It’s really the people that make a place
I don’t mean to sound jaded or blasé about what it is that I am doing, but it’s hard not to get scenery fatigue. When every beach is beautiful, every waterfall unbelievable, and every mountain lush, it’s hard to remember to stop and think about the constant sunshine (and sunburns if you’re me). Sometimes the only, or best way to distinguish one glorious location from another is the people.
This was what happened in Mancora. Famed as a party town, I wasn’t sure what to expect, seeing as how I’m not the world’s biggest party animal. What I found was a group of people who made for a wonderful and unique experience. It’s not everyday that you can sit and feel perfectly at ease with a group of people when you can’t speak each other’s languages. And it’s not everyday that those people will patiently ask and reason questions until you’ve understood what they want to know. It’s a wonderful feeling when you know that you are being encouraged to try and speak in another language, despite protesting that it will be slow and painfully grammatically incorrect. But the best feeling of all is reuniting with friends you left somewhere earlier on your trip. What is much better than a familiar face that you actually missed.
It’s a pretty special moment when this group of people include you in their day to day even though you say very little and are often confused. And when you share an experience together, it’s all the more fun for those challenges. We managed to have a pretty great day of exploration on a search for sea turtles, and the conversations ranged from rapid Spanish to broken English, as we all tried to speak to one another. In the end, our two hour hike turned into a four hour hike and included taking coconuts off a tree, seeing lots of animals washed up onto the shore, and getting in a pickup truck to get to the sea turtles. (Which turned out to be a fishing port where you could jump into the disgusting water with the turtles, just watch out for the fishing boats coming in and out.) I swam with the turtles, and they didn’t seem to care about us, to the point of swimming directly into me. Our way back was even more eventful as we tried to catch a ride for six of us in a very remote place that looked like a desert. Perseverance paid off, and we managed to get back to our hostel in one piece.
Though an inability to easily communicate in one language or another is clearly an obstacle, if you can find the right people, it doesn’t have to be the end of the world. And the right people always seem to fall into your life when they’re meant to.
