Loco in Acapulco

"You'll be pulling out your hair, drowning in despair, with a whole lot of nothing, on your way to nowhere.  Your search for paradise will come to an end, when you realise what a fool you've been"

Now here's a place that our guide books didn't have many positive things to say about, but we were happy to give it a go.  I mean what about.......

...."Going loco down in Acapulco, If you stay too long. Yes you'll be going loco down in Acapulco, the magic down there is so strong"

Most people, even if they have no clue where it is will have heard of Acapulco. Renowned as the playground for the rich and corrupt and with pirate activities in the main bay stretching back to the 1500s. In the 1940s Acapulco became famous for its spectacular cliff divers. Moving into the 50s & 60s it became the a getaway destination for Hollywood stars and millionaires. All resulting in the city becoming one of Mexico's oldest and well known beach resorts.

Come on the Planet that is Lonely, and the Guide that is Rough, how bad can it be? Or will be a case of......"Going loco down in Acapulco, if you stay too long".

Right that's way enough of the Four Tops, for now. Let's get into Acapulco de Juárez.

Coming into land at Acapulco the flight path took us up the edge of the Pacific coastline. A stretch of beach that seemed to run forever. Inland the odd high-rise white blob hotel here and there but mainly palm trees dominated the landscape giving a real tropics feel. Our tropic thoughts stayed very much with us as we exited the airport as the first thing we noticed after heading further south was the increased humidity. Acapulco is renowned for it's seething humidity due to it being framed by the Pacific and foothills of the Sierra ranges.
Up till now our Mexican destinations have all had a dry desert like heat. Here though you're greeted with a hazy sky and very sticky air.

Now any hostel was going to be a come down after Minnesota Jeff's place. But our chosen digs, bang centre of Bahia de Acapulco facing Playa Condesa beach, were pretty rough. Though the staff where friendly enough and the location was pretty good, the building itself pushed it right up there with the best of them on our list of "the worst hostels ever". You could say the interior had a similar appearance to that of a prison. Our cell, sorry room, was more like a Japanese capsule style hotel room. Once in the room at full stretch you could almost touch all four walls! Rucksacks and us inside it was pretty snug.

Having not arrived until mid afternoon we headed for the Malecon beach front for a stroll on Acapulco's sweeping bay, which after 2 hours of bumbling roughly takes you across the bay to La Quebrada Cliffs. The home of the famous Acapulco Cliff High Divers.

Strolling along the Malecon we became more and more gobsmacked at the sights we were seeing This place was seriously rundown, far from loco. We did our best to dodge every mode of transport going, 6 lanes of solid smog belching traffic that's so noisy it makes talking almost impossible. As for fresh sea air, not a chance. The impact of these 6 lanes alone seems to infuse chaos into the heart of this place. It was gridlocked, solid, in all directions.

The Acapulco Malecon seemed to be the place to dump any unwanted beach equipment. Flooded, some completely sunken, half wrecked speed boats from previous seasons. An amount of rubbish, mainly plastic in type, that you're more likely to see at a recycling depot back home! Which of course will all end up in the sea following their heavy seasonal rains. Then there's the extremely persistent hawkers that for whatever reason all seem to think they have just what your life is lacking. Not forgetting the federal police and military presence that is stationed on every corner carrying semi-automatic machine guns, this city is still very much at the mercy of the drug cartels and trafficking fed by the bay's main shipping routes to Columbia in the south and San Diego in the north, the far east and the world beyond.  You getting the picture?

On reflection we would view this place as more run down and unstable than Mexico city. So our reward for our act of bravery in making it to beachside across 6 lanes of mayhem? Grotty shop after grubby bar, a strong look of the "good-times" of the past that have now long gone. All comparable to any very run down seaside town that's having a very bad year. Welcome to Acapulco! This time it does look like the normally cup-half-empty travel writers have summed this one up dead right.

