It's way too late and too many margaritas and Pacificos on board. Good time to write a travel blog entry after 7 months. This trip reminds me of all of the things I love about the tropics. It is SE Asia done Mexican style. I've spent more pesos than I have the math to do. Swam in beautiful waters, surfed sweet waves littered with swimmers, boogie boarders, and beginning surfers laying stomach-flat on their boards, butts to the ocean, waiting for the white water to give them just a little push.
It's Christmas on hipster resort destination with pro surfers chugging tequila in the streets surrounded by hot chicks in tiny outfits and perfect tans. Street dogs make their rounds along with the staggering ex-pat with a questionable history. I'm lodged on a bar stool with a habanero and grapefruit margarita exchanging crazy travel stories with a friend while making a crazy travel story.
This is a place I could live at for a quarter or more of the year. If only I can figure out how. It's all of the places I love without the insanely alive underwater, with crowded breaks, and muy caliente tacos. It has me dreaming.
And itching. It's a heck of a sunburn I've gotten today. The kind that's topped with hives from the lotions to stop the burn or the healing lotions, or the burn itself. It's hives on burn and it's an itch that can't be scratched. A hyperawareness that keeps me ordering margaritas of ginger and orange, another beer.
Today started at 6:30 am. I watched the sun rise from a warm, lazy ocean full and soft. My board, half waxed and waiting 10 minutes to be lofted on a wave, I saw the stars fade to the sunlight shot through villas and palm trees to kiss/burn my face. It was a day of gifts, of azure waters, schools of fish, conversations about how hometowns change sometimes better, sometimes worse. I smeared chilies on my fingers while digging hot pollo from tin foil to cram into fresh maize tacos with lime-charged coleslaw and sweet pink shrimp taco sauce. Beer and waves and the hot/cold sun out on the ocean.
This life is one I know well, I'm happy to say. As much as the pigs snoring in the pasture at night in an endless Oregon City drizzle. It is a perfect compliment to the endlessly gray skies and red mud on my work wellies.
Tomorrow begins Mexico City.