Reading the Guadalajara Colony Reporter

The Guadalajara Reporter is a weekly print and online newspaper for the greater Guadalajara area English-speaking community. The link takes you to its website, which has some of the main stories.

I picked up a print copy the other day and learned that the average Mexican minimum wage is going up 1.87 pesos a day, which is eighteen cents US. The new minimum wage is the Guadalajara area will now be 47.16 pesos, which $4.44 in US dollars -- that's per DAY, not hour. Many Mexicans, such as maids and street vendors, make less.

Chinese competition is cutting into the profits of Mexican companies that make high-quality hand-made Christmas ornaments, by making much cheaper versions of the same things to sell in Mexico and other places. Last year, we talked with a number of Mexicans who were feeling the pinch of Chinese competition in their own small businesses.

The Mexican Greenpeace website has posted a list of transgenic foods and their brands at its website, that is, foods derived from genetically modified plants. I'm always interested to get glimpses of the Mexican ecological movement.

Lower sulfer fuel will be introduced in Mexico in 2006 but will still be way above the guidelines. The costs of upgrading PEMEX's facilities are about two billion US dollars, so it will be a while before Mexico's current standards are met.

Hmm... this paper has lots of environmental news. Thee are several more articles, along with a lot of coverage of the arts, community calendars, etc.

The ads in the print edition show a lot of the upscale houses for sale around Lake Chapala.

Contrasts.

Conversations in Ajijic and San Antonio Tlayacapan

This afternoon Kelly and I walked to Ajijic (pronounced ah-he-HEEK), the next town over. It took less than an hour to walk to the bus station for Guadalajara, where he would resume the consultation begun yesterday with a periodontist.

I said goodbye to him at the station ... well, actually, at the fish market two doors down from the tiny station, because the man who sells bus tickets is the son of the fish vendor, so he usually hangs out and sells tickets there.

I didn't know what I was going to do exactly, just stroll around, maybe walk home or maybe figure out the local buses. I got an ice cream cone and sat on a bench in the plaza eating it.

After a while, an older Mexican lady asked me if I lived there. I said no, and we got into conversation. After a while, her granddaughter joined us. She spoke good English, and that was helpful as I was finding it a little difficult to follow the older lady's Spanish.

We chatted for a long time. The older lady had been widowed with five very young children many years earlier, and she had worked in a scientific capacity rare at the time. She wasn't credentialed in the field but had learned a lot from her husband, a doctor, before he died. Her granddaughter lives in nearby Jocotepec and works at a school for both deaf children and children with disabilities. Its funding has been greatly helped by the foreign community.

The granddaughter had a sister with her, who took this picture. She's married to an American, and they were visiting from Texas.

I was curious to know the old lady's age but wasn't sure if it was polite to ask. So I asked the granddaughter if I could ask and she said it would be fine. The old lady proudly said that she was 91. You can see that she doesn't look it. (Just for the record, she is the one in the middle!)

After we parted, my heart was full from such a friendly encounter. I wandered around Ajijic and meandered back toward home, never quite figuring out the buses. That was just as well, because later I had another good conversation. I was already back in San Antonio Tlay., when I stopped to browse in a shop. I got to talking with a man who appeared to own the shop, and a young woman of approximately college age. Her English was way better than my Spanish, and we got into a far-ranging conversation about Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, capitalism, living an authentic life, and much more! I hope to go back and talk with them some more.

My sister claims that I am a world-class extrovert, but I think that these kinds of exchanges are available to any visitor to Mexico who is willing to stretch a little. If you don't speak much Spanish, of course there will be limitations but the bulk of both talks today was in English.

Lakeside by Lake Chapala, with all sorts of foreigners

For ten days now, we've been in the Lake Chapala area, in the little town of San Antonio Tlayacapan. We're in the smallest RV park we've encountered yet: it has two sites. More about it later when we have some photos.

Right now, I want to start describing the "Lakeside" scene. Picture a series of towns strung along a very large lake with a rather busy highway between them all. Kelly and I were here close to 30 years ago, and I remember being charmed by one of the villages, Ajijic. Now my feelings are more mixed, as Ajijic is now a town of at least 10,000 and many of them are Americans, Canadians, and other foreigners. Real estate prices are high. Everywhere you go, you hear English being spoken. All this takes some getting used to.

