After 40 days of absence from North Carolina and covering more than three thousand miles my van is stuck in the sand on the beach of La Manzanilla. Currently there are ten vans in our comfortable campsite that is a short walk down the beach from the town of La Manzanilla. The town has plenty of tiendas, restaurants and even a few hardware stores and internet cafes. Every morning the water truck drives by our campsite and every night there is at least one party to be heard echoing down the beach.

Most evenings on our trip we have celebrated with good food, drink and long visits under the moonlight. Christmas has been no exception and the celebration started last night with a nineteen course Indonesian dinner called a ricetable. After the dinner some of us walked though town to listen to the loud music at the town square and watch the many locals and tourists dance and mingle. To complete our Christmas eve celebration most of us visited under our decorated tropical Christmas tree into the early hours of Christmas day drinking the new camp drink called “Dirty Mother” which is mostly vodka with some Kahlua too. This morning I awoke to find that Santa had visited. He left a beautiful hand painted iguana (see photo) on my van-side table and brought gifts to everyone else in the group as well (thank you Jerry and Sophie!). Paul cooked delicious blueberry pancakes for everyone and covered them with the maple syrup that the many Canadians in our group are appropriately proud of. Sharing breakfast and gifts this morning made it much easier to appreciate that it is indeed Christmas. We have all been having trouble remembering the season while in our tropical beach setting.

Even though we have now been at La Manzanilla longer than any of the other places on our trip I have taken fewer pictures here. This is partially because everything but time seems to have slowed down a good bit here. It has been hard to get much beyond the essentials of eating, drinking and resting done during the day. Another difficulty that I am having with my photographs is that they all seem to be of sunsets and crocodiles. I managed to find a few photos on other subjects though including a photo with Isabelle’s big bug and a photo where you might see a bit of the whale that swam by yesterday.

Happy Christmas,

Jonathan Poole

La Manzanilla, Mexico

Posted on December 26th, 2007 by Poolio
Filed under: Jonathan Poole