Anduril Sailing Blog: A Few of our Favourite Things

Sometimes the good experiences of life come in combinations. Often these good combinations are in the way of the banal and overlooked, say like a terrific croissant with coffee, or in the way of the divine: 2 feet of fluffy mountain powder on a sunny day. But then sometimes combinations appear more unexpectedly. Our road trip to Guadalajara was like that. Little individual joys we have experienced over a lifetime all coming together in a new experience to make a great little mini-vacation.

With the boat safe in a slip at Barra de Navidad we booked a 6 hour bus ride to take us to the suburb of Tlaquepaque in the Guadalajarian metropolis. Having been in quite a few Mexican municipal buses, we were not looking forward to the long ride. The ETN line, however, provides a surprisingly luxurious experience with a modern, air conditioned, soft-riding bus equipped with business class size recliner seats. Thus protected in our modern bubble we were able to ride along the way through a great salt-flats dust storm that reduced visibility to fog like conditions.

Tlaquepaque proved to be a little oasis of neighborhood beauty. So much of Mexico seems to be this way: large swaths of poverty, littered with garbage strewn wrecked and abandoned buildings and then suddenly, something really nice appears. An arts and crafts centre, Tlaquepaque, is an old neighborhood with narrow streets fronting what once were prosperous family casas. Invisible behind the façade of drab 2-storey street-front entries lay lovely homes with huge gardens in the rear. Such was our guest-house. The Casa de Retono provided modest accommodations, but with an excellent bed and modern tiled bathroom – and oblivious to the street scene a hundred feet away, a lovely garden to enjoy: sunlight dappling through shady trees, hummingbirds flying, birds singing and flowers blooming.

The touristy but still very interesting arts, crafts and restaurant district was a few blocks walk to the north. Centred on the traditional Tlaquepaque town church and square, the old streets of mansions have been converted to craft manufacturing operations, arts stores, cantinas and eateries, both traditional and fusion. The Casa Luna restaurant where we ate our first meal is decorated in a style of some sort of elegant magical realism, with great interior sculpted trees hanging a myriad of softly lit baubles, in a room strewn all over with other statuaries, paintings and lovely table settings. Hard to describe, but a charming place to enjoy a fine meal over a bottle of wine.

The museums, churches and buildings of Guadalajara provided a pleasant day of sight-seeing. As church architecture, the cathedral, consecrated in 1618, is a majestic example of great scale meant to shock and awe and filled throughout with fantastic stained glass and artful reliquary. The Palacio de Gobierno, a still operational government building, is painted with huge and fantastic frescos by the master muralist, Jose Clemente Orozco. For more work by this genius of the revolution we visited the Instituto Cultural de Cabanas.

On this day and the days to follow as we meandered on our way, never too much to take in on one go, we visited a half dozen more museums and galleries, seeing so many wonderful works, ancient and contemporary. For lunches, there were bistros and beer and tasty bits, and for dinners a mess of choices ranging from tacos to fine dining.

During the wild and formative years of youth we discovered the pleasures of rodeo, with all of its attendant machismo, crowd watching and beer drinking. So the opportunity to go to a Charreadas and see how the Mexicans do rodeo was not to be missed. The hats are different and some of the displays of horsemanship and cattle handling, but the spectacle of bronco riding definitely crosses cultures. Like back at home, charreadas, is mostly a family affair of rancher people, dads and moms, kids and uncles. There is less participation in the sporting part for the girls than the boys, but even here there is some small progress apparent, if only yet a chink in the great armour of horsey Mexican masculinity.

In the middle of our time in Guadalajara we took the tourist “tequila train tour” to the town of Tequila. We learnt about the cultivation of agave, from planting to harvest and thence to autoclaving, fermentation, distillation and barrel aging. We tasted (and brought back for further tasting) a terrific Jose Cuervo Reserva de Familia Extra Anejo. And then homeward to Tlaquepaque we rode the rail car, comfy in our luxurious seats, with our personal tequila serving table and the central serving bar all fitted in gleaming burnished wood.

After five days in Guadalajara we headed back towards the boat, staying two days in the charming little town of Comala, a small town living under the great cone of the highly active “Volcan de Fuego”, with its most recent blast only 2 weeks previous, at its summit still belching out gas.

Nearing midnight on our first night of arrival, with shops mostly shuttered, we found tacos and beer in a tiny restaurant hidden attached to a small tienda. Yet another unexpectedly fabulous meal with the value price of $6.50 CDN including a generous tip. Guided by Jupiter, the hotel proprietor, we hiked for a volcano viewing in the avocado plantations, starting our day with coffee grown and roasted by a tiny producer at the foot of the trail. The most exquisite coffee we have ever tasted, sweet and floral. We wisely bought a pound for the boat, but sadly it is now almost gone and we will surely never see its like again! Finishing our hike we visited a commercial scale coffee producer and learnt more of the intricacies involved in the making of our essential morning beverage.

Truly, it was a trip with some of our favourite things: good food, the pleasure of travel to places neither of us have ever been, a train trip, fine tequila, a rodeo, a hike of many vistas, and every day examples of beautiful art to behold. Who could ask for anything more?