Acapulco, Guerrero

Acapulco, Guerrero.
 We left Taxco for Acapulco one morning. The journey took 4 and half hours mainly because the mountain road is not straight. In french, we call this kind of road : shoe lace road. My first impression of Acapulco was not good. The city is too large, there are too many high rise hotels and too many people in a bay that must have been so stunning when Acapulco was only a village. The view of the bay is now spoiled with the sight of tankers and container ships. Our hotel “Mission”, in the oldest part of the city, despite its beautiful court yard, seemed to be run down but the Internet connection was great. We even had it in our room. I could “Face time” with my mum and send emails to our friends and family. Everything looked already brighter. It looks like we never can have both : a beautiful room and good internet, it is always one or the other. Looking closer at our room, I could see that it was clean, the main thing, but anybody could have knocked the door down and the mosquito screens were full of holes. We kept the fan running a good speed during the night and everything was quiet at night.

We had a shower, I changed my jeans for a nice and sexy dress and we went for a stroll, a beer on the shady zocalo with outstanding big banyan trees, then for a meal at a humble Mexican restaurant close by. The staff and the customers were friendly, the food was good and copious but I had to work hard on my pork chop to cut it and it finally gave up with a splash of hot red sauce that covered the front of my dress. I came in wearing a purplish grey dress and left with a dotted red one. My first thought was if anyone had seen it, which reminded me of the first canoe trip in Nova Scotia with my husband to be, when we went backward down the rapids of the Mersey river in Kejimkujik provincial park. We had no control of the canoe, the rapids were tricky and the water was very cold at the end of October. Fortunately, everything went smoothly but my first concern was not the possible danger but feeling ridiculous if anyone had seen us facing the wrong way going down the river. There were nobody there. We spent our day canoeing down and walking up at least a kilometre to get the car for carrying the canoe up river again. Too far for portaging.

The day after we decided to go to a more quiet place my husband remembered from decades ago, Pie de la Cuesta. A very nice young girl spent 15 minutes trying to help us find a bus that went there. It took one hour, two colectivos to get there and through a very busy real Mexican market. Seeing the ocean and walking on the beach was a relief after the chaos of the city. After spending a part of the day on the beach, we found a bus going back to Acapulco. We were amazed to see a big sofa right there in the middle of the street. It was a marker for a huge hole so deep that would swallow a car completely if the driver did not see it, the kind of hole that goes to China. In the evening we went to see the most breathtaking show I have ever seen, the famous cliff divers of Acapulco. These men are from 13 to 55 years old. They are professionals. They dive from a 60 meter cliff into a wild and narrow 10 foot deep passage where the waves crash. Apparently no fatal accident ever happens. One of the most amazing things we were not told is that the divers swim through the wild crashing waves, pull themselves up, climb the vertical cliff bare feet and bare hands before jumping. I was in awe and felt fear for them.

We stopped by Zihuatanejo but the journey took 5 and half hours by bus and I had my “camarones al coco”, coconut shrimps, I was craving for a while. It was the most expensive meal we had in Mexico this year but it was so good, then I was very ready to go to Caleta de Campos to see our friend Cynthia a Casa de la Rosa. We took an other bus from Zihuatanejo to Lazaro Cardenas and we had to change bus station. We knew it was not very far but because we did not know exactly where, we took a taxi. The taxi driver seemed to hesitate a bit but charged us 35 pesos, witch is almost nothing except that it was only a few blocks away doing a detour. We realized that after we were told at the bus station the next bus was in 2 hours but, we could take a colectivo two streets back that was leaving in only one hour. We went back on foot just a few meters from where we took the taxi at the beginning and we laughed. He did not cheat us, we asked for the other bus station and he drove us there.