This week’s entry is action-packed and full of fun. (Well, it is if you have a low ‘fun threshold). Set aside an afternoon and read on. Or pretend you didn’t see our email and go do something useful.
After our adventures in Cabo San Lucas, we went to Acapulco and managed to avoid seeing another terrible old Elvis movie. (I believe he made one called ‘Fun In Acapulco’: I think I saw this film as a lad and I seem to remember it brought an entirely new meaning to the word ‘fun’.) The famous resort is nowadays at the other end of the scale from sleepy Todos Santos, which we covered in the last blog entry. Guess how many inhabitants it has nowadays? Is it (a) two million; (b) two hundred thousand; (c) two? Answers at the bottom of this blog entry.
Anyway, Acapulco stretches across a broad bay, complete with sandy beaches, towering hotels, every US retail chain you can think of and hordes of locals offering to sell you everything from cheap jewellery to hard drugs. (Those of you who guessed Acapulco only had two inhabitants are feeling a bit silly now, aren’t you?) Back from the glorious beach, the shabby back streets are a reminder that this is still a poor country. Catch a bus out of town and you’ll find that the next bay to Acapulco’s, while even prettier, hosts a seaside town full of tin-roofed fishermen’s shacks.
A big difference between this part of Mexico (it’s a couple of hundred miles south of Mexico City) and the last bit we visited is the vegetation. Here, we’ve moved from the desert of Baja California to Vietnam-style jungle. The landscape has, in fact, attracted lots of steamy Hollywood productions - such as whatever jungley movie it was that featured Rambo single-handedly wiping out thousands of naughty Russians/ Afghans/ terrorists/ Inland Revenue officials or whatever - were filmed around Acapulco. They even put Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in a muddy river here to film ‘The African Queen’.
No visit to Acapulco (Tourist Cliché Warning) is complete without a side trip to see the famous cliff divers. The cliff diving tradition started in the thirties, when locals would dive into a narrow channel between some very hard rocks to try to free snarled-up fishing lines. Visiting celebs like film star Hedy Lamarr thought this looked rather nice and (probably secretly hoping they’d get it wrong and head-butt a boulder) started paying them to do it.
Nowadays there’s a cliff divers’ union which collects appearance fees on their behalf and regulates the number of dives they perform. This regulation is necessary. In the early days, divers would go blind as a result of repeated dives from altitudes that resulted in them entering the water at speeds close to 70 miles per hour. (The locals also tell you, with barely disguised relish, about others who lost the use of eyes due to collisions with floating matchsticks, nails (apparently, nails float here) and, in one case, a fly.) Broken bones were also common, although no diver has ever been killed.
The event is quite exciting, although there’s a vague sense of anti-climax. You see the old newsreel films and get the impression that the divers are leaping from the top of a towering cliff-face. (Come to think of it, when I saw ‘Fun In Acapulco’, I’m sure Elvis dived from the top of an Everest-sized mountain.) In fact, the divers use platforms on the side of a cliff positioned up to 137 feet above the water. Still, having once chickened out of jumping off the high-board at the local swimming baths, I am sympathetic enough to realise that when you’re on a cliff the water looks a long way down…
We saw a lot more of Acapulco but, apart from an old fort overlooking part of the bay, it didn’t seem much like Mexico. Lovely views, to be sure, lots of Starbucks, high-rises everywhere but it could have been Surfer’s Paradise (or, for our British readers, Blackpool with bigger buildings and about a thousand times more sun than it usually gets). Not so our next destination, which was further south and called Huatulco. Huatulco is pronounced somewhat like ‘what-al-co’. (The nearest city is Oaxaca, which sound a bit like ‘what-aca’, as delivered by a wombat on LSD.)
Huatalco, like the other Mexican resort towns we’ve docked in, is being developed for the tourist trade using government money. It’s in a much earlier phase of development, though, which means it’s still lovely and will remain so until the concrete mixers finish working their magic. The town of Huatulco itself is just a few shacks in one of a series of glorious sandy-beached bays. We wandered around and then took a taxi ride to the nearby town of El Crucecita. (I displayed my extensive command of Spanish again. ‘Quenta costas US dollars?’ ‘Tres!’ ‘We’ll give you dos.’ ‘OK, senor, but where is this “El Cinecentre’ of which you speak?’)
Anyway, El Crucecita was much more of a slice of Mexico, with potholed streets and sidewalks, the inevitable massive church and a mixture of tourists shops and not-quite-level little houses. We liked it and walked around most of its streets until the 40 degree heat got to us.
***
We sailed away from Huatulco and left Mexico behind. We then sailed through the territorial waters of El Salvador, Guatamala, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, which was pretty smart of us considering we didn’t know where any of these places were.
Out on the high seas, we had an experience that was a first for us and was quite exciting for a while. We were on deck when we noticed that the setting sun was on the port side of the ship instead of the starboard, where it should have been. The captain then announced via the intercom that they had had a report of a local fishing vessel that had been out of contact for two days. The ship had picked up a remote signal so we were diverting to investigate.
