Casa las Olas in Todos Santo

By Jack Brummet, Mexico Travel Ed.,

The address plate on our house's gate.  I really like the stylized painting of the fish and roiling waves,  ,  ,

I did leave them an alternative nameplate:

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Drawing: Faces #1402 - Fellow Travelers in Baja

By Jack Brummet, North American Travel Editor

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Tuesday's terra cotta, blue bisque, and pale yellow sunset in Chaclaa, Nayarit, Mexico

Photo by Jack Brummet, Mexico Travel Ed.

Tuesday's stratocumulus (or cumulus?) clouds at sunset at our house on  the beach in Chacala.  The clouds blew away fifteen minutes later.

click image to enlarge

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Photos and videos of Sayulita, Nayarit

By Jack Brummet, Mexico Travel Editor

I recently spent 2 1/2 weeks in Bucerias, Nayarit (our fifth visit there).  On previous trips, we have made the trek north to Sayulita numerous times.  I'm not quite sure why, except there has always been a buzz about the place.  When we've been there with our children, they were always interested in going because--unlike Bucerias--there are waves large enough for actual surfing.  Other than those waves, Sayulita always just seemed like a sleepy almost featureless town.  But fast forward several years and Sayulita has become extremely hip--a kind of Brooklyn/Oakland/Ballard of the Nayarit Riviera.  The New York Times travel section has had several articles about Sayulita in the last couple of years. Even though the beach is small, with large rocks near the shore, it is more popular than ever (especially with gringos/gabachos).  It was fascinating seeing it in the middle of the big Mexican Easter break.  There were many hundreds of Mexican tourists and visitors.

On the outskirts of town--Sayulita looks just about like it always has.  Except, on the outskirts of 

town,  you suddenly see about thirty tour buses parked in newly expanded parking lots.

During this post-Easter week, many bars in town featured women in various stages

of dress and undress hawking, a/k/a marketing,  Modelo, Pacifico, and Tecate cervezas.

The Tecate brewski gals

Surfers

Boards, boogie boards, and inflatable kayaks and motorboats to rent...

College age kids on the beach, and one thing I'd never seen in 

Mexico--girls walking the beach with quarts of beer in hand.

The best thing about our day at the beach were the bands--las bandas.  There were 

three of them playing, and even sometimes engaging in battles of the bands. . .

A drum band and some ferocious boot shaking.

There are some nice art galleries in Sayulita now.  This is an oil painting of Jesus.

Another oil painting.  Wow.

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Land crabs in Bucerias

by Jack Brummet, Mexico Travel Editor

One night last week in Bucerias, we were watching a movie in our casa after dinner.  Keelin heard a noise and walked over to investigate.  She didn't quite eek, but she had found something.  We turned down the volume on the movie and you could hear it walking, clicking, across the floor.  It skittered under the couch, which Señor Daveed and I moved.  Standing on the floor looking up at us was a land crab.

We had never seen one before in all our trips there.  I don't know much about them other than crabs run the spectrum from fully aquatic to fully terrestrial.  Even the most fully terrestrial land crabs must return to the sea to lay their eggs, so they don't live too far from the beach.  In our case, the beach was about half a block west of us.  It would have gotten pretty interesting if, say, thirty of them had invaded our house. . .

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