We're here to spend time with some good friends from the US who are adopting a baby. I spent much of Christmas evening with the infant cuddled up asleep in my lap, and it was great! We're also here because of Kelly's dental quest to have some implants done. He's in nearby Guadalajara as I write, and I'll report more on Mexican dentistry later. It's been fun to experience some of the many facets of Christmas in Mexico. Here's a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, decorated for the holidays. This is in a yard in our neighborhood.


Being here for a while, we've been taking lots of walks and wondering if this is an area we'd want to spend more time in. There are some nice things. For one thing, I adore lakes. For another, even though the foreigners can be annoying, there are some interesting things about the mix of the two cultures. The Lake Chapala Society, with beautiful gardens, offers many services and progams in English.

Today I met a delightful couple from the American Midwest who have traveled all over the US, Canada, and Mexico -- and have settled down here in San Antonio Tlay. (as it's abbreviated). They are my kind of foreigners, with a lot of appreciation for the warmth and other good qualities of the Mexican people. They did have a couple of stories about the kind of people that make me want to leave the region pronto:

Once they were enthusiastically telling another American here about a great time that they had spontaneously connecting with some Mexicans, when the other person put a damper on the conversation by saying, "We don't do the Mexican thing. We're here because it's cheap."

Another time, a woman in an RV caravan said to them, "Well! You'd think if the Mexicans wanted to sell to Americans, they would learn the language!"

Well! You'd think if Americans wanted to live in Mexico, we'd make an effort to learn the culture and at least some of the language. Seems obvious to me. But it takes all sorts...

Lago Santa Maria del Oro, between Mazatlan and Guadalajara

South of Mazatlan, Highway 15 offers the only section between the US border and Guadalajara that isn't yet four-lane. So we made somewhat slower going. That was okay, though, as our destination wasn't too far. We would camp at the beautiful Lago Santa Maria del Oro. I had read about it in a guidebook last year and had immediately wanted to go there.

But first, a glimpse of air pollution, an all-too-common sight:
Shortly after Tepic, we left the autopista, which was a nice four-lane toll road again, and meandered some kilometers to the pleasant town of Santa Maria del Oro. Out of town, we stopped at the overlook to the lake. A couple of Huichol women were selling their beadwork there, but nothing happened to speak to me.

It's not hard to tell that the lake is in an ancient volcanic crater!


We stayed at a small resort with campground beside the lake, the Koala, run for many years by a delightful Englishman named Chris French, though he may not always be there -- he tells me he has plans for some travel himself. There's a photoalbum of the Koala campground and the Santa Maria del Oro lake on his site too.

Walking around the lake -- and there's a trail all the way -- we passed this charming rustic cabin. Chris later told me that his oldest daughter and her husband own it and that she runs a restaurant in it every Sunday.

When the trail intersected a dirt road, we decided to circle back on it. We did encounter some traffic:


We enjoyed a quiet evening at the Koala and thought of staying over an extra day. As with everywhere we go that appeals to us, we enjoyed brief fantasies of living there. I could certainly imagine going back for a longer retreat!

Mazatlan Days

Since my blog was offline for a while (due to my changing webhosts and getting tangled up in various settings), I'll catch up in a few posts.

We drove to Mazatlan, where we stayed at a small RV campground right on the beach, surrounded by bamboo groves. Had some more nice beach time, a great talk with an interesting couple of Canadian artists, and got our laundry done. (This can become a big deal when you're roaming Mexico!)

Billie, who often posts here, started a group collection of Mexican Christmas photos at flickr.com. Kelly put some up. Here's one I took in Mazatlan. It's not your typical Merry Christmas picture but I thought it captured something:

Jolly Mexican mechanics save the day!

Our clutch got fixed in a very Mexican way. Two mechanics and a helper turned up and had the clutch out within an hour. The disc needed replacing and they went into the nearest city to get a new Toyota part. While they were away, they re-machined the pressure plate. They reassured Kelly that the throw-out bearing was in such good condition that there was no need to replace it.

They came back later in the morning and installed the parts in less than an hour. Total cost $100 US. We paid them in dollars because we didn't have many pesos yet... no problem!

All this was done with great aplomb and jollity. They were so cheerful that Kelly put my little pocket recorder into his shirt pocket and recorded a bit. So here is a 45-second jolly mechanics mp3 file which begins with Kelly walking over by their pickup truck to catch a bit of the music and then joining them. If you click on it, it should just play on your computer. assuming you have Quicktime or some other mp3 player connected to your browser.

