April 4, Saturday:

Around four in the morning the bus reached Huatulco. The driver repeated the name of this Mecca by the sea, 'Wa-tool-co' (the next Cancun, if government plans pan out) and unsealed the doors of the bus. It didn't look like much: a dark crossroads, a few palm trees and a half-lit station that was being unlocked by a sleepy stationmaster, but you could smell the ocean, and after the nine-hour ride from San Cristobal the scent of salt and frangipani hung in the humid night air like a promise.

It was the start of Holy Week, Mexico's Spring Break, when the entire population heads for the coast. A sizable cross-section of the middle class got off here. Mothers with half a dozen kids in tow, teenagers and grandparents hurriedly gathered up their things and piled off the bus. I watched as the hold was emptied -- the big blue bag containing my surfboards remained safely stowed under the bus -- and then looked around. Harry, the photographer who had accompanied me to Palenque and Tikal, was still asleep in his seat. Otherwise, the bus was empty.

Further along Highway 200, morning overtook us in the brown hills of Oaxaca. The two-lane macadam looked like a pale ribbon winding through the thorny scrub. Beside the road, breakfast fires were already burning at the few isolated dirt farms we passed. Sleep eluded me.

The previous morning I had been awoken by shots. I could hear the pop...pop of what sounded like rifle fire through the thick walls of our hotel. Dressing quickly, I ran across the courtyard and unbolted the heavy oak door. The streets of San Cristobal de Las Casas were silent. Four years ago, the Zapatista rebellion had begun in this Spanish colonial town. Signs of the struggle were still evident: bullet holes in the walls, graffiti -- EZLN todos con la paz -- and the ubiquitous T-shirts emblazoned with the pipe-smoking image of Subcommandante Marcos. A few Indians juddered to work over cobbled streets on their bicycles, knit caps pulled low over their ears to ward off the dawn chill. A woman swept the sidewalk in front of her shop -- nothing to suggest the panic of a city in revolt. Then I heard it again, overhead. There, against the deep blue of the sky, I saw two faint lines of smoke punctuated by tiny explosions. Pop...pop. Bottle-rockets. Kids were setting off bottle-rockets to mark the beginning of Semana Santa, the Holy Week.

April 5, Palm Sunday, Puerto Escondido: The surfers have abandoned Playa Zicaleta. Midmorning and the sun already feels as heavy as water and the onshore winds have made riding the waves untenable.

Harry and I went in for a swim. The pull and force of the water is phenomenal. Waves rise here out of open ocean, sometimes traveling thousands of miles from winter storms in the Southern Hemisphere as barely perceptible bands of energy until they encounter the sandbar that stretches the length of Playa Zicaleta and rear up, drawing the water ahead of them into precipitous walls that pitch forward into shallow water and land with a thump so violent that the tremor can be felt hundreds of yards inland. Diving beneath one of these monsters is like skimming the underside of a thundercloud. There is the roiling light and dark of unsettled water, the roar like wind in a canyon, and the ominous low growl as the collapsing wave unloads its weight on the sand.

That evening I walked out to check the surf. The winds were still onshore and swell has some size -- maybe double overhead on the sets -- but it was coming from the northwest, which caused the waves break in 300-yard-long sections -- still unrideable.

Returning from my walk, I noticed a large crowd clustered around something on the beach. At the center of the crowd was a young man, sprawled on the sand in wet bathing trunks. His face was as white as paper and his lips were blue. A surfer kneeled over him, applying CPR, but it was too late. He was already dead.

Later that evening, in the bar overlooking the beach, Harry and I drank margaritas while the sun dropped into the ocean. "L'hora felis," Harry said. "Happy yet?"

"Maybe another round," I suggested.

When the drinks came, Harry raised his glass. "Here's to keeping air in your lungs."

Good Friday, April 10: In the mornings at Puenta Escondida the wind blowing off the land carried the smoke of brush fires. It was the dry season, when farmers in the region burned the hillsides to clear new plots to plant. This year was drier than most and some of the fires had gotten out of control. One morning a light haze of smoke hung over the water that set all the surfers in the lineup to coughing and hacking.

On this morning the winds are light and the smoke is not so bad. The crowd is small, too. There are only three other surfers in the water and although the swell has diminished, the sets still deliver some fine, overhead waves. I'm riding my 7'6" and it seems like just the thing for these waves. I can sit a few yards off the point and still pick off the big ones. The rides are so fun and fast that it's tempting to charge all the way into the inside section, where the waves wall up and pitch over in shallow water. It's a bad idea, because after the fleeting thrill of watching the crest of the wave fold over and envelop you, you are dashed to the sand and thumped by the succeeding waves. I race in for two of these scenic beatings before I get tired and begin to pull off the waves early.

