Carnaval

Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico

What a blast!

"Carnaval" in Mazatlan is a huge event.  For a city of about 400,000 the population is supposedly closer to 1 million during Carnaval.  People come from all over Mexico to attend this week-long party.  All of the events are very well organized although anything that has a published start time runs strictly on "Mexican" time, which means it will definitely not start before the advertised start time - after that it is anybody's guess.

We joined a few other cruisers to go downtown to an area along the beach known as Olas Altas to view the fireworks.  We took a bus downtown (to El Centro) around 7 PM and had a potato each for supper at a street vendor (Yes, you can make a meal out of the stuffed potatoes), then followed a procession through the streets leading up to the Burning of Bad Humor (Quema Del Mal Humor) at the main venue.  We took a short-cut to buy tickets to the Olas Altas area so we arrived before the actual burning took place.

The Olas Altas venue is more or less a mile long street party with about a dozen stages set up with extremely loud live music on each one, mostly Mexican bands but some rock and roll thrown in for good luck.  Admission is 25 pesos (about 2 dollars) and beer is cheap.  Hard to say how many people were there - I would guess no more than 200,000 or so.  The fireworks are set off from several sites along the sea wall, about 5 feet from the crowd and mostly take place immediately overhead, with the ensuing smoke and falling cinders.  After the 10:30PM start at around 11PM, they lasted about 25 minutes, all set to music blaring from speakers spaced along the wall.

After we left the event around midnight (just as the bands were really getting into gear), we persuaded a bus to take us back to the marina  (the buses are basically private ventures at night).

The next day, we had tickets to a banquet and some bleachers for viewing the parade.  We left around 2PM and had a nice buffet dinner before the 5:30PM parade got going around 6:30PM,  This is probably the most anticipated event at Carnaval, the crowds along the Malecon started gathering the night before.  The security was high, especially around the small concentration of "gringos" around the hotel that hosted the banquet.  A bit of an over-reation as a result of some bad publicity about the violence in Mazatlan, scaring the tourists away.

The crowds were very well-behaved, not nearly as wild as we were expecting, just families out to watch a parade like in every other city in the world - except that there was a huge number of them.  The parade route is about 5 miles long and every inch of it is crowed with people.  Lots of vendors selling Carnaval masks and novelties and lots of Pacifico tents selling beer.  It seems as if Pacifico (the local brewery) is the biggest sponsor for Carnaval, which tells you where the money is in these hard economic times.

One thing that was very different from any parade that we have attended before is the fact that it is all done at night, with the floats all lit up and fireworks going off sporadically.  And the floats were spectacular - a lot of work and imagination goes into each one.  The theme this year is "The return of the muses", so the name of the game was music, a little heavier on "The Beatles" than I would have expected, which is OK with me.  All in all, we had a great time and are sure glad we decided to stick around for Carnaval.

Back on the boat, the refrigerator is working fine, if a little noisy; the sink drain is draining and, after a day of labour, I have managed to get the old water heater out of its compartment - had to cut it into pieces to get it out as it appeared it must have gone in before the cockpit drains were put in, or else I missed something.  We are not sure what we are going to do about it now; lots of cruisers here do not have a water heater and don't miss it - if the summers are as warm as they say, we probably won't really need it either.  We may just postpone the decision for a while and contemplate the extra storage space we could have instead.

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