Lake Chapala with the village of Ajijic in the foreground   - photo by Mike D'Cruze

             

No advertisements--that's my policy--so I'm not going to break that rule now.  Instead, I'll tell you about the place I used to live and some friends of mine who just happen to have opened one of the loveliest bed and breakfasts on Lake Chapala. 

Ajijic, a village nestled in the Sierra Madre mountains, clings to the banks of the largest lake in Mexico.  Although thousands of expatriates from all over the world live on the shores of Lake Chapala, Ajijic is still very much a Mexican village. It's a place where a peddler plays a tin flute advertising his services as he strolls through town; where friends (and you will always run into a friend no matter where you go) stop on the cobblestone street to chat; where the market, offering a dozen roses for a few pesos and produce so fresh it's still warm from the earth, is a weekly event no one misses.  Yes, crime has touched parts of Mexico, but it's virtually unknown here.  This is a place that time seems to have forgotten although you'll find that hard to believe when you dine in one of the cosmopolitan restaurants catering to expats.

It's also the place where friends of mine have opened one of the loveliest boutique bed and breakfast's, with three very private suites, in the Lake Chapala area.  Mike, from England, met America, from Mexico City, when she was studying in London; after traveling the world, they relocated to Ajijic to fulfill a dream.  That dream, which took almost four years to create, is named Las Cupulas.

Their bed and breakfast, where beauty is only trumped by comfort, is just a few miles from Ajijic.  Here in this quiet retreat,  you can relax in the saltwater pool or watch the birds that congregate near the lakeshore.  Or you can do nothing at all but bask in the sun of Ajijic's perpetual-spring climate and wish that America's delicious breakfast arrived sooner than tomorrow! But no matter what you do while you're there, I do not think you will regret for a moment your decision to stay at Las Cupulas.

Practicalities - If you'd like more information about Ajijic or Mexico, my book, Retire in Mexico - Live Better for Less Money is available on Amazon.  See more book details in the column at right.

A Month in Mexico - Expatriate Refuge

Imagine a 25-mile wide lake dominating the landscape like an inland sea with quaint Mexican villages clustering on its shores and velvety green mountains circling it all in an embrace.  Add an almost-perfect climate, where air conditioning and heating are unnecessary, and a low cost of living, and you can see why the Lake Chapala area is one of the most popular retirement destinations
in the world.

                 One of the LCS Pools

Still, as welcoming as the geography, climate and people are, expatriates crave the amenities they left behind.  The Lake Chapala Society, known locally as LCS, is here to answer that need.

The “Real” Mexico

David sat in the living room last night reading the books I'd lugged home from the library. Since he's lived in San Diego all his life, just thirty miles from the border, the word “Mexico,” to him, means cities like Tijuana or the Baja coast where he and his buddies used to sail their catamarans. I'd brought home all the books I could find on Mexico because I wanted him to learn about other parts of the country, especially the central part where we will be in June.

He decided, though, to first read the general visitor information and kept calling out questions. Did you know that the gray and black scorpions aren't deadly, but the yellow ones require medical treatment? Is the water in all parts of the country unsafe to drink? Will we need to take our band aids and emergency supplies because this (pointing to the book) says we will?

It's not only David who is largely uninformed about our neighbor to the south; my friends have asked similar questions. When I told Nona where we were going, she said, “You mean you're going in June. Won't it be unbearably hot then?” Joan wondered if we would survive with all the drug violence, and Marissa suggested we not drink a single drop of water the entire month we were there. (I don't think she thought that one through!)

The truth is that Mexico is as diverse as the United States or Canada or France. Just as New York is different from Tucson, or Quebec is unlike Vancouver, or Paris is seemingly a world removed from Arles, so Tijuana is vastly different from Ajijic. Of course, it is possible to find parts of the country where you must fear yellow scorpions, tote your own water and medical supplies, suffer from tropical heat, and fear for your life, but there are just as many parts of the country where none of that occurs.

Goodbye Vietnam - Hola Mexico

It's not the open-air plank toilet over a stream or the thought of bedbugs that has made us postpone a trip Vietnam, because we've done enough reading to know we would not be traveling the same way Karin Muller describes in her book, Hitchhiking Vietnam. (See Where Should We Go Next? article below.) It's a birthday that has stopped us cold.

No, it's not David's or my birthday. It's Vietnam's. The country is turning 1,000 years old, and its millennium celebration is going to be a crowd-filled twelve-month-long gala event. We've decided any year but 2010 is a better time to visit.

This would be a disappointment to us if we hadn't gotten an invitation from some friends of mine. The friends have a lovely two-bedroom, two-bath house in Ajijic, Mexico, but need a house/pet sitter for the summer while they're at their summer place in Vermont. They've offered their spacious house with gardeners and weekly maid service, the use of a computer and a car, in return for loving their two cats. We couldn't say yes fast enough!

We will be there for a month and another friend of mine, who's working on her second bi-lingual children's book, will cover the rest of the summer. That should be just the right amount of time to introduce David to the village where I lived for four years after I left North Carolina; to visit San Miguel de Allende, a world heritage site; and to tour Guanajuato, a colonial gem of a city with underground tunnels.