On the long walk back to the hotel, I notice that someone has erected a shrine of palm fronds, flowers and a card table in the sand before the low dunes. On the card table is a picture of Jesus in a gilt frame. Grace on earth.

This is the routine that I've fallen into: up with the birds, drink some water and grab my board for the walk to the point; surf in the morning offshores and walk back along the beach to the hotel; have some breakfast and coffee then retire to a hammock or a shady chair by the pool to write and read and smoke. Sometimes in the afternoons I would walk to town on some errand or another, sometimes not.

Harry left midweek. Not being a surfer, he couldn't appreciate the satisfying monotony of this routine. He went back to New York to be with his girlfriend and to look for work. I have no pressing work and no girlfriend, which is a good part of the reason I am here. It was like this: I had something precious once, but I let it go.

And the routine suits me. A few weeks ago, in the Yucatan, I traded my digital watch for a straw hat. Now the sun governs my days, which is a kind of grace. Rabelais said, "Never will I subject myself to the hours; the hours are made for man and not man for the hours." I've fled the Kingdom of the hours for the land of the days.

Puerto Escondido was once a surfer-hippie paradise, a perfect little fishing village with a tiny sheltered bay and, further south, a beachbreak with enough size and power to warrant comparisons with the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii. In the 1980s the surf magazines put the "Mexpipe" on the map, and now it has an international jetport and an international parade of the young and the beautiful.

I've settled into a little room in a big hotel south of Zicaleta. Although the hotel aspires to a be a Mexican Xanadu with its profusion of tile and rococo details, it is not devoid of life. In my room there is a busy coming and going of tiny red ants. One afternoon I watched as a gang of them carted off the carcass of a roach. They carried it up and away diagonally across the wall. Last night I discovered a scorpion on the wall near the bureau. I swatted him with my sandal and then flattened him to the floor with a second stroke. No doubt the ants will take care of him too.

For some reason, I found it difficult to leave Puerto Escondido. The surf was good, I was comfortable in my routine, and I was reluctant to set out on my own. Somehow, I let two tickets lapse before I finally boarded a bus to Acapulco at dawn on the morning after Easter.

This bus was a semidirecto on the Estrella Blanca line. The Mexican government subsidizes many of the bus lines since it is the only form of transportation in much of the country, consequently Mexican buses are cheap and go almost anywhere.

Semidirecto means if there's even a semi semblance of space, we'll stop to pick you up. Less than two miles out of Puerto Escondido we stopped again to pick up a few tradesmen bound for Santa Rosa.

The road gradually pulled away from the coast and into the brown foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur. This country is exceptionally dry: one spark is all it would take to set the scrub ablaze for miles around.

This section of the Cartera Costera is poorly maintained. The switch backs through the hill country are relentless and every half-mile, it seems, there is another detour around another washout. The State of Oaxaca has deployed many men to fix these roads, but has provided few tools. In the US the construction of a short bridge with a conduit beneath it would require earth movers, pile drivers and cranes; in Oaxaca the highway department simply dispatches a dozen men with shovels and a wheelbarrow. Of course, there is no money for things like bulldozers, and there is a great need for steady employment. So the highway exists in a constant state of not-yet-finishedness that characterizes many projects, both public and private in Mexico.

Harry called scenes like this "trash heap Mexico." It's the cliché where things are half-broken or half-fixed, houses, lives and ambitions are in a general state of disrepair and every roadside is liberally sprinkled with trash. But most things in Mexico work about as well as they need to. In a land where nothing can be taken for granted, the inhabitants get good at improvising.

Just east of the turnoff for Punta Maldonado we had a blowout. I was reading about Steinbeck's trip to Baha ("We love Carta Blanca beer") when I was startled by a noise like a pistol shot. One of the double rear tires had blown and, after a brief inspection, our driver turned down the ranchero music to a polka-tinged murmur and limped the bus along at 20 miles per hour until a repair shop could be found.

The vulcanizadora, or tire shop, that sat at the crossroads was a modest affair. It was an open-sided hut planted in the dust at the roadside, old tires were used as weights to hold the sheet tin roof to its frame. Across the way, at the entrance to the Maldonado road, a truck driver had parked his two-ton and spread a mat in its shade. The trucker was fast asleep on the mat.

