The La Paz Eddy (Pieces of Peace)

Saturday March 9th - Friday March 15th

Al Marchand warned me about the La Paz Eddy. You see, La Paz is one of those unusual places that you come across from time to time travelling, where people just seem to get stuck. I saw it at Lago Atitlan in Guatemala, in Salento in Colombia, and once again in La Paz. People come for a few days, or a week, and end up staying months, years or even the rest of their lives. Here they call it the La Paz Eddy, perhaps because it's the boating community that is particularly susceptible to it.

And so I too swirled around. For over a week I spent my mornings going to the club at the marina, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze with the greyhairs, before heading to the boat to get it ready for the race. Sometimes during the morning coffee hour, when I got tired of talking, I would just watch and listen. Arms are folded over pot bellies, and grey hair sits over wide sunglasses. Snippetts of conversation that I hear range from how much it costs to house prisoners in US prisons "... and that's WITHOUT guards salaries...", to stories from the military "...and I knew right then that I liked him!", to the obligatory boat talk, and where to get Crocs or cheap insulin in La Paz. Afterwards, on the boat, I scrubbed decks, fixed rigging, programmed chartplotters, or whatever needed to be done. I was told that work on boats should only be done with one hand, so there could be a beer in the other, otherwise it would be too much like work. So no matter what I did, it always seemed that the taste of coffee would only just be fading on my tongue as I tasted the first beer of the day.

In the eddy

The club

In the afternoons, I explored the charitable side of La Paz a little. I found an orphanage, Ciudad Los Ninos, run by Father Fernando, which supports itself partly by a printing business that it runs on site. I like this model, as it makes it easy for people to support the kiddies, simply by choosing that place to get their printing done. I also chatted with EPI, or Ecology Project International, who do lots of youth education through excursions, workshops, and school visits. Their focus is on sustainability and the environment, and they are in La Paz partly because of the status the Sea of Cortes has as a marine biodiversity hotspot.

In the evenings I would either hang out with some of the more youthful sailors - I had dinner on a boat one night, other we spent at the local burger joint and sailor hangout, The Shack - or get to know some of the more interesting parts of the La Paz nightlife with a couchsurfing friend, El Chepe. Chepe is a pretty cool cat, an artist who works most of the year on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska, and the rest painting murals in La Paz.

 

El Chepe

Julia

The days would end as they began, at Julia's place, where I was staying. Julia worked at FANLAP, and at the community garden with Joel. She is a truly kind soul, and was happy to have me as long as I needed. Julia's place was only a short bike ride from the marina, and it was a source of fascination for me that between riding along the malecon to the marina, and back again at the end of the day, you could see so many pieces of La Paz that make it interesting.

 

The community garden

You can see fish swimming and jumping in the water everywhere near the shore, and a little further out dolphins and seals make regular appearances. There are tours to see the migrating whales, and whale sharks, and there are beautiful beaches, bays and islands all around. So in addition to the many tourists, La Paz attracts fishermen, sailors, surfers, and biologists alike. There is small but determined band of artists, conservationists, and liberal-minded people, resulting in art hangouts and events, community gardens and the like. Social attractors are at work here too, as people look to escape the high cost of living in other parts of Southern Baja, like Los Cabos. This gives rise to the broad expanses of suburbia far away from the beautiful malecon, where people live under sometimes difficult circumstances. Running water and electricity is not available in some of these areas, while closer to the centre, there is electricity, but running water only every other day, and sometimes only for half a day. Of course, not running water you can drink, because everybody buys their drinking water here (and in all of Baja California). These conditions stand in stark contrast to the resorts and fancy hotels near the water, where electricity and water are always on, and there are even golf courses, well-watered, and maintained bright green. The image of those lush green expanses set against a desert backdrop, for me, really sums up the madness you find in some places in Mexico. This contrast is fuelled by tourism, part foreign, and part local. It's perhaps surprising then, that the mixture of gringo and local Mexican culture is pretty chilled. The gringo presence is significant, just not as obtrusive and warping of the local culture as it is in other places.

As I sit in my chair at the club de cruceros, I wonder if this is the contrasts, the different people that makeup the gringos here. For every one that hasn't bothered to learn Spanish and never leaves the marina, there will be someone who has lived in town for years, speaks fluent Spanish, and works in a charitable or conservation project. Musing on thoughts like this, I lean back in my chair, reach out for my cup of coffee, and let the warm water of La Paz carry me along, with the other flotsam and jetsam, towards Saturday, towards the race.