Sure enough, thirty minutes later we came upon the missing boat. It clearly wasn’t too well equipped: rather than sending up flares they lit a fire on their foredeck that, for a minute or two, looked like consuming the whole vessel. Eventually the two crewmen put that out and stood up waving flags. Our ship sent out its rescue boat, which circled cautiously – presumably in case the ‘lost’ fishermen turned out to be pirates – and then went close and offered assistance. We were relieved (well, mostly – it would have been nice to have a tad more excitement) to see that nobody was firing AK47s at anyone else. (This was actually just as well as we’re told that the ship doesn’t carry firearms. Apparently there has been a debate about whether merchant ships should be armed and the general feeling is that carrying weapons would encourage pirates to shoot first and count bodies second. Cruise ships do, however, have one weapon at their disposal. It’s called a Long Range Audio Device and it beams high-pitched sound that supposedly nauseates anyone in its path. I seem to recall that a cruise liner successfully used such a device to deter Somali pirates a few months ago.)
Anyway, it turned out the fishing boat’s electrics had failed. Our ship gave them a new battery and supplies and made sure that a tow boat was coming for them. After a couple of hours, we sailed on.
The incident was a reminder of the chances people take to earn a living in the third world. The boat was a hundred miles out to sea, poorly equipped and not much more than 20 feet long. Its two crewmen had gone two days about with no power, in choppy seas and high temperatures. All this for a net full of fish.
***
Next stop was the Panama Canal. The prospect of sailing through the canal was one of the main reasons we booked this trip. We’d done the Suez a couple of times, and enjoyed wafting along on a strip of water surrounded by the biggest beach on the planet. Now we faced the prospect of wafting along on a strip of water surrounded by jungle.
True to expectations, the Panama was way different. There wasn’t much sand but there was an awful lot of jungle. There were also locks. Six of ’em, three going up and three going down. They’re quite something, not least as they were built nearly a hundred years ago, at enormous cost both in terms of money and human life.
(Let’s have one of those little side-effects into history that so many of you have found useful as a drug-free cure for insomnia. The dream of digging a canal through the Panama isthmus started with the French, who raised lots of money around the turn of the twentieth century and entrusted the job to the chap who had dug the Suez canal. Unfortunately, the chap who had dug the Suez canal thought the task of building the Panama would be much the same. It wasn’t. There were a few little differences they’d overlooked, like (a) Panama was made of rock, not sand, (b) Panama had more disease-carrying mosquitoes than any desert and (c) Panama had high land where Suez was flat. Regarding the last point, you needed locks, which weren’t necessary in Suez. The French builders didn’t quite grasp this point.
So, the French effort saw lots of digging and not much progress. The money ran out and so did the lives of 22,000 workers, thanks to the unforeseen mosquito (and yellow fever) problems. After the French operation went bust, the US waited a while and then bought the canal concession in a garage sale (sort of). The US engineers had rather more idea and they built the lock at a cost of some hundred million bucks and another 29,000 deaths. All this so people like us can sail through and take interesting photos.)
The photos will have to be posted some other time, when we’re not enriching the cruise line every time we sign on to the Internet. Here’s a verbal picture. You sail out of the sea into a river and then towards a double set of locks. Then you’re surrounded by grey concrete. The ship fits into the first lock with about 2 feet to spare either side. (It does have a few more feet at each end, but not much.)
(Our ship has, in fact, been built to specific measurements so that it can transit the canal. Such vessels are known as ‘Panamax’ ships. The new giant liners can’t get through. Old WW2 battleships, as a point of interest, could get though no problem.)
The first lock is a bit of a buzz. We stand at the ship’s rail and watch as the land gradually gets lower. It’s a strange feeling (although the speed of ascent isn’t much faster than that in the lift in our apartment building back home…) At some point, a tanker glides into the lock next to ours (the locks are all in pairs but traffic at any particular hour is always going one way) so we can look down on its deck.
When we cross the continental divide and start heading ‘downhill’, of course, we find our ship sinking in each lock and look up to see a massive ship apparently suspended behind a set of flimsy-looking lock gates.
It’s all a triumph of engineering on a par with the pyramids. In between the locks, we spent a few hours sailing through broader sections of canal. There’s an impressive array of wildfire – more than a hundred species of mammals and many birds call Panama home – and we spotted a few crocodiles, often quite close to banks where workmen were busy building new roads.
***
A few other notes about marine life. We saw quite a bit. There have been the inevitable dolphins and flying fish (not that we’re in any way blasé about these lovely creatures) but, a few days ago, we also sailed through a patch of sea that served as a backyard to a bunch of whales. We didn’t get to see said cetaceans up close, as the ship does its best to avoid colliding with them, but every so often we’d see a flash of silver and a glistening fountain as a whale breached and spouted.
