The Drive from Mazatlan to Lo de Marcos, Nayarit: Confusion, No Shortage of Dried Shrimp, and Then the Prize in a Disneyland-like Jungle

Posted by Chuck Bolotin - Best Mexico Movers on August 12, 2016

So there we were, in our van, after taking the Baja Ferry from La Paz and disembarking at the port at Mazatlán.

Very unfortunately, our plans in Mazatlán fell through at the last moment, which is a big shame, because from the little we could see of it, Mazatlán looked beautiful and interesting.   Our next stop would be Lo de Marcos, a small, mostly Mexican seaside town in the state of Nayarit, about an hour north of Puerto Vallarta and about four hours from where we sat, a bit lost already, at the port in Mazatlán.

As we had so many other times in Mexico, we found our way through a combination of “The Five Methods”:

1. Several paper maps, none of which were especially good, useful, or even accurate.
2. Google Maps (doesn’t work without a cell signal, so good luck with that if you have Sprint / Moviestar as we did) and / or Sygic, which is an app for your smartphone that’s supposed to work without a cell signal.  Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes it’s accurate, and sometimes it takes you on route so strange that it strains credibility so much that you wind up not trusting or using it.
3. Asking people.  Some know where things are, and some don’t.  Some who don’t, admit it, while others just tell you to “continue derecho” (“continue straight,” which we heard all the time and is a good laugh, especially when there are dozens of choices to make along the “straight” path other than just “continuing”).  “Asking people” was also a bit of a challenge for us, given that our ability to speak and understand Spanish is limited.
4. Knowing and applying basic geography, which works great for general directions.   For example, we needed to go south, so we just kept keep the Pacific Ocean to our right.
5. Dumb luck, combined with being observant.  We used this a lot, and it was amazing how often it worked.  More than once, we would be blithely driving right past our intended final destination, discovered that we had indeed already arrived, and made a hasty turn into the closest parking spot.  Success!

By employing each of our Five Methods to various degrees, we eventually made it to the turnoff to the entrance of the toll road.  The sides of the entrance were jam-packed, shoulder-to-shoulder, with vendors hawking everything from mangos to dried shrimp.  Given that many of them appeared to be selling the same exact same type of mangoes and dried shrimp as the others and there was no real reason to choose one vendor over another, each one would try to make eye contact and motion me over, as if they were hailing me as a long lost friend.  These are very hard working people with lots of stamina and a great attitude.

On this toll road, they had devised a new game to play.  There were shoulders on each side of the highway that measured about half a lane, so on each side, you would have your lane, as well as about half a lane to the right.  The other side of the highway would have the same thing. Any vehicle that is not going well over 70 miles per hour would drive slightly to the right and straddle the combination of the shoulder and their one lane, so the lane marking the left edge of the shoulder would be in about the middle of their vehicle.  When you come across one of these slower moving, straddling vehicles, you are expected to pass to the left, which of course, would cause you to take up about half of the lane coming in the other direction.  The result would be a virtual middle lane, jointly shared by traffic in the process of passing in both directions.

We continued like this for a few hours, until we came to a construction area in what looked to be a fairly unpopulated area.  Almost magically, though, the vendors appeared on the side of the road, brilliantly taking advantage of the fact that we had to slow down or even stop for the construction, which made it even more convenient to buy their dried shrimp.  I love these people!

Along our path in many places, the trees from each side of the road formed a canopy for us to drive through, gently but fully engaging our senses.  We not only saw the jungle, but as we rolled down our windows, we could feel its wonderful dampness infused with fresh oxygen and smell the combination of musky, decomposing old growth and many times, sweet and fragrant flowers, all while being serenaded by an Italian tenor. Given the sheer, almost shockingly beautiful area we were experiencing, a great calmness overcame us.  As the yogis would say, we took a “cleansing breath,” as our minds cleared, our anxieties melted into the profusion of various palm, mango, papaya, and flame trees all being climbed upon and clinged to by jungle vines, and our desires turned to just relaxing and enjoying the drive.  (“Enjoying the drive” is quite an experience for someone like me, who left LA in part because of how much I hated to drive there.)