Every night, downstairs, the Hotel Playa offers entertainment.
It is sometimes a DJ spinning tunes. Sometimes it is a duo of classical guitars. On certain nights you can hear song smiths warbling out popular melodies. This particular evening we get flashy dancers in the restaurant (La Terraza) performing for elderly guests who are in town for a bridge tournament.
The four dancers, two male and two female, wear sequined outfits and very little fabric.They are as lean as you can get and from staff we learn they are part time employees of the hotel who are paid to perform at night and practice for pay during the day.
For old men these are young women with good figures and for older women these are young men who wear frilled outfits, have good physiques and lift the girls easily over their heads. One supposes the male performers are gay but these days, considering the proclivities of show business, it doesn’t matter. The girls carry the show from where we sit.
Full of energy and movement, the dancers perform as a quartet, a duo, and even solo. Stage lights change from red to blue to green and at the end of several numbers the dancers run off stage and go back to a little room for a quick change of costume.
The dance revue, Alan, Dave, and I agree, is entertaining and we stay the whole show. We hope we see the women on the beach tomorrow but agree that that probably won’t happen.
Lifting even these light girls into the air while doing dance steps is no easy task and it isn’t something I could handle on even my best day.
When the show is over, it is past eleven and sleep hits me over the head.
Not much of a dancer myself, I can still appreciate someone else’s talent.
Fortunately and unfortunately, we don’t see any wardrobe malfunctions.
Walking streets in the historical district of Mazatlan, before people wake up, photo ops pop like bubbles from a glass of champagne.
Inanimate objects are posing and don’t require permission to photograph. With people there are always questions of privacy, vanity, and personal space.
This morning the sun is bright and it is easy to back out into quiet streets to catch the right picture without being challenged by red taxi cabs.
The old city of Mazatlan is slow to wake and people, who have strayed late into the night, are still under sheets smelling of liquor and perfume.
There are two city zones that tourists see most in Mazatlan.
There is the Zona Dorado where newer hotels congregate and bars and discos service night crowds. The beaches are here as well as ten taxi drivers to every tourist and street vendors selling hats, sunglasses, ironwood carvings, jewelry, fruit snacks, hair braiding, whale and dolphin tours and anything that will make money.
Then there is the Zona Historico where you find old adobe homes built by the city’s founders, chic art galleries, restaurants, bars, shops, and boutique lodgings for visitors with money who like to sit on balconies reading French existential novels and sipping red wine.
In the plaza just north of the historical district, where our taxi driver drops us, we discover a map of the Zona Historico on a wood sign.
Guarded by two pigeons, the mapa gives landmarks, streets with names, shows compass points, and points us in the right direction.
All we have to do to get where we had wanted to be dropped off in the first place is go a little more to the south and west. In guide books it is mentioned that the Zona Dorado and Zona Historico are safe parts of Mazatlan for visitors from the north.
Dave takes a picture of it with his I phone and keeps us where we want to be the rest of the morning.
What did the world do before I Phones?
On a tip from Pat, at seven thirty this evening, Alan and I pile into a pulmonia and tell the driver – “Dolphina’s por favor …”
We are taken, for fifty pesos, to distant communication towers rising into the sky to the south of us. During the daytime these towers are unlit and stick up like red toothpicks waiting for a green olive. During the night their flashing red lights serve notice to drunk ship captains that land and rough rocks are waiting if they don’t leave women alone at their helms.
We don’t know where the dolphins are but you have to trust your driver in a foreign country. Our driver is a short man with glasses and a military haircut. We round the south side of a rock fist, partially hiding the towers, and see dolphins illuminated on the Malecon.
“When you go back?,” our taxi driver asks.
“Un hora.”
“I pick you up.”
The dolphins are spectacular with lights and jets of colored water sprayed the length of the pool. Mexican families are posing for pictures and street vendors are cooking by the roadside. A kid dressed in a clown outfit entertains a loud attentive crowd by the dolphin fountain. His shoes are ten sizes too big and he wears a little green bowler hat that goes with the bold colors of his green outfit. The audience laughs at his chatter and that is his claim to fame. If you can’t hold your audience you have to get another line of work.
Seeing another crowd forming, we walk towards a tall rock by the ocean’s edge and watch a young man walking on top of a fence railing .
An English speaking Mexican promoter jumps on a wall in front of us and introduces his friends – cliff divers traveling to Acapulco.
While he promotes, a second tiny diver ascends stairs to the top of the rock, takes the single torch from his friend already there and lights another for his left hand. He then walks on the fence railing using both torches to guide his way. He creeps to the edge of the railing, stops and balances himself, then finally jumps out into space, holding his two arms out with a torch in each hand.
He disappears into the dark water, out of our sight. We look for him to surface but don’t see him as the crowd disperses when the dive is over.
The next time we see this performer, he is wrapped in a towel on the street asking for donations from a busload of gringos.
True to his word, our taxi driver is waiting for us when we start looking for him.
Divers and dolphins, on the same night, is two for the price of one and a reliable taxi driver, in Mexico, is almost an oxymoron.
There are several marinas in Mazatlan.
The northern marina tends towards pleasure while the southern marina gravitates towards work.
This Sunday the only event that draws skippers off their boats are NFL playoffs on high def TVs in bars and restaurants close to the water.There are security gates at each boat ramp that lead down to slips where boats small and large are tethered. On Sunday, yacht owners aren’t busy. Some of the sailing craft here, be they sailboats or yachts, cost in the hundreds of thousands.
On a window near the bar where Alan, Dave and I have lunch, there are For Sale notes for more modest craft. Someone looking for a cheap place in Mazatlan can buy a 30 foot Bayliner with a diesel engine for eight thousand and park in a slip for twenty four cents a foot per day year round. You have it all – security, socializing, proximity, alcohol, sun, and surf.
All in all, this marina leaves the impression that some people have too much money and it needs to be distributed. That thinking, though, needs to be scuttled.
It is bad policy to worry too much about what other people have, and how they got it.
Only politicians keep sipping from this straw.
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