I will never forget my first glimpse of Yelapa from the Sombrero deck as we came around the last rocky point. I later learned that rock was affectionately called shit rock because Pelicans perch on it and did what I had been doing for 3 weeks at the Hotel Marsol. It was surreal and not unlike how I felt many years later when I first saw Venice, Italy from the water; beautiful, exotic and strange all at the same time, more like a dream than reality.
I was still mareado from the boat ride when we had to step down into wooden canoas and get rowed to shore in small groups. Having lived on flat land my entire life, jumping in and out of these canoes was anything but easy. I simply did not understand moving objects on waves. The first time I visited Santa Monica, CA as an adult, I went to the ocean's edge and tried to stand in a little wave. It knocked me over. Between Yelapa and Santa Cruz, I get it now, but, then it was all very foreign and the power of the ocean was alarming. The truth is I was ready to jump into the ocean and swim just to get off that pitching boat, so, I was more than happy to leap into the dugout and head for shore. Of course, it wasn't that simple...the boatman needed to time the olas and try to get us in without swamping the boat. I would find that challenge very entertaining months later when I no longer considered myself a turista. My Spanish vocabulary increased moment by moment.
My friend Barbara and her young son Todd and I were to stay at Christina Woodruf's palapa upriver. That was to be my first landing and home in Yelapa. I recall looking across the full lagoon bewildered and wondering how was I going to get across this body of water. It was the most primitive place I'd ever seen. It was hot and sultry and the lagoon was deep and we needed to cross it.
Several small young boys approached us and offered to help us for some pesos. They took our packs and put them into a tiny canoa banked at the river mouth and motioned for us to follow or get in, I don't recall now. Those enterprising boys were Javier, Jorge and Juaquin Rodriguez! The biggest handled the money and split half between the other two brothers! He was very much in control of the situation and an aspiring capitalist. Today Juaquin runs Jack's Taxi (boat) Service and the other brothers are well known Yelapa entrepreneurs with rental apartments and other negocios of their own.
