We drove with our family to Tucson and then on to Sonora on the northwest coast of Mexico. We had booked a hotel in Guaymas. Both the small hotel and the town looked like they had been popular in the 50’s. The hotel was great looking, in an old world sort of way. But it wasn’t the 50’s anymore. As far as we could tell, there was only one other room booked besides ours.
We went out the first night looking for a highly touted restaurant. We tried to follow the directions in our guidebook.
We got lost. Very lost. We saw parts of Guaymas that were not exactly tourist attractions. We tried to be very upbeat with our children.
Finally, we spotted a small building with a sign that said “Policia”. We went inside, armed with our high school Spanish. A beautiful, young female police officer was there, armed with what I assume was her high school English. After playing charades and finding a few words in our dictionary, she got on the phone.
What followed was a rapid-fire string of Spanish, of which I caught nothing – except for two words – ‘gringos” and “perdidos”. Lost foreigners. That pretty much summed it up.
Then she said, “Wait here.”
We waited.
A pickup truck arrived with two men in the front and four more in the back. One of the men spoke English. “We explained where we were staying and that we had gotten lost looking for a particular restaurant. We gave him the name of the restaurant.
“Follow me,” he said.
We followed the pickup as it wound its way back. We realized we were almost back at our hotel and not at the highly touted restaurant.
The pickup stopped just short of our hotel. There was a small establishment about a hundred yards from our hotel, more like a food stand than a restaurant. It had plastic tent-like coverings around the tables. But it was clean and neat.
“There is your hotel,” the police man pointed. “You can eat here.” He pointed to the little restaurant.
What was this? We thought that he obviously didn’t want to deal with the perdidos gringos any more. Or maybe he was part owner of this place. Had he misunderstood us?
But we weren’t really in a position to negotiate, so we thanked him very much and dutifully went into the little place to eat.
The food was fantastic! It was the best meal we had during our entire trip. In fact, later when we got our bearings and were able to navigate our way around town, we found the highly touted restaurant. It wasn’t nearly as good as the little place right next to our hotel.