Archived Logs

SolMate Santiago Logs

Log #69, June 2008

Thursday, 3 July, 2008

Comala

The tug of the mariachis of Comala finally overwhelmed the warped gravitational pull in the Zona Magica. Stan forced the van up the hill (or was it down?) to Comala, the four of us still shaking our heads in wonder.

Nearby Guadalajara is credited for "inventing" mariachi music. Comala imported it and is now famous for its mariachi entertainers. Restaurants circling the main square in this otherwise nondesript little town use the music as a lure for tourists, who spend the big bucks on food and drink as they listen to the old standards, mariachi style.

Stan, Lisa and Steve in Restaurant Comala, next to SUV parking

The four of us plunked ourselves down at a restaurant table and ordered beers and ponche. Then the botanas (snacks) started flowing, and flowing, and flowing. As long as we were drinking, the goodies kept coming.

A few bands wandered around the plaza and through the restaurants, playing for paying customers, but the main entertainment was the customers, themselves.

A huge white SUV pulled up in the street and parked right beside our table, belching exhaust into our tacos. Smart alecks that we are, our heckling was just getting off the ground when the guys behind the tinted glass hopped out - armed; and a police-car-full of federales pulled up behind.

Swallowing our objections in one big gulp, we quietly sat back, sipped our beers, and followed the action at the table right behind us. It was tough to figure out who was who and what was what, except for the guys in uniform. The guys with guns, we had no clue, until they escorted the tough-looking dudes behind us out onto the street. There they frisked them, checked IDs and made strange gestures (furtive glances, radio calls, searching down the street - as if to catch someone escaping?).

Innocent bystanders that we were, we planned to keep it that way, so refrained from photographing the whole affair. The excitement ended as it began, the macho SUV poured exhaust into our tacos, then raced off. The federales followed. As far as we could tell, the response was a false alarm, cuz the objects of all that attention sidled off down the street as soon as the federales left, unmolested.

Steve passing the time of day with a seed pusher

That was not the end of the entertainment, however, even though most of the bands had packed up their strings. About the time things settle down, militarily, Lisa snagged an old guy out of the street. She remembered him from their previous visit to Comala. The guy was a wrinkled brown nut of a thing, with a cut finger that dripped blood on his nice white embroidered, and ironed, shirt.

Never could quite figure out what his deal was, but Lisa bought a bag of seeds from him for MX$100. We had no idea what kind of seeds they were, little black ones that fuzzed up in water. We think that they might be used to make ponche ... or maybe not? Communicating with the ole guy was pretty hard, since he only had a few teeth, slurred his words, and used a vocabulary none of us was familiar with (not your run-of-the-mill Pimsler Spanish).

Colima, talking to the natives in the zocolo

What with the Zona Magica along the route, the unplanned, but excellent, entertainment, and the endless stream of tasty snacks, the road trip to Comala ranked right up there with some of our best. Colima was great, too, but in a different, quieter way.

Tuesday, 24 June, 2008

Zona Magica
on the highway between Colima and Comala

Zona Magica, Comala

Touted as a magic zone where the world tilts at a weirdly different angle and reality defies gravity, the touring team pulled off the road in the Magic Zone, read the signage, and followed the instructions: stop the car, gear into neutral, see what happens.

The SolVan stopped, geared into neutral

Rolling backwards up the hill

The wide-angle view, rolling uphill

The sensation was so weird, we peat and re-peated, then drove to the other side of the road and rolled it again, a bunch of giggly kids, bouncing up and down on our seats clapping our hands.

Saturday, 21 June, 2008

You Say Tomahto, I Say Salmonella

The state of Colima is on the list of safe places for tomatoes to grow. But, even if they're home-grown, who knows where they're processed? For all we know, our good Colima tomatoes are shipped to Florida, processed, and shipped back to us, all pretty, waxed and full of germs.

SolMate tomatoes come from a variety of sources, local markets, the tianguis, and the supermercados (Mega, Soriana, even WalMart). We consume two to four per day. Raw. The half-dozen on our counter right now are from Mega and they're shiny from wax.

Interestingly, Mega's supply was totally green, probably in response to consumers' concerns about mixing the good 'uns with broken, spindled or mutilated, as described in the FDA Food Safety FAQs.

In searching for info on the great American tomato crisis, I found a couple more good FDA sites - most interesting to me: the FDA Food Guide recommended NOT to use the packaged soaks that so many folks use. Some splash Clorox into a bowl of water, some measure in the Microdyne that's sold in local stores right next to the veggies.

SolMate has never soaked their veggies, but we know folks who have never NOT soaked - it's one of those quirky habits that we query cruisers about, and have found the preponderance do soak (ya'll gotta get out there and do your research). Ha! We're feeling vindicated after all of those eyebrows raised in our direction during veggie-washing discussions.

Unfortunately, soaking's not the point of this discussion. This salmonella thing can't be washed away, and the only defense is not to eat contaminated tomatoes. It'd be nice if they'd stick a sign on the contaminated ones.

Thursday, 19 June, 2008

Turtle Sanctuary

Down the Colima coast from Cuyutlan and the salt mines, snuggled in amongst the dunes between the ocean and a lagoon, the touring team found turtles and iguanas.

