from the ground to illustrate the anatomical points.

It was like nothing any of us had ever experienced. We were awed and dazzled. Elizabeth clearly sensed she was witnessing one of nature's most amazing performances. She gazed silently around her, more reverent even than her horse.

The ride back to the stables seemed shorter, partly because our guide chose a shortcut that seemed steeper and chancier than the one we'd taken in. Now and then our mounts slipped or stumbled. I've been on quite a few trail rides, but this one made me nervous.

Not Elizabeth though. She fell asleep.

Get Up in the Morning at Your Own Risk

So okay, this picture wasn't taken in Mexico. But I'm quite sure there's a family on the road somewhere not far from me with the same traffic safety plan as this one.

Actually, there was a Vespa knockoff lurching along a cobblestone street near our place a couple of weeks ago carrying a family of four. Dad was driving. Big brother was perched on the seat in front of him. Mom hung on behind him with a toddler in her arms.

I did an OMG double-take. But from the above I now see that, relatively speaking, they were paragons of prudence. The bike above is carrying four adults and five kids including the one in the bucket seat. Asia has much to teach us.

We've been adjusting to Third World notions of risk allocation since the day we bought our home here back in 2005. That was when we learned that our little 7-unit condo building doesn't have any liability insurance on it, and not much insurance of any other kind either.

In a zone exposed to hurricanes and also prone to earth tremors, I observed mildly to the owners association president that this seemed incautious, although the word I choked back was "foolhardy." In response I got a prim lecture advising me to take a page from the Mexican Book of Wisdom and purge myself of the litigious "culture of blame" that prevails so unpleasantly north of the Rio Grande.

So I've been trying.

I scarcely turn a hair now when I encounter busy uncontrolled intersections, broken staircases without any railings, electrical transformers that I know are apt to fail explosively squatting at ground level next to crowded sidewalks, refrigerators standing in the beds of pickup trucks, restrained with one arm by a man balanced on the side rim, city buses driven by the criminally insane, unrefrigerated meats heaped on tables in the supermarket, etc. etc.

A few weeks ago I joined a popular hike along the coast south of here between Boca de Tomatlan and Animas Beach. It turned out to be a series of steep climbs and vertiginous cliff walks, all without benefit of warning signs, reliable footing, or anything to keep anyone whose mind or foot wandered from tumbling to the rocks below.

During the rainy season, big chunks of the trail are obliterated by mudslide. Our guide, an energetic Canadian woman, collects 50 pesos from each of her followers. She pays the money to a man who lives in the hills near the trail to build little bridges of sticks and rawhide to get us over these chasms. Many hundreds of people make this walk every year, but nobody else seems to care whether it's passable.

Not that it really is anyway. Last year somebody on this hike did trip on a root or a bit of protruding boulder and took a fatal plunge into the vertical rain forest that lines most of the coastline around here.

Tragic, but that's the culture of blame talking.

I realized recently that I'm finally beginning to silence that annoying voice. I was hanging a wind chime outside our bedroom when I dropped a large pair of scissors and saw it clatter to the bedroom balcony on the floor below.

Our neighbors had rented it to some nice people from Ohio. I went downstairs to collect my fallen shears.

"Ho, ho," quipped the tenant. "That's some pretty good liability for me to collect."

"Ho, ho, yourself," I replied. "Not around here."

Hay Que Festejar

Me and Elizabeth are about to walk out the door to go to a birthday party for Argelia, one of her "amigos" at school. We had no idea what we were in for.

Argelia has just reached the age of three, which turns out to be a very important passage here in Mexico.

I was grateful we had a nice present and wrapped it prettily, because this wasn't just another cake-and-candles affair. There were at least 300 family and friends there, about evenly divided between kids and adults.

We gathered at the Casa de Arbol, a party place with a covered patio and a playground surrounding a banyan tree with a trunk the size of a large elephant and a canopy that rose fifty feet or more overhead. Halfway up there was a wooden deck with a playhouse, linked by a swaying rope and plank bridge to another playhouse from which little party animals could slide through a plastic tube to the ground.

Not far off was a trampoline enclosed with a net. There was an art table with crayons, play doh and paints for anybody who cared to take a seat. There were adult and kid food lines, seating with tablecloths and napkins, sideboards piled with candy, custard and cakes.

