Sylvie's Travels Home

February 28, 29 and March 1st, 2024

We packed our bags for our escapade with Mario and Josée, went to say goodbye to Alain, Diane and their crew since they were leaving before our return then left around 10:30am, destination Santa Maria del Oro. 

We took the new highway to the last available exit at the moment and continued on the old much slower and sinuous route 200 through the mountains. We arrived in Compostela 2 1/2 hrs later and found a cute restaurant to have lunch at. We introduced our friends to queso fundido. They loved it. They also loved their chicken enchiladas. Our chicken dish was a little dry. 

We continued on our journey and the drive was just as slow. It seemed that they don’t know how to build a straight road in Mexico. My theory is it’s to stop people from speeding. They have multiple speed bumps in every towns to control speeding so maybe twists and turns everywhere else have the same results? Besides giving me carsickness? I digress…

We arrived in Santa Maria del Oro or Samao for short, at 2:30pm local time (3:30pm PV time) and it took us more than 30 minutes to make it to our resort which was only 3 miles away, because the road was in such bad shape. The resort was really beautiful, right on a big crater lagoon. 

The cabin we had rented didn’t have air conditioning in the upstairs bedroom as stated in the Booking dot com listing so we asked them to show us another option. It was another cabin, a bit smaller but with AC in all 3 bedrooms. Instead of a big living room with a fireplace, we had a smaller living room but we had a kitchen. We took it. They gave us a credit of 5852 pesos ($343usd) to be used at the resort. 

We went to have a drink on the small terrace outside the restaurant, came back to the cabin then the 4 of us played a game of dice. We went for dinner and 3 of us tried the regional specialty, the chicharron de pescado or fried fish. It was very dry. I wasn’t a fan. It was very quiet, as we were the only guests there, so we all slept great. 

Thursday morning, after breakfast, I had an 1 1/2 hrs massage in our cabin while the others went to find a waterfall. My knees were still hurting so I had decided the day before that I would stay behind. I had a wonderful massage. 

The others came back around 1pm. They had just been driving around after all, discovering little villages instead of hiking to the waterfall as planned because they had been told it was probably dried out and they would have had to walk 2.5 miles each way to find out. 

After my massage, I had planned on sitting by the pool but there was a lot of activity happening so I just stayed in. When the others arrived, we all realized that the pool area wasn’t accessible. A big truck had arrived and delivered piles of panels, tables and chairs. Workers were climbing in trees installing a ton of lights. We decided to go out to have lunch since it was getting very noisy. We complained at the front desk that they had not told us about an event happening during our visit. They decided to give us another small credit of 400 pesos ($25usd). Yesterday we had the whole resort for ourselves and now they were getting ready for a wedding. 

We had a nice lunch at a fish restaurant on the water.  On our return, we noticed that they had started installing panels over the pool! Sooo…yep…no pool for us. Banging all day, no pool to swim in or hanging out at, lots of credit money to use and we were leaving the next morning after our included breakfast.  We hung out in our cabin then went to the bar and had a drink while playing dice. We all had burgers for dinner and crepes for dessert. We even took a bottle of wine because we needed to use our credit.

Friday morning, we were about ready to go for breakfast at 8am, when we noticed lots regional and local police, army people with face masks, some in camouflage, with machine guns, bodyguards with walkie talkies, official looking people with lanyard and photographers. Speculations galore was going on between the 4 of us. Was it a cartel wedding? Some government people or a big star’s wedding? We were almost afraid to leave our cabin but we wanted breakfast. The waitress told us to sit either outside or upstairs. We sat outside. We were trying not to stare but it was quite intimidating to have scary men with machine guns standing 10 feet away from us. Finally, an important looking woman and her mean looking bodyguards arrived and she sat at a table inside with other important looking people.

We realized that this was just another event, a political breakfast at our resort. WTF! We were at that beautiful resort but not able to enjoy it at all. It was the most stressful breakfast I have ever had. Once the politicians and their entourage (we found out that one of the lady was the mayor of Tepic and the other lady was the President of one of the municipalities) were sitting for breakfast, some of the police and guards sat at the 2 tables next to us to have their own breakfast. A bunch more were still walking around, making sure the area was secure. The waitress brought us cake on the house afterward, I guess for our troubles. We took a few pictures hiding behind trees, crawling under bushes, swinging from palm trees and luckily were not caught. We finally left, which happened to be at the same time as everyone else, and we made sure they were all ahead of us.

We stopped in the town, walked around and took a few pictures and started our 2 hour drive to Rincon de Guayabitos to have lunch at Chicken Boy. Well… of course, something else had to happen. We were driving through the mountain and traffic was slow and finally totally stopped. After 30 minutes, Pogo flew his drone and confirmed our suspicions that there was an accident ahead. A big 18 wheeler truck was down the side of the mountain. We were stuck for 1 1/2 hrs. We made it to Chicken Boy at 4pm, an hour before closing time. We devoured 2 chickens in just a few minutes. We then went to Buonissimo for ice cream but they said they could not serve us for 15 minutes because the 7 employees were counting the cash register…We gave up and drove back to Nuevo and went to the Buonissimo in the Paradise Mall. We got home at 7:30pm (8:30pm for us) just in time to catch the end of a colorful sunset. We won’t forget our little vacation for a long time. We certainly made the most of it and had some great laughs, some more nervous than others, but still had a great time with our friends!