Our first day of exploration — Jan 22

After the unpacking and drinking of the requisite coffee, we needed to get some food, and we wanted to do some exploration of the town, so off we went.  First, to pick up a bit of food at one of the large convenience stores and second to pick up some wine for Harold and some vodka for my martinis.  Done!

Then we started walking — delicately.  The “sidewalks” are rocky and are very hard to walk on, and at least for me, very hard on my feet (or at least one of them).  But we made it to the Malecon, the beautiful 1/2 mile walkway along the lake and we walked a small portion of it before we headed off to find the town Center.  Unfortunately, we headed in the wrong direction, and after a lot of walking on rough and rocky streets and seeing quaint little streets and some little shops, we decided to head back to our place.  At that point, I wasn’t so sure about Ajijic.  I was tired and hot and hadn’t seen what I expected the place to be like.

The “sidewalks” where we live

We rested a bit and after taking another look at the map of Ajijic, I realised we had turned in the wrong direction off the Malecon.  So after a cocktail on our beautiful patio, we struck out again for the REAL Town Center.  Quaint and quite wonderful it was.  Our destination was a Cocktail Bar that had trivia on Wednesday nights.  We were a bit late but a couple of tables allowed up to join them (separately), and our teams did well.  It was fun.  We have also learned some things about Ajijic in the past two days.

(1) First about the ex-pats at the cocktail bar.  Two leaders, one male and one female, and they did an excellent job.  I think they even made up the questions themselves, so they were in tune with what we all might know.  There were about 8 tables of 6 each, all expats and all around our age or younger.  There were three women at my table, for example, and they were all younger, probably by ten years The most surprising thing is that they had been there for 17 years, 10 years, and 8 years.  I was shocked.  They indicated that most of the expats who come to Ajijic stay, unlike the expats in Ecuador who seem to move around from location to location and country to country.

(2) Jorge, our driver from the airport, also passed on some info about the area from his experience having lived here for almost all of his life.  First, the palm trees.  You see a few, but not very many.  Recently, the palm tree weevil has infested the trees, and they are dying. Unfortunate.

A picture of the weevil from the internet.  People report seeing them on the sidewalks and even in houses., Happily, we haven’t seen any in ours!

(3) He also talked about the change from rural to city.  In the past, the lake was surrounded by mango groves which have all (?) been cut to make way for new housing.  While he appreciated the fact that the population increase has created new jobs for people, he also missed the beauty of the mango groves.  He also indicated that the people who sold them got an influx of money, but that at this point, they had minimal means to make a living.  They grew up as farmers and there wasn’t need for their kind of expertise any more.

(4)  Lastly, he talked about the lake.  I had asked if it was polluted and he said that it had changed immensely.  When he was young, you could swim in it and see the bottom because the water was so clear.  There also were tons of fish swimming right alongside you (or perhaps under you).  Now, the lake is very dirty, and it doesn’t get the same kind of use that it did in the past.  Also the kinds of fish have changed.  Now there are cat fish, tilapia, carp and a couple of other kinds.  He wasn’t sure of the names of the fish in English, but he didn indicate that some of the locals still fished and ate the fish, but that mostly people were eating fish from the sea.  In the past, the lake was full of white fish, but the tilapia changed that, and now there are no white fish.  The lake has gained some renown as a good bass fishing location, however.

So we are learning.