More Coastal Towns: Merida to Veracruz

Thursday March 10. We left Merida without breakfast and stopped in Campeche for an early lunch. Campeche is a charming old city on the coast dating from the 1500s. It had walls and bastions built to

A street in Campeche

protect it from pirates and the British; remnants of the walls, bastions and gates remain.  We found a little restaurant with a terrace and ordered what they called focacia, but it was really a grilled sandwich. We prowled the streets and walked through the city museum (free) up to the bastion to look out over the city and coast. The shoreline has been filled and developed, so the old city no longer fronts the sea.

We drove the coast road up through Ciudad del Carmen. The coast is very industrialized with off shore oil platforms and the shore side facilities to support them. There is a huge lagoon inshore that is quite pretty. The next stretch of road has an

Off shore oil platforms

inshore lagoon and swamp on both sides and a lots of small settlement right along the road. It was very slow going: Mike counted 30 topes in 5km.    

We reached the town of Frontera late in the afternoon and stopped to ask about a little place further west that showed up one map as Miramar (seaview). We were told it is a beach, with a restaurant (this is important for our beer and ceviche). So we drove there at dusk, down a 5km paved road off the highway, and found that it is indeed a beautiful beach, lined with a dozen or more high-end homes, but no restaurant. There is one public access road at the east end, which is where we parked. The van was instantly filled with viscous mosquitoes, so we closed the doors and unscreened windows and lit up the mosquito coil. Boy does it work! Within minutes our table was littered with mosquito corpses, and presumably the floor too though we couldn’t see well there. After the last of the beach partyers left, I worked up my courage to venture down to the shore for a refreshing little skinny dip in the surf, to wash off the heat of the day. Bug activity had subsided near the van, and there were none at the shore.

Friday March 11. We started the day with a swim (Mike) and a long walk in the surf (Sharman), then a good breakfast of eggs with beans, cheese and salsa in corn tortillas. The days’ drive was incredibly boring: a four-lane divided highway across monotonously flat land through Tabasco into Veracruz. Our occasional views of the coast were dominated by oil rigs and shoreline infrastructure; the cities we passed through were dreary industrial towns. It was hot and windy and getting drier. Mike drove for nine hours straight. I read most of the day. The book is terrific! The Days with Laura Diaz by Carlos Fuentes. Serendipitiously, it is set in part in Veracruz and Xalapa, which is where we are now and going tomorrow.

We ended up in Veracruz, which is not boring. We started at the zocalo and walked the waterfront, starting with the big ships and working our way down to the small fishing pangas and the swimming beach, looking for our fix of ceviche and cerveza.  Just as the rain started we settled on a modest joint across the street from the aquarium that specialized in fish and seafood and had enough customers to look good. The beer was piss water but the ceviche was good: the fish was succulent, with fresh tomatoes, onions and cilantro but not quite enough chilies. The lightning storm ended in time for our walk back. We surveyed the social scene in the zocalo, including the weekly dance adopted from Cuba, then headed out to find the hotel we saw listed on Trip Advisor. But google maps got it wrong, and we spent an hour driving around the wrong part of town before we figured it out. 

Ah, the blessings of a hot shower to wash off three days of sweat, salt and dust!