Long Road South: Finding Mexico's Beaches Before the Crowds
A journey through coastal Mexico before the tourist crunch
Hola Amigos! Here’s a little trip down memory lane: An early vacation to Mexico’s west coast by bus, Tres Estrellas de Oro, the Greyhound of Mexico. Please come along for the ride. Hope you enjoy it.
I must have had a fascination with 24-hour road trips in my early Mexico travel days. Before I talked my friend Claudia into going to Mexico for a vacation after we both resigned from the newspaper we worked for in northern California, I’d been there with my rock-n-roll boyfriend way back when.
B. Dalton and I had taken a 24-hour bus ride on Tres Estrellas de Oro, Mexico’s Greyhound, from Tijuana to Mazatlan. We’d been told Mazatlan was a fishing village—hardly—and promptly left for San Blas. (This was long before the internet. Fact checking was a map and going there).
San Blas wasn’t all it was cracked up to be either, and after dodging a request from a nefarious looking long-hair to “help him on his farm,” we beat feet to a tiny blot on the map, Santa Cruz de Miramar.
With no visible beach (you had to walk around a point to get to the surf spot) it was the perfect cover. Anyone driving around the tiny town square had no clue it was a worthwhile place to stop.
But we liked it and scored a funky palapa on the beach—cheap—empty in the winters and in summers used for fiestas. We had very little money but it was enough to get us through the winter months while the Mendocino County redwoods were drenched in rain and the wood stove was cranked to high.
Another friend joined us from California; we met lots of people—locals and foreigners—got into the lifestyle, learned some Spanish, and had a blast.
Back then I wrote this about it:
On Mexico’s west coast, few cities lie between Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta. Looking at a map of Mexico, San Blas sits halfway between the two—a red dot as opposed to a blue dot—meaning it was a city of some consequence. It holds its own as far as population, tourists, and marketplaces go.
In the post office, an unsent postcard was tacked on the wall. The sender hadn’t added stamps and it was there as a heads up. Others joined this one in reproach. Not only were they missing stamps, some were even missing names and addresses.
The card had been destined for Lake Tahoe. Its message was there for all who could read English: “San Blas must have been a super spot five to ten years ago, but now it’s crawling with gringos and everyone speaks English. It’s crowded and overpriced. Mexican buses are getting to be a drag. But I’m still searching for that backwards little fishing village with the perfect beach.”
Ándale! Read on:
Situated on a dirt road 22 kilometers south of San Blas is Santa Cruz de Miramar. If the person who had failed to send that card had only ventured a ways further, they’d have found a more idealized Mexico.
Santa Cruz de Miramar sits directly on a point that juts into the Pacific. The people of Santa Cruz work the sea for a living, leaving in pangas or rowboats at day break, returning to shore around four with tuna, red snapper, shrimp, crabs and the occasional dorado.
Women and young boys work the oyster trade from the shore, using hatchets or crow bars to pry the shell fish from the rocks. Fishers who catch shrimp leave nets on their boats all day, catching rides to shore with other fishermen. At dusk they return to claim their catch.
Though fishing serves as the major source of income, small tiendas, family markets, a bakery, tortillaria and restaurant support the rest of this town of 700. Work in the neighboring banana, papaya, and tobacco fields are also sources of income.
It’s not hard to imagine how Santa Cruz came into being. Not unlike other coastal towns on the central Pacific coast, it offers much to those who live there. The sea yields an abundance of fish, the terrain sits at the edge of the fertile, humid jungle, and bountiful crops like papaya and bananas grow in rich, dark loam. From the outermost point of Santa Cruz’s beach, one can clearly see San Blas. The distance between villages is shaped like a horseshoe, with San Blas at one point and Santa Cruz at the other tip.
El centro, Santa Cruz’s town square, is small and well kept. Bougainvillea and oleanders are scattered throughout. An open-air gazebo serves as a bandstand on Saturday nights when the town dance livens up the week. Twenty white-washed benches surround the square, facing inwards towards flower gardens spaced between faded tile walkways.
Usually the square lacks life—day or night—except for kids playing, skateboarders practicing surf moves, or the local gardener watering the flowers and tending weeds. To a first time visitor, Santa Cruz looks like it’s on a constant siesta.
