La Cruise

There’s a poet in me.  He loves romantic beginnings.  He wants to know the history of every place he visits.  He wants to invent a history of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, the fishing village on the northwest shore of Banderas Bay on the Mexican Pacific.

In my invention, the village has been there for 700 years.  The Huichol are there tending their nets on the beach while their women hack away in their small fields of mais along the arroyo before the green mountains begin their ascent.  A young man rests in the heat of the day beneath the ageless huanacaxtle trees in the center of the village.  Daydreaming about wrestling matches with the other boys in the village, he is restless.  He is small for his age, so in his reveries he imagines he is bigger and stronger.  The largest boy in the village bullies him at will, but not today.  In this daydream he leaps deftly to one side as the bully rushes him, tripping the bigger boy and pinning him to the ground.

There is talk in the village of Cortez.  He marches with 100 men in protective skins of sky iron.  They ride on mythical long-haired beasts with four legs like dogs but much greater.  They take what they desire.

Beneath the huanacaxtle tree there is a stirring of leaves and a dog barks madly.  It is Cortez.  The boy does not have time to think.  He hefts his fishing pike as the Spaniard jumps from the great dog beast and pulls a sword from a scabbard studded with gold sequins.  The boy leaps to one side, tripping the man, then runs his pike through his chest and pins him to the huanacaxtle tree.  The arms of the dead man are spread in a cross like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and forever the village is known as The Cross of the Huanacaxtle.

But it didn’t happen like that.  The history of La Cruz is much more recent.  It became a fishing village in the 1930’s. Only a couple of decades before sleepy Puerto Vallarta was discovered by Richard Burton and Ava Gardner in The Nght of the Iguana.  In those years there was a large cross under a big huanacaxtle tree near the waterfront.  Simply a cross, with no obvious purpose, and that became the name for the town.

The first thing we saw as we sailed into the La Cruz anchorage were two humpback whales, actually swimming through the anchorage.  In thirty-five feet of water and in between the anchored sailboats, these gentle creatures showed first their dorsal fins and then their silent flukes as they sounded beneath the surface.  We never saw them come back up.

We launched the kayak in the smooth anchorage to paddle into town.  “Hey, Pamela!”  we heard as we passed Adios, a boat we knew from La Paz.  “Are you racing in the Banderas Blast?  We need crew.”  And so we were recruited as hired guns to race with Craig and Jane the following couple of days.  When you’re out cruising, you never really know what you’re going to do tomorrow or the following day.  The days have a way of unfolding themselves.

We tied up the kayak in the marina and followed the walkway into town.  The first thing we saw as we walked into the village was the huge huanacaxtle trees in the square by the waterfront.  There was a local music festival going on and all the town was sitting under the ancient trees.

In the town we ran into Larry who we’d also met in La Paz.  Larry, Joe, and I had jammed on Rapscullion with Pamela Bendall who had just published her book, What Was I Thinking?, recounting her adventures as a solo sailor down the coast of North, Central, and South America.

“I’m going to introduce you to the musicians in town,” Larry announced.  “This is Russ.  He plays harmonica.  And this is Stevie the bass player, and Bobbie plays acoustic blues guitar, and Chuck over there plays electric guitar.“

Larry told me all about the La Cruz music scene.  “There’s a blues jam at Philo’s on Monday night, another jam at the British Club on Tuesdays, good Flamenco on Friday at the Black Forest, and always something going on at Octopus’ Garden.  Hey!  Hear that?  That sounds like a rock band at Ana Bananas.  Wanna check it out?”

“What?  Down that dark street there?  Is it okay to walk down there at night?”

“Certainly,” said Larry and off we paced along the dark cobblestoned path of a street that revealed a lavanderia and a tortilleria by day.

During the following day’s race on Banderas Bay we came in second place and met Dick who’s lived in La Cruz for a number of years.  He was in his seventies, had run a bed & breakfast in the nearby surfing town of Sayulita, and now was retired and living just up the street from the tortilleria.  He gave us instructions for using the local bus system.  We needed to figure out how to get to the airport to pick up our boys who were to spend their college break with us.

“Now, to get back to La Cruz from the airport you have to walk across the bridge over the highway,” Dick advised.  “The taxis at the airport have to pay a tax, so it’s lots cheaper taking a taxi or a bus on the other side of the highway.  Now, there’s a marlin taco shop on the other side of the bridge near where you catch the bus.  Best tacos anywhere, with real smoked marlin.  Now, they don’t sell beer at the marlin taco shop so you have to go down just past the bus stop to get a couple bottles of beer at the little tienda.  Coldest beers anywhere.  Now, you get your bottles of beer at the tienda then take them back to the marlin taco shop, and they have a deposito at the marlin taco shop so they pick up the empty bottles there.”

“Uh … OK.”  Why was Dick telling me all these details about a taco stand?  What could I possibly do with all this mundane information and how could I possibly remember it?

