We arrived at Matenchen Bay at 0400 on the first of January 2009, wreathed in woodsmoke. Woodsmoke! What a welcoming sensation after 700 miles of treeless Baja and the 270 miles of open sea we had just crossed as we came from Cabo San Lucas. The sea smells wonderful, but the land is where we come from. It presents a whole palette of happy odors that remind us who we are and what we love.

Matenchen Bay is a broad, open bay lined with palm trees on the north and steep mountains on the east. Palm trees! Groves of them! If we needed symbol of arriving in the tropics we'd found it. We didn't have much time to admire it, though, for some hours after we'd arrived we got a visit from Gary aboard "Dash." He had come into the bay some hours before us and was itching to enter San Blas, our real destination a short distance to the north. We raised our anchor and made our way in.

A bit of background may be in order before we proceed with our story. Our entry into the estuary at San Blas was heralded on the radio by Norm Goldie, a famous local character who--ahem--attends closely to the needs of visiting yachts. He helps them get through the shifting shoal entrance to the harbor, provides them with a map of the town and proffers--ahem--abundant advice. As we were motoring through the tricky entrance, watching our depth sounder and steering carefully, there he was on the radio, announcing that we really ought to have contacted him prior to entry (as the entrance can be tricky) and informing us about where to take our dinghy when we went to shore, which flag to avoid colliding with while approaching the shore in our dinghy, where to anchor so as to avoid the wrath of the Port Captain, the importance of avoiding the no-see-ums with insect netting, that a departing yacht recently had reported 13 feet of water in the entrance, which was of course impossible because it's all very shallow, and that he would be holding court in the plaza between 5:00 and 5:30 so we should come meet him then. We avoided him a bit too assiduously: I would like to have met the man. But when we entered we were just too busy to talk to him, and after a few days it would have been awkward, since by some miracle we had in fact entered without grounding and anchored without incident and were busy dodging the treacherous flag and swatting at the insects and kowtowing to the Port Captain all by ourselves.

We spent almost two weeks in San Blas. The town was Spain's major seaport in the eastern Pacific in the late 18th century but by the middle of the 19th it had been passed up for glamorous Mazatlan and Puerto Vallarta. A bit of colonial prosperity remains but it's pretty sleepy at the same time. The streets are narrow, cobbled sand. There is a pleasant plaza in the middle, and small one- and two-story buildings make up the rest of the town. It's hard to believe it was a port: There are no cranes and no docks to speak of, only a half-sunken shrimp fleet rusting away, and a big fuel dock selling gasoline to the pangueros. The estuary has room for half a dozen visiting yachts to anchor in a row, a stone's throw from the town's shore; on the other side of the estuary is an island with a rocky hill and a lighthouse on it. There is a brand-new, government-sponsored marina with room for ten boats or so, but when one can anchor for free, why pay to stay there?

In the estuary, every day the tide swings one way or the other so the boat faces in different directions. This variety would be charming, but one afternoon, sitting on the boat it seemed as if the panga traffic in the channel was coming quite a bit closer than normal, and we realized that we were dragging anchor. Now, I'm a really meticulous anchorer, so this seemed a little implausible, but sadly it was true. We started the engine and I pulled up the anchor, which turned out to be a brief task as the chain had wrapped several times around the anchor. So instead of an anchor at the end of 100 feet of chain, we had a big ball of chain with an anchor in it not far below the boat. After less than an hour I had disentangled the chain and we were at anchor again, chastened.

What had happened was that as the boat moved back and forth with the tides, it was going in a circular motion and turning around and around the anchor. Conditions have been so calm that the chain never stretched out; it just made circles and eventually a knot. When we re-anchored we were more in the tidal stream and less in an eddy, and we had no further problems, though we checked our anchor frequently to see if it had twisted up again.

Why did we stay so long in San Blas that we had to keep checking our anchor? Well, it's really nice! It's very warm but not too warm, there are palm trees and friendly people and a nice vegetable market and cheap and tasty tacos and licuados (fresh fruit milkshakes). And there are things to do.

