La Paz: First Impressions
I came to La Paz expecting a slow town. The kind of place where you book three nights, see the malecón, eat a fish taco, and head north for the actual trip. I had a return flight on the seventh day and a hotel in Todos Santos already paid for.
I changed both within forty-eight hours.
La Paz is a real city. About a quarter million people, a working downtown, decent espresso if you know where to look, traffic that’s irritating in the way only mid-sized-city traffic is. It is not Cabo, which is the comparison everyone makes — Cabo is a built-for-tourists strip; La Paz is a place where actual Mexicans live and have lived for several centuries. The difference shows up everywhere. Mercados that exist for the people who shop there, not for the cruise crowd. Restaurants that don’t have menus in English unless you ask for one. A pace that’s slower than San Diego but not performatively slow.
The malecón is the thing the brochures get right. Two miles of palm-lined waterfront with the kind of sunset that makes you understand why the conquistadors named the sea what they did. Mar de Cortés. The water turns four different shades of blue between noon and sundown and I still don’t have a word for the one it goes when the light starts to slant. I walked it every night for a week and never got tired of it.
What got me to extend the trip wasn’t the views. It was the food. I had a carnitas taco at a stand on Cinco de Mayo street that I’m still thinking about months later — fatty, crisp at the edges, dressed with nothing but lime and a salsa that was just chiles and salt. It cost me about thirty pesos. I ate three.
The thing that made me stay an extra week, though, was a different kind of feeling. After three days, the man at the corner tienda recognized me and started pulling out the brand of coffee I’d bought the previous morning before I asked. After four, the woman at the aguas frescas stand by the marina started making the jamaica without sugar because that’s how I’d had it the first time. Nobody at home in San Diego knows how I take my coffee. I’m not exaggerating.
I extended the flight. Then I extended it again. Six weeks later I still hadn’t been to Todos Santos.
The city keeps surprising me. Last week I found a record store run by a guy who’d been a session musician in Mexico City in the eighties and had opinions about every album in the place. The week before, I stumbled into a posada with a brass band that played until three in the morning. Last night, a fisherman at the marina told me an entire history of the Sea of Cortez fishery — the bonanza years, the collapse, what’s coming back — while we waited for a boat to refuel.
This place is loud and slow and quiet and busy and I’m not done figuring it out.