Blog break

     This week I’ve barely been in the same place as my computer. Crew members have been changing and each is a new adjustment, a new personality to incorporate into the dynamic or say good-bye too. I’ll be leaving the boat in a week, back to the wacky hotel in downtown La Paz. Tomorrow we leave to sail to an island called Espiritu Santo, a marine preserve, where the fish are abundant. I'm the lame duck crew now, but have one last sail to enjoy. I’ve been given the job to shop for food for the trip with the new crew person from Australia.  Some markets involve asking for things behind the counter so I need to sign off and go over my vocabulary lists for food items. Here’s the best photo of week, too bad net throwing in the grocery store isn't an option, I could write more and study Spanish later.   

The kindness of strangers

     Getting sick suddenly makes traveling seem like a stupid idea. Why ever go five miles from home? Oh, right, I don’t have a home. And come to think of it, I’ve been sick at home too, when I had one. I ate something, swallowed water in the shower or put my shoe in my mouth while I was sleeping. Who knows? I woke up sick a few days ago and couldn’t keep anything in. Luckily I am in a hotel and not on the boat where the marina toilets are a long, long way away. I would have been sprinting or hiding in the hedges since we don’t use the boat head in the marina. But as it happened I’m in this wacky hotel where the owner fortunately happens to be a doctor, he told me not to eat. When this happened in American Samoa from eating at McDonald’s, I was also told by the local doctor not to eat anything. Starve the bugs and they leave your system faster. I did that. I lay in bed all day hungry and wrote countless emails. Raul, the manager went to the store and came back with an electrolyte drink for invalids. Julio, the maintenance guy gave me a bottle of pills, which turned out are for ulcers so I didn’t take them, but his concern was touching. I must have looked ghastly wobbling into the courtyard to sit in the sun, before I had to dash back. Being sick is lonely, lying in bed feeling sorry for myself and all. I missed my art classes, a gallery opening and a few meals, but it didn’t really matter. Instead I was shown genuine concern from strangers, which is so very heartwarming and actually a very good reason to travel. We all get sick, as it turns out this is the best place it could have happened. I almost wept when I was handed a bowl of soup for breakfast this morning in the staff kitchen. It was kind of them to talk me into joining them. It tasted so good, there is nothing like deprivation to heighten the senses. I sat in the kitchen slowly sipping spicy red broth with lime next to a tiny boy, dressed like Spiderman who was being hand fed. The staff chatted and laughed with each other, which is universal, it doesn’t really matter what is said. I could have cared less if they were laughing at me, but I doubt they were.

     A few hours later I ventured out to the sidewalk, still not willing to go much further. The doctor and Raul asked how I was feeling.  In rapid Spanish they covered a lot of ground that I couldn’t keep up with. I caught the word dog a few times though. Raul explained that the doctor doesn’t like the place Julio went for the soup because he thinks they use dog meat. Had I been given the option I might have declined breakfast out of ingrained American sensibilities, but honestly, it was still the best soup I ever had.

     There’s a giant spider living in the bathroom. I’m careful when I turn the light on not to scare it. It sits in the same place without moving for so long that at first I thought it was dead. I can’t bring myself to kill it and so far it hasn’t seemed bothered to share the room with me. One day I may find out it is deadly poisonous with no antidote, but like dog soup, lack of knowledge is everything.  

Hotel Yeneka

         

     Through a friend I found a small hotel in downtown La Paz, Mexico. Walking into the courtyard the first time has a similar effect on everyone. Eyes wide, mouth open, a touch of vertigo. Every surface is jammed with the flotsam of Baja. If it’s old, funny or just plain worn out the second generation owner, who everyone calls the Doctor (because he is a doctor), nailed it to a wall or hung it from the rafters. Although there appears to be little room left, he’s still buying and building stuff. The palm horse, many of the metal sculptures and some of the crazy furniture are the doctor's. Howard Finster (Paradise Gardens), Calvin Black (Possum Trot Doll Theatre) and Ferdinad Chevalm (Stone Palace of Fantasy) are similar unruly inner visions made tangible over a lifetime. Often considered crackpots, until they expired and the price of their work soared, their compulsive souls listened to the whisperings of the unconscious unheard by most. Hotel Yeneka, YNK to backpackers, is a forty year work in progress.

     Only a compulsively driven atypical mind, and that's meant as a compliment, could turn so much junk into a place of interest, much less one people would want to stay overnight in. I’ve been here a few days and watched people walk in look around, laugh out loud and then trip over their own feet. So much stuff crammed into one area has a highly disorienting effect. It’s random, yet orderly, charming and disturbing and simply the best example of controlled chaos I’ve run across. It would be simply terrifying in an earthquake. A large hairy monkey used to live at the hotel, but died and is now stuffed, the permanent passenger in a Model T going nowhere.  In all the layers of once useful items, including antlers and whale bones, there is a sense of history, like unearthing an old landfill. The objects are carefully displayed like precious relics and by employing a strategy of incredible density they curiously become a treasure not to be overlooked.

