“Ayudame Gerry, me ha mordido un …..”

Well you can’t blame us for not giving away the ending at the beginning can you?  The subtitle should tell you one thing at least: “Hemos llegado en Mexico”, we are back in Mexico.

Strike 1

We’ll begin by telling you some tales of auto-woe.  No, not woe is us, but woe is our car. It’s sort of two strikes and one ball. Strike one was in Puerto Peñasco (Rocky Point to Gringos; it’s near the north end of the Gulf of California) on our 2nd night in Mexico. We made the mistake of putting the car in the unguarded, unobserved lot of our small hotel rather than on the street where the hotel had a video camera and people observing all night.  Next morning we were about to leave when we found that the right front passenger-side window of our car had been broken by a thief overnight. Nothing of value was stolen and we got the window fixed in Hermosillo. The silver lining is that we got to meet an insurance adjuster and visit an auto glass shop and practice our Spanish with both. Strike one. It cost us $65, which seems very reasonable.

Then en route to Ciudad Obregon, Gerry started hearing brake squealing noises and was afraid we were about to lose our brakes.  Thankfully we found Jorge, a friendly mechanic at Maysa Auto, who checked the brakes and found nothing wrong.  Ball one.

Strike 2

And finally, and most expensive, while returning to Ciudad Obregon from the old silver mining town of Alamos, we were halfway back when the right front tire blew out.  Luckily, we were going very slow trying to get onto a main highway.  We must have driven over a pretty sharp rock, because it poked a pretty big hole in our tire.  Amazingly, only 100 meters further on, we found a ramshackle couple of buildings with a handmade sign saying “Vulcanisador”.  We pulled up to find both shacks stacked with bales of hay. Obviously the owner had a second string to his business bow, selling alfalfa to local cattle farmers.  Very quickly two young girls showed up asking if we wanted air.  When we showed them the tire, one of them ran off to call someone else.  Ten minutes later a young man (18?) showed up and pretty soon, Gerry had arranged for him to put on a second-hand tire for us as a stopgap measure for the princely sum of 250 pesos (about U.S.$25). Sadly for him, the first tire he put on blew out while he was testing it for leaks. For us we had a mismatched tire, a little bigger than the original, that had neither been aligned nor balanced, so we drove the remaining 15 miles to Obregon at 45 mph with our flashers turned on.  Next day we were back at Maysa Auto where Jorge tracked down two tires of the right size (ours aren’t too common in Mexico) and mounted and balanced them. Gerry had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary. Strike Two. That cost us $135, about the same as it would have in the USA.

As far as the car goes, we are not out of the woods yet. But now we’ll tell you about Jan’s mishaps.  The first one was caused by a watermelon… We know.  Watermelons don’t sting.  Don’t worry we’ll get there in the end. Remember that after Rocky Point, we went to Hermosillo, the capital and by far biggest city in Sonora.  We dilly-dallied there because the Hotel San Alberto had the best pool we were privileged to use since the award winning (the G&J Pool trophy) one at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas.

Posada del Desierto

After Hermosillo, we headed south for the beach resort of San Carlos and checked in at the Posada del Desierto, almost the only hotel in town within our budget.  It turned out to be owned by a very friendly lady called Lorena, who although Mexican spoke very fluent English. Lorena mentioned that her partner, Dean, who is Canadian, takes people on kayak tours. He was taking some people out the next day; would we like to go? We were put off by the 6:30 A.M. departure and earlier awakening but eventually we said yes and next morning  headed down to a nearby beach and helped launch three 2-person kayaks.  We found out that kayaks weigh a lot more than our canoe did; just the two of us could handle our canoe easily, while it took at least four people and preferably six to get a loaded kayak down to the shore.

We paddled for an hour, getting to see pelicans, frigate birds and blue-footed boobies.  We paddled through a  window cut in the rock  and almost destroyed our rudder when the swell suddenly subsided and dropped us!  But we made it out the other end rudder intact. On the other side, crossing a bay Gerry spotted a lone dolphin about 150 meters away. We watched it surface a couple of times at very short intervals and then the last time we saw it, it arched high out of the water, gave a very good display of its tail, and was gone, obviously to dive very deep.  What a thrill!

Preparing to Launch

Our goal was a small beach on a nearby headland; on arrival we beached the kayaks to rest our poor arms (Jan’s left hand wouldn’t stop shaking, the arm muscles were so tired from paddling).  Dean had also brought a picnic, and all the food had been stored in our kayak, so as soon as the kayaks were safely out of the water, we started unloading the food. Jan asked Gerry to pass her the watermelon, which he did.  However, no sooner did she get hold of it than she wanted to put it down, it was so heavy.  And that’s when she made a mistake she is still suffering from: she bent over. The sudden pain in her left lower back was excruciating. It seems likely that her back had been “primed” for this problem by helping to carry the three kayaks.

We put our best face on things and tried to enjoy the rest of the day, which to a large extent we did.  Our end point had been chosen for its swimming and snorkeling possibilities. Gerry got to spend a great half hour or more snorkeling around the headland, seeing lots of colored fish, and in one instance, a school of thousands (no exaggeration) of  clear, tiny smelts.  It doesn’t come close to equaling Sharm-El-Sheik, but it was good. Jan gently eased herself into the waters and paddled a bit, but the hurting back was quite a limiting factor – getting into the water to swim wasn’t too difficult, but getting out was a much trickier matter.

