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- A Little History
- Birds, birds, birds
- Morning Activities
- Our Dinner with Guillermo
- Celebrity Amenties
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Cabo San Lucas: Birds, birds, birds
As I said, our resort is called Playa Grande. It is on the Pacific Ocean and consists of about 200 rooms in the several buildings (8 or 10?) surrounding three swimming pools,
 a hot tub, carp ponds, two restaurants and so forth. Our time-share space is a large studio on the third floor in Building B, with a lovely balcony overlooking the palm trees that surround the pools. The first night there, we were too tired to appreciate much, but we had an absolutely incredible, if expensive, meal at the on-site Buccaneer Restaurant--a better lamb chop than I have ever had in Oregon if that gives you a clue, my heart may belong to Argentina...
But the next morning the vacation really begins! A little before 6:00 am I woke up just as the sun was rising. I’m not an early riser and the time zone is close to Oregon’s (give or take an hour for early Daylight Savings Time), so this is a little unusual for me. But a bird on the balcony twitted my attention, and the sun-rise chorus was well-worth early-morning consciousness. There was an early chirp, pause; then, chirra-chirra; chirp. Then several voices, twee-oh, twee-oh; whick-whick; rrrrich-rrrrich; cheep-cheep-cheep; threep-threep-three-oh, chirp; chirp. After a few minutes, many more, all at once, sleepy and questioning, then vibrant and happy, a little challenge here and there, all of it buoyed by a heavily-felted timpani -- the surf, rolling in and out and pulling the song and the light out for all of us to enjoy. This is the only time of day that all the birds sing together, but it’s enough.
And then, rise from your bed, go onto the balcony and breath the air -- air that hasn’t touched land for thousands of miles until in touches your lungs. Sit for a while and the birds gradually stop serenading and start to go about their business. I forgot my “Birds of Mexico” book, so I just enjoyed the many sizes and colors and various food-gathering techniques. Our studio is at about palm tree height and provided an excellent vantage point for watching. This was adequate entertainment every morning. And when combined with the good coffee that Patsy brought and made every day, pretty much unbeatable,
After watching the birds flit about for a while, I also became aware of humans going about their business. First, across the way, the apartments of those tanned and toned beings who had paid for early morning sun, and, apparently, someone to bring them breakfast on their (much larger) balconies. Ah, the rich folks. Then, on the ground, the various employees, testing the pools and ponds and adding chemicals, scrubbing every trace of bird poop from the walkways, railings and seats, watering the plants and trimming any untidy blooms or branches, raking the sand. Then, the selfish deck-chair bankers. Since this is one of the Spring Break weeks, we are pretty crowded and those grand old American values work themselves out this way. If someone in your group comes down by 7:00 or so every morning and puts out beach towels, s/he can claim as many prime deck-chairs as s/he has towels. The chair occupants don’t have to show up until noon or 3:00 or whenever they feel like it, but the lounge chair is reserved. In the end, this only annoyed us a little bit, because, although the most-coveted seats (wooden with padded cushions) were always taken, we could almost always find an employee who would drag up a plastic lounge chair from the beach and find us a nice umbrella to shade us.
But the deck chair occupants and strollers by are good entertainment too. Many of the young ladies have never heard of skin cancer, or food, as far as I can tell. Any one of them would shame both Zonker or George Hamilton in their tanning primes. Some of these girls are so dark, you really can’t tell if they started out Caucasian or some browner flavor. Each of this species has a nice strut. And a tattoo in the small of ones back seems de rigueur. Well, that and the miniscule bathing suit, of course. Besides these pros, there are lots of young men and women on Spring Break. The ones at our place are well-behaved and pretty-much sober, at least at the times of day that we interact with them. You don’t want to listen too closely to their conversations, though. We watched two young men meet and stop to talk to a young woman. After what looked like a pleasant exchange, each continued on their journey, the boys walking by us, just in time for us to hear, “I tried to have sex with that girl once.” “Oh, really, when?” “Hmm, don’t remember, maybe last summer.”
I know I’m a female and don’t understand, but wouldn’t it be more logical to ask, “How’d it go?” or “What happened?” or “That pretty girl, really?“ or even “Where?” since they were all out away from home, but “When????!!!!” Why does that matter at all? Unless, of course, it was last night, and some follow-up assessment was anticipated…. Well, I avoided hearing distance after that and assumed clever and romantic repartee and more sensitive evaluation of prior encounters. So as not to be disappointed in the yourger generation, you know.
While we’re on birds and birds, I should mention that the first avian I saw in Mexico this time -- I mean besides the ubiquitous raptors, the turkey buzzards and the timeshare buzzards -- was an OSTRICH! We saw it on the ride in from the airport and spent some time afterwards asking people about it but never did learn much about why one poor, single, lonely ostrich would be here. Maybe next trip.
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