ODDITIES: Mexico

There are some things about Mexico that I find strange. I suppose that there are oddities about any place. I would think that when a person from another country comes to visit America, there are things that would seem a little strange to them. It is with this in mind that I have created this post which is poised to be the first in a series of posts entitled "ODDITIES". This is where I will share my observations, thoughts and experiences about such things that I find just plain strange, odd and completely out of the ordinary, as far as I am concerned, with regards to the locations around the world that I visit.

Mexico:
I love dogs. They are the one of the animals that I typically have a close bond with almost immediately after meeting them. If I got along with people the way I get along with dogs I think life would be much easier for me...at least that is the case with American dogs. In Mexico, dogs seem to come from a completely different breed. Dogs are not typically leashed, which I personally think is absolutely wonderful. They are allowed to wander freely about. They go where they want and seem to do what they want. If and when I ever will be fortunate enough to have some dogs to call my friends again, I hope to be able to let them roam free as much as possible. I feel it to be cruel and unusual punishment to keep such an animal, any animal really, locked in one place blocking their free movement. I think it is great that this seems to not be the case here in Mexico, however, I do not feel that it is an act of generosity or of kindness from the Mexican people as a whole. The dogs here seem to be quite afraid of people in general. Any attempt I make towards befriending a dog ends in them either completely ignoring me, them running away and cowering, or them barking while running away and cowering. So far since I have been in Mexico I can only recall one instance of having what I deem to be a normal greeting with a dog. I find that most of the dogs I come across look particularly malnourished and mistreated. There may be more to this story, though, because I have not come across any hostile or otherwise aggressive dogs like I would assume to come across in the event of dogs that have been mistreated. In any case, it is certainly an oddity.

Everyone has a cell phone. I would not be surprised to see that there are as many cell phones here in Mexico as there are in the states. Even out in the rural areas of the country where it takes 2 hours to drive to the main road; 2 hours just to get to the main road, not even to another town, 8 year old children are running around with cell phones. Very odd, I must say. On a related note: If you are in Mexico and want to hear some music, apparently the only way to do it is either by having some music on your mp3 capable cell phone and blast is so everyone can hear or to run your car constantly and turn up the volume so the whole block can hear. I have lost count of how many times I have seen people walking down the street listening to their choice music on the loud speaker of their Motorola Razor.

If you are out walking through a town in Mexico and you happen to have a need to throw something away, you better hold onto it because the odds of you finding a trash bin in Mexico is about the same spread as finding an iPod in Mexico. In other words, it is not going to happen. It seems that most of the population does not hold onto their trash, they decide to throw it where they happen to be at the time. Pollution is rampant. Look in any creek or river and you are hard pressed to find an area that is not littered with bottles of all sorts and wrappers from any numerous amounts of items. I come from California...this is very odd to me.

Have a need to get somewhere in Mexico? Get on a bus. The buses go everywhere here. They are cheap, efficient and frequent. If it were not for the fact that it takes forever to travel from point A to point B there probably would be no airlines in this country. In fact, they are so good I feel sorry for Mexican tourists that visit America. They must have one hell of a time trying to get around. Most of the buses that I have been on have actually been quite comfortable as well. The seats have plenty of room and a lot of them had movies to watch while we were on the go. As for the quality and selection of movies, that is another story.

So far, I have only seen one Starbucks.

Puerto Vallarta Pictures 2.0

I have added more pictures of the shelter I am volunteering at.

Puerto Vallarta

Puerto Vallarta Pictures

Pictures of Puerto Vallarta and the shelter I am volunteering at.

Puerto Vallarta

Making Head Way

I am very excited because today is the first morning I have woken up here and have actually felt pretty normal. I am hoping this means I have reached the peak of whatever sickness it is that I have and I can concentrate my efforts on more important things.

Yesterday morning was probably the worst I have had here in Puerto Vallarta so far. I was feeling absolutely terrible and worn down. I did not feel like doing anything what-so-ever. After wracking my brain trying to figure out what I should do, it occurred to me that I could just travel home now for the holidays. This thought had an immediate effect on my body. I suddenly felt better, more alert and happier. It was then that I realized that a lot of this could all just be in my head. Sure, I was feeling pretty bad and I knew that my body was quite unhappy with whatever sickness was going on, but if it was all just my body why would a single thought make my body feel better? I made a decision right then that I was not going to let this sickness rule my time here.

