We drive north out of Cabo San Lucas on the road to Todos Santos, just past the new CCC supermarket and Soriana – the Cabo San Lucas equivalent to Kmart - and hang a sharp u-turn in front of the American-sized shopping center. Matt guns our little rental car and amid angry horns honking, crosses two rows of oncoming traffic, and veers into a dusty parking lot filled with old Toyota pickup trucks, American made minivans, and micro-cars not so different than our rental cookie-sheet on wheels. There are no lines on the postage-stamp sized dirt parking lot, but Matt notices a car leaving what appears to be a parking space, and guns the engine again to grab the lone spot before another car claims it.

It is Wednesday at Los Michoacanos, and even though the lunch hour is over, all but a few of the tables in the open-air restaurant are full and a line of people 6 or 8 deep waits in the “To Go� line for tacos. We stand at the entrance and watch as half a dozen wait staff, dressed in jeans and bright red t-shirts emblazoned with cartoon pigs gathered around a large cooking pot, run from table to table, to the open kitchen, to a work station where a woman stands and cooks tortillas, back to the customer. They run the maze of tables over and over again, bringing soda in a can, bottles of Mexican beer, steaming plates of carnitas filled tacos, to the families and locals who sit at the plastic covered tables in white plastic chairs.

We find an empty table near the front of the restaurant and almost immediately, a waiter somewhere in his mid-20s, brings a carousel of traditional salsa, avocado salsa (not guacamole, but a thinner, pale green, almost milky sauce), and chunky pickled peppers and carrots. He takes our drink order and returns a few minutes later with a cold can of soda for me and a slushy bottle of beer for Matt.

We give our order of carnitas tacos to the waiter, and from our vantage point in the center of the restaurant, watch as he takes our order to the man behind the long counter who yields a cleaver as effortlessly as an executive does a pen.

The man behind the counter stands while he works, fetching large chunks of fried pork from a glass display-warming case that holds freshly cooked meat. He drops the ham-sized pieces on a well-worn hard plastic cutting board and with blurring speed, chops the pork into bite-sized carnitas. He picks up a handful of the shredded meat and drops it into a metal scale, sometimes adding a few more pieces to the scale, other times, taking back a few shreds before scooping the meat onto a plastic-lined piece of parchment and wrapping the package expertly. Every few minutes, the cashier handling the “To-Go� orders walks to the man, retrieves a package of carnitas, and exchanges it for a few hundred pesos with a waiting customer.

But we have decided to eat at the restaurant and after bringing bowls of bean soup to our table, the young waiter returns to a table a few feet from our table and waits while a woman kneads a large round of dough across a concave stone. She pulls golf-ball sized pieces of the white cornmeal into her greased hands, smooths and rounds it until it is nearly a perfect sphere, then drops it onto the base of a metal press and brings the top of the press down quickly, flattening the ball into a 6-inch round disk no more than an eighth of an inch high. She tosses cooked tortillas into small cloth-lined baskets and returns to rolling the dough over and over.

The waiter picks up a basket full of tortillas, places three or four on each plate, and takes the plates to the man behind the counter, who drops a few ounces of shredded carnita meat on each tortilla. The waiter sprinkles the tacos with chopped onions and cilantro and within 3 or 4 minutes of placing our order, our steaming plates of carnitas tacos arrive.

Los Michoacanos serves nothing but carnitas tacos and bean soup; no rice, beef, chicken, fish or shrimp. No enchiladas, taco salads, burritos, or dessert. No chips. Nothing I am used to in California except for the carnitas. Even the beans are different.

“They put a lot of faith in these carnitas,� I tell my husband. He shrugs his shoulders as he scoops four different types of salsa on his tacos. I don’t understand how he can taste the food under all that salsa.

I inspect my taco before taking the first bite, looking carefully for anything that shouldn’t be in the meat, but find nothing suspicious. I drizzle a spoonful of avocado salsa over the meat and lean in to take a bite.

I realize, almost instantly, that there is no need to serve anything at Los Michoacanos but carnitas.

We return to Los Michoacanos the following Sunday and are treated to live music – three men dressed in matching jeans, long sleeved shirts and cowboy hats who sing and dance in choreographed unison. We arrive just before 3 pm to mostly empty tables but less than 30 minutes later, every table in the restaurant is filled with families in Sunday-clothes, just in time for the rich-Spanish music to fill the open-air restaurant. We eat several tacos each and then order one or two more and extra tortillas. The woman making the tortillas smiles when we watch her fill our order.

We make one last trek north out of town, just past the Soriana, loop a quick turn against traffic, on the Wednesday before we go home. It is late in the afternoon, early in the evening just after the sun goes down, and as we pull into the little parking lot, we realize we have made an error arriving so late on 2-for-1 Wednesday at Los Michoacanos.

Although the restaurant has no doors or windows, its lights are dimmed and the kitchen is empty and we realize it is closed, sold out of food for the day. We have been told there is no need to lock doors here even though it is in the barrio, but we have not witnessed the trust that exists, the unwritten respect here for local people and businesses, until now. It is something that cannot be legislated. We stay in the car and watch as a potential customer walks through the darkened dining room and checks behind the counter for an employee, then heads back to her car.

We could stop at Hard Rock Café on the way back to the condo, or pick up food to go at McDonald’s or Domino’s Pizza, but we decide to make no stops at all. There are still a few tortillas left over from our excursion on Sunday and since it’s our last night, we decide to clean out the refrigerator. Maybe we’ll use the tortillas and cook some quesadillas on the grill.

Maybe we’ll just heat the tortillas and dip them good salsa.