Here are our heroes. The one on the left is the one who was laughing the hardest on the sound file.

A perfect walk on the beach, and a great fish dinner

I really don't like adventures. I'm a timid soul on Mexican highways. But I do love being in interesting places. Like now, I'm quite content to be stuck at the beach while we wonder when the promised mechanic will arrive. Today is the day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and this may slow things up, or perhaps her intervention will help. I am far from being a Catholic, but I do love la morenita... that's one of her many nicknames.

Cando, unable to move further, has arrived by a motel and RV park on the shores of the sea of Cortez. There are maybe a dozen other RVs here by the beach.

Yesterday in the late afternoon, we went for a long walk along the sandy beach. It seems to stretch for miles in either direction. We didn't realize when we got here that the beach is aligned east-west rather than the general north-south direction of the coastline. Funny how hard it is to change your sense of place once you get something fixed in your mind. Anyway, we went west yesterday, which took us past a number of pleasant vacation homes, probably belonging to Mexicans and mostly seeming to be unoccupied. As Baja California is between us and the open ocean, the waves are small. The water isn't exactly cold, but this is December, and the air hasn't been warm enough yet to entice us into the water.

The beach has more shells than any we've been on. I like the late-afternoon sun on these:


After our walk, we stopped by the restaurant here. The wind was blowing and it had gotten dark. "How about takeouts?" I suggested. We asked and the waiter said sure. I asked what they were known for and he said the fish dinners. I asked what one of them was, and he took me into the kitchen to show me. It looked good.

Kelly and I decided on that one, and said we'd come back when it was ready. When would that be? Our waiter teased us that it would be half an hour, or 40 minutes, or 50. We said we'd be back in half an hour and went off to take showers in the motel.

After half an hour, there was a knock on Cando's door. The waiter grinned as he presented us with a huge platter containing a fish sliced in half down the middle, resting on aluminum foil, and covered with a sauce. There were plates, silverware, a bowl of warm tortillas in a handwoven basket, fresh tomato salsa, fresh cut limes, and assorted condiments.

We spread everything on the table, and just as our forks were in hand, I said, "Maybe we should get a photo for my blog." But we were too hungry to wait.

The fish was a true feast, and the fresh salsa -- really more like a spicy salad -- was a perfect complement to it. When we took the plates back to the kitchen, I asked the cook how he made it. He told us the name of the fish but it didn't mean anything to us. He said it was a local red fish. On top of it, he put thinly sliced individual rings of onion, then a small layer of mayonnaise (and Mexican mayonnaise typically has more personality than ours, with lime juice and perhaps other things), then a little cheese. None of these add-ons were allowed to overpower the flavor of the fish. Exquisite!

Proof that the fish was local turned up this morning, as I walked our dog on the beach. Larry found a skeleton of exactly the species we had eaten last night.

Good bad luck on the road

Yesterday we left San Carlos, heading south down the coast. From our guidebook we'd picked out a nice campground as our destination: Mr. Moro RV park at a tiny beach town called Las Glorias. It would be about an hour off the highway, but we had come this way specially for beach time, so that was okay.

As we drove uphill out of Guaymas in the morning, Kelly noticed that when he accelerated, the engine revved a little but there was no corresponding acceleration of the vehicle. This told him the clutch was misbehaving but since it was the first time it had happened, he figured he'd have time to work on it before it would act up seriously. He didn't even mention it to me.

That was probably just as well. I was feeling delicate from a cold, and was having trouble looking out at mile after mile of trash -- mostly plastic -- along the road. The occasional skinny dog rummaging through trash close to the highway didn't help my mood either, though at least I didn't see any dog corpses by the road this time.

The highway went through the city of Ciudad Obregon, and at the stoplights there were hordes of raggedly dressed boys and young men, mostly wanting to wash windshields but also selling various items. We fended them all off, but when we stopped for gas and to have brunch in the RV, one plaintive boy watched us. I waved him off, but he opened his mouth in an obvious symbol for hunger. I took him out some extra tortillas, and when he saw me coming he hid between a couple of soft drink dispensers, presumably so I couldn't hit him. He accepted the tortillas politely and mostly left us alone after that, but the whole thing bothered me. I'm never comfortable in such encounters, no matter how they play out.