When it was time for the piniata, there were four of them, one after the other, so there were plenty of swings for the whole crowd, and certainly plenty of treats and toys to scoop from the ground.

There was even a face painter to put seahorses, shells and hearts on anybody who could sit still enough for it, which Elizabeth could. A hired photographer documented all.

I commented to somebody standing next to me that it was more like a wedding than a birthday party, mentally calculating that if this was what a birthday calls for around here, we'd have to rethink our family economy.

But Pam told me later she'd heard that the tradition of big third birthday celebrations dates from the 19th Century in Mexico, when three was the age at which a child was deemed to have survived what was then a very high infant mortality rate. Apparently expressing communal joy over anyone younger was thought to be tempting fate.

Mexico's infant mortality rate today is well below the world average, and in any event Argelia herself certainly has little to fear from it. Her parents and grandparents are doctors, and the extended family surrounding her last Saturday looked glossy and prosperous.

Elizabeth bustled from venue to venue for four hours, pausing only to stuff herself with grease and sugar. None of the attractions looked UL approved, so I stayed as close to her as I could while exercising my meager Spanish on anyone who looked polite enough to tolerate it.

When we collapsed exhausted into the car at last, Elizabeth sighed contentedly as she waited for me to unwrap one of her lollipops for the road. "Was that party for me?" she asked.

I just told her I was glad she'd had fun. What hostess wouldn't be thrilled to know she sent her guests home feeling that way?

It's So Obvious

There are some things we can all agree on.

Well, no, actually there aren't. But I keep forgetting and finding myself faced with awkward silences or worse when I try to make party talk out of one of those things we supposedly can all agree on.

The first time I remember it happening was back in the '80s when I found myself standing at a hotel bar in Des Moines next to a pretty girl and decided to chat her up while we waited for our event to start.

CNN was gassing away on a TV above the bartender's head, and an item popped up on convulsions in South Africa as apartheid neared its final days.

"Who in their right mind," I wondered aloud, "would imagine that it's okay to run a country by suppressing the rights and opportunities of 90 percent of its inhabitants?"

D'oh.  "Anybody who can get away with it" is the right answer to that naive question. There are lots of such people, and they've been getting away with it on every continent but Antarctica throughout recorded history.

One of them was my bar companion, whose accent I had failed to register as South African. Who'd have expected to run across her in Iowa? I thought she would throw her martini in my face. She didn't, but she gave me a piece of her mind and a passionate lecture on the shortcomings of her indigenous countrymen.

No matter how utterly wrongheaded or even downright evil you are sure something may be, there are people who are just as sure the world would be a better place with bigger helpings of it. Don't assume one of them isn't seated beside you at dinner or sharing your church pew.

I was reminded of this lesson last year when I saw an article in the New York TImes about people in Chelsea and the West Village who wished the High Line Park had never been built.

The High Line Park is a mile or so of scenic landscaping installed over the tracks of an abandoned elevated freight line, providing hitherto unseen and unexpectedly stirring mid-rise views of the surrounding converted warehouses and factories, stylish new condo and hotel buildings, and the Hudson River.

It struck me the moment I saw it as visionary, an indisputable benefit to mankind. A rusting hulk of unused infrastructure, haven of derelicts and vermin, had been transformed into a beautiful space, open to all, without displacing anything or anyone. Surely we could all agree that this was an unalloyed good.

But no, the park's very perfection and popularity doomed it in the eyes of many locals, who complained to the Times that rents were rising and the new crowds of well-heeled visitors were spoiling the post-industrial funkiness they treasured in their neighborhood.

Which brings me to the images above, before and after views of the Los Muertos pier here in Puerto Vallarta. It's where fishing, water taxi, and snorkeling excursions begin from the busiest beach on the bay. The new pier was just opened this month to great fanfare. Even without the opening night lighting, it's very good looking and far more useful than its predecessor.

Around the central sculpture there's lots of seating with excellent views of the bay, the town and the surrounding mountains. And the business end of the pier descends toward the water in three levels so boats can be easily boarded, high tide or low.

