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| I found a shell on the beach |
I'd been hearing about this plane on a beach for a while. I couldn't find anyone who had actually seen it. I was in Zipolite and most people there found the trip from the sleeping bag to the bong to be an adequate days adventure. So I went looking and found it in another small village 10 k away. Then I discovered why not many people had been to the site. It was easy to find, it was just a long hot walk on a deserted beach. I saw one campesino on the trip. He was walking with the two things every campasino always takes along. A machete and a skinny dog. The stories on the plane were the usual. Spy plane,drug plane, cia plane, cia drug spy plane. As usual in these matters there is a truth commonly held, an official truth and the things we will never know for sure. Kinda like the Queen of the north.
(You can click on the photos to enlarge.)
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| Toto the clown in his room |
- Toto the clown was staying in the rooms behind my campsite in Puerto Escondido. He is studying in Mexico City and works the streets as Toto to pay tuition. He is in his early twenties and acts like he has seen a lot in the time that his age allows. I think he will do well.
I suspect this to be a small representation of the victims of Puerto Escondido surf
Puerto Escondido. Best described as a place where something always seems to be going on in the background. You can't quite figure it out but things seem to be not as they seem. I am trying to figure this out but I only ever get the surface of things here. I don't know that this is not a good place to stop.
I met the most boring man in the world the other day. We were camped in the same place. I said a polite hello and was treated to a long story about doing his taxes. I waited for the interesting part but there was none. No witty element or tragedy, just filing taxes. The next day he approached me and started to tell me about loading a pickup with gravel. The gravel loading story was equally bereft of drama or entertainment. I thought, I've been polite enough and just walked away. Yes he was a Canadian.
I think the beach version of this trip is about to end. It is nice and all but I'm off to Oaxaco city soon.
I'm in Mazunte at the moment. It is the slightly more sane neighbour of Zipolite. Zipolite is tired. It is an old hippy hang out currently occupied (and that is the right word) by heavily tattooed European street vendors. If I needed a dreamcatcher I would have stayed on Gabriola. Mazunte also offers a beach that you can actually swim at. The beach at Zipolite is treacherous. Huge waves and rip tides.
It is great to see these little traveling circuses still working. They bring in a good crowd.
I was thinking about how it came to be that Mexico came to push Colombia out of top spot in the drug trade. Looking at the history of both countries, aside from the ready market, they both share a history of extreme violence that is both recent and I suspect unfinished. Colombia endured a period simply known as "LA Violencia". This was a bloody civil war that lasted from the 30s into the late fifties. Mexico had a bloody revolution. It was marked by extreme cruelty and a breakdown of social order that has never really recovered. Various governors have built replicas of the Parthenon and country homes sporting horse racing tracks and exact copies of Studio 54 from that era. That is the obvious stuff. The simple trappings of corruption. But the corruption moves down the line and soon the corner store guy is kidnapped for a ransom of $75.00. You better have that $75.00 or Daddy is gone. In the 80s in Colombia the kidnapping got so bad that a radio station was founded to deal with kidnap issues and send messages to the kidnapped. If you have land or a business in Colombia that the bad guys want they say "quiere plata o quiere plomo." Would you like silver or lead. In Mexico it is much the same. Everything has a price, even if the price is death.
I met the most boring man in the world the other day. We were camped in the same place. I said a polite hello and was treated to a long story about doing his taxes. I waited for the interesting part but there was none. No witty element or tragedy, just filing taxes. The next day he approached me and started to tell me about loading a pickup with gravel. The gravel loading story was equally bereft of drama or entertainment. I thought, I've been polite enough and just walked away. Yes he was a Canadian.
I think the beach version of this trip is about to end. It is nice and all but I'm off to Oaxaco city soon.
I'm in Mazunte at the moment. It is the slightly more sane neighbour of Zipolite. Zipolite is tired. It is an old hippy hang out currently occupied (and that is the right word) by heavily tattooed European street vendors. If I needed a dreamcatcher I would have stayed on Gabriola. Mazunte also offers a beach that you can actually swim at. The beach at Zipolite is treacherous. Huge waves and rip tides.
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| Canadian building project in Zipolite. Could someone call worksafe? |
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| Campsite and eurovan |
It is great to see these little traveling circuses still working. They bring in a good crowd.
I was thinking about how it came to be that Mexico came to push Colombia out of top spot in the drug trade. Looking at the history of both countries, aside from the ready market, they both share a history of extreme violence that is both recent and I suspect unfinished. Colombia endured a period simply known as "LA Violencia". This was a bloody civil war that lasted from the 30s into the late fifties. Mexico had a bloody revolution. It was marked by extreme cruelty and a breakdown of social order that has never really recovered. Various governors have built replicas of the Parthenon and country homes sporting horse racing tracks and exact copies of Studio 54 from that era. That is the obvious stuff. The simple trappings of corruption. But the corruption moves down the line and soon the corner store guy is kidnapped for a ransom of $75.00. You better have that $75.00 or Daddy is gone. In the 80s in Colombia the kidnapping got so bad that a radio station was founded to deal with kidnap issues and send messages to the kidnapped. If you have land or a business in Colombia that the bad guys want they say "quiere plata o quiere plomo." Would you like silver or lead. In Mexico it is much the same. Everything has a price, even if the price is death.
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