La Paz to Mazatlan

La Paz is a lovely town with a large ex-pat community. It has an active cruiser net every morning that is the best source of who’s in town, who’s leaving, where to get services or who has stuff to trade. We spent our two weeks in La Paz at Marina Costa Baja which is on the very south end of town. It has good shuttle service to town, which was good as it’s too far to walk.

One of our goals in La Paz was to get a Mexican sim card for our phone so we could have a local number and cheaper internet than the phone plan we have from the States. We also needed to get more coconut fiber for the composting toilet. We ended up walking from the Cathedral to Home Depot, a much longer trip than we anticipated, only to find they didn’t have any coconut fiber. Peat moss would have to do. We found a Telcel nearby that sold us a phone chip, but they had no way of loading it with minutes, we’d have to find an Oxxo for that. Luckily they are all over. We bought our minutes but they didn’t seem to load. We found another Telcel store, but really they are a phone and accessory vendor, not a plan seller. And their English was as beginner as our Spanish. The younger salesman grabbed his phone and opened up google translate. The challenge then was to minimize key strokes and still communicate. Ultimately he was able to walk us through the general process, it worked pretty well, and reminded a couple of old folks of a useful tool. It was a good thing to learn while waiting for our minutes to load. We’ve used it a couple of times since then.

Shopping in La Paz is fun. There are department stores where you can buy a motorcycle, a refrigerator or other major appliance, and clothes, all within feet of each other. Fabric stores are all over but don’t sell patterns. Cotton yarn is impossible to get (or any kind of wool). The Bravo Mercado is a big, traditional market but you want to get there early to get the best produce. There is a small farmer’s market twice a week that has fresh food and crafts.

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Our original plan was to be in La Paz for about a week and then head up to Espirtu Santo, an island north of La Paz that is a national park. The weather didn’t cooperate so we ended up staying in La Paz and made it to the HaHa party. We headed up to the island just as the weather was about to go awful again so we anchored one night at El Mezteño and headed back to Costa Baja. It started to rain hard again. The wind picked up.

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Back at the marina, Bill changed filters on the watermaker only to find a leak after putting it back together. One of the filter O-rings got crunched and stretched when he was tightening it back up. Water everywhere. Checked out the La Paz cruisers resource webpage and Bill connected with the watermaker guy, who has been in La Paz for fourteen years, and got a new ring and a couple of spares.

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We left La Paz on Dec 3 and headed for Playa Bonanza. It has a nice sandy beach that’s about a mile and a half long, with light surf for landing a dinghy. There’s supposed to be a trail to the other side, but with all the rain, it was underwater.

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Next stop, Mazatlan, a two night passage to the mainland. We had an uneventful ride other than a brown booby deciding that it wanted a ride on the top of our mast, and a pin popping out of a mainsheet block in the middle of the night. We fixed the block with a soft shackle and thwacked the halyards on the mast to scare the booby away. We anchored in Mazatlan in the harbor near Club Nautico. The Club and the harbor have seen better days, but the access to town was easy and we felt safe there. It is however, next to the town’s treatment plant, and the harbor had all kinds of trash floating in it. Needless to say, we did not go swimming in the harbor. The walk to the old town, however, is pleasant and we found good places to eat, bought some fused glass glasses, and a new traditional shirt for each of us.

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