The afternoon wore on as we headed south. Traffic was pretty heavy, and much of it was SUVs and other vehicles with California plates -- Mexicans and Mexican-Americans returning to their families for the holidays. At one time we saw five California vehicles in a row.

We also noticed a Monsanto plant, and that didn't do anything for my mood. We were in a fertile agricultural area now, and no doubt most if not all of the verdant crops were genetically modified. This is not a good thing for a number of reasons.

When it was finally time to pull off the highway and take quiet back roads to our campground destination, we were both relieved. I was glad to get out of the wild energy flow... in fact, I fervently wished we didn't have so far still to go to Mazatlan, Guadalajara, and Bernal. Kelly had noticed a few more incidents with the clutch but he had come to the conclusion that we could probably get all the way back to our town of Bernal in a week or two, before needing to work on the clutch. Kelly's done a lot of work on our vehicles over the years, and his judgments are good.

But it was not to be. For the last 20 kilometers of back roads, the vehicle was not running at all well. When we turned onto the street where the campground was supposed to be, we stalled. Kelly got us going again, and we both watched eagerly for the campground entrance as the motorhome crawled along with the engine racing. There was the entrance, here the dirt road out to the beach, here a spot with water and electricity. We pulled in and stopped.

Whew! We made it... to paradise in the form of a bright yellow motel building flanked by campsites, beside a long beach. Palm trees, a pool, a palapa restaurant, gentle breezes, you get the picture.

We've long said that we have good bad luck. That is, we have bad luck from time to time, but it tends to have silver linings. So now we are stuck here in this charming place. What a problem!

We went for a long walk in a glorious sunset. Larry liked the wide beach and romped like a puppy. Kelly and I were both immensely grateful that we'd gotten here.

And what about the clutch? We'll have to see. Kelly has read his manual and looked things over, and his conclusion is that we need a new clutch. The people in the office say that there are quite a few mechanics at the nearby ranches, and they will think who is best. Perhaps tomorrow someone will come by here.

In the meantime, Kelly has gotten our internet dish set up, we've enjoyed a sunrise even more glorious than the sunset, we've chatted with some of our fellow campers, and life is good.

They say some people stay here for months.

Music, sunset, and dinner in San Carlos, Sonora

Today's been a layover day in San Carlos, just outside of Guaymas.

(Before you envy me too much, it did include some dentistry. A crown of mine had come out yesterday, and I found an English-speaking dentist a short walk from our campground. I was in and out in just a few minutes. )

For dinner, we went across the street to a seafood restaurant just before dark. I had a delicious shrimp caldo or soup, and Kelly had a perfectly sauteed fish filet with a very fresh Mexican salsa.

But even better than the food was the music. A large table of Mexicans, from their late teens to their 50s or more, were enjoying themselves while two silver-haired singers/guitarists sang one love song after another. I particularly liked it that one of the musicians was a woman. Both she and the man had lovely voices, as did some of the people at the table. The music went on the whole time we were there, maybe an hour. The songs were mostly love songs and judging by the amount of singing along, they were well-known favorites.

Such magic moments! We listened to the music combining with the gentle lapping of waves, while the sky darkened. Such times of alegria, or joyous liveliness, seem to come more often in Mexico. That's a big part of why I'm so glad to be back here.

We're finally back in Mexico and it feels great!

We crossed the border today at Nogales, AZ, and it was a very easy crossing. Partly because we are getting used to the routines and partly because it's all freeway if you take the Mariposa crossing on the edge of town.

You don't even stop at the border! It's marked, but if you blinked when you crossed over, the frequent signs with safety exhortations in Spanish would tell you you were in Mexico. There's a customs post that we didn't need to stop at, just a little ways in (3 miles?) and then at Km.21 you pull over and go through a very well-organized setup.

We were told to get our FM3 visas stamped so we got in line behind a lot of American tourists. When one of the Mexican officials saw the green of the FM3 in my hand, he nodded to us to move past all the tourists to an open spot on the counter, where someone else immediately helped us. This man started looking through all the pages of my FM3, something I didn't want him to do too thoroughly because there's a condition typed in it that I had to have official proof that I'm married to Kelly in to the Migracion office in Queretaro last summer. I did get it in, but I have no proof that I did. He seemed to be looking for the exit stamp, so I said that the official in Chihuahua last summer had said we didn't need it. This man said we did, and proceeded to give us our entrance stamps in the FM3s, which are little booklets kinda like passports.

