Chance to catch up

Chance to catch up . . .

We crossed the border from the U.S. to Mexico on Wednesday, November 26th. The border crossing was really uneventful – then you travel into Mexico until kilometer 21 – that’s where all the paper work is processed. We were there by about 0900 hrs and while our paper work seemed pretty strait forward, it took one and a half hours to get through it all . . . and this was a slow day. As luck would have it, the young girl at the bancerito (cashier) had never done a Canadian vehicle before, so it seemed to take a very long time - welcome to Mexico! We were waived through at all the checkpoints that we came across and decided on stopping at San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico for a few days.

San Carlos is the Gringo area – Guaymas (10 minutes to the South) is the original Mexican port town Now, when we read it was a port town, we assumed it would be a small Mexican town – but, no . . . so wrong . . . it’s a bigger Mexican city – probably over 100,000 people , and they don’t cater to tourists so English is not spoken. We drove around Guaymas, found a “mall” and got a few groceries . . . then headed back to Gringoville (San Carlos). We found a really nice bar across from the RV park where we could have a cerveza and some chips. This bar – Charly’s Rock, overlooked the ocean and we were able to see the dolphins playing in the bay.

The next morning, we packed up and headed for points south. The roads around Guaymas are not the best – no shoulders, and lots of Topes (speed bumps) at every little town along the way. This area seems very impoverished. Lots of people selling food on the roadsides, and when we did go through cities, we were swarmed with squeegee kids looking to make a quick peso. We politely said No Gracias, and they left us alone. Some of the areas were so poor looking . . . we found it difficult to say No, but if you gave pesos at every stop, we’d have none left! The small towns had lots of big topes, so every time you had to slow down to get over the tope, people were trying to sell you something - bread, tortillas, oranges (naranjo), peanuts . The City of Obergon seemed especially poor (in the area that we needed to go through) and then, of course, the farming communities in Sonora were poor – seems live a very hard life for the average person.

We crossed the state border into Sinaloa