Dulce con Canela! The sounds of La Cruz

While Tom, Brian, and Roberto stink up the boat in the middle of the Pacific, the kids and I are surrounded by our own smells here in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. Carne asada sizzling on sidewalk grills, cinnamony-sweet churros frying in a vat, bright pink flowers powdering their pollen and trees oozing liters of sap, astringent cleaning products steaming off the sidewalk attempting to kill the remains of dog poop, fish carcasses, and scattered trash. And it’s all coated in the smell of jungle, a sweet, humid, decidedly green smell emanating from the cells of every trunk, coconut, and palm frond.

But it’s the sounds of La Cruz that I will remember most. Here in our little apartment in a very real Mexican neighborhood, complete with dirt roads, yappy dogs of all shapes and sizes, and barefoot kids playing with tops in the street, I wake every morning to the crowing of roosters and shrill shrieks and caws of unknown jungle birds. In the background is the hum of trucks starting their early days. And then out of the low din blasts a loudspeaker announcing something that is “DULCE CON CANELA!” I haven’t yet figured out what it is that is sweet with cinnamon, but I plan to find out.

If I walk the two blocks down to the main corner at 7:30 in the morning, it is a bustle of life. Trucks, scooters, bikes, cars and pedestrians dance around each other. Tables are out with tacos, tortas, and juice for sale. The smell is sweet and salty and mouth-watering. There are honks and shouts and exchanges of pesos. Trucks drive by full of men on their way to work, shouting at friends they see on the sidewalk. It is so full of life. Every few seconds, everyone is reminded of the DULCE CON CANELA, and people head toward the top-heavy, crate-laden motorbike to partake of something sweet with cinnamon.

If I head into the center of town at the same time, all is quiet. It is dead except for the few people out sweeping their front stoops and the occasional street dog barking at an iguana. It is in the afternoon and evening when the center becomes alive. School children yammer and screech on their way home. Delivery trucks bump their way down the narrow cobblestoned streets. A truck loaded down with mattresses blasts its product through a loudspeaker. Construction workers shovel and scrape and build. Live music blasts from bars full of retired gringos and vacationers. On Friday, the cloppity-clop of dancing horses resonates from the La Cruz Inn. And at sunset, the party boats full of bare, dancing, inebriated bodies make their way back to the marina blasting Mexican techno.

La Cruz grows on me as I write these words. We’ve been in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle for six weeks now, an eternity in the cruising lifestyle. And I like it. I like this small, Mexican beach town. And yet, it hasn’t grown on us in the same way that La Paz did. By the time we had spent a month in La Paz, we felt as if it were a second home. It was a place we wanted to keep coming back to. So, why hasn’t the charming town of La Cruz grabbed us in the same way? Why haven’t the cobblestone roads, muraled walls, and broad smiles of the locals enchanted us in quite the same way?

The first and simplest reason is that our minds have turned westward. Westward and busy. We explorers have spent our days crossing items off of lists and working on projects, and our adventurous souls did not venture very far past “what new taco place should we try tonight?” Our days were filled with preparing the boat and ourselves for the long passage to French Polynesia and then further across the islands of the South Pacific. While Tom went back to the States for ten days to put some more cash in the cruising kitty, I tackled the first round of purging and sorting (while we, conversely, got tackled by a cold bug going around La Cruz). But the to-do list has no interest in waiting for the phlegm to pass or the 90-degree afternoons to abate. The work continued, our mindset shifted further and further west, and I even started studying French. We haven’t really been fully present here, because our minds are in the middle of the ocean or in the customs office of some distant island.

But we weren’t the only ones. Banderas Bay is a hub for cruisers planning to jump the puddle to French Polynesia, and so everyone is somewhat busy and preoccupied with projects. The marina buzzes with scuba regulators, sanders, drills, clanging halyards, VHF calls, and Spanglish conversations about a myriad of boat services.