We had to get a sticker for the car too, and the very helpful young woman whose window we ended up at told us we could spend $30US for a six-months permit. I started to get a bit flustered because we might stay longer than 6 months, but then she said that if we wanted, we could spend $50 US and get a TEN-YEAR permit for our motorhome! Of course we did that. So we can come and go for years without another wait in line for the motorhome.

It was late morning and we were getting hungry, as we usually have brunch around then. So Kelly turned on the propane and we ate in the motorhome. Fortified, it was on to customs. There was a lane specifically for motorhomes but no official near where we stopped. Kelly eased forward, and an official broke away from a group of men and came over. He wanted to see inside. Kelly held our dog Larry in the front seat while I opened the side door. Did the dog bite? No, he won't eat you, I said. Did we have any guns? No, I said. The man glanced inside the door, where his gaze fell on a poster we have of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Have a nice trip, he said, and we were done.

That was particularly pleasant because our shower stall is completely full of housewares and whatnot that we are taking down to our house in Bernal. An officious sort could have made us take all sorts of things out. Whew.

The highway south was another surprise. Except for about 40 minutes going through the city of Hermosillo, the road was almost entirely 4-lane highway and rather lightly traveled. Definitely way better than our entries into Mexico from south Texas have been!

We commented to each other on how normal it seemed to be in Mexico. I was surprised to be feeling this way. After some 250 miles of attractive desert lands, we arrived at San Carlos, a popular resort for North Americans. We pulled in just before dusk, with a pink sky reflecting on the waters of the inlet of the Sea of Cortez, palm trees lining the spacious boulevard. It was pleasantly warm... especially welcome after several days and nights of unusually cold weather in NM and AZ at about 4000 feet.

Soon we were set up in an RV park, complete with wifi access, and out on the beach with Larry. This dog has never been out of Colorado before and he was wary of the little waves coming in! A little later, we went out to dinner and the restuarant turned out to be one that is for students to learn to cook and be waitpersons. We had a table right by the kitchen, where we could see all the action. It was quite entertaining, and the food was excellent.

Good to be back in Mexico!

Kelly went to Mexico today, but I didn't.

We are camped in southern New Mexico, finishing up some business before heading into Mexico. Today Kelly crossed the border and went to talk to a dentist in Palomas, just across from Columbus, NM. I stayed in the motorhome on the US side, as our dog Larry is still quite anxious when we both leave for any length of time. He's doing great generally, though!

Reflections on leaving a home

Last night as Kelly finished his email, I sat in our living room with Midnight Star purring beside me. The house was as clean as it was going to get, and the motorhome was crammed full. The last load had gone to our storage unit, and the last trash had been disposed of. My back was sore and my hands were raw from scrubbing.

It felt good to just sit quietly and look around the room. With the artwork off the walls and things gone from the shelves, the house was in transition also. We really like the people who bought our house -- a couple within weeks of our own ages with whom we have a lot in common -- but they had hit the nail on the head in an email yesterday, when they said we must have mixed feelings about leaving this house.

Sure, we do, more than other houses we have left. We built this one ourselves, mostly Kelly, from unique design concepts. But as I sat there, with so many images running through my mind, I was in a place of peaceful acceptance about the choices we've made and a curiosity about what lies ahead. I'm deeply grateful that my beloved cats can still here in this house a while, till we are ready for them elsewhere.

When we were in Mexico last winter, we decided to sell the house, get completely out of debt, and return to Mexico and see about living there full time. When we came back here, I found that it wasn't so easy for me to give up this community where we've lived for nine years, where we have such deep ties. The climate is hardly my favorite, with lots of sub-zero weather in the winter, strong winds in the spring, mosquitos ruling the out of doors for a couple of months in early summer... late summer and fall are nice. If I were starting over, I wouldn't choose this climate. But much of my stress turned to joy when we recently bought some land here for another home. Community is one of the greatest riches there is, and I am so happy to be coming back here later.

Now it's about time for me to turn off the computer, take the last things out to the motorhome, and take off southward with Kelly, and for the first time in Mexico, with our dog Larry.

We're heading down into New Mexico today. And soon into Mexico!