The return to smalltown Mexico

Out of Manzanillo and back on the road. Again we made a pretty graceful exit back onto the long, winding, coastal road that feels it necessary to divide every small town it can possibly find in half, with a handful of nasty speed bumps just to keep things interesting. Through the military checkpoints on each border, I had the opportunity to contemplate the irony of soldiers in camoflage with reflective roadworker vests.

We called it a night in the small town of Lazaro Cardenas, in a hotel called Sol y Arena. Our room had the largest criquet clone I’ve ever seen chilling on our drape. My dad and I headed to La Mira, the town just down the road, for dinner, and on my way to my bike, a guy on the street offered me a beer. I stopped and talked to him for what turned into close to an hour. I told him about my trip, he asked me how he could charm American women. I asked if he was into the blondes, big affirmative there. A guy who’d been deported after living in Oceanside, CA for 10 years came into the conversation for a bit and started trying to make trouble in his fluent english. He called one of the friends of the guy who’d given me beer gay, and the guy I was talking to thought he was talking about him. He got very serious and tried to explain that he definitely was not gay. It took awhile to explain to him that I figured that out by the third time he asked me what American girls liked. Xenophobia 0: Homophobia 1. The guy also explained to me that his sister had paid $4,000 USD for false papers so she could join some other part of their family in Carson City. What a world.

Needless to say I added a few more signitures to the bike, even if one of his friends, a definite aspiring grafiti artist, scrawled “Diablo” on the front. Oh well. Tomorrow, zihuatanejo!