Roommate Names: Fill & Download for Free

First time surfing. This involves weed, random interactions, visiting abandoned mansions, and forts.I got off a sailboat with my travelmate Matt in Manzanillo, Mexico after having crewed from Puerto Vallarta. I met Matt at my hostel the night before I left to go crew on a boat. It ended up being extremely nice to have another young guy on the boat.I hadn't couchsurfed before that but Matt had. Matt was an expert at traveling extremely cheap. As he was traveling down the coast of Mexico, he'd sleep on random beaches to save cash. He was only 19 at that time (5 years younger than I) but I admired him in many ways.We got off the boat early in Manzanillo and wandered around. We were waiting to meet up with our couch surfing host and I paid an arm and a leg to ship a bunch of stuff home. We were tired and hot. I walked 15 blocks only to find the ATM I wanted was out of service. We finally found our couchsurfing house just by asking around the neighborhood. We walked around back of this house and to the upstairs where the apartment was.Lupita (Mex), Michael (Fl.), and Julia (Wisc.) were our hosts. When I initially met Michael and Lupita, I wasn’t immediately thrilled. They seemed to give us a sort of half-hearted welcome, it felt odd. Lupita looked like she hadn’t slept in a couple days and Michael was pretty haggard himself. Another guy came over and smoked a joint with Lupita. The neighborhood has its fair share of gringos (mostly Canadian) but it’s not an upscale neighborhood. I wasn’t sure what to make of our hosts so I grabbed my passport and cash out of my big bag before Matt and I took off.We wanted to check out another marina one bay up from Manzanillo. We ended up catching a bus to about 20 blocks away from the main road and into some fairly lower-middle class neighborhoods. So we had to walk those blocks in the hot midday sun in the middle of a neighborhood that doesn’t see many foreigners. We’d ask people the way out and they’d give us wishy washy directions. I was hot, tired, and not really feeling the area or our couch surf. Matt pretty much always has one ear bud in and listening to something and at that moment, in the heat, I was just tired of him and his damn earbud. He later told me I was only really grumpy for about 5 minutes. He seemed fine with walking, we occasionally have very inverse moods as travelmates. We made it back to our original marina and still weren’t able to find leads. It wasn’t looking good.I felt silly for being whiny all day and decided to stop bitching and just settle in. We got back to the house at 5-6, beat, and smoked a couple joints with Mike. The weed in Vallarta had sent me on a bit of a paranoid trip that I didn’t care to return to. I vowed not to go there in Manzanillo.Julia, roommate 3 who I hadn’t met, works at a bar that just opened up. It was in Santiago where Matt and I had just gotten lost most of the afternoon. We walked the 20 blocks quickly so we could catch the last half of the 12-7 happy hour. And this is when my real couch surfing time began.Instead of just walking through yet another Mexican city, we were with an ex-pat who truly knew the place. Mike is an excellent guide and he loves to tell stories. As we walked, he’d point left and right and tell us different things about places. We walked past some buildings on a ridge we’d seen earlier. “Yeah those are guaranteed to come down in the next earthquake, you can see the crack from here” Mike would say. “That mountain off there in the distant has a great view on top and you can see the whole city lit up,” Mike said and he pointed to some hills off to the north.Of course the weed was amplifying the whoah-ness of these stories, but they would have been great regardless. Mike told us his stories of hitchhiking all over the US and Mexico. He had been caretaking a really cool piece of land near Orlando that was waterfront property and very out there. For a couple years, he essentially lived away from city life and spent most of his time fishing and exploring the areas around the land. “That’s the real Florida,” he’d say. It was so cool to simultaneously hear about Manzanillo, Florida, and his life. The stories enthralled me.We came to the bar with two minutes of happy hour left and ordered some beers from Julia. “So these are the couchsurfers?” she asked Mike without looking at us. I guess I am a couchsurfer now. Julia is from a small Norwegian town of 10,000 in Wisconsin and she looks it. She’s tall, has light eyes, and a thick Wisconsin accent. But she also speaks perfect Spanish, perhaps the best I’ve seen in someone who didn’t learn as a child.She’s been coming to Manzanillo since 2003 and two of her brothers live here and run a family business. On Saturday, she’s flying to Wisco (as she calls it) to pick up her other brother and drive down here. He got tired of missing out on this life. His wife and baby are going to fly down in two weeks once he gets set up (he’s going to be the accountant for the business). I was blown away by the fact that she’s effectively moved her family to Mexico while to her it was no big deal. That’s the thing about most people living crazy alternative lives; they don’t think anything of itJulia herself is full of stories about everything. I really enjoyed just letting both her and Mike run. She offered us our first shot of Mezcal, the one with the worm in the bottom of a bottle. Julia explained how this drink was similar to Tequila but it was made from green instead of blue agave. After making a big batch of the brew, they dropped a butterfly larvae/worm in. If it died, they knew the alcohol content was good. Julia poured us some shots and passed us orange slices with red pepper from Oaxaca on it. You take a small tip of the Mezcal, savor the aroma for a sec, bite into the orange and then take the full shot. It was smooth and delicious.Worm at the bottomWhile Julia may have grown up in Wisconsin, she is truly a local of Manzanillo, Mexico. When she’s out and about, people invite her to weddings and parties. She pretends she knows them regardless of whether she does. Her boyfriend is a dutch guy who is captain of a dredging boat. His team is dredging a nearby lagoon to expand Manzanillo’s port. Jan, her boyfriend, gets called Juanito here. He usually worked 6 weeks on and spent 6 weeks off back in Holland. This was the first time he wasn’t flying to Holland on his off time. It was a minor achievement for Julia.Mike and Julia ran the