Visiting Mazatlán and San Cristòbal in Mexico

I think I mentioned a while back that I’ve been to Mexico. Got back two weeks ago. I flew into Mexico City and from there made two trips, one north to Mazatlán to see two dear friends from California whom I miss, the other south to San Cristòbal to see my German cousin’s daughter who has a house there. She’s a doctor, married to a doctor, and their two sons are doctors so it’s obviously important to keep in with them.

In Mazatlán it turns out I have a fan called Hector Peniche, who not only rides motorcycles but also happens to run a very fancy restaurant called Hector’s Bistro. He started his career in London as a pastry chef (I think I got that right, Hector?) where he met his wife Victoria, also a pastry chef, who comes from Worcester, in England. They married and came to Mazatlán to start a restaurant in a small, rented place; but they were so good at it that a wealthy customer decided to back them, and they now have a whole block humming away, with the bistro and a café. I ate there twice and it’s not to please him that I say the food was wonderful.

Hector’s place

Victoria rides too, and Hector showed me a lovely, retro-seeming new BMW parked outside that he had just bought for her, but a forgot to take a picture of it, or her (she’s lovely, by the way) so the best I can do is a picture of Hector himself. Here he is:

Hector Peniche

Later we all went to a tiny cinema called El Retro, where I gave a slide show for about fifty people.. I’m very out of practice and did the show really badly, but everybody claimed to have loved it – which is not an uncommon experience. Once, back in the nineties, when I was still using Kodachrome slides and a projector, I did a show at a BMW rally somewhere in the American South. Just before it started the cassette tipped over and all the slides fell out. There was no time to sort them – all I could do was stuff them back in any old how, so I never knew what was coming up next. The audience was delighted and kept me in pizzas and beer for the rest of the show. [“It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”]

In the old colonial centre of San Cristòbal, as in Mazatlán, the low facades of the houses disguise the fact there is usually a large area of ground behind them with one or more larger houses and gardens.

Outside in the street the houses look like this:

But inside, behind these modest facades . . .

. . . are big properties like my cousin Christine’s house and garden.

San Cristòbal de las Casas, to give it its proper name, is a wonderful old town, with a great climate, but I got there too late in life.

At 7000 feet I discovered that at my age my tolerance for altitude has vanished. I was breathless the whole time I was there, and really only comfortable sitting down. Where is the man who was once quite happy coming down to Potosí from 15,000 feet in Bolivia? Not only that, but I suffered the indignity of a tummy bug coming back to Europe. I have always prided myself on my gastric fortitude and I’m humiliated.

In fact the last time I can remember losing it was when I squatted in a field in India, in the state of Bihar, 47 years ago. That’s when I composed my most memorable poem:

One should not stray far,
After lunch in Bihar,
For the food in Bihar is rather bizarre.
Not even as far as the nearest bazaar,
For none can outrun the food in Bihar.

When I came to check in to my flight at the airport hotel, Aeromexico offered me a business upgrade at a price I couldn’t refuse. I snapped it up because it meant I could spend my last six hours in Mexico waiting in their business lounge. But it was not like any business lounge I’ve ever lounged in – it was more like a works canteen, a huge noisy barn of a place full of people eating off paper plates. Well, I’ve nothing against people having fun, and I have no reason to blame my condition on the one mouthful I took of the “bife” and rice, but it was not nice.

The flight home however was very comfortable.

PS: I hear that Vladimir Pudding leaned on his buddy and drone supplier, Pistachio “Percy” Kameni, to persuade HIS buddies, at Hamas, to start something awful and take the world’s eye off Ukraine. Probably rubbish, but it certainly worked.