We’ve been in Mazatlán now for a couple of weeks and are starting to get an understanding of the layout and how things operate – Todd’s nailed the driving again, which is a feet in itself. When we tour in Ruby, we typically plan a few daytrips to surrounding towns or areas to see what there is to see. We haven’t really done that here because we are still in Sinaloa and don’t really want to stray too far from home to steer clear of any potential cartel who-ha. I got itchy feet one day and did a google search on bus tours from Mazatlán to see where people might go if one wanted to drive there in the car…turns out there is a bus tour to Concordia and Copala. We google mapped it and determined that (in our Canadian minds) this seems like a good safe place to go!

Todd packed a lunch….and we hopped in the car and headed out to the colonial city of Concordia. Less than an hour later we were at town centre and touring the gorgeous church, built in 1565. We walked around the town centre before we jumped back into the car and headed another 35 minutes up the highway to the town of Copala, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre mountains. This town was built on the side of a mountain. In 1565 prospectors discovered silver veins and the town of Copala was founded to serve the mines.  The roads into the town were all cobblestones and they all came together at town centre, which was very small but also led us to their gorgeous church! Here is our daytrip: https://rumble.com/v64z60p-day-trip.html We were glad to get off the farm for a day (leave the RV Park). By 2 pm we were headed back home so we could meet all the neighbors for Christmas eve happy hour. We met almost everyone in the park at this event, including the daytime caretaker/manager Rafael. This Christmas get together is so popular that even some that are no longer in the park, but still stay in Mazatlán come out. Stories from 25, 15 and 10 years ago were all shared with us newbies; we were introduced to a new tequila shot in ode to the “dry socket”. We ended the evening with a fantastic rib dinner and a firepit with a couple of neighbors, before we called it a (mid)night.

Christmas day was unlike any we have ever had; started with a bike ride….Todd realized that we have never ridden a bike on Christmas day! It was a mellow day and noticeably less busy on the roads. Late afternoon we headed down to the hotel area to see the crowds and walk the beach until sunset. We popped into a jewelry store, and I may have been bamboozled by the silver sparkles all around me and Todd said “pick anything you want”! I succumbed to the pressure to buy a couple pairs of earrings – opal/silver and blue coral/silver…Merry Christmas Wifey! The plan was street tacos for Christmas dinner, but when we got to centro, there weren’t any and instead we found a restaurant called Topolo’s, lucky for us, they had a table available at the bar. We unanimously decided that we will forever be trying all tortilla soup whenever its on the menu. Once we ordered, Carlos showed up to make our salsa tableside right in front of us – It. Was. Awesome! Charley delivered the delicious tortilla soup; within 10 minutes we were already full and hadn’t even ordered our mains yet. The waiter said he would put our main order in whenever we were ready. It was nice to sit for a half hour and take in the whole ambiance. The mains were fantastic and service again was impeccable; three hours later….we rolled ourselves out of the restaurant and down the street for a walk back to the car.

There are many challenges with “living” in another country, where English is not the main language. When we think hey we should go to the theatre or the museum or see a live play…but we can’t cause we don’t speak the language. We did hear that the closest movie theatre shows movies at certain times with English sub-titles and there are lots of ex-pat bars with live music – rock, oldies, country – but you can’t do that every night.  So we are always on the lookout for evening activities where language doesn’t matter.  While on a beach day last week, a random guy from Phoenix stopped to chat with us for 20 minutes and mentioned that he had gone to a baseball game the week before and said it was a great time! We had seen the brand-new stadium a few days prior when driving around the city. We went online and bought tickets to the 7 pm game on Boxing day: the Mazatlán Venados vs the Navajoa Mayos. These teams are 2 of the 10 that make up the Mexican Pacific League.  Being Canadian, of course, arrived 10 minutes early, got easy parking and when we went inside, the stadium was almost empty! By the time the third inning finished, the stadium was about half full. So obviously no one arrives on time, except us! It was fun…baseball is a slow-moving game. There was an 8-member cheerleading squad that included 4 amiga’s and 4 amigo’s. Todd thought the amigo’s resembled chippendale wannabe’s (they “perform” their dance moves with their shirts unbuttoned).  Spent a lot of time trying to figure out all the different kinds of snacks that were being sold and here are a few items that we saw:

• A tray that had multiple styrofoam containers, lined with plastic bag of cooked rice. They then squeezed lime on the rice and poured hot sauce on it when you bought it. (Food safety Jill doesn’t approve of rice in styro containers…. incorrectly stored rice is so susceptible to Bacillus cereus)
• Plain plastic bag of chips inside a Styrofoam container. When you buy the chips, they pour them into a hard plastic container and pour hot sauce in it, then put the lid on and shake the shit out of it. Then pour it back into the Styrofoam container and give you this chip mush to eat with a spoon!
• A hotbox of hotdog pieces….this is a plastic covered Styrofoam cooler and inside are Styrofoam boxes of different sizes. Inside the Styrofoam are tinfoil wrapped cutup pieces of cooked hot dogs and 4 types of containers of sauce and a cut lime. They sell this to you with a toothpick to eat it with.
• Full pizza’s are pulled out of backpacks cooler – there are only 2 types (pepperoni and ham and mushroom0.

