La Semana Santa, By Randall Bourquin

The Semana Santa has finally drawn to a close. I ended up landing in Guadalajara, moving over to the beach at San Blas, slid down the coast a bit to Puerto Vallarta, and somehow made it back to Monterrey. Along the way I have accumulated a small book’s worth of interesting stories, so in lieu of the usual summary of events, I will, over the next few days, be capitulating my experiences into a bit of a Novella.

Chatper One: The Perils of Planlessness
The plane touched down in Guadalajara in the early morning and I stepped optimistically into the Mexican sun. I brought with me one backpack full of swim trunks and other things that one wears at the beach, and a tent, as to not be confined by the necessity of a hotel – or more probably the necessity of vacancy at a hotel. We were to meet up with two Chilean friends of my Chilean roommates, stay with them a couple of nights, and then head to the beach either with them, or with Neto, a Mexican friend of mine. Regardless of how, the crux of this story is that we were to head to a beautiful Mexican beach full of beautiful waves, beautiful bottles of Mexican beach beer, and beautiful Mexican women as soon as possible.

The ensuing four days were amongst my most stressful here in Mexico. The problem, I believe, lies in a cultural difference between Americans and Latinos, and if not that, a cultural difference between Randall and the great nation of Chile. While Americans are very much action oriented – that is to say that there should probably be something decently cool happening at all times while on vacation (doing nothing on a beach is an exception, because it counts as doing something) – Latin Americans are quite content to live the low key lifestyle and do nothing, especially if there are friends around. This formed a deadly combination with the Latino tendency to not at all care about time or promptness, which resulted in a daily promise that we would leave for the beach tomorrow, and four days into my stay in Guadalajara, I found myself restless and un-amused.

A typical night in Guadalajara for me consisted of sitting in a room somewhere, beer usually involved, food sometimes involved, bad music always involved, kind of paying attention to the Chilean conversation about Chilean things but not really, as my mind was occupied with how I would like to be at the beach. A highlight of the trip was our excursion to the Chivas soccer match in Jalisco stadium. This was my first Mexican soccer experience, and come to think of it, my first soccer experience with anything close to hooliganism, and I was genuinely excited. The avid fan section was impressive. Think the fraternity section of a Georgia game, but all on the same page and with the Redcoat Band’s drums. They started singing when the team ran out, and didn’t stop until the end of the game. Juan Pablo, an avid fan of the Catolica club in Chile, informed me that, although it was cool, it was not as on par in terms of being crazy with other Latin American sporting events, and that Mexican club soccer is weak.

Before I went to Guadalajara, Marco, my roommate, advised me that Guadalajara is famous for having a population of really good looking women. Upon hearing this, I laughed, thinking it an outrageous claim, but when in the city, I couldn’t help notice that he was right. This kind of regional singularity in the level of hotness present in women was strange to me. I tried to think of some other place in which the same phenomenon occurs. Sweden? Too big. The Midwest? Texas? Wow, a unique place in the world, this is exciting. And then it hit me. Guadalajara has nothing on Athens Georgia, and I live there. After realizing this, I was bored again.

The peril of planlessness in this instance is inaction. I’m scared of three things in this world: nuclear war, carnies (circus folk, small hands, smell like cabbage), and inaction while on Spring Break. This resulted in my having to break the news to the roommates that the next day, bright and early, for my mental well being, I would be hopping a bus to a mythical place on the coast at which I have been trying to arrive since march called Stoner’s Surf Camp (http://stonerssurfcamp.com). I awoke at sunrise, paid the man 100 pesos, and boarded a bus headed west until it hit water, happier than ever to be on the move.

Chapter Two: Setting

The bus first rolled into a town called Tepic, from which one can pay an additional 40 pesos for the hour long ride to San Blas. I had about a forty minute layover in Tepic, which was occupied by really great Carne de Res and waiting ever so sketchily outside a bank next to the bus station for the owner of a car with North Carolina tags to walk to his or her vehicle. While doing this, I sat in the sun and watched the electronic bank thermometer climb from 32 degrees Celsius to 34 degrees Celsius. Time to board the bus rolled around, so I wrote “I was born there” with an arrow to the license place in the dust on this person’s window and went merrily on my way.

On the bus ride, I met a very nice ex-marine , ex prison transporter, Vietnam veteran from Kentucky who had moved down to San Blas with his wife and opened a bed and breakfast with the two spare rooms in their house. I peppered him with questions about what he had done, as this is a very viable retirement (career?) plan for me, one of which was “How many Gringos live in San Blas?” He said “About six or seven.” I said “Six or seven…hundred?” He said “No, just six. Or seven.”

