Volume
92
Carnival in Mazatlán
March 2003
I can’t tell you how many places I’ve read that Mazatlán
Carnival is the third largest in the world. Well, I don’t
believe it. Perhaps it had something to do with my mood, which
was glum because Don was still in the States at his watermaker
school, and I was looking at it solo. Or perhaps it had something
to do with the weather, which was stubbornly gray and chilly. How
can you be “HOT, HOT, HOT!” when it’s NOT, NOT,
NOT!?????
Perhaps Mazatlán’s Carnival is the third largest
in terms of people who come to participate? Mexicans do love a
fiesta, and people did travel here from all over the country to
drink and dance. But I fear I told everyone and anyone within earshot,
that Mazatlán’s Carnival doesn’t come anywhere
close to Trinidad’s. I’m sorry, I should be open minded,
but it just didn’t measure up.
Here were the most noticeable
differences. The Food Fair, scheduled to be down in the Plaza
Machado by the Angela Peraulta Theater,
had nothing happening during the lunch hour when a bunch of us
went down. The booths were very nice, but empty, and quite frankly
all of them displayed signs from the very same restaurants around
town we could go to any time. In the Caribbean, food fairs feature
the real home cooking by ladies church groups that you can’t
otherwise get!
Saturday’s Fireworks display took place around 11pm hours
late putting it well past both my bedtime and the limit of my patience.
Clearly, we will never know the REAL MEXICO, because apparently
the REAL MEXICO doesn’t take place until the middle of the
night! The marina had arranged a bus (or three) to carry the cruisers
down to Olas Altas, the old resort area of Mazatlán, where
a gated Carnival Village had been set up along the beachfront.
We arrived about seven, and after being bodily frisked at the gate
made our way to the restaurant where a dinner had been arranged
in the upstairs room from which we could watch the display without
suffering the crunch of the masses. The alternative was to stroll
the street and eat at snack bars. Since I was solo, the reserved
seat dinner seemed like the right choice for me, however the meal
was utterly uninspired (and not even Mexican), beverages were expensive
(which dampened enthusiasm for artificially induced merriment),
and the wait standing in place on the balcony was frustrating.
I’ve never met a fireworks show I didn’t like, and
when the show purportedly a recreation of the area’s sole
naval battle with a French ship in the 1800s finally started, it
was pretty good. When it was over, we found ourselves with barely
20 minutes to get to our midnight bus rendezvous. But the fiesta
on the street, with bandstands every hundred feet or so, was just
get going, and, when the cruisers emerged into the crowd on the
street, we were caught up in a frightening press of bodies, most
of them young and rowdy. It was almost impossible to move. Small
women were lifted off their feet, unseen hands groped your body,
and there was a real fear of getting knocked over and trampled.
Groups of us formed chains clutching the shoulders of the person
in front, and inch by inch we made our way out. It is not something
I would do again. Even for fireworks..
For the parade, a couple of days later, the cruisers had bleacher
seats at the Agua Marina Hotel on the parade route. This came off
much better than the fireworks deal as the bountiful buffet lunch
was more filling and tastier and our seats were right up front.
The parade, however, was also hours late, putting it well after
dark! This meant that all the floats had to be electrified, which
thereby meant all the floats had to have loud generators! I will
allow that the floats were pretty damn fancy. There was one at
least two stories tall. Others were mechanized, and all had pretty
girls waving. However, they all looked cold.
Here’s the thing, nobody really looked like they were having
fun. The Carnival Queens were put onto of inter-city buses. The
troupes between the floats were small (as were their routines.)
The marching bands were small (as were their tunes.) None of the
costumes approached the imagination (or sexiness) of even a small
Caribbean parade. And the music, when you could hear it over the
generators, was mostly generic thump thump thump. Where, I ask
you, was all that great Mexican musica? The best thing in the parade
to me was the group of Paso Fino dancing horses, but of course
they weren’t electrified, so you could hardly make them out!
Mazatlán’s Carnival did have one fine event. The
parade that goes one way on Sunday evening, goes back the other
way Tuesday afternoon, and for that parade the cruisers who helped
with the winter’s fundraising events for the volunteer fire
department were invited to ride on the fire truck. My expectations
were pretty low. I waffled about going. I mean how could a rerun
of something that was disappointing to begin with have any hope
of being fun. Not to mention that the fire truck’s position
in the parade was dead last.
They were so late at the end of the nighttime parade, everybody
bailed out before they reached us!
Well, it was a hoot!
First off, who hasn’t, in their heart
of hearts, wanted to ride on a fire truck. Ours was a puce green
ladder truck that still said Santa Monica Fire Department on the
side (Santa Monica, CA is Mazatlán’s sister city,
and much of the equipment here is hand-me down stuff.) Then, incredibly,
the parade back was only an hour or two late in starting, so it
was daylight most of the way. To our amazement there was actually
a crowd, and it was a happy one, filled with families!
About
fourteen of us rode the whole way on top of the truck waving
madly while
Iréne (the mastermind of the fundraising effort) and her
husband Lou sat in the cab and fired off the siren at intervals.
It’s amazing what eye contact you can make with even the
smallest kids in the crowd. At the back of the truck, one of
the cruisers (from a boat called Moon Me…oh, dear!) had
on an Uncle Sam outfit. Periodically, he would flash the crowd….to
reveal a T-shirt with the image of a muscle man chest! He was
a hit. And although we were still the last “float” in
the parade, our reception was as warm as if we had been the
first!
Of course, we have no
idea whether anyone in the crowd really understood what the bunch
of gringos on the fire truck was doing
there. There were three big posters on the front and sides with
the sailboat logo of the “Amigos de Bomberos” fundraising
group. However, since the newspapers repeatedly got the story wrong
(when they bother to cover it) we figured there was just as much
chance that people thought we’d come all the way from Santa
Monica! Oh, well.
So, I was in a good
mood when Don got back the very next day. Carnival is over and
checked off the list, but better yet, I’m
not lonely anymore!
|