Drifting...

A very old woman, frail yet earnestly able, has shared the last two buses with us.

We are in Teacapan, Nayarit. A few millimetres below Mazatlán on my map. Narrow dirt streets. Rocking chairs on doorsteps. Sound of a distant trumpet catching in our ears.

Everywhere, the smell of the sea.

Her daughter-in-law rents rooms. We obey her unblinking, conjunctivis eyes and birdlike beckoning and waddle to a bare-brick, three-roomed box of a house, where we are welcomed with honest smiles and the offer of a free bed.

The parents, two sons and grandmother sleep in one room, us in another. They somehow squeeze themselves into two single beds. We don´t realise this until the following day, by which time it is too late. They won´t have it any other way.

A pile of hotcakes and gloopy Maizena sends us to a milky sleep. For me, it is another night of naps interspersed with lung-emptying coughs.

I am disturbingly reminded, as I have been every night since I arrived, of my mother before she died. My mid-choke worries that I´ll never get my breath back pale to the nostalgic reality that her nights really were shadowed by death, whereas I am simply trapped in a dream-like paranoia.

I roll over and drift into a vividly undulating landscape of conscious, unconscious and the vague surreality in between.

At 4.45am the father leaves for his morning´s work on the fishing boats.

At 5.30am I hear everyone next door rise through the mosquito-net wall, and the all-night background noise of cockcrows crescendoes to a symphony.

At 6am the house opposite announces the start of the day with a cheerfully loud Europop/Mariachi mix and I know it is time to give up on the night. Breakfast is delicious Mexican standard - scrambled eggs, frijoles (refried beans), tortillas and salsa, this time jazzed up with frankfurters and our first real coffee in days.

We realise the house has no running water. We stand outside to brush our teeth and pour buckets of well water down the toilet.

Thus begins our five days of idyllic tranquility on the lagoon shores of Teacapan.


The sun is the only thing in the blue, blue sky, apart from the zopilotes and pelicans that molest the boats in swarms. I lose count of the number of fish that jump out of the water as we walk past. We make ceviche on the beach with freshly caught prawns and lime juice, eaten with gooey fingers and moans of unrestrained delight. Eva catches her first two fish, and presents them to the family with a wide smile of pride.


Days are spent in steamy exhaustion, beached upon the palm-backed sand. We watch sunset after jaw-dropping sunset in the meditative flow of our hoops, feet splashing the water into glittering gems of amber that seem to hang in the air around us.

We wash from a bucket. Laugh hysterically with our new friends. Watch a thousand shooting stars fall from the sky. We are warmed by the palpable love and unending generosity of the family.




The only shadow on these light-filled days is the persistent knock of hammer echoing around newly constructed villas on the beach.

They say in twenty years Teacapan will be bigger than Cancun.

This fills me with something akin to grief.

I struggle to convey my feelings in Spanish. But it is the same everywhere. Mexico´s paradise coastline is the playground for the rich, the devouring gringo with his crushing concrete and insatiable hunger for all things bright and wonderful.

The serenity here drifts like the sweetest smoke, fragrancing our minds with peaceful submission. But everywhere, the underlying stink of rotting raw beauty and the devasting stench of blind foreign investment.

When we leave we are close to tears. But we know it is time to move. As they said themselves, they would sleep five in a room for ten years if we wanted to stay.