Best of all, we will walk down cobblestone streets, lined with plumeria and orchid trees, where purple, red and orange bougainvilleas tumble over the walls. We'll eat fresh bolillos and fruit that's still warm from the fields. Fireworks and church bells will interrupt the quiet of ordinary days. Friends will join us for lunch, and we'll linger at the table as long as we can. For these are moments to treasure, and we want to savor each one.

Alaska Versus Mexico

I leaned from the bed and stretched a hand towards the window to pull back the “darkening” shade, then plucked apart the slats of the blind with two fingers. Would I find rain or sunshine? My cousins and I planned a trip to Glacier Gardens, but it wouldn’t be much fun in a cold rain.

“You might get one day of sunshine a week,” a wizened sourdough told us when we first arrived in Alaska, “if you’re lucky.” I guess the Weather Channel web site hadn’t made a typo when the ten-day forecast for Southeastern Alaska predicted rain every single day.

I knew this part of Alaska was a rain forest, but I was hoping the rain always fell at night the way it does in Ajijic. Mexico. Actually it always did fall at night. And in the morning and in the afternoon and in the evening.

So much rain falls in Ketchikan that it’s measured in feet, not inches, and it’s given the sobriquet, liquid sunshine. But a euphemism cannot disguise fourteen feet of rain per year. It was wet—all the time.

Dreary days that stretch into weeks do strange things to people. Alaska’s water-stained streets are usually deserted. Sunny summer days, however, are so rare no one squanders a moment of the nineteen-hour sunlight. Employers expect their employees to “be sick,” and parties are often canceled so folks can go fishing. In Juneau, some friends of my niece hosted a huge wedding. The chosen date, which fell on a Tuesday night, would have struck anyone in the Lower-48 as an odd choice, but it made sense to Alaskans. It never rains on July 3, so it was perfectly reasonable to hold the wedding in the middle of the week. They were right, by the way. It didn’t start raining again until 4:00 a.m. July 4.

Mostly, though, sourdoughs have resigned themselves to their fate and make valiant attempts to deal with unremitting gloom. Juneau’s Fourth of July parade went ahead as scheduled despite the drenching downpour. In the best bookstore in Sitka, a display sign cautions, "Don’t drip on the books." And for those who cannot cope any other way, bars open at 7:30 in the morning.

The Alaskan government distributes stipends every year to either offset the cost of living in the fifth most expensive area in the United States, or to alleviate the cost of escaping to a drier climate once a year, depending on whom you talk to. But it would take far more than $2000 to convince me to live there.

Yes, the Last Frontier, twice the size of Texas, is remote and beautiful. Most of the towns in Southeastern Alaska are landlocked and can only be reached by plane. No matter how large the city, there’s only a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the sea that can support only 30 to 75 miles of roadway. And it’s true beauty is everywhere. Sitka’s harbor is dotted with fir-covered islands and the mountains, which serve as the backdrop for the tiny town, are snow-capped. Ketchikan’s library juts over a rushing brook where you can read a magazine while watching the salmon struggle upstream. Waterfalls streak the mountainsides with silver and eagles hang glide overhead.

And certainly there are moments in Alaska not quickly forgotten. As our boat approaches the glacier, the celadon-glazed sea turns aquamarine and seals cling to floating ice chunks. The four-mile jagged wall, full of compressed ice crystals, can reflect no other light rays except sky blue. Standing on the boat deck watching a cruise ship, dwarfed by the glacier, pass closer than our fourteen-man boat dared, I think of the Titanic and this frigid water which kills in just five minutes. When the glacier calves and part of the ice wall falls into the sea with a roar, I am not the only one who shivers in the rocking boat.

But not even a two-million-dollar stipend could convince me to live there.

As I lay in bed on that second to the last morning in Juneau, I thought about my life in Mexico. I remembered a trip to Boca de Iguanas one winter when I marveled at the emerald mountains where a giant god had wrinkled the hills and sprinkled bits of chartreuse in the folds. Fjords are majestic, but not as lovely as the lake nestled in a ring of mountains in Michoacan. And nowhere in Alaska could I sit on a quiet Saturday morning and contemplate a ball court built in 450 A.D.

I released the slats of the window blind and huddled under the covers. The heater clicked on. I realized it didn’t really matter if it were raining in Juneau. All I needed to remember was that, somewhere in Ajijic, open windows welcomed the sound of church bells wafting on the warm morning air.


Practicalities -
I'm not fond of cruises. If I wanted to stare at water all day long, I'd fill up my bathtub. Still, there are definite advantages to an Alaskan cruise. Many of the most scenic places are only accessible by boat. A stop for only a day in each town is enough time for it to reveal all its charms, and then you can get back to the real show you'll see from the ship--the sea lions and whales.

My cousins and I did not take a cruise. We flew to Ketchikan, then to Sitka for a few more days, and finally, Juneau. With only those 30-75 miles of roadway to explore, we would have been bored after 24 hours if we hadn't taken some short, half-day cruises. So, the fly/boat option is feasible, but not one I recommend. Take the cruise. You won't regret it.