Las Hadas

Tenacatita – Here we met other cruisers – Ultima, a steel hull who are back from world cruising where they had become friends with Hans and Roos from The Wind Cries, a boat we met in Sausalito earlier this year. There were a couple of other seasoned cruisers aswell – a couple of men cruising on a power boat, Mike and Tom . Tom had a pretty gruff manner, but a lot of useful information to impart, whether you wanted to hear it or not. Plus a couple of other boats who had also cruised Mexico quite extensively.
When we tell people where we are going, we usually get odd looks and the question, why would you want to leave Mexico? I must admit that the question crosses my mind quite often too – and I suppose if we happen across a place that we love as much as the home we have in Canada and it happens to be in Mexico then maybe we’ll become one of the many gringos who stay. It hasn’t happened yet.
Tenacatita Bay has a lot to offer a cruiser who wants to stay a week or two – we had a couple of days so we narrowed it down to swimming off the boat and the ‘jungle river tour’. Actually it was quite exciting really. We had the small 2 hp Honda engine on the dinghy which meant we went slow. The write-up on the trip told us to estimate about 3 hours, so that we could stop and row sometimes so as not to disturb the wildlife. We did do this at the beginning of the ride. That was before we almost got mowed down by the 3 pangas giving ‘extreme river rides’ to hotel guests from somewhere. There really isn’t any room for passing in the river – unless one boat (guess which one?) gets squashed into the mangroves. The first 2 boat drivers were quite nice to us and gently passed us with apologies for our discomfort. The 3rd driver revved his motor as he passed us deliberately creating enough wave to swamp us. Well there’s always some ---hole isn’t there.
The mangrove swamp reportedly houses crocodiles – which thankfully we didn’t meet, millions of red crabs running up and down the roots of mangrove tree trunks and quite a few beautiful birds. I’m sure if you did this tour very early in the morning before the pangas start coming through you would see a lot more – well maybe next time.
At the end of the one and a half hour toodle up the river we arrived at Tenacatita beach – quite a bustling place, many palapa restaurants on the beach – quite a few people but certainly not crowded. We did go into one of the restaurants and had a pretty good lunch. We were told by other cruisers to try the fish role – Rollo de Mar. It’s a decent size fillet of fish wrapped around some pretty big shrimp, dipped in batter, deep fried and covered with a wonderful coarse almond sauce. I can’t wait to have that again, it was truly worth risking the river trip to get to.
This was the only time since we have been in Mexico this time that we were ‘bothered’ by beach vendors. We know everyone has to make a living, and we are sorry that they had nothing we wanted, but one does get a bit sick of saying no, gracias every couple of minutes – quite often to the same person who won’t leave your table while you are trying to relax on their beautiful beach.
Something we had never seen before was a cradle holding a very young sleeping baby in the tienda/store we went into. The cradle was a big wooden cage completely enclosing the baby in screening material. What a good idea to ensure the baby is not wakened by biting flies etc.
Speaking of biting flies – another first. At Tenacatita Anne and I both sustained many, many, many bites on the legs and arms – not mosquitos, but some small fly, which unfortunately we still have quite a few of in the boat – a week later.
So from Tenacatita we headed to Las Hadas, which is in Bahia Santiago, better known for the town called Manzanillo.
Las Hadas is a huge hotel/condominium complex built in the 60’s. The outside design looks so much like the Mediterranean, all white stucco walls which morph into towers, domes and spinarettes, integral staircases with bougainvillas everywhere.
We anchored in a very calm spot right outside the marina breakwater alongside 3 other boats – The Wind Cries from Holland, Paisan from Nanaimo and a couple of other boats we do not remember the names of. We met a chap called John who seems to have set up residence in the anchorage. John is very grateful to the locals who helped him when he was ill recently. So he encourages new yatistas arriving to frequent their businesses. The couple who are cruising on Paisan are Canadians who came from Uruguay originally, a lovely couple we hope to meet up with again in Huatulco, which is where we may be for Christmas.
The Las Hadas resort also owns the marina, and for 150 pesos we were able to use the hotel facilities, ie. Tie up our dinghy in the marina, use the pool, and hang out in the amazing lobby of the hotel. This lobby looked like a set from Casablanca, absolutely gorgeous furniture – very comfortable couches etc. But no Bo. (Bo Derek from 10)
The town of Manzanillo is quite similar to Mazatlan, or I’m sure many other towns in Mexico, with narrow cobble streets, crumbling stucco buildings with tiny shop fronts selling anything from leather goods to clothes pegs. We got to the municipal market a bit late but it was still pretty good – these are definitely the places to buy fresh produce though the meat counters are quite intimidating. As we got on the bus to come back to the anchorage some musicians also got on. They played a couple of pan pipe – bongo type songs for about 10 minutes, then one of them walked around the bus with his hand out and everyone gave him some money. Dick gave him something from us. They then immediately stopped playing and got off at the next stop.
About 15 minutes later a clown got on the bus – he was a really horrible clown and kept screeching propaganda against the Americanos. He was so annoying and his voice sounded like fingernails scraping down a blackboard. Thank God our stop came up and we were able to get off the bus. You sure do get your money’s worth on those suicide busses. Not only the thrill of a lifetime, but a bit of education too. All for 5 pesos.
So it was time for Anne and Dick to go home – we spent the afternoon around the pool like any other guest, swimming, sunbathing and drinking pina coladas, then we went to Dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Marina. It just opened a couple of days ago and has very few customers yet. The food was pretty good – great pizza. The best thing that restaurant has in their bread. They make great bread. I spoke to the owner and suggested that they sell the bread in the marina to the yatistas. There is very little good bread to be had in Mexico because its not in their normal diet. He thought it was a good idea and I bought a loaf from him. Actually it was half a loaf because they make very big loaves.
When we got back to the boat we had a little goodbye ceremony. In particular we promoted Dick from Swab to Mate and gave him a commemorative t-shirt, which had a pretty laid back bloke in deck chair at the beach and a bunch of Spanish we didn’t understand, but liked the picture. I wrote Mate underneath the picture. We gave Anne a little ankle bracelet so that she would look a little more like a cruiser (sort of hippyish), and then we all went to bed.
Tony took Anne and Dick to the hotel lobby at 6.45 next morning and they bussed back to Puerto Vallarta to catch their plane home. We were glad to be able to give them a little of the experience of cruising in Mexico as a preview of what they will be doing next year.
And they gave us their friendship and help along the way. I’m sorry that they have to go back to the cold, but also a little envious that they will be with their families during Christmas – and we won’t.
On our way to Zihuatanejo - at time of writing we have left Las Hadas and are sailing – yes I said sailing, we’ve got little wavelets – between 5 – 10 kn wind and we’re sailing at about 4 kn and the boat is pretty stable, enough for me to be below and typing. More later