It turned out that in the next four weeks we made six different trips to the airport to pick up and drop off the boys and flying to and from Oaxaca.  We followed Dick’s detailed instructions to the letter and got marlin tacos and cold beer with every airport run.  I found myself repeating Dick’s instructions later to various cruising friends who were coming in and out of the airport for the holidays, each time watching their expressions as I repeated the details.

When the boys arrived we sailed to Nueva Vallarta and Paradise Village.  It was as if we were magically back in the USA.  There was a Starbucks coffee shop by the bus stop, a Subway sandwich shop by the mall, and plenty of prosperous gringos beside the pool or arranged in neat rows along the beach.

“You guys are not Paradise Village people,” one of the cruisers in the Baja Ha-Ha had told us.  “Go to La Cruz.  La Cruz is real.”  What could he mean by that?

We spent Christmas Eve at Punta de Mita at the head of Banderas Bay, then Christmas Day at Islas Tres Marietas, a marine sanctuary, climbing on rocks and snorkeling along the reefs.  In the late 1960’s, Jacques Cousteau  led an international outcry to prevent the Mexican government from bombing these uninhabited islands.

Pam and the boys gave me a GoPro video recorder for Christmas.  The boys threw handfuls of pretzels over the side of the boat and made underwater movies of hundreds of pretzel-eating fish.  They were jumping off the sides of the boat and filming underwater explosions when Joe arrived on Cygnus.

“I’ll just swim over and say hello,” he said as he dove into the blue water and swam up to Pamela’s swim ladder.

“Watch out for the explosions,” I warned.

We sat on the deck in the late afternoon sun as the boys made their movies and Joe told us more about the La Cruz music scene.  That evening we sailed back to La Cruz.  Pushed by light westerly winds we glided past humpback whales, then anchored at La Cruz listening to dolphins splashing beside the boat and exhaling loudly in the calm waters.

For New Year’s we wandered the streets of La Cruz in the rain looking for entertainment for the boys.  At Octopus’ Garden we had dinner with Robin and Mark from Mintaka, who we promised to sail to Polynesia with.  Just before midnight our waiter brought us each a dozen grapes.  He beamed as he set the bowls of grapes in front of us.

“You take these grapes,” Robin explained, “and you put the first one in your mouth twelve minutes before New Year’s.  Each minute you put another grape in your mouth.”

“You do what?” I asked.

“Yhuh hmput fmuggen” explained Pam with five grapes in her mouth.  “It’s a Mexican tradition.  At midnight with all twelve grapes in your mouth you make a wish, then you swallow the grapes.”  At about six minutes to midnight my mouth was so full of grapes that my eyes bulged as I tried to breath and make more wishes.

Ten days later, after touring the Oaxacan countryside in the pursuit of mole negra and artesian tapestries, the extensive ruins of ancient Monte Alban,  and the seaside villages of Puerto Escondido and San Augustillo, we found ourselves once again in La Cruz.  The town was starting to grow on me.

“¿Pamela, si?” confirmed the señorita at the lavanderia who washed the Oaxacan dust out of our clothes.  After taking our laundry once before to this corner laundromat the young lady remembered the name of our boat.  I was beginning to feel at home in La Cruz.

So what is it about La Cruz that is so appealing?  It’s not a romantic fishing village.  Rather, its tiny network of streets are dusty in the heat of the day and muddy after a rain.  Many are cobblestoned, but with potholes and mud puddles.  The buildings are somewhat dilapidated and run-down.

I think its a combination of many small things that keeps bringing us back to La Cruz.  A wonderful market of organic greens on Sunday morning.  A fabulous fish market filled with dorado, tuna, and shrimp.  A funky shack by the main road selling grilled chicken on skewers over a fire.

And a brand new marina with lots of space, water, fuel, and wi-fi.  Plus, a good anchorage, seldom rolly, and capable of sheltering dozens of boats.

Not least, its where we continue to meet all our cruising friends as they make their way down from Cabo, the Sea of Cortez, and Mazatlán.  Everyone stops in La Cruz for a while, and the evenings we’ve spent having dinners and drinks on our boats, or listening to blues bands playing the funky bars in town, or simply enjoying tacos in the streets of La Cruz, have all been magical.

But what is the final thing about La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, that elusive ingredient that other towns do not have?  Its the old huanacaxtle trees.  Their trunks are easily ten feet in diameter.  Their canopy tops provide shade for the entire village square.  The curve of their expansive branches is as graceful as the arc of a gothic cathedral’s flying buttresses.

In the coming years La Cruz will “grow up”.  The ever-expanding pace of development that spawned from The Night of the Iguana will eventually make its way around the entire Bahia de Banderas and condominiums will one day consume La Cruz.  The laws of supply and demand, the growing middle class of Mexico, and sun-hungry Norte Americanos will conspire to turn the friendly fishing village into a bustling urban center like Puerto Vallarta.

But the huanacaxtle trees in the village square are destined to remain forever protected because the name of the town makes it so.  The cross is gone, but the trees remain.  And while the town named after these trees may not have a romantic past, the huanacaxtle trees will inspire its romantic future.