With what little energy I had, I went to the store and bought some imodium AD to hopefully curb my bodies reaction to whatever it is that I have. I decided that from now on any water that I consume is going to be boiled even if it is bottled. The thought of food was utterly disgusting, but I knew that I needed some sort of sustenance if I was going to go up and volunteer. I made some rice for myself and evidently put waaaaay to much salt on it. I did not think I put that much in the water, but alas, I am no experienced cook. I ate as much rice as I could muster and then took one of the imodium ADs. Not much longer after that, I threw it all up. Oddly enough, I felt quite better after this then I did earlier in the morning and I then went and volunteered up at the childrens shelter. When I was finished it was about dinner time and I came back and made some fried rice with egg in it. By that time I was really hungry and ready for some food and some clean water. I ate a lot and drank a lot.

I hope this marks a turning point for me here in Puerto Vallarta. These last few days have not been very fun, but I hope that yesterday turned the new leaf and I can now give my time to more worthy causes.

Puerto Vallarta

I have been staying at the Oasis Hostel in Puerto Vallarta for the past two nights. I was hoping that when I arrived here in Puerto Vallarta I would have numerous emails from most of the different volunteer organizations that I sent emails to, unfortunately that was not the case.

So far I have received three reply emails. The first of which was written all in Spanish and as far as I could tell basically said that they would welcome my volunteer assistance come January. That is great, except I am trying to find something between now and when I leave to come back home for the holidays. The second email I got was from an organization quite a long ways south of here. It seems that transportation down there would be a large problem, especially if I were to take a bus which might take me to Mexico City. From what I have heard, just assume that if you are in Mexico City that you will be held up at gun point and robbed. I do not really like the sound of that so I am thankful that I got an email yesterday from this organization: Refugio Infantil Santa Esperanza.

Tomorrow I will be heading up the street where their orphanage is located to see about volunteering there. Hopefully all will go well and I can stay here in the hostel I am currently staying at while helping out with the children at their facility which is a 5 minute walk from here.

In other news, my body is reacting negatively to something I ate and I am soiling what were some clean garments of clothing earlier this morning. I will be taking the rest of this day to relax here at the hostel reading, sleeping, writing and watching movies. I hope to not spend to much time in the bathroom. Tomorrow will probably be my first day volunteering and it would be unfortunate if I spent it all indisposed with other problems. With hope, this will not be the case.

Bus-ted

Okay, I am ready to leave Cabo San Lucas. The Cabo Inn is charging me 50 USD per night. I think they are trying to give me a hint to leave and I am taking it. Believe it or not, this is the cheapest place to stay in Cabo. I am glad to be moving on. I am not really a partying person and this is party town.

Shortly after writing this blog I am going to be hopping on a Bus for La Paz. From La Paz I will take a ferry to Mazatlan and then get on a bus there to head down south to Puerto Vallarta. It should be interesting. Apparently Mexico`s bus system is one of the best in the world. You can get anywhere by bus and if you are willing to pay, the buses are rather nice. If you are not willing to pay you are roughing it cattle car style. I think I am going to go for the former instead of the latter. Hopefully the trip there will not take to long although I believe the ferry ride itself is 12 hours long. I could be out of contact for quite a while depending on when and if I find accommodations. I have an actual hostel picked out in Puerto Vallarta, but since I do not know when I will be getting there I cannot reserve a spot in advance. Hopefully they will have room for me and I will not be stuck on the street.

Volunteering and Christmas

I am currently doing all I can to find some volunteer work somewhere here in Mexico that is relatively close to where I am curretly am. I have sent out a couple emails, but have not recieved any replys as of yet. I am hoping that I will find something meaningful to commit some time and effort to. All of my previous volunteering has always turned out to be a very positive experience and I can only hope the same will happen here.

I now am staying by myself here in Cabo San Lucas. My crew mates who stayed with me the last two nights have now moved on to other things. I am paying 20 USD a night to stay at the Cabo Inn. It is much less expensive then most of the accomodations here in Cabo, but 20 a night can add up fast. I have sent out a couple of emails through the Couchsurfing service, but have not had any replys to them as of yet. There are not many people on Couchsurfing that are offering a couch here in Cabo, unfortunatly.

