Part 4.2 Undertows in Manzanilla (and Michuagan)

Part 2 is about our trip to Manzanilla during weekend 21.-22.8. It was a pretty short trip for that long driving, but I really think it was worth it!

We left on Saturday morning to la Manzanilla (not Manzanillo) in Costa Alegre, a beach town in the west coast of Mexico that was said to have peaceful, cool beaches that weren’t packed with tourists. Its located on the west coast of Mexico, as shown below.

La Manzanilla on map

The road there wasn’t really the fastest one and we snaked through the mountains all together for like 4.5 hours (1 hour stops). The length didn’t bother me too much because of the magnificent scenery that lasted the whole trip and of course because of good company. Here’s a typical pic of Mexican countryside.

Mountain side view

The actual town of la Manzanilla was just the way that I had imagined. All the action was focused basically on the main road, on which the hostels, bars and all the shops were concentrated. We of course asked for a place to stay with a cheap price and we first went to see a hostel that cost about 1 euro per night. The place was worth exactly its price so we decided to find another one (the owner didn’t want us to live there either I think). Next we found a really good and tidy place and we stayed there for 8 euro per night per person. The name of the hotel was Topala and I really recommend it to all people visiting the place.

We were very lucky with the weather in Manzanilla. The first day it was so hot, that with only sitting in the shade and drinking cold beer you would get sweaty. The difference to Guadalajara was actually surprisingly big and it was obviously caused by the sea and 1500 meters difference in altitude.

Our main focus was to get to the sea. The waves were surprisingly big and especially the strong undertow of returning water made it feel like we're floating on a moving ocean. Here’s few pics of the beach.

Oh boy..

¿Comprende?

Dont worry, the sea wasn’t too dangerous to swim there, and we had a good time just relaxing and having a relaxing time. However, everyone else weren't that lucky. I will discuss that on the next chapters called.

The bad news section: 223 -> 222

The undertows were apparently even bigger in another town in Mexico, in Michoacán, where a local student association group held a big camping trip. Around 180 international students were partying on a beach, where the currents and waves were really dangerous. Some people still went just to walk in the sea, and it resulted to one French girl missing from Friday afternoon. The missing wasn’t first taken seriously and there was only minor searching in the beach on Friday night in the dark. The first organized searching to find her wasn’t started until Saturday morning and on Saturday afternoon she was found dead by the Mexican army, either drowned or smashed to the cliffs nearby the beach. The whole episode was a real disaster and I heard so many bad words about the organization team. I heard that many other people were also really close from drowning and they were saved by their friends in the last second.

I didn’t know the girl, but some of my school friends knew her and it touched them obviously a lot. The student group already held a ceremony for the girl, and some actions from Tec are also expected.

I have to add news from Puerto Vallarta, where a hand grenade was “accidentally” blown, causing a death to 1 person and injuries to 20. This kind of news really tells you the bad situation that Mexico is in, with all the gang wars and corruption. Guadalajara is safe place to live and all these kind of news seem really distant from us. However, Puerto Vallarta was also considered as a safe city, so you never know what’s going to happen next.

I could explain more about the horrible news here, but I rather focus on telling the positive memories that I have here in Mexico. A exhange student friend of mine has told a bit more about the big problems considering Mexico, u can visit his blog here.

Note to self : Eyes open and don't drink too much Tequila.

However, on Sunday 22.8 we just drove around Costa Alegre and went to a different beach with remarkably smaller and nicer waves. The city itself was really empty of people and the reason for that revealed when we arrived at the beach. Literally everyone was just chilling out in the beach and drinking Tequila in the middle of the day. Maybe it was partly because it was Sunday, but no-one seemed to try to do absolutely anything, which is very different for people in the similar economic condition in Asia. The same situation was occurring in the local towns. The landscape was really beautiful and it’s seemed like a really potential area for tourism. However, it seemed like a missed opportunity, because the majority of the bigger hotels there were abandoned, ruined, or half-constructed. A big reason for this was the earthquake of 1984 that was really disastrous for the local houses and hotels, but anyway it feels really sad to see the hotels still in the same condition.

Another finding was that all the ladies in the town were more fat on average than e.g. in Guadalajara, which really reflected their style of living. I don’t want to generalize, but it seems that in Mexico the poorer people are generally living a much unhealthier lifestyle than the rich people, who generally make a big effort on their looks and health. Maybe it’s because of social dichotomy (yes, I googled that word) that rich are very rich and the poor are very poor. The rich want to look better than the poor people and that’s why they exercise more and eat healthier.

Above said, I’ll give the poor Mexicans a valuable tip. Try harder. We’ve talked quite a lot on the economic situation of Mexico, and it seems that the social system and deeply rooted habits prevent Mexico from revealing its true potential. A problem like that is extremely hard to solve, because it is related to everything and people are accustomed to it. For example, the police are corrupted here, and instead of getting bills, you pay them bribe money. The government tries to eliminate this by making the punishments of drunk-driving much bigger, but actually it just gives more power to the police to ask for more bribe money. The real answer would be to affect to people’s mind, and especially among those people, who can motivate also other to do the same. This means that you should primarily the chief officers, who currently enable the current situation to occur. That’s a hard nut to crack, because they have a lot of power and such proposition to eliminate corruption would most probably have a negative effect on their benefits and income. Good luck with that.

Urgh, I constantly get lost from my actual story of our trip to la Manzanilla. Anyway we had a little bummer on our way back to Guadalajara on Sunday afternoon. The road was full of big holes and our Swiss driver accidentally drove into one, causing the tire to explode. The spare tire was in bad condition, so we had to find a place to change the old one. Luckily a friendly family stopped by behind our car and told us the route to a place nearby (which was owned by his brother, what a coincidence!). After the fixing operation of some 2 hours, we could finally continue our trip back to Gdl, this time in the dark. We took it really cautiously, and it took all together like 6.5-7 hours to finally get to the city, at 2am. All in all, a really good trip that I really enjoyed. More of these please!

This is the end of chapter 2 of this update, hope you liked it :). Chapter 3 is about my next week until today (23.-29.8) and I'll try to pop it out soon enough. This time I added my views of Mexico in between the chapters and I don't know whether the text is too hard to follow up now. You guys can comment on that!