Loud in Los Mochis...

We left La Paz on a ferry across the Sea of Cortez to the Mexican mainland. True to form the lounge on the ship continued the trend of Mexican buses for showing hideously inappropriate films, treating us to a helping of tasteless splattergore involving reality TV show contestants being hunted down in grisly fashion by inbred cannibalistic hill-billies. Fun for all the family. The ship was also patrolled by a phalanx of armed security guards causing me to nervously ponder exactly what sort of trouble they might be expecting at sea. Passengers rioting in disgust at the choice of films perhaps?

In Los Mochis we made the unfortunate choice of the Hotel Los Arcos as our place to stay. Our room was clean enough but the window had been taped and boarded up so there was no natural light and it reeked of cheap Brut-like aftershave so was a bit like sleeping in Henry Cooper’s armpit. The shower head had a built in heating element to warm the water which was wired to the mains in suitably quirky Mexican fashion. What safety-paranoid idiot said electricity and water shouldn’t mix anyway?

An alarm bell should have rung in our heads when we saw the bar next door as we arrived: ‘Chicass & Beer’. The clientele seemed to be having a contest to see who could make the loudest, most irritating noise throughout the night. The competition was intense, early contenders started on slightly obvious tactics such as playing Mexican pop at speaker-fuckingly loud volumes on the stereo of your parked car, demonstrating your new air-horn to your friends and shouting to people 500m away. This initial promise was trumped later by what sounded like two guys ululating into a microphone followed by the enormous crash of a heavy object being thrown from an upstairs window into the street below. The winner by a clear lead, for sheer bollockular bravado alone, was the silencer-free motorbike that was ridden repeatedly at high, roaring revs along the pavement outside our room. The challenge was concluded just before 3.40am when everyone seemed to have had enough and finally fucked off home. Thank. God.

I could try and blame sleeplessness for the poverty of our Spanish but this is more down to cloth-eared incompetence than disturbed nights and exhaustion. I have at least managed to establish that ‘cuevas’ are caves and not, as I’ve been led to believe in my first 35 years of life, a light cheesy snack. Thanks to the gravely tones of Michel Thomas we can conjure up enough ‘survival’ Spanish to ask directions, book accommodation and shop politely. The only downside is our superficially fluent delivery of the basics tends to open the flood gates of conversation with perennially garrulous Mexicans leaving us utterly befuddled and gaping fish-like in confusion.

My response is usually to try and answer the question I think they have asked. Fi mistook this for innate linguistic talent rather than the seat of the pants blagging it quite blatantly is. At breakfast the other morning a Stetson’d hombre greeted us and, we guessed, asked where we were from. He followed this up with, I assumed, a question about how long we were visiting Mexico for. ‘Dos mesas’* I confidently replied.

*’Dos mesas’ = ‘Two tables’ (The word for months is actually 'meses')