More from Mazatlan

So I went up the beach again today on my bike. First thing I did was snap a picture of the hacienda at the beach edge that they’ve been working on. It’s open to the sea and when there is a storm, there’s not much to protect it.

The before picture:

The after picture:

This old park, which includes those buildings shown above, is owned by a local family with many members, some even living in the states. I’m told that they have been fighting over the park for 10 years now. Lots of family, and the owners died without wills. And this is a tourist area so the economy is boom or bust, not much in between. But perhaps they have ironed out their difficulties.

Looking west towards the ocean, those buildings front onto the ocean.

This shot is of the worse hacienda they have. I can’t imagine them trying to save it, a roof support beam is rotted out and that big hole on the side of the building isn’t suppose to be there. And it’s been open to the sea for years.

Why am I so interested in this place? Well, I sense a bargain. I’d like to lock in a long term lease on one of those places on the beach for all year round and then rent it out when I’m not in Mazatlan. Anyone want to go in for half with me? Or quarters?

Here’s a shot of the interior of the old RV park looking east. It’s empty of course and most of the buildings are rotting away. I understand that it hasn’t operated as a RV park for several years. The pads are to small for today’s rigs…

My bike ride was exceptionally difficult today…I don’t know why, perhaps since the tide was just heading out, that made the sand mushy instead of firm.

Here’s that big rock I always head for during my rides:

Looking back while I rest, that tall building there in the middle is right in the Golden Zone:

Here’s that restaurant I’m always talking about. Si, no windows.

A gaggle of tourists. I tried to get a better shot of that gal there as she walked up the beach and before she sat down but I couldn’t get my camera set up fast enough. Sigh. Muy Hermosa!

After I left the beach I stopped up at the Playa Cerritos. This is one of the two restaurants there.

Remember the story I told about my stubbed toe? This relates it that. The contractor just didn’t bother to put the cover back on. As you can tell, it’s been open quite a while. And it’s a public sidewalk. The bikes there for dramatic effect.

One other thing I found on the trip was a very long section of sidewalk that just wasn’t there. You’re riding along and it just disappears. Dirt path. No landscaping either. So I asked the manager here and he says that the property owner that the sidewalk fronts is ‘invited’ to pay 50% of the cost of the sidewalk. They can refuse. Their neighbors come over and talk to them. Sometimes it doesn’t work. It’s a public sidewalk, but they don’t have to pay their share of the property improvement. So, when that happens, no sidewalk. See that a lot down here, I’d wondered why.

Yesterday afternoon here at the RV park they had a little spiel about the condos going up near here presented by the local Realtor. There was free food provided by a great local restaurant, free margarita’s in large cups, and free Mexican type music. It was great. I sat over with the owner and the manager like a patron’ and people came over as supplicants, responding to our every request. Good fun.

Note: If you are a regular visitor to my daughters web site (www.goblinbox.com) and have clicked on the thread ‘Off I go…’, then you have already read the following few pages since I planted them there first. I might have changed a word or the order when I brought them here, but essentially they are the same. Also, it’s possible some of the stories are now out of order. You’ll adjust. I have added some pictures too. There is some minor PG13 language.

Feb. 21

Today I wandered up to the area where Gigante store is since I had an appointment with a dermatologist. It’s importante’ to have your skin checked every so often because of the skin cancer epidemic we have going on even though the prez and his idiot buddies don’t believe in science OR global warming, which includes the FACT of ozone depletion. I’d made the appointment yesterday while I was heading toward Gigante.

Here’s a shot from the bus of a typical street.

So I walk in and plant my ass down on a chair. I’m the only patient. The receptionist doesn’t speak any spanglish and I don’t speak english very well but she was pretty so I flirted with her as well as I could until time for my appointment with the DOCATOR…dun dun dun dunnnnnnnnn!!

The doctor is near my age, and she has this HUGE plack on the wall that seems to state she is a graduate of some doctor school somewhere. It’s all in Spanish so I have NO idea if she’s a medical doctor or a witch doctor. Isn’t Mexico fun?

Anyway, she asks me, in very broken English, ‘What the hell do YOU want?’. So I tell her, since she’s a skin doctor and all, that I’d like her to check my skin. It’s the same skin I walked in with and it’s kinda droupie but I’m use to it.

So, she gets all serious…’You have problem with skin, bad?’

I say, ‘No, just check up for safety.’

She relaxes and has me go into the examination room. Puts on a magnifier and tells me to remove the shirt. I do and she starts looking at my moles and stuff. Thing is? She never puts on gloves. Pokes and prods me all over looking at moles, asking questions etc. No gloves.

But I showered today so no biggie. I hope she did too.

She does find some irritation around one mole but in general I’m good. No weirdness to speak of.

We discuss the cyst or two I have and she quotes me $3,000 pesos to excise them. Hmmm, $300 USD for what would cost me $1,000 USD in the states? Sure, why not.

So while we’re talking in her office about the procedure…easy, local anesthetic and a bandage…I look at her medical degree again. It has a picture of her when she graduated years before. I say, ‘Muy hermosa’ (Very pretty). She laughs and tells me that her granddaughter was in the office a few days before, looked at the same picture and said, ‘Who is this?’. When she found out she says, ‘You were very pretty, now you are not’. Hey, 5 years old, what can you do. And it will happen to all of you.

Good night, buenesnoches.

Feb. 20

I wandered down to Gigante today for some grocs. There’s also a WalMart but I don’t go there as often since this is more convenient and less expensive.

They had the most delicious oranges. At $0.40 per kilo. That is a damn fine price even here. I grabbed 3-4 kilo’s of oranges and a kilo of bananas, also very good.

