San Blas

After leaving the rolling anchorage of La Cruz we headed for San Blas. A small Mexican town without a lot of tourists, no big resorts, but plenty of friendly people and good food. It was here that I found the closest thing to a New Mexican sopapilla in Mexico, they call it a gordita harina and sell them for only 2 pesos each. We also found one of the best taco carts we've been to called Las Cuatas, they put a layer of cheese between the 2 tortillas when making your taco and Chavas who makes a roasted pork taco, which they also sell by the kilo, that is amazing.

The anchorage is in the estuary which makes it very calm but at the same time it's surrounded by mangroves and so the bugs, mosquitoes and jejenes, can be very intense. We really enjoyed the town itself and would of liked to stay longer but our defenses just weren't up to win the battle with the biting insects and so we retreated after a couple days bringing with us a kilo of fresh tortillas and of course a kilo of pork from Chavas.

The old church and the new church under construction on the main plaza

 

Old Fort Built in 1770

Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, built in 1769. The ruins once contained the bronze bells that are said to have inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Bells of San Blas"

'But to me, a dreamer of dreams,
To whom what is and what seems
Are often one and the same,--
The Bells of San Blas to me
Have a strange, wild melody,
And are something more than a name.'
Except from the poem The Bells of San Blas by Henry W Longfellow

The jejenes or no-see-ums are the size of a period "." and inflicts such pain that you can only imagine that it would have to be all teeth. The bites from these things take days to heal and will often start oozing. In San Blas the jejenes would get so thick you actually could see them. It was a couple days after leaving before we got rid of them all, they moved in and stayed.

View from the Matachen anchorage outside of San Blas, we tried anchoring here for a night to get away from the bugs, but they found us anyway.