town, they did what they pleased. They only paid 40 bucks a month for their rooms (Julia and Lupita share) and life is cheap here. The community knows them and they know the people. I couldn’t help but be reminded of my time in Colombia, I knew Colombian slang, danced their dances, I learned to walk the walk I admired them for finding a second home in a Latin country.We got back to the apartment and smoked some more. Julia had to go pick up Jan at the best western as he was off for the day. She was going to drive her big old Ram Charger and I decided to join. I hadn’t been in a big old American car like that for a while. The weed, the new people, the car, the town, it was a bizarre wonderful experience. We stopped at the Best Western and found Jan and his two dutch co-workers having drinks in the fancy hotel bar. Jan immediately offered me a beer and a seat. Most of the dutch I’ve met are tall skinny polite backpackers types. These were not those. These were working men, tattoos and muscles. They didn’t bother switching to English on my behalf so I sat there as they rattled on about who knows what.Jan is already a captain at 34 and was involved in the dredging of the famed palm tree islands in Dubai. The guy must have 100 countries under his belt. Jan told me that some dutch guys on another big boat had set off a homemade cannon earlier. They were a group of bored engineers that decided to make a homemade canon. The boom from the cannon shook all the buildings in the bay. Jan laughed and shook his head.I hopped in back of the Ram charger and Jan drove us back to the apartment. I felt like I’d already had a week’s worth of conversations but the night was still young. The next plan was to go walk around an abandoned mansion up on the hills above the marina where Matt and I had sailed in.We squeezed in to the Ram and drove up there. We pulled into an abandoned cul-de-sac at the top of the peak. It was fenced in. “Imagine this was where you pulled in and had your car parked by the valet,” Mike said. We pushed a door open in the fence and walked down to a gigantic white building. Jan’s smart phone put out a decent amount of light so we could see a bit. We whistled in order to let anyone who might be squatting that we were coming in. The place must have been about 40000 square feet. It overlooked the bay with 25 foot ceilings and a huge deck. There was an abandoned swimming pool below the deck. The guy had been a Mexican politician and he put a helicopter pad on the roof. A helicopter crash was what killed him and effectively destroyed his estate. Construction was halted and the property abandoned for several decades now. Mike and Julia had come here several other times and had seen the place get even worse. I had never seen a house so large and decadent.Abandoned PoolIt probably sounds a bit stupid to go wander around an abandoned mansion in Mexico. It was worth it—it wasn’t that scary. That was an experience that could only be had through couchsurfing. Jan, Matt, and I searched for a way to get up to the helicopter pad but to avail. I saw another flashlight outside the door and said something like “the other people are here.” That kind of freaked Mike out, I said it with a children-of-the-corn tone supposedly. They were simply some local security guards suggesting that we leave, that it wasn’t safe. Mike and Julia explained that this was how it always was, the security guards would come up and nicely ask you to leave, no problem. “If this were Florida, where I’m from, they’d get you for trespassing and all sorts of other stuff.” Mike said. That’s the thing he really loves about Mexico: the raw individual freedom.I crashed on the couch and Matt slept on a lazy boy chair He got cold but I knew he had a sleeping bag. I almost gave him my blanket but decided I didn’t want to be cold either.We woke up and smoked some more joints with Mike. I’ve never really been much of a waker and/or baker but I do attest it’s an interesting way to start a day. We must have sat there for a couple hours and I was content to be a blob in a hammock. Matt read his book while Mike talked for a while about how fucked up the central banking system is and how the founding fathers would have never wanted it. Like many people I’ve met on my trip, Mike believes its a matter of time before the US crumbles in someway. He says that most people you meet in Florida—the brand name wearers—will be fucked when we regress back to an agrarian society.At first, I saw Matt as being yet another nut pothead bitching about the man while living off it. But the guy was gutsy and resourceful. He tried to put his money where his mouth was—he had volunteered in some dicey post-disaster situations. He got to be a bit intense at times though. He kept trying to convince Matt and I to hitch hike out of Manzanillo instead of sailing.When we got tired of sitting around, we went off on another adventure with Mike. He wanted to show us a spot off in the hills in the south part of Manzanillo. We bussed over there and walked up up some steep neighborhoods into the woods. Some friends of his had cut a little encampment out of the hill and were making drums up there. They had parties up there, made stuff, and went for hikes. Julia called the place “never never land”. It was, in reality, their fort.Drum MakingsMike smoked some more but eventually Matt and I decided to stop joining as we needed to get sober for the marina later. One of Mike’s friendly hippy friends showed up with his hopelessly stupid dog and we hiked up to the top of the hill. From there, you could see the entire region, including the area where dutch Jan was dredging. You could see where the port was going to be doubled. You could see where part of the former lagoon was filled in with sand and dirt and it wouldn’t be too long before they installed cranes and the works. Mike lit part of the dry grass on fire, messing around. A lot of the hillsides around had burn marks and seemed fine but it was still unnerving to watch it spread so fast. We all walked back down the fort and Matt and I left to go to the marina.We were pretty apathetic at this point as we trudged through the resorts and golf courses to Las Hadas Marina, where we had come in the morning before. Bob was gone by now. We weren’t finding anything. We decided to sit down at restaurant table and hang for a couple hours. I was planning of busing south later if I didn’t find anything. I was happy to have had such an eventful time in Manzanillo.