Luckily, the shop had a tire to match the one that had blown. A teenage boy and a one-armed man rolled out the replacement tire. They were followed by an old lady in a flower-print dress carrying a length of pipe longer than she was and a star wrench. While ten men stood watching in the noonday sun, the one-armed man and his teenage assistant pulled off the two rear tires, replaced the bad tire, and put the two massive wheels back in place. The whole operation took about an hour.

...........................

In the dry season water in the broad rivers flowing to the sea is reduced to rivulets that pool between boulders and sandy shoals. Local women set up laundry operations on these shoals to wash clothes in the brown water and exchange the news of the day while their children splash nearby. From the bridges of Route 200, the brightly colored clothes are hung on sticks or draped over bushes to dry look like enormous flowers sprung up on the riverside.

Beside the de riguer portrait of the Virgin of Guadeloupe, the bus driver has built a little shrine of family pictures around his rearview mirror. This driver has also fitted an electronic box with three preprogrammed sounds next to the wheel. Two of the sounds, which are broadcast outside of the bus with a loudspeaker, are warning beeps; the third is a wolf-whistle that the driver employs whenever he sees a halfway pretty girl by the side of the road. Most women ignore this homage, a few wave and one brazen girl strikes a pose and smiles. All these drivers have their own thing, the signature flourish of el cabellero de camino real. One driver on a night crossing of the Yucatan had framed his windshield with Christmas lights and recorded a bit of opera into the noise box. At the approach of another truck, the bus driver flicked on the Christmas and cabin lights, played his aria and made gesture with his hand that looked like the Barber of Seville brandishing his razor. He probably appears in fervid trucker's dreams, rushing at them out of the darkness lit up like a carnival fortuneteller and grinning his maniacal grin. This constitutes fame on the road.

We made Acapulco by late afternoon. The airport where I planned to rent a car was all the way across town. I retrieved my surfboards from the bay under the bus and went looking for a cab. The young woman working at the cab stand took one look at the 8-foot long blue bag hanging from my shoulder and laughed. There was some discussion among the cabbies as to who would take me to the airport, but at last a stout fellow stepped forward and led me to his car. There was no way the board bag would fit inside the tiny sedan, so we lashed it to the roof with a scrap of rope and some webbing I had in my bag. When we got underway I was glad that I had tied the boards down tight. My cabby raced along the serpentine road that flanks the cliffs above Acapulco's azure bay with the supreme confidence of one who has made peace with his god.

With the holiday just passed, the car rental agents at the airport were eager to bargain. Renting a car in Mexico is usually an expensive proposition, except in the capital district and the large tourist resorts where there is enough competition to drive the prices down. I drove away with a Geo Metro hatchback for about $36 US per day. And with the passenger seat set back, the boards fit inside the car.

Leaving Acapulco was more difficult than arriving. I had no detailed city map, but as with most towns on the Pacific coast, if you keep the ocean in sight as you make your way north you will eventually return to the Cartera Costera, the only road between towns. Unlike all the other towns on the coast, Acapulco is enormous. From the dentate smile of high-rise hotels that line the bay to the tumble-down barrios that carpet the hills, Acapulco is an endless nightmare monument to the almighty tourist dollar.

It wasn't always like this. Spanish galleons first dropped anchor in the Bahai de Acapulco in 1512, just seven years before Hernan Cortes mounted the invasion that would topple the Aztec empire. By 1530 the Spanish had built a road from Veracruz, on Mexico's Caribbean coast, through what is now Mexico City to Acapulco, in effect opening the route to the East sought by Columbus. Acapulco remained an important trading center until Mexico's War of Independence, which began in 1810. After commerce with Spain's colonies in China and the Philippines stopped, Acapulco became what it had been before the Spanish arrived, a quiet fishing village. It wasn't until 1927, when a paved road was built from the nation's capitol to Acapulco, that the town was reborn as a tourist destination. Once FONATUR, the government tourism agency, took over development of Acapulco in the 1950s the city became the prototype for the other Mexican mega-resorts: Puerto Vallarta, Cozumel, Cancun, Ixtapa and now Huatulco.

By nightfall I'd found my way out of the maze of the city's streets to the Pie de la Cuesta, a beach resort just north of Acapulco. At the end of the strand was a quiet little auberge called the Hotel Evasion run by an avuncular woman from Quebec. Mexico is full of Canadian refugees from winter. Some, like this woman and her Quebecois partner, stay to make new lives south of the border.