Executed Watermelon: Strike 3

Later, quite unceremoniously, the guilty watermelon was executed. It was delicious. After lunch we paddled back with less enthusiasm. We hadn’t been in a canoe in five years and our shoulders let us know it. Our guide Dean, paddling himself and his 8-year old charge easily kept ahead of the other two boats. The 8-year old’s parents, we guess around 35-40, easily kept ahead of us. This time, instead of a dolphin being the great sight, it was our kayak touching home shore. Nonetheless, we did have the energy left to swim another twenty minutes in the wonderfully warm waters of the Sea of Cortez, a.k.a. the Gulf of California.

Gerry was also not completely immune to troubles. When we got back from kayaking he couldn’t locate his wallet and put off our supper for an hour searching every bit of luggage looking for it. He was sure it must be somewhere, but gave up the hunt so we could go fill our bellies. After eating he called the USA collect to block the credit cards. There, the great blackout of 2003 had its effect on us. Although all of our credit cards say that we can call collect, it was refused on two of them. We suspect some database was not available or damaged. We did manage to get through to Citibank via collect calls. But they couldn’t do all we wanted because “the computer is down.” Then we thought it was the usual disorganization of banks and credit card companies; now that we know about the blackout it seems that the call center was unaffected while the computer center, located elsewhere, was.

Cathedral of Ciudad Obregon

We went to bed reconciled to the problems with credit cards and the lost cash. But the big problem that loomed before us was replacement of Gerry’s driver’s license. That, it seemed would be tricky. Next morning we were still contemplating going to a forger when we had good news. Gerry went out to the car and made a new search. He thought that maybe he had hid the wallet in the trunk before leaving the beach for our kayak trip. He’d searched once before but hadn’t noticed that rather than put it inside our book box as intended, he had let it slip down by the side of the box. Of course it doesn’t help that the trunk floor and the wallet are both black! So we had the wallet, credit cards, money, and driver's license back. Citibank, however, could not unblock our Citibank card. So is it a strike, ball, or foul?

After a day’s rest for Jan’s back, we set off again on our southward journey, passing through Guaymas (once the most active port on the Gulf of California), then Ciudad Obregon where we stopped to have the brakes checked and ended up that night in Alamos – it used to be a silver-mining town and is now devoted to mining tourists.  In its boom town days at the end of the 19th century, Alamos had a population of 30,000 and was the capital of what was then called Occidente State. It almost died and then was resurrected  by Americans. A small town, it has a core of Spanish-Mexican courtyard-style homes with moorish influence built by the silver barons that have been restored such that the center of town is now a historic district covered by the Mexican version of landmark preservation. It seems to us that there is and will be a great deal of similarity between the history of Alamos and Taos, New Mexico: the latter was discovered by a small handful of people willing to go off and live a life without all the accoutrements of a big city; 70 years later so many tourists came that the accoutrements came too.

Spanish Colonial Alamos

Alamos is a pretty little place, though we did not see it at its best, sweltering as it was in the summer heat and besieged by midges and mosquitoes. (Patience, we are getting there).  Not only we, but it seems that the residents of the town prefer to avoid the daytime heat. After taking a motel and cleaning up a bit, we went for a walk into town after sunset and found ourselves in the Plaza des Armas in front of the Cathedral where almost the whole town had turned out for a wedding.  We hung around in the darkness to see the bride and groom leave the church serenaded by a mariachi band and carried off through the streets in a tiny beetle-like car with the wedding guests honking loudly behind them. A dozen or two American-size pickups following this midget car gave the impression of a pack of wolves after a baby rabbit.

We went back to our hotel and to bed.  The next morning we planned to get up early and take a walk before it got too hot, hoping to avoid the insects of the previous evening.  Gerry woke at 6, Jan half an hour later.  She got up first in her shortie pajamas to go to the bathroom and as she came out of the bathroom, she flicked on the light switch for the bedroom. At that moment she felt a sharp sting on her thigh. She yelped and  instinctively tried to brush the unknown culprit off; for this heroic effort she got stung again on the second finger of her left hand.  By then she was in a complete panic, back pains momentarily forgotten by a higher level of need, dancing around and in high falsetto saying, “Help, I’ve been stung by a, a, ….scorpion.”  The slight hesitation was because at just that moment she caught sight of the creature scuttling away under the nearby chest of drawers.  And so now you know.

The Scorpion's Victim: Strike 4

The pain was quite intense, but Jan didn’t really get worried until after fifteen minutes she noticed that she had pins and needles all down her finger.  After making enquiries with the hotel keeper, it seemed  best to go to the hospital, which happened to be less than 500 m down the road.  It is really more a clinic than hospital, having about 15 rooms in the building. There a doctor asked Jan a few questions and assured her that since she didn’t have trouble swallowing and didn’t have stomach ache, she wasn’t badly poisoned.  Nonetheless they butt-ressed her natural resistance with an injection to mitigate the poison and told her to come back if any other symptoms showed up.

Twelve hours later, the finger end where the bite took place was still completely numb and somewhat painful when struck (which makes typing difficult; think of all those e’s, d’s, and c’s!) and the pins and needles (hormigueo in Spanish, as we learned by necessity) extended as far as the left elbow where they thankfully have stopped.  The spot on the thigh that was bitten was also still sore – rather a burning sensation – but the pins and needles there seem more localized.  Anyway, Jan was feeling a bit fragile and afraid that any open container could harbor a scorpion. For a time at least she wouldn’t dare go to the bathroom in the dark during the night, which means disturbed nights for Gerry.  But hopefully the only long term effect will be greater care in low-light situations.

Now, to summarize, here’s the score: Auto vandals 1, road side rocks 1, watermelons 1, scorpions 1, Jan -2, and Gerry -1. But we’re still happy to be in Mexico.