I arrived in Manzanillo yesterday and I will be staying here for one whole week. My girlfriend flew in yesterday and we’ve rented a lovely little beach house together. I am looking forward to having some time to relax and explore!
But to catch up on the last couple of days: I left Tepic on Friday after finally finding a shop that carried 10w40 motor oil. A Honda motorcycle shop near my hotel had it in stock, and after some convincing, I finally got one of the mechanics to change the oil in my bike. I would have done it myself but I did not have a catch pan and the shop only charged me the equivalent of $24 USD for the change.
Glad to have new oil in the bike, I set off for the coast and for Manzanillo. I had the option to ride inland towards Guadalajara, but I’m glad I chose the coast, because the highway (MX 200) is absolutely amazing! Like, “200+ miles of 40mph twisties on a well-maintained one-lane highway with little to no traffic” amazing. For the most part I was having too much fun to stop and take photos, but I did snap one of this guy:
I rode through the beach town of Sayulita and explored it as a possible resting point for the night, but while the town had a certain old-time feeling, it was completely crowded with vacationing Americans so I decided to move on. At that point I still had about 3 hours of daylight left so I continued down HWY 200 towards the warm waters of the Pacific.
The sun began to set at around 5:20 so I started looking for a place to spend the night. I found a small beach town just a couple KM off the main highway that had a couple hotels so I got a room for $250 pesos. The town wasn’t too interesting – just a couple of restaurants and homes – but the beach was pretty nice, and I bought a pirated DVD from a guy selling DVDs and CDs for about $2 USD just for the hell of it.
I arrived in Manzanillo yesterday at 2 PM and found our rental house without much difficulty. The GPS map that I have for Mexico is not particularly good for city streets, but I’ve found that I can look up the latitude/longitude of an address with Google Maps and then use dead reckoning to find it. My girlfriend’s flight arrived at 3:30 and I went to the airport to pick her up.
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