We spent three days (18th-20th) at sea on our way to Acapulco. The time was very hectic for Dawn as there were plenty of orientation activities for the students, followed by the first two days of classes, which included Dawn’s longest and busiest day… drop-add! The time was pretty relaxed for me, but I am teaching three yoga classes a day (the first one starts at 6am) and sitting in on two other classes and a Spanish conversation course.
We arrived in Acapulco to beautiful sunny skies, but blistering heat and humidity (95F and around 90%, respectively). It really colored much of our time here, sapping our strength, and our will to be out and about during the day. But we did get out…!
On the first day we took a tour of the city with a perfectly awful guide – think Henny Youngman who cared to share little with us other than the locations of (numerous) Starbucks, Hooters, and Sylvester Stallone’s vacation home. But the views of the bays of Acapulco and Marquez from the higher elevations were stunning.
At the end of the tour (after being dragged through a souvenir shop) we visited the famous Quebrada to see the cliff-divers. The views (and the breeze!) were awesome, as was the daring of the divers, even if the show itself was a quite perfunctory.
That night, nine of us trooped out of the main tourist areas for some comida tipica at La Chilapena. We were the only tourists in sight and it was nice to get away from all the bars and beach craziness that typifies the places that draw most of the international travelers. The food at Chilapena was excellent, and the staff (as is usual in such local eateries) bent over backwards to accommodate us. Afterwards we walked through the back streets to find the zocalo, where we wandered about enjoying the (slightly cooler) night air, the sounds of evensong from the Catholic church congregation, and the dense night-song of a huge swarm of birds in the trees above us. Sorry, but I didn’t have my camera with me…
On the second day, Dawn and I took a ferry out to Isla Roqueta (just off the coast near the Caleta area of old Acapulco) for some lunch and easy hiking. We ate at a restaurant where we were the only American tourists. The rest of the crowd was all tourists from Mexico City, including the lovely couple who let us sit at their table and let me practice my Spanish with them. After seeing a bit of the island, we found a bunch of our shipboard friends on the ferry back to the mainland (from L-R: Dawn, Raza, Ann, Karen, Doug, Mario, and Tania).
It was also fun to sail by the ship and see it against the backdrop of the city and the hills beyond.
The next day while Dawn was on Dean Duty dealing mainly with an emergency medical situation of a student (unrelated to any travel experience she had), I toured Fort San Diego which was right across the road from where the ship was docked.
While the fort and the forces of New Spain were able to protect the wealth of the trade of the Manila Galleon (which exchanged Mexican and South American silver for spices, fabrics and luxury goods from Asia) for the Spaniards, it did not necessarily ensure that that wealth “trickled down” to the indigenous peoples, who still constitute the majority of the poor in Mexico, and whose never quite-finished homes are still adjacent to the fort and visible through its embrasures.
Finally, on our last day, feeling the need to escape from Acapulco’s tourist focus, a bunch of us hired a driver/guide named Rosie (a great entrepreneurial spirit and wonderful person whose sons are both US citizens and are living and going to school in Florida)
and went up the coast to Laguna Coyuca, where we played hard in the roaring surf on the Pacific side of the sand-peninsula, ate lunch on the lagoon-side, and then took long naps (like our friend Ann below).
On the way back to the ship we stopped by the house of the last mistress of the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to see one of his last works, an outstanding tiled frieze of the symbolic history of the Mexican people. It included images of the co-origin of maize and the people, and the feathered sky-serpent, great God, Quetzalcoatl (whose eye is below).
That night, the ship departed at 11pm or so for our next port, Panama, where we will make landfall on the 29th of June.
