We ended up staying five nights at Lo de Marcos, we just couldn’t pull ourselves away from the beach and the town. It was so easy to stay. Every day or so a man would come by with a truck full of vegetables for sale, and one day two pretty young women quickly talked Derek into buying some fresh lobster, which we cooked up that night for dinner.
We drove south from Mazatlan to an ocean front campground near the town of Teacapan called Color Marino RV Park. We took the libre (free) road, instead of the toll road, travelling through several small towns. Peoples’ reaction to us varied from enthusiastic smiles and waves, to slight frowns (damn tourists!), to indifference. Many of the small towns we drove through looked very poor, and we later learned that many farms in the area were badly damaged by hurricanes and have not recovered.
We have really good internet here in Mazatlan, so I thought I would take advantage of it and upload a few pictures from our walk around town yesterday. To enlarge an image, just click on it.
We had two options for driving from Durango to Mazatlan. The first was the old highway, part of which is known as La Espina del Diablo (the Devil’s Backbone), described as a treacherous road that snakes through mountains known for their marijuana fields and opium production, and which would take about 7 hours, if all went well. The second, a fairly new highway, costing about 35 CAD in tolls, with 115 bridges and 61 tunnels and a driving time of about 3 hours. We love adventure, but treacherous, not so much, so we opted for the toll highway.
We left Sunnyvale near San Francisco and made our way into Arizona, heading for the border crossing at Nogales (south of Tucson). Before leaving California we spent another night in a casino parking lot just west of Palm Springs. We woke up at 3 in the morning to the sound of helicopters flying overhead. In the morning we discovered that there were several police cars, authorities armed with HUGE rifles, ambulances and other emergency equipment blocking off part of the casino….what the ….. ?????? Okay, looks like some action happening, but can we still use the rest room????