Cameron began what planned to be a furious drive back to Seattle with the throttle "taped" open and high hopes to get home to Seattle in a week or so, and hopefully not get fired from his job.
After some indecision on my part about weather to drive East to Mexico City or continue South along the coast, I decided to take the easier path and continue traveling along the coast to Acapolco. Continueing a trend that had begun in the US, I had lost my lonely planet travel guide, a book that to me ranks slightly below my passport and credit card in terms of importance. Thankfully Monday night Cameron and I had run into some Canadians that we were surfing with earlier in the day that were traveling home in the morning, and I was able to purchase a slightly used version of the same book I had lost. Awesome! I knew where I was going once again!
So after another tasty breakfast at the Zehautinajho Pancake house, Cameron and I packed our bags and headed in different directions. I had an easy drive south on Mex 200 about 16o miles to Acapolco. Once arriving in Acapolco things got very hard. The lonely planet travel book for Acapolco sucked: in a city of 500k they only had names for a dozen streets and to make matters worse Acaploco has only about 4 steet signs in the entire city. It took me about an hour of driving around, asking for directions, using the terrible maps and GPS I had with me to find the hotel I planned at staying at for the evening.
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Edit: sorry about the half post. When I was writing the first draft of the post in Oaxoca two Swedish girls and Dutch girl interrupted me with an invitation to go out for drinks and dancing. Like The Godfather, when girls like that make an offer like that, it can´t be refused.
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Anyways, back to the post. I finally made my way to the place I planned on staying for the night, the awesome Hotel Eiffel Tower. After stashing my bike in the garage and checking in for the afternoon a walked into Old Town Acapolco, checked out the town square (always called the zocolo for some reason), took a tour of Fort San Diego that gaurded the harbor and ate a delicous fish dinner at a resturant.
Later that night I swam some laps in the Hotel pool and watched the cliff divers. I stayed up late that night with the owners of the Hotel eating cookies, drinking coffee and talking about Acapolco adventures.
Here are some pictures:
Beautiful Acapolco harbor, well protected from the weather from the hills that line the bay. This was the Pacific end of the old Spanish trading route to the Philipines and the Far East. Think of it as an older San Fransisco with wide sandy beaches. Spanish silver mined in Mexico was traded in the Philipines for china and silk for over 300 years along this route. This harbor was often the subject of fierce navel struggles between the Spanish and various european navel powers and pirates.
The view west from Hotel Eiffel Tower. 10,000 miles to the West is the Philipines. Below my left shoulder are the cliffs that the Acapolco cliff diver jump off.
The famous Acapolco cliff divers. The diver that dove the highest distance, the guy in the middle, dropped about 65 feet into the ocean and needed to clear about 10 feet of cliff to make the dive. Before the divers jump into the ocean the pray at a little shrine on top of the cliff. The thing about the dive that seemed tricky to me is the fact that they need to jump out to clear the cliff and that they need to make a semi technical climb up the rock face of the cliff to reach their diving platforms. I have a small regret that I didn´t swim out to the cliff in the morning before leaving town and attempt my own dive.
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