I write this a few days ago but haven’t been able to get it up online until now
Acapulco, Hotel Avalon Excalibur, 2 January 2007, 5.21pm.
Well, it’s taken three days of constant irritation in the grand resort of Acalpulco but finally it seems as though I may have a moment of peaceful relaxation. I have a room overlooking the bay, a cold bottle of beer, and my iPod playing something other than Mexican-tourist music – in fact Dusty Springfield is cheering me up by telling me about the son of some preacher man and what good he’d done her.
How and why everything has been such a struggle is a tale in itself, but I shall defer that for later, once I have typed for a bit and felt suitably calm and reflective to find the humour in it all.
Acapulco is an extraordinary place. The vast bay once held the world’s most exotic resort, and it’s not hard to see why – a long, gorgeous curvaceous bay, dotted with hotels and filled with attraction, promise and glorious weather. But its glory days are over and it has since become a package holiday destination living off its former reputation – no longer the world’s fun-seekers but hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who treat themselves to a bit of coastal glory once a year.
The sophistication lingers but you have to look for it. Mostly it has been overrun by the mass market at inflated prices. The French Connection of the resort world.
The hotel I’m staying in – the rather preposterously named Avalon Excalibur – is possibly the best example of what happens when the rich and glamorous up-anchor and make way for the all-inclusive hordes marked out by blue wristbands.
The front of the Avalon smacks of Monaco, a elegant raised stone driveway where you can be sure the Ferraris and Aston Martins of the 1970s gladly cruised up, the owners exiting and strolling inside, safe in the knowledge that somehow their luggage would appear in their room, with shirts and cocktails dresses hung up, by the time they’d met up with friends for an alcoholic fruit drink in the bar.
The valet service is one of few services that remains and is now so incongruous that it makes you wonder why they still bother. I arrived in my hire car and by the time I got out, an attendant had already written out a note with its registration number and type and handed it to me. I have it in my wallet complete with a promise that it will be ready to go within 20 minutes. I have yet to try that part out – I am preparing to give it an hour and even then I am writing out a copy so I can wave it at someone in reception who will hopefully know that they offer such a service in their hotel.
A lovely drive
The drive down to Acapulco to Mexico City is one of the most lovely I have been on – up there with crossing the mountains from California to Oregon, or heading down the A9 from Inverness to Edinburgh. A toll road has managed to largely defeat the eternal Mexican problem of potholed tarmac rollercoasters, but it’s not cheap and I can’t see many Mexicans affording the 452 pesos (roughly £22) paid for at five different poll stations. There may be more but I lost track of the tickets and started throwing them about the car after the first three.
The cost at each station varies and of course the most expensive – 109 pesos – comes just prior to the worst bit of road. But, I am reliably informed, it is a huge improvement on the previous road (free and still there) where it would take seven to eight hours to cover the 400km, where now it only takes three-and-a-half. Actually it took me about three because of my wilful disregard of the 110mph speed limit.
How anyone can take a beautiful sweeping mountain bend at 60 miles an hour when it is quite clear the road can easily handle double that is beyond me. Although I was restricted by my car which has clearly been tampered with by the rental company to kill any hope of acceleration passed 50mph.
In fact the only thing that ruins the drive – which sweeps high and down, across and through mountains, over wondrous bridges, valleys and ravines – is the unbelievably ugly concrete pillars separating the two lanes of traffic. Once they have finished the tarmac, I hope they invest in something other than L-shaped soulless dividers.
Just as you approach Acalpulco with one more mountain to cover, the buzz of the place suddenly hits home. You hit a traffic jam in an area that presumably is home to Acapulco’s poor but has the same crazy intensity and noise as cities in India. It is a remarkable entry point before you enter the long tunnel that burrows its way to the sea. Open the window and turn on the lights (the tunnel is virtually pitch black) and it suddenly hits you – the heat, the humidity and the bustle.
Crosstown traffic
Arriving as I did at 6pm on New Year’s Eve, traffic was exceptionally heavy, apparently random, and constantly cut and divided by troops of families taking their lives into their own hands. You have to make sure your accelerator and brake are up to the job in Acapulco. Driving isn’t so much aggressive as mildly psychotic but you soon get used to it.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how difficult it would be to find my hotel. Having spent an hour driving around – usually trying to avoid hitting other cars and Beetle taxis that equate a two-inch gap to a new lane, as well as increasing inebriated pedestrians, I decided to pull in at a big hotel and ask for directions. I choose the poshest one I had seen and pulled in. The attendant was very helpful and told me if was four blocks back the way I’d come – I must have missed it. So 35 minutes of crazy driving later I get to the spot and find — nothing.