La Cruz is also a Kid Mecca. Marina Riviera Nayarit has become well known for its La Cruz Kids Club, which boasts constant activities to keep the kids occupied and entertained: chalk drawing, sushi making, knot tying, navigation skills, baby turtle releases, trash clean up days, talks on saving whales, and the list goes on. The marina also has another kid magnet: a pool. And the sounds of shrieks and splashes, shouts and whines, while the boat kids spent endless hours in the sun-warmed water will stay with me for a long time. It is here that parents bonded are forced to take a break and bond over the myriad joys and challenges we all face. To have heart-felt conversations about crushed dreams and painful decision points. To recall remote anchorages of calm and serenity to give our minds and bodies a break from the bustle of people and projects.

But the bustle of people is part of the second reason La Cruz hasn’t grabbed our hearts in the same way. So much of the bustle of the town is in English. I walk past countless restaurants and bars filled with pale, white faces chattering in distinctly North American accents being served by people with darker skin and darker hair. And even though I speak in that same North American accent, and even though I like supporting the local economy, I feel uncomfortable in this somewhat divided society. I have not yet fully processed or thought through this division (perhaps in a future post where I can reflect at more length). There is a reason so many tourists and snowbirds flock to Mexico; it is a warm, beautiful, hospitable, and a truly special place. But the segregation and the sounds of English everywhere invokes a discomfort in me that I am going to have to process as an American, a lifelong traveler, and a migrant of sorts myself.

I feel strangely more comfortable in the Mexican neighborhood of our little AirBnB, perhaps because it jives more with what I like to experience in international travel: a temporary home, an adoptive family, the chance to become a part of a living neighborhood and culture for a while. The neighborhood is both vibrant and calming. During the day, sales people walk through the alleys selling their wares: huarache sandals, baked goods, hot peppers, propane. Each evening, families gather on plastic chairs on the street and pass around plastic bowls of food and taco toppings. Quesadilla and taco stands pop up sporadically on the dirt roads or front stoops. Mariachi musics blasts from various doorways. Friendly faces greet us every day as we walk through the dusty lanes, filled with kids, puppies, cats, horses, iguanas, and just about everything else you could imagine.

La Cruz de Huanacaxtle will always be a place of transition for us. A transition between North America and the Pacific, between the first half of our sailing trip and the second half. A transition from the daily gunkholing of the coast to a cruising life of big passages between destinations. And perhaps even a transition for our family as we try desperately to reunite in a world that its shutting its borders all around us.

I realized, though, as I walked through my neighborhood and tried unsuccessfully to capture visually the sound of the jungle birds screeching overhead and the blaring of Mexican music out of a second story window, that as much as La Cruz will forever represent an intense time of transition for me, it will equally represent an awakening of my senses, of the smells, colors, textures, and sounds of this small vibrant city. Our last in Mexico. For now. And because I didn’t want to leave Mexico with any regrets, I went chasing down the Dulce Con Canela motorbike this morning to get a taste of whatever it is that he is marketing at top volume from his loudspeaker. It is bread. Sweet, fragrant, and full of carbohydrates and cinnamon. It tastes of Mexico.

Informational Addendum: The kids and I leave Wednesday afternoon for San Diego to spend some time with my parents (quarantined in a campground with a beach nearby, I might add). Tom is 2/3 of the way to the Marquesas and is no doubt ready for landfall. But is land ready for him? And us? Just yesterday, French Polynesia declared a required 14-day quarantine for all incomers to the country. For those on yachts, time at sea counts. For the rest of us, it does not, so the boys and I are expecting a period of quarantine in Tahiti before we can fly to Atuona. IF the borders aren’t closed completely. I’m trying to move up our flights to get there sooner, but more than eight hours of time on hold with United and resulted in nothing because I can’t get through, and my international ticket can’t be changed online. Additionally, they have banned inter-island travel except in emergencies or family necessities, so it might be possible for me to get to Atuona, but once there, we don’t actually know if we’ll be allowed to go anywhere else. The situation is fluid. Very fluid. And at this point, all we want to do is reunite our family so that we can just take what comes at us together from now on.