MeXscape

Driving in Mexico is like every freak-you-out, what-are-they-thinking, this-will-never-happen-in-real-life simulation you had to sit through in Driver's Ed. Remember sitting in your little faux car with steering wheel, pedals, turn signals, and side-view mirrors driving along with the movie on the screen while crazy pedestrians stepped out in front of you without looking, people opened car doors at random, children chased balls into the street and 50% of drivers ran stop signs? The machine always spat out a score at the end. I always did miserably. Thank God I'm better at it in real life.

No, they are not golf carts on steroids, they are pulmonias - modified VW Things and the cutest public transportation I have ever seen. They are unique to Mazatlan. Regular taxi drivers started calling them pulmonias, the Spanish word for pneumonia, intimating that the ride in the open air air cars would make you sick. They were trying the squash the competition for fares in its fledgling stage. It didn't work. You see them everywhere. But the name stuck.

Ok, after spending a little more than a week here, I have to revise one of my earlier statements about life in this city. It is entirely possible to feel uncomfortable or even unsafe in this town. I'll describe the scenario for those of you who haven't been there:

If you drive in Mexico, it doesn't take you long to discover your first tope. You'll know you've found one when your car suddenly jumps and lurches, which may be accompanied by a scraping noise. The translation for tope is speed bump, but that is way to narrow a term to describe what a tope really is.

Mazatlan- the misconceptions

Mazatlan is a small town. From everything I've heard and read I expected a small town with a central downtown area, probably around a square. A few main roads. Some sprawl as things spread out along the coast and of course the newly developed tourist and resort areas north of town.