the first installment

Hello everyone - when I last talked to you over a week ago, I was leaving Creel in the Sierra Madre in central Mexico for a train ride to Los Mochis on the Coast. I had just left Luis, the pompous yet kind Mexican. There is actually a lot more could write about my visit with him, so maybe just a few sentences. Basically, if youre white, it seems to be assumed that you are given a free expense account by the U.S. government to do whatever you want. Life is never hard for white people, and everything in life falls right into our hands. I talked to Luis about stuff like this for a while, as he offered his opinions on America and racism (which I think I already talked about). Its fairly annoying in the first place to think about how some people view you as a white person traveling around, not ever having had to work for anything. At the same time though, it si ridiculous to realize (as a friend has said) that I am indeed part of the fortunate 10% of the worlds population who can do as they please as far as travel. Even for a Mexican to visit his neighboring country is a hassle to get papers, and that hassle is nothing compared to those living in the Middle East who would like to travel (like another friend). The more I move around then, the more I feel like I have to keep seeing these things, since I beat the odds and was given the privelege of being born in one of the countries that controls the movement things and people throughout the world. Anyway, thats that for now, onto the trip where I left Luis. I headed out to the station when it opened at 10 although Luis said the train didnt come until 2 pm. It was a good thing I went early, though, since the second class train left at 1230 and the first class one at like 11 or 1130. I checked the times and headed for something to eat for the ride. When I got back to the platform, I started repacking my stuff so the new food would fit when a perhaps-American, maybe whiter Mexican girl approached and asked "English or Spanish?" Not sure which she preferred, I just went with SPanish right away but said I knew both. So we started conversing in Spanish, and she asked if I would like to split a cab from the town before Los Mochis to the boat that goes across to Baja California. At first I said I wasnt planning on going that direction, but asked for a minute to decide while I packed my stuff. As I said that the train rolled in, and I gave sort of an "oh well" glance. But then I figured what the hell, I dont have plans, so I jumped on the first class train to actually spend some money for the first time in the trip. In the train, I learned that Denise is actually from Germany but lives and works right now in Cuernavaca Mexico. So we spoke Spanish the whole time, but she does know English pretty well also. Her mother, Elena, is in Mexico visiting her before Denise has to leave to renew her visa to work more in Mexico. The train ride was beautiful, and we saw a lot of the same stuff I saw during my drive with Luis. Big canyons, lots of desert, and cool rock formations. As we got down out of the mountains, we crossed a river at sunset and it was all extremely pretty. We got into the town at dark, and found a cab for way more expensive than we were told and headed towardthe coast. Our driver, Manuel, was extremely nice and told us a story of his grandfather who got rich being a bandit and then got poor by having 24 kids. The drive was pretty quick and we were on the boat by about 11pm. The boat took a solid 6 or 7 hours, but the ride was interesting. When we first boarded, we went right to the restaurant for the meal that was included in the trip to be greeted to the Smashing Pumpkins blaring over everything. It was quite odd after 2 solid weeks of traditional Mexican music, but I was hungry and didnt really give it too much thought. So we had dinner and pretty much everyone went to sleep. Denise and I hung out on the deck to check out the ride and when we came back inside, people were sleeping in every possible spot imaginable, making for a slightly eerie ghost ship feeling. The sunrise from the ship was awesome, since it came just as we reached Baja. We finally got on shore at about 730 am and headed to the nearest town of La Paz. After arriving in La Paz, we asked about the best beaches, and found out they were right where we had gotten off the boat. About 200 meters of walking would have been sufficient, but instead we had ridden all the way into town. So we headed back out to the beach and hung out for the day. We slept on the beach that night under constant mosquito attack. But it was definitely nice sleeping on the sand. The next day, we hung out on the beach again (my life is really difficult, I assure you), and then headed back into town for a hostel for the night. While in town, we asked about the best beaches in the area, and we received a tip on a very secluded beach further south called Cabo Pulmo. So we took a bus that after noon to the crossroads where you can head out to Cabo Pulmo. Then we got two rides to get into the town, the second ride from a woman photographer doing a story on diving in Cabo Pulmo for the San Francisco Chronicle. It turns out that Cabo Pulmo is actually a diving and fishing Mecca that has had the same two families inhabiting it and protecting the living reef since 1900. It was pretty cool and all of the residents were more than welcoming. We rented a cabana from Nancy, who was slightly less than friendly and had much more of the typical American in her than Mexican. She always seemed just a little "off," like she was waiting for you to pay her for something, like water. We understood that we could fill up our water in her restaurant for free, but everytime we did she would come out with a question like "can i help you?", making geting water a fairly uncomfortable task. The beach was amazing in Cabo Pulmo, and we snorkeled and saw a bunch of fish on the reef. The last night, we moved out of Nancys after finding an abandoned cabana on the beach and we slept there. The next day we swam a bit more and then headed out for the town in the back of a pickup, and finally made our way by bus to Cabo San jose, further west. The beach in San Jose was much bigger than in Cabo Pulmo, and the waves were awesome. It was a good time playing in the water for a few hours. Anyway, we stayed in our place two nights, and this morning I said goodbye to Elena and Denise as they headed back to La Paz to board the boat for the mainland and I headed north to Todos Santos to begin a 3 day hike into a national park thats supposed to be extremely uniqu in Baja. I will probably head back myself after that, but who knows. We shall see.