Miraculously, I find a parking spot down a side street, and wander around looking for the Avalon Excalibur. Still nothing. So I go to another hotel where the receptionist promises me it is literally one block to my left. I was wary and tired and wanted to have a shower and rest before heading out on the town so I asked for a map. Nope, he doesn’t have a map. I offer to buy a map thinking he might be unwilling to hand out maps to non-guests. No, he just doesn’t have any maps. I walk up that one block – still nothing.
So I call the hotel directly and, after being put through to three different people in the hope of finding someone who spoke English, proceeded to outline where I was using the landmarks where I was standing. The directions led to me another hotel where the indifferent receptionists merely stared at the heavily sweating Englishman before eventually deciding I needed to go four blocks off to the right. Do you have a map of Acapulco? I asked again and again without response. Quiero una mapa de Acapulco? Una mapa? Tienes una mapa de Acapulco? Eventually, the answer: no, no maps of Acapulco.
Tengo mapa for chrissake
The thing is: there are no maps of Acapulco. Just out of interest I have been on the look-out for maps for two days now and the best I found was at a tourist booth (actually a temporary conference-style shelter at a main roundabout with a plastic table on which are various brochures) – and even that map has no more than an outline of the bay with various graphics inaccurately giving the position of business than had paid for the pleasure.
Not that a decent map would help because there aren’t any street signs. There are signs *to* streets on the main roads but no indication of whether you have reached them or on the road itself. This is undoubtably the reason why even locals give such incredibly inaccurate directions. Havinng been told my hotel was four blocks thataway, I walked eight blocks and still turned up nothing. I asked two parking attendants. They said, incredibly, two blocks in the direction I had already come.
This merry-go-round was eventually ended when I found a small rundown little place that purported to offer rooms in all hotels. And I found a delightful woman who told me it was six blocks back the way I came. I started ranting. “No, it’s not. I have been told it is four blocks that way, two blocks that way, and two blocks that way. Do you have a map?†No, no map, but I pulled out my notepad and pen and insisted that she draw me a map. Sure enough, when she had to put it down on paper, it turned out that it was in fact about 12 blocks away.
And you know what? I found it. Covered in sweat, very, very frustrated, unbearably hungry, I discovered my hotel at 8.30pm – more than two hours since I had arrived in town. And then – to my enormous fortune – I found a man who had clearly been working at the hotel in its glory days and retained, in his own determined way, a level of helpfulness that saved my bacon. He wanted to show me the room but I insisted on getting my car – now 15 minutes walk away. He told me what turnings to take to get to the stone driveway (and it’s a good job he did) and so, eventually, with some extremely aggressive driving on my part I got there, he recognised me, and helped me to get to my room.
Worst room in the hotel
What was wonderful in retrospect was how he showed me the room. A man that took a pride in his job, even when it rapidly became clear that I had the worst room in the hotel.
I had expected this to be honest. It had only occurred to me a week before travelling that I ought to book a hotel to make sure and I was stunned when, having carried out a dozen Internet searches, it turned out that there were only two rooms left in Acapulco for New Year’s Eve. As a friendly cab driver told me later that evening, it was the busiest day of the year in Acapulco.
And so I was given room 1718. A room which, I am partly ashamed and partly infuriated to report, cost me £160 – a small fortune in most of Mexico. What I got would make grown men weep. It was positioned right next to the lifts. Those people leaning against the opposite wall waiting for the lift to arrive (something that takes, on average, five to ten minutes) were not more than five inches from my legs. On the other side of the room was clearly some kind of heavy duty electrical equipment, possibly a pump or transformer, which emitted four long electronic beeps non-stop all-day every three minutes. It was oddly well equipped – a coffee machine, a microwave, a sink, a fridge, numerous cupboards, a draining board. And then it hit home – this wasn’t a hotel room, it was the cleaning area converted into another room. Right outside my door were the stairs (not the external fire exit – that is closed for repairs).
The next day, having waited for literally ten minutes for the lift, I decided to take advantage of the stairs and my suspicions were confirmed: as you rounded the bottom of the stairs there was a space the width of the stairs themselves but as you came to the next floor, this gap was reduced to the extent that you have to squeeze past it. At some point, in an effort to squeeze in as many punters as they could, the hotel owners had moved the walls to allow for another room to be slotted onto the corner. One of these entirely inadequate results, on the 17th floor, the one below the top-floor restaurant, was my abode.
But then what would you expect from the worst room in any hotel? Well, possibly a bath plug, a TV remote, and less exposed plumbing, but hey.
Party!!!