RV’s and campers cruise into town. Finding no hotels and one feeble attempt at a restaurant, they continue their drive south. Small palapas made from palm leaves and saplings entwined with string or tile houses make up the village. To the serious tourist there is little reason to vacation here. Life is not geared to gala fiestas or the unusual. Life here is one long siesta.
Santa Cruz’s rocky point discourages surfers. Little do they know it’s got the best waves in the region. To the untrained eye, it’s a dot on the map with a rocky beach, no surf, no place to spend the night and slim pickings for eating out. But for those who prefer a slice of Mexican life, Santa Cruz de Miramar is primo.
Travelers attracted to this town are not your typical tourist. Most speak passable Spanish, have time to kill and want a quieter lifestyle. American transplants stay not weeks but months. Writers, painters, surfers in the know, even circus performers (some members of the Pickle Family Circus) have found it comfortable, a space without clocks or schedules. It’s a still life in pastels rather than dramatic oils and as docile and unassuming as the cows that walk the streets—not domesticated yet agreeable.
I dragged Claudia there several years later and the place hadn’t changed much. A few more people had stumbled onto it but it was still slice-of-life real. We became friends with a Canadian couple who were tight rope walkers, maybe hangers-on from the circus. They hung their ropes between palm trees and practiced in the afternoons. There were other creatives—a musician or two, a writer. Occasionally a returning surfer who wanted to check the waves. The usual suspects.
We met an artist from Seattle who lived in the other half of our palapa duplex. He took a shine to Claudia but she wasn’t interested.
We walked backtrails five kilometers to El Llano where we heard a gringo guy named Michael lived in a huge double teepee tent. Local gossip had built him into a small scale version of Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. We stood outside his tent and he motioned to us from his dais far inside the grand teepee. Somewhere he’d found an upholstered chair and sat there like a king on his throne.
Later we drank tiny Coronas with him at a cantina in the pueblo and gave him an old copy of Rolling Stone after listening to his wild stories. We’d dragged it around the entire trip. He coveted the magazine. It had Kerouac on the cover and a William Burroughs review of the film remake of Carolyn Cassidy’s story of Kerouac, Neal Cassidy and herself in the 50s.
Before our two week vacation was up, we managed to get to Tepic and cash in our return air tickets so we could hang out in Santa Cruz another week or so. This time I’d flown down, unlike my first trip south.
Our return airfare got us train tickets from Tepic to Nogales, then a bus to San Francisco, plus an extra week in Mexico. Things were still cheap south of the border.
The train ride was, well, an adventure. Billy, the artist who’d fallen for Claudia, said he’d accompany us. We liked the idea of having a guy around for the 24-hour trip. All the first class seats had been sold out (first class train tickets in Mexico aren’t expensive). So it was the second class car. We parked ourselves in a set of four facing leather seats, two and two.
In theory it sounded good, but the reality was far from it. Loud children wailing, lenient mothers, bathrooms without toilet paper, and a very, very slow moving train the first ten hours. For the next 14, the engineer felt compelled to play catch up and simply standing became a feat of nature due to centrifugal force. Billy’s tequila stash ran out early. Forced to observe the scene sober as judges through bleary eyes in sleep-deprivation mode, we prayed for the next whistle stop where local vendors would come to the windows and sell us tacos and soft drinks.
We made it to Nogales and from there somehow managed to get back to northern California. That area of Mexico is now called the Riviera Nayarit. Playa de Los Cocos several kilometers north of Santa Cruz is famous for its beauty. When B. Dalton, my rocker boyfriend, and I were first there, it was rural and undeveloped.
Years earlier, driving the rutted beach road north to Playa de Los Cocos for a music night was an adventure. We’d crowded into the back seat of a VW Beetle for the bumpy ride. Back then B. Dalton charmed the locals with renditions of songs by Los Be-át-les (the Beatles) after borrowing someone’s funky guitar. Though he played his own songs, not the classics or the Beatles in his band up north, the Mexico Santa Cruzians demanded the Fab Four. Undiscovered Los Cocos Bay was gorgeous at night. The moon was full, the beach was right there. It was quite a fiesta. And a time to remember.
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MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland we’ve pyramid hopped everywhere and often. Over the years I’ve searched out every book on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids, the archeologists who dug at these sites, the scholars who wrote about them and talked to locals with stories to tell. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually began to write about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
Thanks for the restack @Phil and Maude
I like the history of this -the way Mex used to be. You don’t say when (what year this was) and I’m curious!