I feel a little bit uneasy currently due to my stagnation. I decided while on the boat of terror that I wanted to come home for Christmas to see and be with my family. I am looking forward to that, but that feels quite far into the future right now even though it will arrive very fast I think. I feel that me wanting to go home for Christmas will hurt my chances of finding some volunteer work. It seems that a good number of places want a certain time commitment from their volunteers. I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will find something. If I cannot find anything volunteer wise relatively soon, I will need to come up with some kind of alternative plan. Right now that tentative plan is to head to Puerto Vallarta even though I know I am not going to be taking a sailing vesstle into the South Pacific. Although, in order to get to Puerto Vallarta that means I will probably have to crew on another sailboat...not really something I want to jump right up and do at the momment. I also do not really want to stay in Cabo San Lucas.

Cabo is quite expensive as it is frequented by tourists from all around the world. It is nice to be in a part of Mexico where many of the locals understand English though. I get stopped by guys at least twice a day trying to sell me cocaine and weed, however. Drugs are rampant through this area, in which case I feel I need to be on my guard everywhere I go in the city. I am constantly watching those people around me and keeping a very close eye on where their hands go. I hate to be judgemental of everyone around me, but I feel I need to assume that everyone I see is a potential threat to my well-being in order to stay safe; not really the greatest feeling in the world.

Sailing Pictures

Here are some photos from the drive down to San Quintin, Sailing and my room in Cabo San Lucas. The photos of the dolphins did not seem to turn out all that well, unfortunatly.

Sailing

Realizations

Well, I am still alive. I made it through the ordeal that was sailing down from San Quintin to Cabo San Lucas.

I have determined that sailing is not my thing. Sailing out on the bay for a couple hours or even a day is cool with me. I would do that every once in a while. Sailing blindly through the night while huge waves crash over your boat while it is constantly taking on water and your captain has no knowledge or opinion about what to do to fix any problem we get into is certainly not for me. I lost count of the number of things that broke on our boat during our trip. One of which was our outboard engine which is basically a lawnmower engine designed to push around little tiny boats through the water, but this was being used to push a 28 foot Piver Trimeran built in 1964. In the sailing community these boats have a terrible reputation. The designer of the boat, Mr. Piver, basically sold the blue prints for his boat design and then touted that it was the greatest things since sliced bread and that anyone regardless of their experience could use his designs and build one of these boats in their backyard and then sail them safely around the world without issue. Needless to say, people did build them in their backyard and people did sail them around the world except some people did not build them as good as they could have been built and people died. Thankfully, that did not happen to us. The boat did seem to run into problem after problem, though, day after day. Practically every night when the sun went down I was in fear that that would be the last night in a fully functional sailing vessel. The two other crew mates seemed to share my fear, however, thankfully, they had some experience with sailing; come to find out they seemed to have more knowledge of the boat we were sailing on then the captain himself. If it was not for Jason and Pete I probably would not be typing here today.

With every day feeling like they could be my last I was thinking about death a lot. Prior to my days in High School I used to be very afraid of death. It used to scare me to the point of throwing up just by the mere thought of it. I have since lost my fear of death until this trip. It is not so much the fear of actually dying that was getting to me, it was the fact that once I was gone I would never see certain people in my life ever again. That thought really struck a strong chord and I can now say that I am indeed afraid of death once again. It was a realization that death is for certain and that I only have a limited amount of time to spend with those whom I love.

To sum up, this sailing trip has taught me two things: 1) That I have absolutely no passion what-so-ever for sailing. 2) Seeing and spending time with those people that I love is probably the most important thing in my life. Time is limited and there is no telling what tomorrow will bring.