Don offered me a ride to the surf camp from the bus station, which I was very much grateful for, and minutes later I walked into paradise. The surf camp occupies the fifty yards of sandy land in between the road and the beach, and consists of a large thatched roof that houses a restaurant for beachgoers, two beachfront cabanas, two not quite beach front cabanas, showers, a small kitchen, four or five hammocks in the shade, and a real heady Mexican longboard surfing champion named Pompis who owns the place. When I first walked to the beach and saw the ocean, very much to my surprise, it looked like a lake. Who puts a surf camp on a beach with no surf? Pompis came to talk to me about my business there, but all I could say at first was “Dude. Dude, where are the waves?” He assured me that they would be rolling in at dusk and that the next few days would be good. This made the rest of my day an anxious waiting period for my watery friends to be blown to me by the wind somewhere in between San Blas and Hawaii, and sure enough, they arrived at dusk. I rented a board, waxed down, and headed out with the locals for the rest of the night, happier than ever. Here comes one of those bad MasterCard commercial rip-offs:

Place to put a tent: $3

Surf Board, daily: $6

Seafood, Delicious: $4

Surfing until sundown and not getting out of the water because the full moon provided enough light to continue: Priceless

The one downside to the paradise that is San Blas, that unfortunately has a lot to do with the aforementioned priceless full moon, is the hellacious insects that take residence there. These little guys are quite aggressive and take no prisoners. The worst part is that they like to make sweet, sweet hellacious insect love (mate) when the full moon is around, so instead of having to deal with normal insects, we had to deal with sexually frustrated adolescent insects and their raging hormones. These insects, who have garnered fame for themselves all along the Mexican coast, are translucent in color, which makes them hard to kill and impossible to head off their attacks on your ankles and legs. We did however discover the local custom of burning dried coconut shells to ward off these little devils, because just like me, these bugs hate smoke.

Apart from the bugs, the beach is ideal. It is about three kilometers long and is lined with rugged, tropical looking palm trees. It boasts water that is cool enough to be refreshing but warm enough for people lacking body fat to enjoy and waves that aren’t quite as brutal as those in Puerto Escondido but make the east coast of Florida look like child’s play. Structures sporting thatched roofs are the only ones present on the beach, which adds to the tropical paradise thing. I lament, however, that San Blas is experiencing the surge in construction and development that seems to attack every tranquil and low key paradise. Someone just erected a two story thatched structure.

I had access to ten peso beer, surfboards, waves, sunshine, sand, and great food and all was right with the world. It was here, in this place, that I would meet the people who would really make my vacation.

Chapter Three: The People You Meet

There exists a sort of camaraderie between people in Mexico who look definitively like they are not from Mexico. It is almost always acceptable to find a language that the two subjects have in common, and run through the standard questions like “Hey, where are you from?” and “So where are you going?” I fall into this category, as does Phillip, a six foot five, blond haired blue eyed Swedish guy who was also staying at the Surf Camp. I forget who it was the started the conversation, him I believe, but I came to find out that after high school, Phil left Sweden on a grand adventure to

In San Blas, while idly waiting in the swells for a wave to ride, I struck up a conversation with a slightly foreign looking person per the aforementioned rule, who introduced himself as Noel from Brazil. A few wavelessness minutes passed, and Noel and I continued talking. Three days of knowing Noel later, I think that he is the most interesting person I have ever met.

Noel’s lifeline (kind of like a timeline, but for one’s life) looks something like this. He was born and grew up in Brazil, where he learned Portugese, German, and English. When he went off to college, he went to Switzerland, where he studied bio-medical engineering. He spent a year studying in Valencia, Spain, where he converted his Portugese to Spanish. He then went to work on the swiss border with Germany, where he masterd German. Somehow Noel speaks French. The language tally is now at 5. That, while impressive in itself and more than enough to win my admiration, all happened before the cool part of Noel’s life. He worked for about a year and a half in Switzerland, after which he dropped everything and set out to make the world his playground.

From Switzerland, Noel did europe, then jet-setted to africa, where he bummed around for a while before going to south east Asia for a number of months. After Asia, he bounced to Australia to visit his sister for six months, where he worked with a local farmer harvesting crops by hand (with a biomedical engineering degree). After australia came Fiji, and a long flight back to the continent of South America, on which Noel spent three more months traveling before returning home to Brazil to work for a year. When I asked how Noel came to be in San Blas, he responded that he had flown to Los Angeles, bought a car, and is now driving back to Brazil. When I asked what kind of car, he responded “Ford Aerostar” which caught me off guard.

Noel, in his time traveling, had some really awesome stories to share around the beachfire over the next couple of nights.