After a few days camping in the van after we left Cerritos, an overnight ferry to the mainland, and a six-hour drive, we finally arrived in Punta de Mita. Or Chapter 3 as Dave calls it.
Driving from Mazatlan to Punta de Mita was so awesome. Not only were we seeing new places, but the terrain was completely different. We were out of the desert and into the jungle. We also switched time zones from Mountain Standard to Central Standard Time. Getting out of Mazatlan was kind of crazy as the streets were crowded with Carnival celebration aftermath (or setup?). It was Sunday morning as we were driving through and it seemed like they were either cleaning up after last night’s celebration or getting ready to celebrate that night. Either way, it was kind of crazy.
Finally, we hit the highway south. We chose to take the toll road as we had miles to make. Typically for every toll road there is a road that parallels it. Overall, I think we paid around $25 in tolls, so it’s not super cheap but it’s worth it. We’ve gone both routes in our driving, but obviously the toll roads are better maintained and the slower traffic stays off of them.
I was surprised by how much agriculture we saw along the drive. At one point there were miles and miles of orchards in every direction. There were two main trees in them. One was peach and we weren’t sure what the other type was. We found out later that they were mango trees. In one area they had just harvested the watermelon crop and every house, store and street vendor was overflowing with watermelons. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity so we stopped and bought a couple medium sized ones. They were 15 pesos each, so about .75¢, and they were so incredibly juicy and flavorful. Fruit stands along the way were also overflowing with pineapples and jackfruit.
We stopped for a late lunch in the coastal city of San Blas. I was interested in
checking it out since I had read a bunch about it when I was researching our stay in Nayarit (the Mexican state we are in). Apparently, there is a surf wave there that’s known as the longest right in the world. I also read that some American and Canadian snowbirds live here during the winter but we didn’t see any other gringos in our short time there. After a failed attempt at finding the beach with Siri due to a road that had loads of rocks dumped on it, we decided we had better stop to eat. We did a couple laps through town scoping out a parking spot for Lola (the van). She is a
hard one to park on these narrow Mexican streets, but Dave did a great job fitting her into a spot right next to an outdoor restaurant with a delicious smell coming off the grill. I LOVE streetside restaurants where you aren’t really sure what you are ordering. I pointed to the grill where there were huge chunks of fish smoking away and ended up with a very large marlin steak. Dave got pescado a la plancha a la diabla, which was a whole grilled fish with a spicy sauce on it. Ollie and Fin got quesadillas off the breakfast menu and Miles got shrimp empanadas that didn’t
arrive until we had all finished our meals.
Over the course of our leisurely lunch we struck up conversation with three older gentlemen at the other end of our table. (BTW-meeting people like this is absolutely my favorite part of the trip.) These guys were three brothers who live far apart from each other but get together when they can. They happened to be in San Blas because one of them owns mango orchards in the area. He flew into Guadalajara and drove three hours to check on his orchards and his brothers met him there. One of the other brothers asked us where
we were from and when we replied Idaho, he asked if we were from Boise. This surprised us as most people here don’t really know where Idaho is. It turns out he has one son that is going to BYU (they aren’t LDS) and another that lives in Long Beach, CA and he visits them often. His son in CA just worked on the SpaceX launch. Our conversation was super interesting and constantly switched between English and Spanish as two of the brothers kept telling the other one to speak Spanish so we could practice. AND we saw our first mariachis! They wandered up and down the street playing and singing. It was awesome. And we did finally see the beach as we drove out of town.
After lunch we drove about 2 1/2 more hours and arrived in Punta de Mita by early evening. The funny part of our arrival is that I was sure we were staying at the El Anclote condos. Why? Our condo listing on AirBnB never actually said what complex it was and instead of asking I sleuthed it out on Google Earth based on photos. Ha ha! I was wrong. As we drove into Punta de Mita my phone map randomly gave me an address (how does AirBnB do that???) which I ignored and made Dave go to the Anclote complex on the other side of the street. The security guard was really confused as he wasn’t expecting us and they don’t use three numbers for their units. The internet wasn’t good enough to pull up our reservation so we had a few confusing moments until he told us to check across the street at Faro de Mita. Sure enough, that security guard was expecting us. Turns out we are in the end unit and the pics show El Anclote across the street!