The beer I bought was less expensive then Modelo, but it’s more robust. And it’s imported! Doesn’t taste bad either.

I also found a nice looking watermelon and some warm milk, known here as leche. Funny thing is that most of the milk sold here is warm. It’s in a carton like soy milk is up in the states and they just pile it up on shelves or in the aisles. They also have cold milk in coolers. I tried some of the warm stuff last week and it tastes just like regular milk. When I first bought it, it was because I was looking for soy milk, I saw those cartons piled up in an aisle and figured they must be soy since they weren’t in the cooler case. So I bought 2 cartons. When I got here to the park, I asked the manager if they were cartons of soy milk, I couldn’t tell because every word was in Spanish.

He laughed and pointed to the picture of the cow on the front of the carton. “What does this look like?” he asked. To which I answered, “A soy bean?”.

Anyway, now I know that ‘leche’ means ‘milk’ and ‘soya’ means ‘soy milk’ but it still kind of weirds me out that there are tons of boxes of milk just sitting in store aisles getting warm. I guess they boil the hell out of the milk before shipping…

If you grew up in the states you’d know what I mean.

Feb. 19

Nearly every day I ride my bike the 2 miles up the playa into a fresh headwind to the restaurant where I get back on regular streets for the ride back to the park. With the stopping for site seeing and stuff it takes me an hour or two. Yesterday the tide was in and the sand wasn’t as firm up that far up the beach as it usually is when the tide is lower so the ride up the beach was not altogether easy.

When I got to the hiway, I stopped at one of those little open air business along the road that sells ‘Cocos’. Cocos=coconuts.

Here’s her place, she wasn’t in today when I took the pic. Took the day off I guess.

Here’s what most of them look like…I’ve eaten here twice…good food. Mucho spicy. Burn mouth like fire.

Anyway, I point at a coco on her sign and she goes to a cooler and grabs a fresh, just fell off the tree in her back yard within days, green husk and all, coconut. She whips out a giant machete and WACKS the end off of it like she’d been wacking things off for years.

She jabs a straw in it and hands it to me. I hold out a palm full of coins. She laughs and grabs a few…I think it came to $12 pesos ($1.15 USD).

I’m still sweating from the bike ride and the coconut milk was soooo cold. I just shivered thinking about it. There must have been at least a cup of coconut milk. Maybe more.

When she wacked the thing open, she skillfully nicked out a hole in the top of the nut for the straw and laid the piece of coconut on top when she handed it to me. I nibble at it but it didn’t have the intense sweet you have come to expect of coconut from stores. Delicate flavor.

After I’d finished drinking, she pointed at the nut and indicated she could wack it some more with the machete if I wanted. So, sure, why not I thought, slightly confused. I wasn’t sure whether most people just drink the juice and leave the meat or take it with them.

So she proceeded to break open the nut and scoop out the nutmeat. Drops it all in a bag, adds two limes, zips it up and hands it to me.

I ride the 2 miles back to the park and ask the manager what the deal was with the limes. Several people there all volunteer the info that with a fresh coconut, you don’t put sugar on it, you soak it in lime (limon’).

I did that and I have to say…it’s pretty damn good that way. Fresh off the tree, sprinkled with fresh lime juice. I could get use to this.

Point is, when a pretty woman in Mazatlan offers to wack something for you? Let her.

Good Day.

Feb. 17, 18

Yesterday and today I hung around the RV park and got several people up and running on the WiFi system I’ve set up here. I’ve got my Linksys WiFi router up on top of the office roof and all secure and stuff with a new SSID and a required key. Funny that I had to work on 5 Toshiba notebook computers, all running XP Home and all with the same sequence of symptoms. They couldn’t connect to the new SSID even though they were getting a better signal.

The fix was to go into the ‘Config Fix’ program provided by Toshiba and run it. Worked every time. Before…couldn’t get connected. After ‘Fix’ and a reboot…connects.

Weird.

The manager was all happy because now the signal reached all the way back to the fence where before it was only getting back 3 rows of RVs…so he wasn’t making much money from people because they couldn’t get a strong enough signal with regularity. He had a bunch of happy people that no longer had to wander up to the office with their laptops to get a good signal. And had 2 deadbeats come down and pay since the old password didn’t work anymore.

Then, late today, around 5:30 pm, I wander into my RV and I see a notice that there are ‘Wireless’ networks available. I click on it and find a new WiFi hotspot. Then, all my work goes to hell. The Linksys stops transmitting. W-t-f? It had worked from 10AM yesterday until 5:30pm this evening. I couldn’t even raise the router from the server…

First we go up on the roof and check it. It has power, and all the activity lamps are flashing like normal. But still no talky to the server. So we unplug it, drag it down into the office and plug it into the modem with a short cable. Takes right off and starts working again.

Here’s the office for the park…the WiFi router was sitting on top of it.

OK, this is weird, is it just a coincidence that it stopped working when that other WiFi came on air? Did that have something to do with it failing to transmit? Or was it just because of the extra long Cat5 cable (rated for long length)? Also, it’s a 802.11B box so the cable length could be like 300 meters if I wanted, the cable I used is commercially made, is rated for 100MHz and is only 10-15 meters. Well within it’s range.

I’m dumbfounded.

Any ideas? Anyone?

On Edit: I think the problem was that the original modem, in which I’ve turned OFF the transmitter? It’s still transmitting on channel 2, weakly, same channel I was using for the Linksys. When that other transmitter went on air, the conflict between the Linksys and the modems transmitter was enhanced, knocking me off the air. Changing the Linksys to channel 9 seems to have fixed that problem.