Mornings get off to a sleepy crawl in the small Mexican beach town of La Manzanilla - about 8:00AM or so, some of the local ladies set up an impromptu juice stand in the center of town, just down the street from Posada Tonala. Equipped with some fairly powerful juicers, they do a very brisk business during the few hours that they are open. Their specialty is orange juice and carrot juice but they offer several other mixes as well - for a tall glass of orange juice the cost is 12 pesos (1.10USD) and for carrot juice, the price is 15 pesos (1.40USD). A good and healthy start to the morning!

After juicing up, I walk around the corner to El Girasol Bistro & Café for breakfast. Their specialty is shade grown organic coffee and some very tasty whole grain - home made muffins and cinnamon rolls. The other day I treated myself there to a large soy latte with organic coffee - the cost was 45 pesos, although somewhat expensive (comparable to Starbucks in terms of cost), I am supporting sustainable coffee cultivation in Mexico. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention they have free wifi for their customer, that’s another plus. More and more of the restaurants that cater to gringos have free Wifi access for their guests.

Typically I will spend a couple of hours at El Girasol - writing articles for this blog and surfing the Internet for the latest sports news, then I am off to beach The beach is pretty much deserted at this time, although during the 2 week Easter holidays it jams with Mexican tourists mostly from Guadalajara. There are about 12 open-air palapa restaurants on a 600-meter stretch of beach. Two of these restaurants rent the traditional beach lounge chairs (the ones that recline) with attached umbrella for 110 pesos (10.50USD) for the day although if you buy some food or drink, they will not charge you anything for use of their facilities. Fair enough! The rest of the restaurants have conventional plastic lounge tables (with attached sun umbrellas) and plastic deck chairs. Most of them won’t bother you if you sit at one of their tables and do not order any food or drink.

I usually hang out at a place called El Rincon. The guacamole here, served with chips and salsa is muy delicioso (30 pesos) - I wash it down with an ice cold Negro Modelo (15 pesos). The rest of the afternoon goes by pretty fast as I alternately do some reading, snooze, take a swim in the lukewarm ocean waters or watch a variety of beach vendors trickling by. The beach vendors come out in force on weekends during the season or on Mexican holidays, but during the weekdays, their numbers are few. Oops 6:30PM, time to head back to Posada Tonala and get ready for dinner. Just another day in paradise….
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El Girasol Bistro and Café recently had a change of ownership and will be closed for the duration of the offseason (till the end of October).

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Mexico, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.