Now onto other lighter matters. While I was sailing I saw lots of wonderful things which include: whales, dolphins, fish, a turtle, lots of birds, bio luminescence, starry skies, shooting stars, many sunrises and many sunsets. All of which were exceptional and amazing. The one memory that stands out in particular happened just yesterday during the day. We looked behind our boat and saw about 20 or so dolphins skimming the surface on our right side. They were traveling fairly fast and looked to be playing. After watching them for about a minute they all changed direction and started heading straight for our boat. At which point we looked to our left and saw a huge mass of dolphins literally surround the rear of our boat in a U shape and then they all converged at the center of the U all at the same time. They must be some of the most intelligent creatures around. Basically what they did was drive a school of fish to the very rear of our boat and surrounded them. Scarred by the noises that our boat was making on the water as it passed over the surface the fish did not dare come close to us and in essence the dolphins trapped the entire school. Once they had them all surrounded the dolphins pounced and it was a feeding frenzy. There must have been at least 200 or so dolphins all working together in coordination. They knew exactly what they were doing and executed it perfectly. Certainly not the first time they have done it before either because the birds in the area were privy to the action. They were swooping and swarming around the center trying to pick off what fish they could. I find it amazing how humans have disturbed so much around us and destroyed much life, but still many species continue to thrive and actually use us in order to survive. Utterly brilliant animals.

I did get a couple pictures of the event although I doubt they will come out to be anything of significance to look at. I am hoping to be able to come back to the internet cafe tomorrow in order to sort through what pictures I have taken and hopefully I will be able to upload a good number of them.

Turtle Bay

I am currently in the city of Turtle Bay in Baja California. Turtle Bay is a little hole in the wall, or in this case, a hole in the rock that is located in Baja California some 240 miles south of San Diego. Although, I believe those are nautical miles which I learned are longer than normal miles because it takes into account the curvature of the earth. If you were to measure the distance between point A and point B of a nautical mile it would be the same as an American mile, however, for some unknown reason, they thought it would be good to take into account the curvature of the earth when it comes to a nautical mile. In any case, Turtle Bay is quite a long ways from San Diego.

I must say, Mexico is a very dusty, dirty place. I am not even sure I would call it a third world country, but man is there a lot of dirt everywhere. I could not wait to get out of San Quintin on Monday. We did not actually leave San Quintin until Tuesday afternoon. After we set out, things started off really well. I saw a whale and then dolphins were swimming along side of our sailboat for about half an hour. It was not until night when things started to go south (no pun intended).

The skipper of the boat, Walter, got sick almost immediately. He was out of commission for a very long time. That night I determined that I do infact get sea sick, but only when the sun is down. When the sun is up I am fine, as soon as there is no sun I have issues. That night we hit a fair amount of wind and some of our sails got messed up pretty bad. Our front sail got to the point where we could not furl it back in, which basically meant that when the winds picked up at night like they did we did not really have control over the boat. For a couple of hours we were sailing in a North East direction which is not very good considering we were supposed to be going south.

Day number two which was Wednesday, I was happy to be alive. The day went fine for the most part, but we found out our boat was taking on water in one of the hulls. That is not good. Thankfully we have 3 hulls. Although today we found water in the main hull as well. Anyway, that is another story. So we had a lot of water in our left hull going into the night on Wednesday and we were headed South when I was trying to go to sleep. Wind was coming at us from the East and so were the swells of waves. The problem being that since we had water in our left side hull that side of the boat was already sitting lower in the water then it should compared to the other hulls of the boat. Since we had both the wind and the swells of water coming at us from the right side of the boat that put even more pressure on the left side of the boat to sit even lower into the water. The kind of boat we are in is quite reliable except when there is a lot of weight on board. Especially a lot of weight on one side of the boat. If the left side of the boat were heavy enough and had enough force on it, if it dugg into the water on the left it would not have been that hard for the boat to flip over. Of course I am thinking and realizing all of this while I am trying to sleep, our skipper is still out of commision and cannot really think straight and the other two guys on the boat are trying to get us where we were going as fast as boatly possible. I was freaking out a little. Obviously we made it through the night though and came out okay.

We got into Turtle Bay yesterday and we will be leaving tomorrow morning, I believe. Sometime on Sunday we should be hitting our next stop. I forget what it is called but apparently it has no services like Turtle Bay. Meaning I will not have access to things like phones and the internet. Anyway, as long as we keep the water in the hulls to minimum, sickness of those who know what they are doing to a minimum and with a little bit of luck maybe we will make it through this thing alright.

I have never used a computer in a country where English was not the native language. I must say I do believe a Mac would be better in Spanish then this thing I am on right now.

I do have pictures that I need to upload, but I will not do that here because I am getting charged by the second.

I hope you all are doing well.