The road to the north of Pie de la Cuesta winds through orange plantations, banana groves, cornfields and vast tracts of coconut palms. Copra, as they say, is king in these parts. Trucks heaped high with coconuts trundle along Highway 200 to regional processing centers where the milk, oil and meat of the coconuts are extracted and packaged for shipping.

About 80 kilometers north of Acapulco a small sign points to the village of Tetitlan. Tetitlan is a town of four cobblestone streets beside the Rio Tecpan. It's a quiet place where the arrival of a strange car is well noted by the villagers lounging beneath shady verandahs along the main street. At last I arrived at a fork in the road and stopped to consider. A man passing by glanced at the gringo and the surfboards and pointed to the left. "La Playa," he explained.

The beach was another three kilometers by way of a rough dirt track through the coconut palms. The track terminated in a clearing beside a green lagoon. A large gray truck filled with soldiers was parked there. The men sat sullenly in the truck looking out at the water where a soldier in full battle dress struggled to stay afloat and push a 55-gallon drum across the surface of the lagoon. His commanding officer stood nearby, cradling an M-16 in his arms. The soldiers must have known that rivers and lagoons in this part of Mexico are favorite feeding grounds for caiman, some of which grow to be 14 feet long. Certainly, the man rolling the barrel looked concerned.

A teenage boy stood in his boat watching these maneuvers. He was the ferryman; for two pesos he took me across the lagoon, motorboat cutting a bubbling white swath through the floating green carpet of lily pads and stirring herons to flight. I had some concern about leaving a car full of gear unattended, but with a platoon of soldiers parked beside it, there seemed little cause for worry.

The beach at Tetitlan is little more than a sandbar with a few palapas, or thatch-roof huts, planted upon it. I followed my boatman to one palapa where a rainbow of hammocks swung in the shade around a couple of picnic tables and a barrel-shaped woman was tending to a trio of kettles steaming over an open fire.

Beyond the fishing boats pulled up to the high-tide line and the nets laid out on the sand to dry, the Pacific was placid. Neatly formed three-foot high waves broke on the beach. Beneath the palapas I could see a half-dozen boogie boards scattered about, but no surfboards. Tetitlan looked like a sponger's wave -- short, steep and fast. More swell might provide a few good tube rides, but waves of any real size would surely close this beach down.

After a meal of fresh fried snapper, rice and cervescas I asked the boatman to give me a lift back to the road head. The army truck was still there and, I was glad to see, so was my car. The soldiers looked more glum than before. Many of the men sat in wet uniforms while they watched another unfortunate recruit do the barrel roll.

Back on Highway 200 I skirted the touristed Zihuatenejo and Ixtapa, got lost in the port town of Lazaro Cardenas, and arrived at Playa Azul late in the afternoon. Playa Azul is the Jersey Shore of the Pacific Coast. It's a popular spot for families with a few mediocre hotels and a string of restaurants that comprise a sort of boardwalk alongside a broad, flat beach.

For a little less than $20 I found a room in the Hotel Maria Theresa. It was a family style place with big, clean rooms, hot showers, a fair restaurant, a pool and something I hadn't seen since Mexico City: television.

Although the waves looked like slop, I grabbed my gear and walked down to the beach anyway. After two days of driving, I just needed to get wet. Playa Azul isn't really a surfing beach. While that section of coast is visited by some large swell, the topography of this beach turns it into soup -- broad bands of white water that act as a barrier to any surfer who would try to ride the misshapen green waves that break on the outside bar. Punching through the soup took a good half hour and the swell on the outside bar was disorganized at best. I rode one lumpy surge until it collapsed and then bellied in on the foam. It's strange, but even an awful session like that provides some restorative charge, as if a brief immersion in the ur element was all that's needed. Some surfers consider these training sessions, time spent preparing for real swell. Others wax New Age, talking about the massive negative ion charge one gets from moving water or the spiritual connection they feel with the sea. I don't know. Even a bad session leaves you with an abiding calm that you can feel deep in your bones.

That night I watched television alone in my room. There were the evening soap operas that are so popular in Mexico, the news, which is much more comprehensive and international in its outlook than American news programs, and there was Fox TV. Mr. Murdoch has been busy expanding his empire into Latin America with Spanish-dubbed versions of Fox's American programming. Flick on any TV in Mexico and you can stay abreast of murky plot developments in the X-Files, marvel at Homer's transformation in Los Simpsons and cheer along as an army of flack-jacketed enforcers trample the civil rights of common citizens in the innumerable video-verite cop shows.