 

                   Hotel Yeneka

                   1520 Madero

                   La Paz, Mexico

                   hotelyeneka@hotmail.com

                   612-125-4688
                   http://yenekahotelandart.co.cc/

La Paz

     La Paz is not pretentious; it’s a city a little like Oakland in California with a waterfront that is not unlike South Beach in Miami. People are friendly and even though I try to speak with very limited Spanish, I’m finding that people are more willing to practice their English. The result is a twice broken conversation with a lot of smiling and head nodding. Other than in the marinas very few gringos are walking around, but I remember that about La Paz from when I was here twenty years ago. Very little is what you expect, which is what makes it interesting. The pet store is also the place to shop for bulk spices, from our slip in the marina (a mile and half from town) we can hear thumping music from the dance clubs and the traffic is just crazy. Pedestrians are more like target practice. Cars reach top speed between stop signs and stand on end stopping, if they bother. Lights are a suggestion. Guys dance in traffic for tips. More than once I found I can still run very fast since buses apparently don’t have any brakes. Art in Mexico is exceptional and I could learn a lot about painting as the work in galleries is better than anything I’ve seen, pretty much anywhere. This coming weekend La Paz is hosting an art festival with guest artists from Australia, including a group of fire dancers. Whimsical sculptures line the Malecon and grace the courtyards around town.

Bay of the Dead

     Ensenada de los Muertos has a few surprises. After nearly a month in wild places with only a few stops in marinas it took us by surprise to stumble onto, of all things in this remote bay, a model train museum. The entire area is slated for development with a golf course and a hotel already established. There’s an open air restaurant on the opposite side of the harbor with a dingy dock nearby. The hotel is exquisitely designed with pools, artwork, fountains and the unexpected train museum on the mezzanine of the restaurant. The hotel and grounds are laid out with so much thought given to the details of comfort and beauty that it is simply stunning. Roads, lagoons, cliff side homes and shopping centers are planned, but for now it is economically stalled.

     With all this going on it would seem that something as simple as a dock for dinghies would be a somewhat stable affair. It is not. Assembled from large snap together plastic pieces it looks deceptively friendly, like a Playskol product. We tied the dingy up and jumped onto the platform which is when the fun began.  The innocuous plastic dock held an unexpected surprise. The surge sent it slamming it into the rock wall it was tied to, knocking us off our feet. The only safe way to traverse it was on all fours, which none of us were willing to do. We simply could not have successfully sailed down the notoriously difficult Baja coast only to discover the most difficult passage turned out to be fifteen feet of plastic gangway. Big tough sailors cannot exactly walk into a local bar with their heads up after crawling up a kiddy dock. We had merely a moment of warning, when the surge tugged the dock away from the wall, to prepare for the next jolt, arms flailing, knees bent, as it careened into the rock wall. A rubber fender or a few old tires would easily cure the problem, but in a billion dollar development complete with a mile of tiny trains and scads of marble water features it must be have been considered an unnecessary expense to ensure the safety of transient sailors. The surge swept the dock away from the stairs making the leap too far to risk between them. Timing was everything. Missing the chance required bracing for impact, then waiting for the next wave to shove the dock toward the wall, altogether quite challenging for a toy dock.

     The steep stairway leading to the path to the restaurant must have been constructed by the decedents of ancient pyramid builders or they were an afterthought chipped randomly out of the vertical wall. I love Mexico, this would not be allowed north of the border and it was actually quite amusing after the initial near dunking when the dock first revealed its crafty little secret. The molded plastic ladder attached to the end of the dock, a modest convenience for the people who have been launched into the water, proudly displayed the logo “EZ Dock”, which is insultingly oriented toward the person climbing it soaking wet.        

     And for all the people who have been sending advice about lures and how to use them, here is our latest attempt. We are now anchored in clear enough water to actually see the fish smirking at us.

Anything but stable

     After nearly a week of being holed up in a quiet bay, anchored below a mountain of rock and cactus off a lovely sandy beach we moved north to Ensenada de los Muertos, Cove of the Dead. As there is a restaurant and golf course here, it is much livelier than the last place despite its name to the contrary. At Bahia los Frailes I had only gone ashore twice, to walk on the beach, opting to stay on the boat while Steve and Peter took off during lulls in the wind to go exploring. Early yesterday morning the sea was calm enough to hoist the anchor. Motoring makes it easier to take pictures since the boat is more level than when beating into the wind and sails don’t block the view. Whales and dolphins visited us once again, but still, I have no photos that would prove anything other than a fin in the distance lost in the waves. A pair of whales dove under us and a huge school of dolphins leapt at the bow. Like fishing, it is a running joke. We always trail a line, with various lures attached, but nothing has been tempted to bite. The decks remain free of fish guts, which is meager consolation. To be able to fish it was required that we each buy a Mexican fishing license, which so far is a contribution to conservation, since our efforts have proved to be the case.

