Welcome to Stone Island

No trip to Mazatlan is complete without a trip to Stone Island. A Gilligan’s Island sort of place with predictable characters, happy catchy music playing in the background, and an underlying premise that people with different personalities and backgrounds need to get along with each other in order to survive.

The first time I met Ernesto, he was selling tours to Stone Island for somewhere between $30 and $80. The price seemed ridiculously negotiable, but I wasn’t interested in going somewhere I’d never heard of, at any price. I told him that I didn’t need a tour. I needed a fountain. And the rest is history.

Shortly after I hired Ernesto to be my handyman, he asked me if I wanted to go to Stone Island with him and Publio the following Sunday.

“Oh, no,” I told him. “That will cost too much money.”

“It won’t cost much at all. We’ll take a panga across to the island. It only costs $1.50 for each of us.”

“What’s a panga?”

“A fishing boat that ferries people across the channel. We can walk to Playa Sur, where they sell the tickets. You’ll like it. It will be fun.”

“What about the cruises you were selling on the beach?”

“Oh, those are only for tourists. You aren’t a tourist any more. You live here. We’ll take a panga across.”

Pangas leave the mainland every five minutes, or so. The boats speed across the channel and arrive in less than ten minutes. People pile in and out of the boats with everything they need to spend a day at the beach. Neto and Publio brought their surfboards. Other people brought beach chairs and coolers of food and drinks. One family even brought a large plastic children’s swimming pool, even though we would be right next to the water. I  just brought my fanny pack with sunscreen and pesos.

Sundays at Stone Island are truly a magical experience, with restaurants serving fresh fish and traditional drinks. (Think lemonade, beer and margaritas.) Neto’s friend, Rudy, worked in a restaurant owned by his sister-in-law, so we always went there. Other ex-pats were loyal followers of other nearby restaurants. Rudy had comfortable chairs and hammocks. His English was perfect and his manner was unfailingly charming. His Mexican lunch of fish with rice and beans was delicious.

One of my favorite parts of a day at Stone Island was talking to the beach vendors, who travel up and down the beach, selling jewelry, clothes, rosaries, and wooden sculptures of palm trees and turtles.

Women pay to get their hair braided, and henna tattoos on their arms and legs Children scream and chase each other across the sand. Some tourists haggle with the beach sellers. I never did. I liked talking to them and usually bought something that caught my eye.

One time, I actually paid to take the cruise to Stone Island. We were in a catamaran, a Mazatlán party boat, filled with tourists from the cruise ships. We circled the rocks where a colony of seals barked at us. The crew was jovial and started pouring beer before we even put on our life jackets. When we disembarked, trucks drove us to the far end of island, where we were served fish with rice and beans that wasn’t nearly as good as Rudy’s.

Victor Hugo (his real name!) traveled between tables, trying to entice people to sign up for time-share presentations. By the time we got back in the truck, and then back on the catamaran, a lot of people were suffering from too much beer and tequila, too much sun, and too little good judgement. Once was enough. From then on, I happily took a panga with Neto, and spent the day with Rudy.