For a few weeks now, Marcia and I have been talking about taking a mini-vacation. Living in our small little town is paradise but it’s good to get out, every now and then. Adventure is good for the soul.
Saturday, Marcia and I headed up the coast about an hour to a small beach called Chacala, a beautiful little nothing town, off the beaten path. The waves were gentle and the bodysurfing was great. We grabbed some chelas and cacahuates for the beach and kicked it for a few hours under our slowly deteriorating umbrella. We really needed a little adventure to go on, so this was the perfect place. Loaded with tour buses from Guadalajara, Chacala is growing just a wee bit too fast for it’s own good. At the advice of another ex-pat gringo, we set out heading south of town to find a secluded beach. We stopped on a ridge overlooking the bay, a beautiful arc, with Chacala’s long wide beach in it’s pouch. We found a Guanabana tree, it’s fruit green with fleshy spikes (I took one home, but I was too eager to open the alien casing and jumped the gun before it was ripe). The road we were on had been put in as part of a project to build a luxury housing development and signs were everywhere that this sleepy little beach community is about to change, drastically. When I see that level of infrastructure, it means there is big money behind the project, Marcia joked to me about how 5 years from now we’ll be talking about how Chacala was once this sleepy little town. It was a lucidly ironic moment. We plowed through the country side, occasionally taking a wrong turn and thanking god we had the Pathfinder’s 4×4 to get us out. The soil was rich and red, it reminded me of my trip to Puerto Rico when I was a child, where the soil was blood red, as we drove through the sugarcane countryside.
We ended up at a rock filled beach which I spontaneously named ‘playa pura piedra’ and so we thought we must have taken a wrong turn. Back at the gates of the development, where we had started, an old guy who I assume was the night watchmen told us that we had not taken the right way. After another false start we cut our losses and drove back to town and then to the highway.
El Cruce de Chacala is this little intersection that marks the turn-off from the highway to Chacala. Several fruit stands and a mini-super market mark the turn-off. The fruit vendors sell all kinds of fruit and on the way up here, one particular fruit caught my eye. A large green fruit with nobby, mellow spikes easily the size of a watermelon. We had talked to one of the vendors and promised to return on our way out of town. And so we did. The fruit is called a “Jaka” I may be spelling it wrong. It is the most insane fruit, split open the innards are like a shag carpet and the fruit is hidden inside the strands, cut out one by one, the fruit hides a large nut inside and the flesh tastes like a cross between mango and banana (my two favorite fruits). The texture is like no other fruit I’ve ever tasted. It has a slightly elastic feel to it almost like the snap of a twizzler without the waxy feeling and the smell has lasted in my car for an entire day since.
The day was still young and we were up for adventure, so on the way back to Bucerias, we stopped at three beach towns: Boca de Naranjo, Lo de Marcos and San Pancho. Each town had it’s own flavor and character. Boca’s beach was wide white and flat, set quite far from the town which had little signs of tourism. Lo de Marco had a charming and colorful town square and a nice wide beach loaded with palapa restaurants, definitely a tour bus destination and then San Pancho, another quaint little town with a notable gringo population. Of all the towns we visited that day, San Pancho struck me the most as the one I’d like to end up in someday when Bucerias becomes too busy. The feeling I got as I drove through the streets was one that I felt for the first few months of living in Bucerias, just a small town with a great vibe, perfect for getting lost in.
It was a wonderful getting lost in each of the towns, finding our way through them, getting to know another side of Mexico we don’t see in our day to day lives. I love getting to know Mexico, even in a town similar to mine with a large tourism pull. it’s so beautiful to see the differences and charm in all these little towns, right next to each other or at most just a few miles up the road, but entirely different places with different cultures and customs.
Mexico truly is waiting to be discovered. and I hope it never is.