Coming out of Huatulco, we also sailed past a number of turtles. These were green turtles. Apparently there are three kinds of sea turtles, the others being loggerheads and something else. We know there are three kinds of sea turtles as this was the subject of a question at one of the onboard quizzes we’ve been going to. (After giving us the answer, the quizmaster asked if anyone could name turtles that live on the land and J got herself a big round of applause by shouting out ‘Ninja Turtles!’. ’Wish I’d thought of that!)
Which leads us nicely to the subject of the onboard entertainment, which has ranged from Broadway-style singing and dancing events (I have managed to last almost four minutes at one of these before running from the theatre with my hands over my ears) to comedians, ventriloquists and hypnotists (not all at once) to classical musicians. The bext of the latter was a Greek guitarist who once studied with the famed Segovia and was just magic. It takes a lot to get me to sit still for an hour but this guy managed it.
It becomes obvious that there is a second division of entertainers who rarely appear on TV and will never grace the pages of the women’s magazines but who churn out a nice living sailing from port to port and trotting out their well-oiled 45 minutes of comedy, song or magic to pay their way.
Oh, and we still frequent the open air movies under the stars. It’s a tough life.
***
As we write, we’ve had two more port calls since emerging from the canal into the Caribbean Sea. The first of these, Cartagena, has something of a tough reputation, being in the country of Columbia, where the main industry seems to cover cocaine production, smuggling and various other forms of crime. The city’s reputation is such that some of our fellow passengers refused to leave the ship.
Undaunted, we decided to go ashore and get ourselves to the old city. Cartagena is, it turns out, two cities in one. The new city is full of modern hotels and skyscrapers and is much the same as new cities everywhere. The old city, though, is something else. It dates back to colonial days and is the sort of picturesque Spanish town that you expect to find in Spain but generally don’t. The buildings are painted in bright pastel colours and have many balconies and ornate frontages.
We travelled to the old town in a taxi and, for a reasonable price, the taxi driver stayed with us and showed us around. (The driver’s name was Saul, pronounced ‘Sow-all’, and he was a friendly black man who seemed to know everyone in the city. He’d also played football so we spent a happy few minutes comparing old injuries until we were trumped by an elderly fellow-traveller who had played four times for the German national team in the fifties.)
We wandered up and down narrow streets and spent some time sitting under the shady trees in the main square, which is named after and features an equestrian statue of Simon Bolivar. (Bolivar was the liberation hero who battled the Spanish out of Columbia, Paraguay and Bolivia, which is named after him.)
The old city has lots of street vendors who are keen to be your friend but will generally turn away if you say ‘no, gracias’ or offer $2 for the watches they’re selling, the latter being J’s method of choice. I did buy a straw Panama hat for US$5. It was a very hot day and my suitcase-creased cricket hat was looking rather worse for wear.
Otherwise, it was a very pleasant day and we weren’t kidnapped and held to ransom once. This may have had something to do with the fact that there were armed police and soldiers on every corner. We later found out that the President of Columbia was in town so the heavy law enforcement presence, like the 21-gun salute that had boomed out from the old fort earlier in the day, was more in his honour than ours.
We made it back to the ship deciding we’d really liked Cartagena. Our next port stop wasn’t quite so exciting. We sailed north and docked at Aruba, which is a classic desert island, replete with sandy beaches and lots of cactus plants. It’s also in the path of the trade winds, so it always has a steady breeze. When we were there the steady breeze was blowing at 30 knots so it wasn’t really a beach day. We spent time wandering around the capital city of Aranjestad but what we mostly found were tourist stalls and big, glossy shops of the type we normally avoid like the plague. After the charm of Cartagena, it was a disappointment but it wasn’t hard to see how you could have a relaxing beach break there if the wind stopped blowing.
We did have some trouble getting out of the place, though. One of the ship’s starboard engine developed a fault so the engineers were in touch with the manufacturer’s 24x7 help desk. Passengers made the usual jokes about whacking the side of the engine block with a spanner to fix it and we silently hoped that said manufacturer’s 24x7 help desk hadn’t been outsourced to Manila. (‘Engine? Where is engine? Can you turn off and then turn on again? Then wait twenty minutes and call us back if not fixed.’)
We left them to it and went to bed. They must have changed the spark plugs or something because the cabin is now rocking so we’re somewhere around the spot where Johnny Depp seized the Black Pearl in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. We’re headed to Bermuda. We have two days at sea, which is how we have time to update this blog.
***
Oh, and Acapulco has two million inhabitants. Definitely more than two. (By the way, Mexico City has over 22 million.)
P.S. A note for our Kiwis readers. One of our fellow passengers is Arthur Alan Thomas. Now looking much older but with a glamorous youngish wife (or consort?). (For non-Kiwis, this guy was locked up for years for allegedly murdering a young couple who lived close to his farm. After a dozen or so years inside, he won a retrial where the jury declared him innocent (not least as it turned out the cops had oiled the wheels of justice by planting evidence). He was released and given a million bucks in compensation. Fair enough, too.)
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