On The Road To Punta Pescaderos

“Where’s the beef?”

That refrain was heard from half our table when their order Nachos Supreme came without any.

And without salsa, peppers, and guacamole.

What was requested was an order simply without cheese.

So you might say, the Supreme part of the Nachos was lost in translation.

Doing things in Mexico is different than doing things at home.

But for many of us, that is one of the attractions in heading south, in the first place.

That is not to say one place is better than the other; they are just different.

Of course, you can always find an occasional foreigner down here - which includes us Americans - who somehow have the notion that things should be the same as they are at home and then proceed to let waiters, hotel staff, store owners, etc. know it.

For those of you old enough to remember the phrase “ugly American“, in the worst of cases some people tend to forget they are in another country with their own sovereign values, norms and traditions; not ours.

Oh yeah, and there’s that language difference: I am pretty sure that there are some “tourists” that think that if these people want our money, by God, they should learn how to speak our language.

But of course we accepted the “Nachos-lite” as part of the joy of travel in a foreign land and just ordered “uno mas Pacifico con limon’.”

Driving in Mexico, specifically in Baja - where I have done the most driving south of the border - it is not all that different from driving the back logging and ranch roads I have driven countless hours in the western U.S.

But down here - here being southern Baja for the moment - the rough, barely one lane-narrow, rock-strewn roads with steep drop-offs, sans guardrails, is pretty much the accepted condition, along with the all-to-common wash-outs in the arroyos. 

And with the ailing economy back home and the declining budgets to support the sagging infrastructure - in other words the roads and bridges are all falling down - we may not be too far behind. Better make sure that hybrid has high clearance.

Punta Pescaderos is not a particularly easy place to get to, unless maybe you have a fast twin-engine plane - and can hopefully land better than that guy last year with his Lear Jet who drove the landing gear into the fuselage - but really special places rarely are easy.