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.

Art of the Huichol

Spent some time yesterday looking around a gallery with Huichol art while Jim was downloading stuff from the internet. Funny thing was that I never noticed all the peyote symbols while I was standing there and only saw them after looking at the photos I took. They say it's like that when you go out in the desert to look for peyote, you look everywhere and can't find a thing until you finally spot the 1st one and then you look around and realize they are everywhere.

The inlayed images are produced with colored yarns pressed into bees wax. Other pieces are made using colored beads, each individually placed in intricate patterns.

A little more info about the Huichol People can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huichol_people
and here:
http://www.mexconnect.com/articles/190-mexico-s-huichol-resource-page-their-culture-symbolism-art

Anchors Aweigh!

So, after more than 3 months we are finally underway. We enjoyed our stay in Barra, met a lot of the locals, met a lot of the part timers, who come to stay for a few months each year to escape the cold in places like Canada and the northern states, made lots of new friends, even ran into one of my mom's ex-boyfriends, who I hadn't seen in 20+ years. It's good to be on the move again, and good to get away from the lagoon and the mosquitoes, which were getting worse by the day, I think the warming weather had something to do with that. We finally got the prop out of the cockpit and placed on the shaft where it does a lot more good when it comes time to moving the boat, had the bottom cleaned, which was beginning to grow roots and permanently anchor us to the bottom of the lagoon, went to one last party, okay 2 last parties, one last street taco, picked up the laundry and we were off.

Kitchen in the the house where we were invited for a BBQ, I like the brightness of it all.

Our first stop was Bahia Tenacatita, where we ended up spending an extra day due to Jim coming down with a case of sun poisoning, he was in ruff shape, but feeling good enough to continue on the following day.

Next we stopped in Bahia Chamela after having to motor the entire way, not much wind at all, and calm seas but when we got there the wind had picked up and there was quite a big surf, so we weren't about to attempt a beach landing in our little inflatable. By the next morning things had calmed down quite a bit and we were able to get to shore to visit the little town of Perula. Had a excellent meal of pollo y calabaza in a cream sauce with fresh made to order tortillas that were so good that I asked if she could make us a dozen more for us to take with us and she only charged us an extra 10 pesos. Then we stopped at one of the local markets to buy a few provisions and also bought a pineapple, remembering the one we had bought on the way down, and this one was even better, so sweet! The must grow them close by. We stopped to have a couple beers on the beach, just so we wouldn't have to go back to boat quite yet. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, think most of the locals are gearing up for the Easter week festivities in which just about the entire country gets the week off and heads for the beach.

Beach town of Perula

Diving Boobies

1st time to see so many boobies feeding all at once, there were hundreds of them, the nest on the nearby islands. 

Two days later we find ourselves back in Banderas Bay, sailed through miles of red tide, a swarm of bees and passed a yellow bellied sea snake to get here, but we made it, the seas were quite calm and of course the wind didn't start blowing until we got to the anchorage. Quite a few of our cruising friends are here making plans to either put their boats away for the summer or like we are, planning on heading up into the Sea of Cortez.

La Manzanilla

We took a bus ride over to La Manzanilla today. Small town north of here on Tenacatita Bay that is known for their crocodiles, which live in the river there. They keep them from walking around town with a fence that runs between the town and the river. Some of these guys are quite large, maybe 15-20 feet long. They are definitely well fed, just look at how fat they are.

White Ibis

The ibis were trying to get at the fish scraps that were being thrown to the crocs without getting too close.

Groove-billed Ani

Want more little dogs in your diet? 1st you have to get rid of this sign.

These guys were quite a bit bigger than the one we saw here in the Barra Lagoon, that one was only 5-6' long.