So after a fume-filled 2 hour stroll along a very disappointing stretch of coastline, we made it to the La Quebrada Cliff Divers. This world famous narrow inlet is just slightly away from the chaos of the city which did seem to lean slightly towards the Mexico we'd experienced for the last few weeks. A small town feel dotted with street vendors, hawkers and local families enjoying the evening sun.  These famous clavadistas (cliff divers) of La Quebrada have been dazzling audiences since 1934, swan diving with graceful finesse from heights of 25-35m into the narrow ocean cove below. To reach the dive points they walk the same steps as the cheering crowds that lead to the viewing point, high fiving

For the night dives all this is carried out to the sounds of Mexican party tracks with matching strobe lighting that certainly gets the crowd going, the lights did nothing to aid our night photography! The adrenaline that these guys are feeling at this point must be super- high. The bungy in New Zealand was a 43 metres, but this came with the safety of a large elastic band and was positioned centre of a huge valley, no where near the cliff edges or the need to calculate the jump to judge variable water depths in the landing zone below! This was a fantastic spectacle to watch and the tension pre-dive touched the whole Friday night crowd.

Understandably the divers pray at a small shrine before leaping over the edge, just as Elvis Presley did back in the 1963 flick Fun in Acapulco. At least three divers perform the 5 dives each day. Today being a Friday many divers had turned up and as a result the crowds were massive, hugging all along the surrounding cliffs tops that lead to La Quebrada's main square. Add in the street vendors and performers and the atmosphere was fantastic.

Today the divers are all professionals, many taking part in competitions and demonstrations worldwide. The inlet below La Quebrada is only seven metres wide and four metres deep. Unfortunately the dives are not without their accidents - there have been many broken bones. These boys, and some of them can't have been much older than mid teens, are ice-cool with immense bravery to plunge themselves head first into the crashing waves below.

We hung around for a couple of shows as once you're down on the cliff mounted viewing platform you can stay as long as you like. Plus a local family have built up a lovely little business in cooking up sopas, small savoury type pancakes, loaded with toppings of your choice, including the odd selection of chillies, of course. Goes without saying.

As the night hour edged into the wee hours we headed back to our hostel. Our ride home was a 2001 VW Beetle, with not one straight body panel. Only 16,000 registered on the clock, though I guess this could mean anything in Mexico. The trouble being though it had never made it out of the city's boundaries or 3rd gear!  The traffic was still bad, of Mexico City standards with 6 lanes of stationary traffic. Mainly V-dubs and Harley Davidsons making up the numbers. As we became acquainted with Husman, our driver, he mentioned that this weekend was Acapulco's annual Harley Davidson meet. Hence the Mexico city style traffic, mainly due to road closures. After a tour of dark, neighbourhood back streets, streets that most outsiders are told to avoid, day or night, imagine the sights through the shadows of darkness, we land, somehow, out front of the hostel. Genius.

For the next hour or so it's hard for me to explain the sights I saw. From the safety of the hostel terrace we witnessed the most crazy bike rally antics ever. One 3 lane section of the road outside the hostel had been closed off. Let's just say GP style track ready super- bikes had fully taken over the Harley meet. Bikes with engines bigger and more powerful than your average super-mini way out numbering the Harley cruisers easily 10-1. The main super-bike of choice seemed to be the bigger the better and as noisy as possible, looking like it's just come off a track day with Valentino Rossi. To complete the total look, if you didn't have a half naked girl stuck on the back, hanging on for dear life, well then you'd obviously come to the wrong event or maybe you didn't read the small print on the invite.

As the evening went on guys started to perform more and more tricks on these ridiculously sized bikes. Then there was the first guy to totally stack-in. From kerb edge to taxi side panel to coming to a rest in front of a applauding overexcited crowd. A failed maneuver that resulted in most of his fuel emptying out onto the roadside. With no one really running the event this slippery spill brought on 6 more accidents within the next couple of hours.The final image of the night for us, which will stick with us for sometime, was the reversing bin-men backing up the wrong way of a closed section of road where the main performance bike show was now in full swing. But panic not though as at the rear of the reversing truck was a guy waving a red t-shirt to warn approaching super-bikers!

To sum up our first loco day in Acapulco - just as the travel writers explained it, a bit of a dump and totally nuts. Well what did we expect from a city where the men dive from 40 metre cliffs into shallow tidal waters for a living. Thank goodness we weren't stopping for long.

Tomorrow it should be easier to walk the streets as surely overnight most of this biker lot will try to pull off one too many stunts resulting in a pretty long hospital stint.