     There is something worth photographing that isn’t quite so frustrating. The ocean as a mirror of the sky, the water as a clear body revealing its depth over the varying ground beneath it, the shadows thrown from wind tossed waves, these are things that do not appear and disappear in a flash that is nearly impossible to capture. They simply require observation. Whoever gets those brilliant whale and dolphin photos I am convinced has never set foot onshore or lowered a camera from their face and receives regular telepathic messages from sea going mammals about the exact location of future breaches. 

      The ocean is so much more than blue, it is a complex range of light, shade and colors on its hypnotic, undulating surface.  When underway I rarely go below. Going ashore, while fun and interesting at times, does not hold a candle to the effect of the ocean on my senses. It is the reason to be here, to put up with the inconvenience of boat life, to risk, well, everything. Standing on the bow of a boat careening up and down over the deep ocean swells, with nothing but the horizon demarking the meeting of sea and sky, I lose the ability to indulge in woes and worries. The monkey mind chatter simply stops. Laughter from deep inside wells up and I only attempt to contain it if people nearby would fear for my sanity. Luckily my traveling companions either don’t notice or they understand from having the same appreciation for the mesmerizing effects of the undulating surface that the boat so willingly rides over. The boundary between self and everything that is not dissolves, a feeling of grand expansion from heart to horizon wells up and for those moments of exquisitely, intense joy I will bargain for nothing. They cannot be traded in for stability, a well ordered life, the compromises that form meaningful relationships or even for a secure future. I simply do not know how to find that feeling any other way. Drugs promise it, meditation may offer it to a more disciplined mind, love of a loyal pet maybe, but yesterday while underway, the magic was mine for hours at a time. It’s all relative though, for others it is merely a recipe for hurling.       

         

    

      

           

Close quarters

     Traveling with people on boats requires sensibilities that do not often challenge us in our normally ordered American lives. This is not unlike living communally in a tropical village of open huts, where every sound our bodies utter, whether voluntary or the result of biological function, is heard by someone else. Living this way breaks the bonds of decorum we hold so dear when the luxury of privacy is available. There are other phenomena as well, closer to our former evolutionary status as cave dwellers, where we simply must care about each other for the sake of our own safety. It does not matter what we personally have in common, it depends little on if we like each other or that we will have forged enough compassion to continue friendships into the future. This part of the human psyche I had not experience before traveling on boats, but I’m sure it can be likened to other situations in life. Miners working deep underground, wilderness explorers, astronauts, people who must bond with each other around the common goal of survival. On the outside, it appears as friendship, but it feels more like a connection to strands of DNA not often exercised in modern life that are most certainly part of our common past. We look out for each other, worry a little when one is too long out of sight and hope for their safe return when we would not do so if they were simply our neighbors going off to work in their car.

     As a phenomenon it comes and goes with the perception of need. When we are no longer in wild places those bonds go as slack as the safety lines that we use when the boat is in in motion and stow when we are once again comfortably tied up in a marina.  Boundaries snap quickly back into place and that sense of caring takes its more usual back seat. I cannot imagine making jokes about bowel movements with people I have known for a short time in any other situation than on a boat where the thin walls of separation for the most private moments do little to ensure them. One can hope these odd circumstances forge friendships, but it does not guarantee it. Boat life is a crash course in what we usually learn to tolerate slowly about others and it helps to take a somewhat anthropological view, if possible, before nerves are frazzled from pushing personal limits. Platonic traveling in this situation on this trip has worked well and I certainly hope the women attached to these two men are not concerned in any regard about my intentions. I am relieved there is no spark of attraction between any of us because it would only add unnecessary tension. My good friends know, I simply love cruising on sailboats. There are good and bad things about both these guys, as with myself, but the presence or lack of those factors contribute purely to the enjoyment and safety of the trip. Traveling on boats with new people is a little like buying a car where you have only been allowed to view the internal workings of the engine from the greasy sludge in the oil pan to the whooshing exhaust from the internal combustion without ever once looking at the beautiful shiny exterior. It would be like forcing yourself to fall in love backwards and I doubt it happens very often. Girls, these boys are yours. And for all the lovers who are new to each other, there are many good reasons not to explore the trepidations first stages of love on a boat.    

p.s. Still unable to upload photos, still waiting out the wind in Bahia Los Frailes. I can get email so feel free to write;
 cb2c@yahoo.com

Steve, the captain/owner of Si Bon also keeps a blog;
sailblogs.com/member/sibon/