Acapulco

Thursday 3rd December 1987

We called it “a night” at 06:00 hrs. and said “adios” to the sleepy receptionist who told us to get the Metro or a taxi to the Southern Bus Terminal. Metro Tasqueña also serves Mexico City's southern bus depot, which serves important cities like Cuernavaca, Acapulco, Taxco, and the rest of southern Mexico. We wanted to get to Acapulco.

Once again, we joined the twilight world of the predawn Mexican workers in Mexico City, sleepily heading for their days work. We were allowed into the Metro at Metro Revolución Station, despite our baggage which would have been prohibited at a later hour.

The Mexico City Metro (Spanish: Metro de la Ciudad de México), officially called Sistema de Transporte Colectivo, often shortened to STC, is a rapid transit system that serves the metropolitan area of Mexico City, including some municipalities in Mexico State. It is the second largest metro system in North America after the New York City Subway. The inaugural STC Metro line was 12.7 kilometres (7.9 miles) long, serving 16 stations, and opened to the public on 4 September 1969.

We found the Metro to be a clean efficient system with a brilliant air-conditioning system. For 50 Mexican Pesos each we were whisked quickly to Metro Tasqueña at the southern limit of the city where we found the bus terminus.

Here we paid 10,315 Mexican Pesos for tickets for the Estrella de Oro Line coach leaving at 07:45 hrs. We had a good mixed breakfast at the self-service café affair in the terminal and then climbed aboard the streamlined metallic bus. I was not too keen on one component of Mexican breakfast fare, the frijoles (refried beans) which looked like a glob of diarrhoea on the plate.

The driver was a maniac but appeared to be pretty standard in overtaking at high speed on blind bends. We drove for six hours through mountainous terrain covered with scrub bushes and Mammillaria Elongata or Lady Finger cacti in warm sunny weather.

We passed several roadside outposts with lean-to shops offering all services from food to motor parts. We stopped at Cuernavaca, which is the capital and largest city of the state of Morelos in Mexico. The city is located around a 90 min drive south of Mexico City using the Federal Highway 95D. The name "Cuernavaca" is an euphonism derived from the Nahuatl toponym "Cuauhnāhuac" and means "surrounded by or close to trees".

We also stopped at a Drugs Traffic Control Post along the way. At one point we passed a vast graveyard of smashed up cars and vehicles including a few Acapulco Express coaches like the one we were on, with mashed in fronts!

At Acapulco we wound up through a vast sprawl of concrete block houses and apartments before descending into the almost totally enclosed bay. The buildings improved towards the seafront and the multistorey hotels disappeared, Costa del Sol-like, into the distance.

Acapulco de Juárez, commonly called Acapulco, is a city and major seaport in the state of Guerrero on the Pacific coast of Mexico, 380 kilometres (240 miles) south of Mexico City. Acapulco is located on a deep, semi-circular bay and has been a port since the early colonial period of Mexico's history.

The city is one of Mexico's oldest beach resorts, which came into prominence in the 1940s through the 1960s as a getaway for Hollywood stars and millionaires.

We got off the coach and staggered, sweating to an ill-defined bus stop across the road and paid 100 Mexican Pesos each for a ride to the atmospheric tree shaded Zócalo Square with it’s squat white cathedral. This was the Catholic Cathedral, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, which rests at the end of it's traditional town square, the Zócalo. Despite the age of Acapulco, the church wasn't built until the 1930s and so lacks much of the glorious colonial architecture of Mexican cathedral.

There are some fountains and wonderful large Banyan Trees with immense root systems here in the square where local people gather at night. From here we found the Hotel del Patio who provided a friendly reception and a basic ill-secured double room for 800 Mexican Pesos. The hotel had definitely seen better days and had lost most of it’s custom to the new modern tower block hotels.

We went out, after a much-needed shower, into the heat of the afternoon for a couple of beers. We drank Dos Equis or 2X which is billed as refreshing, crisp, golden, lager style beer brewed in Mexico, before taking a stroll along the harbour front.

We sat in the sun and watched water skiers and parachutists being towed by speed boats in the distance as a few less-affluent locals swam off the rocks.

When we returned to the hotel, we found some sort of fiesta rehearsal underway with much lively Mexican music, but few people in attendance. The hotel manager forecast delights to come from our new neighbours in the next room who he said were big breasted American girls!

I have just begun to stop dripping with sweat, lying here topless under the rotary ceiling fan. The music is blaring outside. The town has a really festive holiday atmosphere. We went for a short stroll through the zócalo where relaxed locals loafed under the banyan trees and ended up in the “El Puerto del Sol” bar. The locals burst into impromptu song as we got steadily drunker and my melancholy mood dispersed.

Some fat and eccentric (or possibly normal) Americans left the pack of tourists and joined in drinking at the bar. It closed at 21:00 hrs. and we paid for our 12 bottles of “Dos Equis” before hammering down a quick meal and returning to the hotel. “Inglaterra esta lejos,” said our waitress (England is a long way away).

Back at the “Hotel del Patio” a ladies Hen Night was in full swing with old biddies and young muchachas salsa-ing with gay abandon. We stood on our first floor balcony overlooking the party in the atrium and the Governor, who seemed to have taken a shine to us, sneaked us up drinks and offered to wake up the American chicas next door for us.

The Governor continued to ply us with “El Presidente” brandy and Coca Cola to make sure that we got well pissed before going to bed. Declan didn’t quite make it to the bog (toilet), giving him some early morning washing of his urine-soaked clothing.