Mexico Day 97: Fire & Fright

La Ventura to Acapulco, Guerrero //

After five days on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico, I can tell you that it’s uncomfortably hot and humid for anyone not accustomed to such a climate.  However, the first two hours of daylight are deceivingly beautiful.  It’s warm but not hot, a light breeze gently rustles the palm trees overhead, and the rising sun casts golden hues across everything in its path.  I could be fooled into pulling up a chair and believing I’m in paradise, but I know what’s coming.  At 9am we finish packing up the truck and get back on the road.

About halfway through the first town that we’re passing through, Mark looks in his mirror and immediately pulls over while uttering the words “ah fuck” in a serious tone.  I know it takes something serious for Mark to react to any situation in such a way, and my knee-jerk reaction is that Heather & Adam were pulled over.  Instead, I get out of our truck to see a plume of smoke billowing out of Heather & Adam’s engine compartment as Mark runs past me with a fire extinguisher.  Since we’re parked precariously in a traffic lane, I stay with our truck and wait.  Meanwhile, my heart races.  A few minutes later, Mark returns with the news that Adam’s truck battery caught on fire.  

I don’t know what this means yet, but I know well enough to know it’s not good.

Mark moves us to a more out-of-the-way place to park while Adam assesses the damage.  Meanwhile, Heather finds some shade to sit in with the dogs while I begin determining whether or not we are broken down in a friendly and welcoming place.  My litmus test involves a friendly “hola, buenos días!” to every passerby.  Very few don’t return my gesture without a bright smile.  The first couple that walks by shakes my hand and extends a welcome to their town, “Bienvenidos a Chapala!”.  There’s a lot of daylight to be had still, and I’m hopeful we won’t be spending the night here on the streets of Chapala, but if worse comes to worse, at least our safety doesn’t feel like a concern.  If you remember from yesterday, we’re in a “red state,” and I’m still on the fence about whether or not there is any kind of basis for the US government’s warning to not travel here.  

It turns out Heather & Adam got extremely lucky.  In a failure that could have burned their entire truck and camper to the ground, the only damage incurred was to the battery itself.  This meant that the next order of business was to locate a new battery.  Would we be able to find one in this small town?  We had no idea.  Mark and I set off to find out.  

It didn’t help our cause that it’s Sunday, and the first couple of places we try are closed.  At the opposite end of town is a small storefront that appears to sell automotive parts.  A man and his wife run the store from behind a rod iron-clad service window.  I wait at the truck while Mark walks over to the store.   This will be a true test of Mark’s limited Spanish.  Our vocabulary as it pertains to dining out and paying for campsites is decent, but sourcing a truck battery from an auto parts store is an entirely new ballgame.  After a half-an-hour game of communication, Mark walks away with a new battery, and I feel immense relief that this little town had what we needed.

When we get back to Adam, he’s cleaned up his engine compartment and is ready to install the new battery.  I wait in the shade with Heather and the dogs while Mark and Adam get the truck back in working order.  I have a great deal of sympathy for how stressful this must be for Heather & Adam and also can’t ignore the multitude of ways that this could have been far worse.  The number of roads we’ve been on in Mexico that would have been extremely hazardous to be broken down on are immeasurable.  The fact that this happened in the morning hours with plenty of time to spare so that we weren’t breaking the number one rule of driving in Mexico, driving at night.  We didn’t have to drive hours to find a new battery.  No tow truck was necessary.  And the most important thing of all, Heather & Adam were okay and their home-on-wheels remained intact.  

After three hours on the side of the road in the small town of Chapala, Guerrero, the truck was repaired and ready to go.  Unfortunately, even though the guys have a theory, we’ll never know exactly what went wrong.  With that, caution would need to be exercised and we left it to Heather & Adam to decide how much farther they’d like to drive before finding a place to camp.  They chose to stick with our original plan of making it to and around Acapulco, a two and a half hour drive.  I’m happy to report, the rest of the day’s journey commenced without incident.

For a second night in a row, we arrived at another empty campground.  The locked gate and empty grounds caused a moment of concern that we may need to look elsewhere, something none of us really had the energy to do, but eventually a kind, old woman appeared at the gate and let us in.  We settled in, got comfortable, but knew that once again this wasn’t a place we wanted to spend much time.  With a promising location in mind for tomorrow, we went to bed with plans to get back on the road again in the morning.  

Hopefully, we would all get a good night’s sleep and the stress of this day would soon be behind us.  

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