A Triumphant Return
- myrahgraham
- Jul 1
- 2 min read
"El que persevera, alcanza" (He who perseveres, achieves) - Spanish proverb
It was my first time in San Pancho. It was my first time in Mexico as a whole, actually.
News footage of burning buses and Cartel retaliation had painted a grim picture of the country, but the news is rarely a reputable judge of character of a place. Still, exiting the tin can airplane enclosure onto the wet tarmac of Puerto Vallarta was about as long as I stayed in that place. Massive advertisements for a giant resort were dwarfed by the resort itself, complete with castles and a gondola over the highway. Those billboards might as well have said : Introvert Nightmare.
I got a getaway car at MEX, which avoided getting hidden fees from the larger international companies (beware!). While waiting for my wheels, I took in the car lot, and rested my gaze on an old old mango tree who was presiding over the signing of paper work and the handing over of keys. Thank you, Mango Tree. May your fruit droop always.
So anyways, that’s how I got to San Pancho on the first day. Clueless as any tourist, I ended up there because it was by the beach, and smaller than Puerto Vallarta and Sayulita. A wild guess for a quiet beach vacation. I walked up to a BnB and checked in, sans reservation.
A short while after, I pulled up to the beach under the sinking sun’s aluminium glint over the water, and chaos greeted me. The crash of mariachi, the calling of food vendors, screaming kids and about 100 plunging pelicans, brown pelicans diving from high up all around the swimmers in the water. It was Santa Semana. The holy week of easter. Blessed be the cacophony of all of creation screaming on one beach.
Too disoriented and stunned to take it in, I went to bed.
As the week unfolded, I became curious about the flying dinosaurs that dove all around me as I surfed, swam and sunbathed. They were like torpedoes, or fish finding missiles. Up close, I watched the crooked bow of their necks elongating as they nose dove for fish. It looked like carnage every day, and still these birds would surface and awkwardly fluff their wings as they bobbed on the waves before the next takeoff, their bretheren crash landing all around them.
I got bored, or curious, or self conscious of my ignorance. So I read about them to make sense of what I was seeing. Turns out, they were critically endangered in the 70s and 80s because of insecticides. And then environmentalists and communities complained, and lobbied with all the other people who noticed the dying animal. Señor Pelícano pardo, the californicus subspecies, lives along the northwestern Mexico coast, migrating into California and as far as BC sometimes. And now they are back in large numbers, around 170 000. So cross-border cooperation for the good of a bird worked out, and it led to these displays I was seeing, of feasting, happy birds.
In the spray of feathers, fishy salt water and sqwaks, I thought: Good for them.
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