The old one really did look that bad, a crumbling lump of cheap concrete and rotting iron work. Still, there are people who miss it.

I forgot myself a couple of weeks ago and innocently remarked to an acquaintance at a social gathering how puzzling it was that anyone should prefer the old wreckage to its replacement. She happened to be one of the contrarians, and once again I had to listen to the indefensible being defended.

"I've done it again," I said to myself.

And once wasn't enough. Not a half hour later I was talking with a man who's been slowly building his own house next to the barbecue restaurant he runs in the rain forest just outside town. I casually told him how strange it is how Mexican builders seem to leave rusting rods of rebar sticking out of the roof of almost everything they put up.

I expected to share a wry chuckle and a shrug with him at the fecklessness of local builders. Instead he replied, "I've sure got them on my house. If I have a good year I may go up another floor."

Some people never learn. Maybe that's something we can all agree on.

Wardrobe Malfunction

Anticipation is half the fun, and sometimes more than half.

When I was still working and looking forward to the day when we'd be living full time in the tropics, I sometimes expressed my longing by ordering clothes I imagined I would need.

As a result I now have a closet full of fancy shirts and white linen pants I almost never wear, some in their original cellophane wrapping. Most of this stuff came from websites I now realize are aimed at people who have been invited to destination weddings in Aruba or Costa Rica.

I also have a couple of straw fedoras which it turns out I can't use much. They are quite snazzy, but they mark me as a tourist and potential sucker for the cheeky floggers of tequila and time-share condos who line the streets near the beach. Leaving the hats on the shelf spares me the need to choose between wasting my time or being rude to people who after all are just trying to make a living.

I did place one order that has paid off big time though. I bought four pairs of swim trunks, in blue, green, red and black. You can swim in them of course. But they're long enough to look like ordinary shorts if you tuck in the drawstrings, and they've got pockets on the sides for change and keys, plus one in the back for a wallet.

They dry in minutes, and unlike their owner they never wrinkle, shrink or fade. I'm sure they must be manufactured out of some heinous petroleum derivative, because you don't get benefits like these unless there's been a pact with the devil.

I have found that my life now takes me to few places or occasions where these shorts don't work just fine. With a T-shirt, I'm good to go for the beach, pool, or happy hour at the neighbors'. With a wash-and-wear shirt that has a collar, I can get into any restaurant in town. For a charity gala or fancy cocktails, I can rip the cellophane off one of my cubavera.com specials, still no need to change pants.

When I packed to come here, I knew I would almost never need socks. But it has come as a pleasant surprise that I also almost never need underwear.

Well, now I really have over-shared. But what else is a blog for?

The Cheap Seats

It costs about U.S. $75 to get into a high speed inflatable and go speeding across the bay for close-up views of the humpback whales that swim down from Alaska to spend their winters along the Pacific Coast around Puerto Vallarta.

I only paid about twice that for these oversized binoculars and tripod, but now I can stalk marine mammals and a good deal else for free from the comfort and safety of my living room.

I'll admit it's not really a substitute for getting up close and personal, where you can see the scars and barnacles on their shiny hides and hear the deep throaty gasps that accompany their expulsions of spray and mist.

In fact, if it weren't for the tourist barges I'd see far fewer of the creatures long distance, because nine times out of 10 the way I spot them is by noticing a cluster of boats heaved to in the bay. Focusing in on them, I see spouts, dorsal fins, and now and then the lifting of wide flukes that means the whale is diving to cruise the depths for as long as 15 or 20 minutes.

When there's not much haze, the binocs give me such glimpses almost to the horizon. But the ideal distance is close enough to see the action with the naked eye, in which case the glasses make a real show out of it.

That was the case a couple of days ago when I looked up from my book to see a couple of boats flanking some disturbed water in which a gout of spray suddenly appeared that was larger than either of them. A dark shape rose up, and then there was another huge splash.

I lunged for the lenses and got them aimed and focused just in time to see the entire length of that frisky adult whale, certainly a testosterone-driven male, thrust free of the water, then fall back in a cloud of spray that soaked everybody on the nearest boat and probably scared them to death.

It was the best look at a living whale I ever had from any vantage point, ashore or afloat, and for my money those binoculars paid for themselves in that one exciting moment.