Around the Cerritos area…

Where I am at the Las Jaibas RV park, it’s a couple mile bike ride to the northern tip of the coast line that is considered part of Mazatlan, than it curves east and makes something of a large harbor. Miles east and north are many large condos that I suppose the owners use Maz to shop at, it’s remote though. That’s the Punta Cerritos area as this map shows.

I ride up there all the time just to hang out. Here’s some pictures first of the back 40 of the Jaibas RV park. It’s a pretty nice park, but there aren’t enough 50 amp spaces, the 30 amp overvolts far to often (every night), and the wifi sucks everywhere but the first few RV spots near the building. Those of us with high gain antennas don’t have too much trouble because there’s often a line of sight with the building and since it’s uncrowded here, I can stream most every day. Then the owner charges $40 peso ($2.20 US) for the use of the washer and the same for the dryer. Twice what other parks charge. And then he won’t roll over your payments. Let’s say you are undecided how long you’ll stay when you first arrive, so you pay for a week. That rate is higher then the monthly, but he won’t allow rolling it over when you switch to monthly  like most parks will do without complaint. Maybe that’s why his park is never full? I can’t think of any other reason…his daily/weekly/monthly rates are pretty good even with being this far from the Golden Zone. Might just be the lack of 50 amp spaces and the poor wifi?

Well, anyway, I like it here, but only because there’s hardly any RV parks left in downtown, where I’d rather be. The only one left is packed for the entire winter, all the others are closed now.

One time as I was starting out on my bike ride I went way back to the back area of the RV park. These apartments were not there the first time I stayed here at the Jaibas.

Here’s the rear washroom/banos building. This is where the owner could run another wifi setup if he wanted. I suggested it years ago.

Lot’s of RV spaces available here. Large spaces too. If he hangs on a bit longer, this park might start filling up just from the fact there’s so few RV parks left in the downtown area and campers will be forced to stay here by default.

The owner is getting on in years, and he talks about his kids taking over the park, maybe they’ll make improvements?

Meanwhile, the other day, Kwan the Kat was in a hunting crouch on the floor above the stairwell, with the screen door closed, intently watching something outside. It was this thing. She prudently decided not to attack.

Anyway, here’s what my bike ride north to Punta Cerritos shows me…first I ride up the east side of the road heading north. You can see the newer neighborhoods that are there now compared to when I first stayed here in ’06. Here’s a link to one of the posts I made while staying here back then: More from Mazatlan – ’06

The tall building on the left in the foreground, and the apartment development on the right shown in the following picture are all newer than ’06.

And the sidewalks are now in much better shape. No need to dodge big holes in them like I did back in ’06. BUT, they still have places where I have to jerk up on the handlebars pulling the front of the bike up in order to clear a steep curb. But even with the few hazards on the sidewalk it doesn’t take long to reach the Punta Cerritos.

Way off in the distance are those other condos I mentioned.

And I made a short movie sweeping from the end of the road on the left to on the right…it’s having trouble uploading so I’ll have to come back later and try again.

<Insert Movie here>

Nice little strip mall here. On the other side of the street are the older, ramshackle, held to together with wire businesses that have been here much longer.

And at the end of the strip mall is this gated entrance…but I’ve never been stopped when I walked, biked, or driven in. This was years ago a big RV park but now it’s a ‘Buy your own RV space and improve it with buildings’ sort of place. What you see now is nothing like it use to look. There use to be individual RVs visible every few feet like a traditional RV park. Now most of them are under those open sided buildings. Ahh, progress.

Right around the corner from that RV parks entrance is a road that heads towards the beach. And there’s another strip mall with traditional tourist type businesses and beach stuff for sale. And a big, been there for years, restaurant. I stopped off on my afternoon bike ride to have a nice pina colada and a carne asada taco plate.

And a few shots of the beach while I was ‘resting’.

That was nice. Had some take home stuff too. But no plastic bag to carry it in. So stopped off at the trinket store and asked for one please. The older gentleman was happy to give me one, the old woman wanted pesos. I didn’t have anything other than a $50 and the bag was only worth a couple centavos so the man won out and just gave it to me while arguing with his wife. A couple weeks later I came back and gave her $0.02 pesos, and two plastic bags. She was surprised.  It wasn’t until I was riding back home that I remember years ago, the same thing happened, almost exactly. Needed a bag, he gave me one, she bitched about it. Weird.

Back on the bike, this time heading south on the west side of the road…

Check out the aloe plants just growing willy nilley here in Maz. But this is also a good view of the road I was traveling by on the sidewalks. Four lanes with a center divider filled with plants and trees, sometimes with a rope fence, most times not. And every so often a turn around or returno for the taxis and pulmonias, and cars, and buses, and delivery trucks. They often came in handy. Thing is that the speed limit out here is fast and it can be harrowing trying to cross these streets with or on a bike as there’s really not much of an apron on either side of either lane.

And while roaming around, I found those two elusive RV parks that are often shown on the maps I’ve seen, but I hadn’t noticed while biking up till now on this day’s excursion. One of them I had visited back years ago because this time I recognized it right off . But they aren’t marked well on the main road so I’d missed them repeatedly this trip. You can see the RVs are kind of hidden, and this picture is from the side street used to get into it.

And here’s the 2nd park. This one is a bit more open but also not visible from the main road and no signs either. There’s another 3rd park in the neighborhood further south but it’s always packed…I think it’s one of those parks you buy your space. It’s not very inviting and looks like it would be hard to get your RV in and set up as it’s one lane on a packed dirt road. Not sure there’s anywhere to turn around. AND there’s no wifi there that I could discern. I didn’t take a picture of that one. So 3 parks in the vicinity of the Las Jaibas. All out in the north part of town, really the suburbs. I should stop in at all of them and check their prices and wifi availability…but I’m sort of ok where I am since I can stream. And I’ve heard that those that border the beach, as all 3 of them are, are always more expensive. The Las Jaibas is only $480 US per month.

So that’s most of my first month in Mazatlan. I did drive into town for shopping and things like that but I won’t bore you with pictures of that sort of thing until next time…

Thanks for reading!