It’s another hot sticky night. I guess the further south we go, the warmer it will get. We are looking forward to the cooler climes on Southern Chile right now.
It’s a pain not having a working fridge, so Tim suggested we strip it down and see if we can see an obvious issue. With a little help from a YouTube tutorial we soon had it in pieces!!!! Nope! Nothing appears to be wrong. The nearest listed Engel fridge agent is in Mexico City, but everything is in Spanish. So, I write to the Aussie Head Office to see if they can help. Andrew Norman the customer service manager comes back quickly to say that as it’s (our fridge) a European model, refer to the Mexican site for help. In other words, we don’t give a damn! Maybe we can find an electronics guy locally to resolve it.? When connecting it to 12v power, it’s blowing the fuse.
We are camped in a lovely RV park. Sandy, the Californian owner and his Mexican parter run a professional camp and they are lovely hosts. Clean flushing toilets and running water for showers, are a real bonus.
After resembling the fridge it’s time to give Poki a spruce up. The roads in Mexico are very dusty and with regular mud holes to be negotiated when we go off road, it was looking decidedly shabby.
One of the campers, Brian, from Vancouver, suggested he take us all down to the local village for dinner. He’s been coming down to see and stay with Sandy for the last 11 years and is pretty familiar with the locality. He’s in his late 50’s? and is a surfing dude.
At 5.30pm we all pile into his 7.3L Ford King Cab Pickup for the 3k trip to town. There are restaurants side by side but Brian has his regular and we all order from his suggestion.
What a delicious treat. Jen and I had Gringa Adobada (chopped, grilled pork with beans and sauces in a maize tortilla). It was so cool to be siting with locals on plastic chairs at plastic tables, beside the road. They are such happy people, Mexicans. The food is served on plates inside a plastic bag. Ingenious. No washing up and hygenic. Unless you get the first top plate that will be covered in dust..:) This is NOT a tourist town and as a result the prices are very reasonable. 450pesos for 8 of us, three kids included. About NZ$38, with drinks.
There is the suggestion we stay another night but while it’s a wonderful setting, with great hosts, the pull of the road is strong and we still have a long way to go.
Returning to camp we sit around with Brian and the hosts and listen to amazing stories of how the locals got so fed up with the drug barons. They formed their own militia, kicked the corrupt police and army out and set up barriers at each end of the town. The story goes that a convoy of four drug trucks came through and the inhabitants of the vehicles were taken into a nearby field and “disposed of”
An observation. Mexicans love speed bumps. There are speed bumps, (Topes) entering, within and leaving and sometimes in the middle of the road, for seemingly no reason at all.
Visits: 23