I stand at the outdoor kitchen by the pool and heat the tortillas until they soften and darken against the heated bars of the grill. I slide a tortilla off the grill and feel the heat of the fire on my palms, feel the woman’s hands, the ridges of the press embedded on the dough. I place sliced pieces of soft Mexican cheese on half of each tortilla and remember the woman who kneaded the dough against the dark stone, rolled the ball of dough in her palms, flattened each into a disk and cooked it just before it came to my plate.

I imagine the people she must have fed, standing behind a table in the middle of a restaurant in the middle of the barrio in Cabo San Lucas.

http://www.losmichoacanos.com/

I cannot sleep, or rather, my body believes that I have had enough sleep, this morning at 5:23. Only six hours, not really enough. But when I close my eyes against the warm night air in my bedroom, my mind swims and my eyelids flutter. I am awake. 5:28 am. I have been like this since coming to Cabo a week ago. Maybe it’s the sound of the fountain outside my front door; maybe I can hear the surf of the Sea of Cortez a few hundred yards away, calling me, beckoning me back to her shores. The sun is still tucked deep behind the horizon and I know it will be another hour and a half before it peaks over the water’s edge and starts the final few days of our vacation.

This morning, I will return to the beach just after sunrise when the tide is at its highest and the water will feel most warm. Air bubbles on the surface of the glistening sand will reveal where sand crabs have dug into the shore after each wave recedes. Maybe there will be turtles hatching on the beach.

This morning, I will take my snorkeling gear: mask, snorkel, fins.

I will wade into the sandy side of the crescent beach and watch as the fish – only a few feet from the water’s edge – swarm around my legs, flick lightly at my knees. I will stay very still and let the puffer fish swim gently by.

* * *
I make my way down the cobbled road from our condo to the abandoned gully that leads to the beach. Rocks poke from the sandy soil and a wide trench runs the length of the gully, a path for the occasional rain water that drenches the peninsula when tropical storms make their way this far north. I step gently, careful not to stumble into a hole or on a rock.

We arrive at Los Cabos International airport early in the afternoon. The flight from San Francisco - just over three hours – transported us from a rainy and cold winter morning to a sunny, 85-degree afternoon. The flight is nearly empty – Matt and I have an entire row of seats to ourselves and so when we approach the small airport a few miles inland of the Sea of Cortez, I scoot to the window seat and raise the plastic window shade of the airplane window and watch as we descend from 30,000 feet into the barren Baja desert.

I walked around our building, past the family swimming pool, down the sandy hill that curves through palm trees, and out through the gate just beyond the complex’s sewage treatment pool. The construction workers had not yet arrived to begin a new day hammering heavy nails and pouring concrete into the 3 or 4 mansions being built just outside our gates so I turned left toward the cliffs where the new houses will sit and made my way to the end of the continent, and waited for the sun to rise over the Sea of Cortez.

One of the residents in our condo complex mentioned to me that there was only one paved road in Cabo San Lucas 20 years ago, but its difficult to believe if you stay on or around the “Tourist Corridor�, as the main resort area of Cabo is called. The nearly 20 miles of high rise condominiums, hotels, and acres of perfectly manicured golf courses that stand today make it difficult to conjure a Cabo any other way.

But after staying in the “Tourist Corridor� the first few days, we finally made it to downtown Cabo San Lucas yesterday and I realized, as we were driving through the city – can it be a city if most of the roads are poorly maintained dirt or ancient cobblestone?- that the sociologist in me never sleeps.

This morning, while sitting at one of the tables by the pool visiting with a resident of the complex, I noticed Palm fronds falling from the canopy of green above me. I followed the “thwup, thwup, thwup� of a heavy tool beating in the air to the cascade of fronds falling to the sandy soil below and finally, looked up into the tree from which they fell.

A ladder, probably 20-feet tall, rested against the narrow trunk of a tall Palm and atop it, a thin, grizzled man in cowboy boots, blue jeans, a colorful long sleeved shirt, and baseball cap, stood. He held a 12-inch long machete in his oversized hands and swiftly, with precision that comes only from years of repetition, he cut through the stalk of each of the fronds attached to the statuesque tree, leaving only a few tall fronds in the very center of the crown.

I’ve been in Mexico- Cabo San Lucas, which is a little resort town at the very tip of Baja California- for less than three days now. We arrived on Tuesday afternoon at the international airport 30 miles away and spent the first afternoon/evening grocery shopping, cooking dinner, and swimming in the heated pool.

On our first evening I went to speak with Miguel, the manager here at the small condo complex we are staying in, about the use of the barbecue by the pool, finding a detailed map, and the drinking water supply. His English is impeccable with only a slight Spanish accent. I wanted to ask him where he learned to speak my language so well, when I, a relatively privileged college instructor from America, knows only one language, English.

But the last thing I want to do is embarrass Miguel, and instead, I ask him for his guidance, his expertise about the area. Where should we eat? What sights should we take in while we are here? What should we avoid? And when he ticked off a list of restaurants, the beach, and small towns we should see, I scribbled furiously on the mental notepad inside my head and vowed to myself to visit as many as we could fit into our 9 days in Miguel’s country.

Wednesday, we drove the curvy but beautiful road north to Todos Santos, a destitute artisan’s village that sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Miguel suggested that we make the 45 mile drive to get a feel of the “real Mexico� and when I saw the look in his eyes when he said “real Mexico�, I wondered, is he sad, like I am, that in the last 15 years or so, that his little village of Cabo San Lucas has been transformed into a mini resort town, bringing Costco, Home Depot, more people, and awaking thousands of his countrymen and women to the economic disparity between Mexico and America and Canada? Although he is kind and generous to his guests, there is sadness to the set of Miguel’s eyes, lips, and brow.