In his long complaint about Mexico, The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene wrote, "I loathed Mexico -- but there were times when it seemed as if there were worse places." That was 1938 and Greene was referring to the burgeoning consumer nation on Mexico's northern border. Sixty years on America has yet to claim Mexico's imagination, but our religion of manufactured desire and purchased gratification has all but converted this country.

It was raining the next day when I got up. April 15, tax day in America, another day on the road here in Mexico. I had a breakfast of scrambled eggs, fried hot dogs and weak coffee at the hotel restaurant by the pool while I went over the map. With luck I would get through the states of Michoacan and Colima before arriving in the town of Barra Navidad by nightfall.

It was a relief to get out of Playa Azul and back on the Cartera Costera. The highway sticks close to the coast throughout Michoacan and each curve unveiled another deserted point break or barreling beach break. I stopped at a few spots like Las Pensas to check the surf, but chose to keep moving.

North of Coleta de Campos, the road ran into the hills. Like sections of Route 1 in California, Route 200 cuts a defiant line across the mountains that rise from the blue Pacific. Hairpin turns, dazzling views and rock falls were the milestones on this section of highway.

In 1967 Peter Dixon wrote, "From Mazatlan, where Mexico's western surf begins, to the Guatemalan border there are more than 2,000 miles of Pacific Ocean-fronting coastline. And with the exception of known old-favorite surfing spots such as Mazatlan, San Blas, and Puerto Vallarta the whole long mainland coast has yet to be explored by surfers."

Before Route 200, the drive from Puerto Vallarta to San Blas took three days over dirt roads that wound through inland hills. Now it can be done in three hours. South of Manzanillo, all the way to Acapulco, there were no roads at all.

"The lack of coast-following roads," Dixon noted in his book Where The Surfers Are, "along the beaches of central Mexico limits the exploring surfer to about 150 miles -- unless he packs his board on a burro and sets off down the beach on foot."

A burro would have a tough time in this country. In the dry season these hills are brown and the rivers only sandy pathways leading to the sea. The coastal range is covered with low, thorny scrub. Most of the trees have lost their leaves and a few show an autumnal blaze of red or yellow.

Towns are few and far between here. Many of the settlements clustered in the river valleys are without electricity or phones. Grinding around one switch back in second gear, I passed two boys on a horse traversing the road. Brothers, perhaps, doubled up on the animal's broad back, machetes slapping in their sheaths at its sides. They clopped along the pavement for a ways before disappearing down one of the dirt trails that cross the road, their dog trailing behind.

At a wide spot in the road called Efimero I stopped for a hitchhiker. "Where are you going?" I asked. "North," he replied.

He told me his name was Jesse and he came from Illinois. He had long blond hair rolled into dreadlocks and a bracelet around one ankle. His luggage consisted of a backpack held together with shipping twine and a mandolin in a colorful patchwork bag.

There were other hitchhikers at Efimero (NOTE: "Efimero" and a few of the other place names in this article are fictitous -- why hasten the decline of such lovely places?) going south. A handsome German couple in tattered clothes waited by the side of the road. They also had backpacks.

This tiny fishing village, along with maybe two dozen other places scattered throughout Mexico and Central America, has been added to the international backpacker's circuit. Places like Tulum, Palenque and San Cristobal attract a multinational crew of youth in transit. They are the advanced scouts for the army of travel consumers that will surely come later. Stay on the circuit long enough and you will see the same faces over and over again.

On closer inspection, I realized that I had met Jesse before. One drunken evening in Palenque, while discussing flying dreams with a pair of American archeologists, this dreadlocked kid appeared to tell us about his own nocturnal aviation and his theory of lucid dreaming. "All you have to do," Jesse explained then, "is to tell yourself to look at you hand. If you can do that, then you're in control of the dream."

We stopped for lunch in Cuyutlan, in the state of Colima. Cuyutlan and the industrial port town of Manzanillo to the north were recently bypassed by a the only multilane superhighway on the Pacific Coast, Mex 110. Cuyutlan, however, retains its dumpy charm; merchants hawk their cheesy beach towels from open storefronts on the main street and bicycle vendors still sell hot cobs of corn from their rolling tubs.

There was another reason for stopping at Cuyutlan -- an old legend about a green wave. In 1964, George Van Noy wrote in SurfGuide magazine, "I have heard of the place where the Ola Verde comes one day in spring, and such is the height of the wave that the sun is no longer seen save blue-green through the eye of the wave. Finally the wave can grow no larger and it begins to collapse onto the hot, black sand at the edge of the jungle." That wave was supposed to come ashore at Cuyutlan in April.