November 27th – La Paz – Jim’s Blog #3

We are beginning to know our way around La Paz quite a bit better – the places to get specific types of hardware (ferreterias), the shops that sell vegetables and meats that can be trusted to be both fresh and clean, the pharmacies that sell prescription drugs, the local restaurants that can be trusted to wash the salad-makings in clean water, etc. Naturally none of these is located next to one another, and all seem to be about a mile or so from the marina; so we are getting plenty of exercise. Based on our search for “clean and safe” items to eat, you can see that we take a lot more care about what we buy and try in Mexico than we would in the U.S. On the other hand we don’t want to cling to tourist places to eat and buy food that would keep us isolated from the country and the people we are trying to get to know better.

Saturday we heard about a Sunday flea market that required a bus ride to get to. A bunch of us decided to go see what it had to offer. The bus driver had never heard of it, and a Mexican student on the bus attempted to find out where we wanted to go using her schoolgirl English. All we knew is that we were to take the bus to a cemetery on a particular road and then walk northeast along the highway until we saw the market. The student tried to persuade us to go to the Soriana Mall in that general area, but we persisted and the bus driver dropped us off in front of the cemetery with a shake of his head, indicating “gringos are crazy.”

We trekked along the highway for a quarter of a mile and then ran into a succession of shacks that were loaded with old tableware, cast-off clothing, broken toys, damaged electronics – all piled in heaps on long tables. I’m sure the locals couldn’t understand why “rich gringos” would be shopping at the equivalent of Goodwill stores – and we couldn’t understand it either. We trekked back down the road to pick up a bus to the mall, where Sheilagh and I had a McDonald’s hamburger in the “International Food Court.” We then proceeded by bus downtown, where we could walk a half mile back to the marina. Adventure comes in all shapes and sizes.

During the search for the market I found I remembered a lot of Spanish that I had learned 45 years ago during 4 years in high school and college. Words would suddenly pop into my head that turned out to be right for the conversation. I’m sure my tenses weren’t all correct for the verbs I was using, but the nouns came fairly quickly with the male “el” and female “la” seeming part of the noun itself. That night at dinner I confidently ordered a Margarita en las piedras con sal (a Margarita on the rocks with salt) only to have the waiter ask “you want your Margarita on your feet?”

It turns out that the local idiom uses “en las rocas” for drinks “on the rocks,” (or “con hielo” meaning “with ice”). I took a lot of abuse from the others at the table for that little gaffe, but I later looked up “piedras” and found it means “rocks” such as cliffs or crags. You’ve got to watch out for that high school Spanish that isn’t designed to teach one how to order drinks. Incidentally, the word for “feet” is “los pies” – pronounced “peeays;” so it must have been my bad pronunciation to the waiter that started it all off.

We got back to the marina after dinner and were walking along the dock to our boat, when we saw a man beside his boat in the water clinging to a dock line between his boat and the dock. He didn’t say anything as we approached; so our first thought was that he was cooling off in the warmish water. On second thought, we couldn’t see how he planned to get back up on the dock or on the boat; so I asked him if he needed help. He said he thought he could handle it, but that he had fallen in while checking on his dock tie and had been hanging there for about an hour. We got him to put his legs up on the dock and then we grabbed his arms to pull him onto the dock. It was apparent that he had been drinking heavily; so we escorted him up and onto his boat. If he had been hanging there for an hour in less warm water, he could have died from hypothermia.

Just another adventure while cruising, with some lessons to be learned: 1) don’t check your dock lines while drunk, 2) cruise in warm water that won’t cause you to freeze to death if you do check your dock lines while drunk, and 3) ask for help when you need it. The second lesson above is the reason why Sheilagh and I are planning to do our cruising between the 30th parallels north and south of the Equator, where it will always be warm.

Tomorrow we set out for Mazatlan, which is across the Sea of Cortez on the mainland of Mexico. The trip takes two days and two nights of sailing and the weather forecaster predicts some good winds that will let us sail rather than using our engine. We’ll post more from Mazatlan.