SAYULITA, MX (2021) "Tarot Cards"

She showed me some shells she had collected.

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This trip was the second leg of a longer stay in Mexico in February of 2021.  I had spent two weeks in Guadalajara and was now taking a coach bus to Sayulita to spend a week by the ocean before I went home to Portland.

I bought my ticket at the big bus station.  It was early morning.  I got a coffee and sat in the waiting room and watched the luxury buses come and go.

I’d met a local woman during my time in Guadalajara.  We’d had a little romance, which was super fun, super chill.  The most unlikely person and yet we had understood each other almost instantly.  I’d forgotten how nice such a thing could be.

Ah, love.  It changes when you get older, but there’s still that pleasant feeling of connection to another person.  And thinking about them.  And feeling that bittersweet tug in your chest, when you have to move along. 

*

My coach bus came and I got on and then it was a couple hours of watching the desert pass by out the window.  And stopping in the little dusty towns.  And watching the cheerful Mexicans having their own bus ride dramas and adventures.

Then it was up into the mountains for an hour, into the tangled, inhospitable jungle. 

And then down again, toward the ocean.  And finally into Sayulita, a small surfer/beach town, full of tanned Canadian bikini girls, dudes in board shorts and flip flops.  

*

My dad (RIP) brought me to this town a long time ago.   He had bought a little house up the road about forty miles.  He didn’t know about Sayulita.  But then he found it, this nearly perfect vision of a sleepy beach town.

I lived in Brooklyn then.  I was 39, a fully urbanized writer/intellectual.  I was not interested in beaches or Mexico or drinking Coronas in the sand.  Or drunk girls in trucker hats.  Everything about these things repulsed me.

But on that day, for whatever reason, I saw the beauty of it.  The mathematical precision of the rolling waves.  The surfers.  The exultant physicality of this lifestyle.

Ten years later, I was a dedicated surfer.  And ten more years later, I was back here again surfing.  Thanks Dad. For showing me things. Even when I didn’t want to see them.

*

I got off the bus at the Sayulita station.  The sun was hot and I had to shed my coat as I walked down the dirt road toward town. 

I found the street my Airbnb was supposedly on.  But I couldn’t find the house.  The street went up a hill.  But the numbers weren’t lining up.   

There was a nice café, with two gringo women at a table outside.  They watched me walk by them up the hill, then down the hill, then back up the hill. 

I was sweating and getting frustrated.  I knew enough Spanish to ask a local where this address might be, but then when he answered I couldn’t understand him.

*

*

Finally, a gringo woman who lived nearby took it upon herself to figure this out.  She led me to the top of the hill, then down this little driveway/road, that I hadn’t seen, to a small house.   

I thanked her profusely and when she was gone, played the video on my phone that explained how to get inside. 

I had splurged a bit on this particular place, after staying in a cheap hostel in Guadalajara.  This place was nice.  A big kitchen.  Organic soap in the shower.  But still Mexican.  So there were gaps in the walls, etc. 

And the furniture was uncomfortable.  This is the curse of Mexico.  Comfortable chairs or couches are hard to come by.  I rearranged the furniture, as best I could, to maximize the one chair that I could comfortably lean back in.   

Once settled, I walked down to the beach to check out the surfing.  It was windy so the waves weren’t good.  But there were still people in the water.  There were a lot of people in general.  A lot of Canadians and Midwestern Americans.  Escaping the cold, the blizzards, the darkness.