There are also many hawkers walking around with signs for liquor, drinks and other weird things. You flag them down and they run and get you what you want. Todd had a beer, which ended up being a double beer for $120 pesos ($8 CAN). All in all, everything was pretty entertaining – the game, the cheerleading, the people watching and the Venados even won the game with a score of 2:1. Here is our evidence of that night; https://rumble.com/v66am3j-venados-baseball.html

When preparing for this trip back in October, Todd packed the propane firepit, because he knew how hard it is to find wood for a campfire. Since we’ve been in Mazatlán, we have used the firepit A LOT! It nice to light it up after dinner and listen to music or have the neighbors over for a visit. We emptied 2 – 30 lbs propane tanks in about 2 weeks and although you can call the propane truck to the RV park to come fill them up for you, sometimes we just like to go touring to find the propane station on our own. When in Canada, we go to Costco for our fill, and they do everything by the book – never filling our 30 lb tanks over 27 lbs……in Mexico this is not the case. They overfill those babies to 40 lbs for $21!

On the next Friday night, we were going to head to the local (pollo) chicken takeout for a spatchcock chicken dinner. We found these chicken dinners to be pretty good and reasonable priced, when we were in the Yucatan and Campeche. So we headed down to our local Puro Pollo a few blocks away around 6 pm to check out the menu. We were ready to order, when the guy typed into his phone translator “You have to pre-order, it’s a minimum of 45 wait and I’m out of chicken”. So….the only thing they really sell at this place is chicken….its 6 pm prime dinnertime and the only thing you sell you don’t have?! OK, well I guess that’s Mexico and we left….luckily there was a taco stand a block away and we ended up crashing a dinner party of some of our neighbors who were also there! They did tell us that its best to order chicken dinner for lunch….they never run out at lunch!

As per the norm…we beach walk and ride bikes pretty much every day. Mexico isn’t known for easy bike riding or having many paths, but we’ve randomly seen other bike paths while driving around, so we put the bikes on the back of the car and headed to the El Cid community. It’s a gated community; we parked the car outside the gate and rode our bikes in toward the gate house. We drove in behind a car and as Todd was riding his bike through the gate, they dropped the gate down right on his head! Thank goodness he had his bike helmet on. They realized and lifted it back up and away we rode. We found the bike path fairly easy…a couple of turns later we realize we are biking on the golf course. We weren’t sure if it was right, but we saw young kids driving a golf cart mock chicken on the path and a couple people walking their dogs too, so we figured it was ok to ride bikes. Never ridden a bike on a golf course before…always a first!

Bike riding at the golf course

Post Christmas, but pre-New Years and pretty sure today we saw a changing of the crowds along the Malecon and beach. There was also a larger presence of military personnel (tourist policia, traffic policia, marines, lifeguard police, national guard and municipal police) …which we assume they do for tourist safety leading up to New Years…not sure.

New years was spent with the neighbors with a 4 pm happy hour and snacks. Around 9 a few people came over for a firepit and around 11:30 everyone headed over to the beach to watch the fireworks. It was loud and about 8 minutes later, it was over ….welcome to …2025!

The rest of our time here has been on our bikes and at the beach. We typically plan our trips to Centro or the Malecon based on the cruise ship arrival schedule. So our second last day was a Sunday, there were no ships arriving and it was the mass exodus day after Christmas holidays. We figured it would be the best day to finally walk up to the top of the Faro (Mazatlán Lighthouse) and checkout the view! Todd packed a lunch and headed over to centro to do this walk. It is a 745 m of easy walking trail followed by 336 steps at the end to get to the top. The view was gorgeous! You can opt to take a zipline back down – it takes you across the bay…we didn’t take this option! https://rumble.com/v66acgg-lighthouse-walk.html

You know we need to talk about the driving: Todd’s been acing the driving here, and its no easy feet. Sometimes it takes two of us looking continuously in all directions to navigate…Todd has said many times you wouldn’t believe the amount of shit that happens in the rearview mirror! There are no lines on most city roads – so if you need 2, 3 or 4 lanes of traffic you can make your own lane whenever you want. There are a lot of non-working light signals, so at those intersections its like a free for all. They do have traffic circles, but they are more of an oval and if there is a stop sign at the entrance, its just a suggestion if the lane is clear for you to move forward, no need to stop. There are crosswalks, but they don’t really mean anything. If you want to walk across the street, do it at your own risk. With that said if a family with small kids or elders need to cross the roads, we’ve seen multiple times that cars will just stop for them and let them go. Here is some examples: https://rumble.com/v669xl1-driving.html

Life at the RV park has been pretty great! This is our second RV park in Mexico and upon arrival the neighbors will come over and introduce themselves, invite you to events, add you to local activity groups and stop by for a chat on an almost daily basis. It didn’t take us long to start recognizing people on the streets, bike paths, or just out and about.

Our time here seemed to fly by and we are already at the end of our first month…where did the time go?! Overall, our opinion of Mazatlán is that we loved it! The location of the RV Park is awesome….easy access to the beach, a bike path across the street, the bus right outside the entrance, easy to drive into town, the Malecon or centro. The park caretaker, Rafael, works 6 days a week, always had a smile on his face and a kind word to say. He made sure he greeted everyone daily, attended all the park festive events, bought beer to share at all events, and had his wife make us traditional Mexican soup!

The weather is pretty perfect – 24-27C daily and 14-18C overnight and there is very little wind. The beaches have been unbelievable, so many of them and they go forever. The sunsets are always an amazing finish to every day!

Although the city has roughly half a million people, it doesn’t seem that big! We loved the history and old buildings from the 1500’s (when Spain conquered it from the Totorames indingenous). It’s a cultural city in all aspects, but also metropolitan. During our time here (Christmas season), the majority of tourists are Mexican families, there is a minority of Canadians (mostly) with a few Americans scattered in. We have never felt unsafe at any point in our time here.

Thanks for having us Mazatlán; you were so much more than we expected!