I’ll quit the moaning however to explain why it was worth all the expense and hassle to get to Acapulco for New Year’s Eve. Exhausted, sweating, irritable, starving and feeling distinctly less than in a party mood, I lie on my bed watching some terrible film on TV and I somehow managed to gee myself up to go out – it was the whole reason I was here after all, I was going to let Avalon, Excalibur or any other Arthurian legend get in my way. So at 11pm, I summoned up the courage to venture out. The doorman that had saved my sanity had also helpfully imparted to me the information that the best party in town was likely to be at the Palladium – but it was 30 minutes away by cab.
So I jumped into a cab at 11.10pm in a desperate hope to get to the club, grab a drink at the bar and toast 2007 properly. He was delighted (although he had promised his wife to be in town at 12pm) and in a kind manner informed me he was going to charge me double normal rates to get there. I told him if he could get me there in time for me to get a drink in time for midnight, I would pay up, and so with the bargain struck, we zoomed through feverish traffic and pie-eyed pedestrians to the other side of the bay, up the hill and he dropped me off – but not before checking that it wasn’t a ticket-only event (he knew somewhere else that we might just make if it was).
A cab ride that I would later walk back, and which took an hour on foot, cost 300 pesos (£15), the Palladium cost 600 pesos entrance. The whisky and coke, the barman apologetically informed me, was another 140 pesos.
But then I walked out into a sea of young partygoers arranged in a Roman theatre style room with the most extraordinary view high across Acapulco Bay through ten-foot-high bay windows. Exactly five minutes to spare, the huge LED screen informed me. By the time I had found a decent spot to view it all, the countdown started, as had the enormous fireworks show in the bay. Hundreds of drunk, hopelessly fashionable and fantastically obnoxious people were screeching the countdown… cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno… Happy New Year!!!! A huge anti-aircraft siren went off, as did hundreds of dripping yellow fireworks in front of the windows. Some idiot to my right clearly felt this celebration was somehow all for his benefit and off to my left some drunken tart with her arse hanging out was hopelessly trying to draw everyone’s attention to her but it didn’t matter, it was glorious and I had a massive rush of hair-back-next-up. Thank fuck for that, was my overriding thought.
Travels
I had got up at 3.30am, taken a flight to Dallas, another to Mexico City, driven for an hour through Mexico City madness, another three to Acapulco, spent a dreadful three hours in search of my hotel, paid through the nose for a cleaner’s cupboard, and made it with but minutes to spare but, incredible as it may seem, this blast of energy, a huge rising tide of celebration across the miles of Acapulco Bay, shimmering and shining in multi-coloured explosions had somehow may it worthwhile. Thank fuck for that.
I was far too tired, too ill, and eventually too drunk, to have much of a conversation with anyone in that club, save the sort of snippets that reminded me of my clubbing days, but even so I had a ball.
Watching the hilarious antics of people that have yet to learnt they aren’t centre of the universe; observing the insecure trying to give the appearance of unobtainability before eventually snogging whoever was nearest when the last-but-one shot of alcohol cleaned out the final remnants of their resolve; dancing with the kind of joy and intensity that makes absolutely no sense during the day – all these things caused the sort of end-of-year foggy reflection that marks the best end of year and (you believe at the time) heralds a world of possibility in the coming year.
But at 4am, I had grown bored of the repetitious dance music and the increasingly drunk clientele. Even through the whisky haze, I realised it was time to leave.
Walk home
I decided to walk back home, get some air and reflect on life on the way back to the hotel. But not without first observing the extraordinary arrogance and idiocy that rich spoilt brats manage so effortlessly. Outside the Palladium, the steep driveway was abuzz with cars and taxis in an interconnected morass that would take an hour to unravel, and yet as I strolled down the path back to town, several limos of beautiful people were waiting to get to the club. It was mere seconds walk to the club but all were stubbornly refusing to get out until they pulled up outside and the door was opened and velvet ropes were removed to register their importance. I was glad I had got out when I did.
What amazed me though was that the town was still going. Never let it be said the Mexicans don’t know how to party. At 4.30am they were still going strong, whole families from 60-year-old women to six-year-old infants were still wandering about in groups, chatting and dancing. I was propositioned by a middle-aged prostitute who asked me if I had a cigarette and then proceeded to grab my balls and tell me she could show me a good time. I wasn’t as convinced as she appeared to be, removed her hand and keep walking, toying with the idea of grabbing a final drink on the way back home. But I had had my new year’s and I now I wanted to sleep off a cold, a wedding, a day of travel and plenty of scotch. I bought a huge bottle of water and had drunk most of it by the time I arrived at Avalon Excalibur.
I decided to have a final sit on the beach before going to bed and then passed out at roughly 6am, full of glorious plans for 2007.