Entrance, turtles to the right, iguanas to the left

Covered turtle pools
with swimmers cruising round and round and round

Sometimes there's a break in the action

Looks pretty austere. It was, and hot. The black sand sucked in the sun. Depressing, too, like all wild animals caged, but for these rescued turtles, the alternative would be worse.

The sanctuary also incubates turtle eggs rescued from the beach. It's said in Manzanillo that turtle eggs have aphrodesiac properties. One can imagine the race between environmentalists and poachers to dig up newly created nests on the beach. Sanctuary personnel transfer the eggs to new nests behind chicken wire, guard the eggs, and then repatriate the hatchlings.

Good news! Stan reported hundreds of turtles swimming off our coast on his delivery north last month. Each female returns to its birth beach to lay eggs, regardless of beach development between the time she hatched and when she returns. As busy as our beaches have become, the only way the hatchlings can survive is through the works of sanctuaries.

Thursday, 12 June, 2008

Salt

A short 60-mile hop to Colima took the Flying Free/SolMate Santiago Professional Touring Team (FF/SS PTT) five hours. Lots to see and do along the way.

It was still salt season (April) when we hit Cuyutlan. Of course there's a season, which answers the age-old question, "What happens to salt when it rains?"

Vanna White
and friend entering the Cuyutlan Salt Museum

The salt museum held an array of info in one little display room, from how Phillipine coco palms came to grow in Mexico to how sea salt is harvested from the local lagoon. It also hosted nice, clean public restrooms.

The whole harvest-to-market process explained in the museum was illustrated with an actual operation up and running, right there in the same building.

The warehouse, last year's salt on the left, this years on the right

Double pillars support the all-important rain gutters. Corrugated tin roof directs the flow.

Storing this year's harvest

Playing in last year's

The players

Warehouse to processing line

Loading the hopper

An older fella sat at a rickety table in the shade of the warehouse where he hand marked a load of empty bags with the time and date.

Filling bags from the hopper, above,
then sewing them closed with the blue stitching machine

Loading the 50 kilo bags

Hefting those bags of salt made the FF/SS PTT very hungry and thirsty, so we headed off in the direction of the little beachside resort of Paraiso, with turtles on the way (not on the menu!).

Friday, 6 June, 2008

Beach Volleyball (back in April)

Thinking (falsely) that an international sports event would start on international time, as opposed to Mexican time, the Flying Free crew moseyed down to the beach with Stan and me right after breakfast. We settled on the bleachers, top row, at 9:15 AM. The Canadian men's team wandered in at 9:30, and their Puerto Rican opponents started warm ups shortly thereafter. Play began an hour or so after the advertised start time.

The venue, Miramar Beach - who knew to bring our own umbrella?

Corona Girls
posting the score above the Cuban court

No importa. There was so much action around the court that we were entertained, game or no game. There was music, there were dancing girls, there was a cheering squad.

The music never stopped, it was turned down for each match, but then resumed heart-pulsing level in-between. Sometimes the Corona Girls had a hard time multi-tasking, dancing while keeping score, but nobody in that crowd seemed to mind.

The beer tent,
Stan bellied up while Steve and Lisa wait their turn

The cheering squad was a group of professional tourist entertainers from the Maeva Resort, the hosts of the tournament. They were positioned throughout the crowd and led chants for the favored teams during the games. During lulls in the action, they provided additional entertainment leading the crowd in rowsing renditions of the YMCA song, and other revved-up crowd-pleasers.

Mexico (left) vs. Cuba

Loyal Picudos fans that we are, we disrupted volleyball, raced over to the futbol stadium to watch our boys kick the ball around, then hussled back to the beach in time to catch the last couple of womens' finals matches. Wow!

Mexico giving Cuba a run for their money -
awesome volleyball, a wild crowd, but the Cubans walked away with it

Sunday, 1 June, 2008

Lake Chapala

Lake Chapala, five hours NE of home

Slightly resembling Lake Chelan, my ole home stomping ground (water), Lake Chapala is a weekend fun-in-the-sun destination, conveniently located half an hour from Guadalajara. Although roughly equal in length and breadth, Lake Chapala sports an average depth of only 20 feet. Unlike deep, cold and pristine Lake Chelan (disregarding its mining pollutants), Chapala reaches fine incubation temps and sports a hue to match.

Ajijic on Lake Chapala

The warm Mexican sun has had its way with farm and city runoff in the lake, and caused a bloom of chokers that restrict visibility to about two inches. Beaches also disappeared under water hyacinth that thrived on the great nutrients. To top that off, Guadalajara demanded more and more water, funneling it out of the surrounding watershed and leaving the lake cities high and dry. At one point city waterfronts were hundreds of yards from actual water.

Reclaiming the beach, one tuft at a time

Better water management, by state officials or the rain gods, has brought the lake back up to a near-normal level. Now the city of Ajijic is reviving its beaches. While we watched, two guys mucked around the mounds of weeds, cut them loose and floated them over to the water's edge. The back hoe, performing double duty, plucked the weeds and plopped them down in a nice, neat pile on shore and also scraped up mud and slopped it into a dump truck, which in turn hauled it down the beach a-ways to dump as fill.