On our second day there we hiked up to a hill overlooking the town, where the town was founded. A chapel was built there beginning in 1789; in 1879 in a fit of disestablishmentarian rage the government removed the bells, inspiring poor old Henry Longfellow to write his last poem, "The Bells of San Blas." The ruined chapel is still there; the bells are still elsewhere, and it's a beautiful spot. There is also a fortification to protect the town from pirates, and old cannons point out to sea and along the estuary. Below are palm groves and the town itself: A lovely view.

A couple of days later we went on the "Tovara Jungle Tour" which meant riding on a panga slowly and gently up through the mangroves to a crystal-clear freshwater spring. Along the way we saw and photographed lots of birds, plants, and crocodiles. I believe that if we were birdwatchers we would be very pleased with ourselves, having seen all sorts of herons and cormorants and raptors along the way. And crocodiles always make their observers feel like adventurers. We saw some remnants of the set of "Cabeza de Vaca," a 1990s film about a conquistador gone off the deep end (see photo gallery for shack on stilts with cow skull).

This jungle tour is pretty famous so there is a whole district of outdoor seafood restaurants alongside the road near the landing where you board your panga. We went to one and Sarka had a really extraordinary fish filet (grilled perfectly) and I had what was billed as "shrimp cocktail" and proved to be the most delicious warm shrimp broth with shrimp and octopus in it, with cold chopped onion, cucumber and tomato to sprinkle on top, served in a big round sundae glass. For both of us it was some of the best seafood we'd ever had anywhere: They really do know how to cook fish.

Right on the plaza there is a pleasant gringo bar called "San Blas Social Club" that reminded me slightly of Caffe Trieste in North Beach, only the characters here are a bit less interesting and more washed-up. The proprietor is really great, though, and they have jazz records on the walls and jazz music on the stereo, and free wifi for our laptops. The place is wide-open to the plaza, with open doors and windows letting the balmy breeze in. Beer is about $1.

We arrived in San Blas on New Year's Day, when Mexicans are still on holiday, so there were lots of people in town to go to the beach. There was a little carnival just next to the San Blas Social Club, with crazy homemade kids' rides of the sort that haven't been permitted in the US for forty years. A multi-story trampoline village was extremely popular--a large-gauge net (big enough for a child's head) kept them from flying out--and the happy cries of delighted kids and squeaking springs made the whole area a bit hard to hear in. But then the holidays were over, the carnival moved on and the town slowed down.

Sarka sanded and varnished (not vanished) for a couple of days, and I lazed around reading a giant book about the malfeasance of the construction of the transcontinental railroad. I will be recruited to varnish the sides soon, but I got off easy this time.

Several more days were consumed by my getting what at first I thought was "la turista" and later concluded was a virus.

There is a cute little business called "Pepe's Dinguies" where you can land your dinghy on a little beach, and Pepe will watch it for you for 20 pesos ($1.75). Pepe lived for six months in Oakland and is young and friendly and eager and has a beautiful wife and little baby. He helped us get water for the boat, and took our laundry to the laundry place on his bike. He's great and it's fun to go there.

One day we took a bus an hour or two from San Blas to the mountain city of Tepic, which is the capital of Nayarit state. As it was a Sunday, the museums were closed, but fortunately we had plenty of entertainment sitting around Tepic's bustling main plaza. There was muzak ("The Girl from Ipanema" and some Hawaiian favorites) piped in throughout, and a little fiberglass train driven by a teenager carried kids along a red-painted path that wove around the plaza. Someone had strung a cable between two trees for children in harnesses and helmets to slide across a big fountain on. Weddings let out and people dressed in satin finery strutted around and took pictures together. The Huichol indians, who live far away in the mountains, come to Tepic to sell handicrafts, and Huichol people wearing the most beautiful woven clothing walk the streets among the mestizos. Sarka and I were literally the only gringos we saw all day, except for one we saw eating on the balcony of a fancy hotel. We returned to San Blas in the evening, refreshed by watching most of "Alvin and the Chipmunks" in Spanish on the bus.

Speaking of the Huichol, the shore of the estuary away from the town is an island with a beach on the far side. We rowed over there one day to check it out and go swimming. The Huichol go to the island to make offerings, and on the beach were all sorts of little handicrafts. There were candles tied with blue cloth, with little dream catchers lashed to them, and little cloth beads, and carved bamboo stems to support the candles, I suppose to stick in the sand. I found two little wooden squares with brightly-colored yarn paintings on one side, showing abstract snakes. We left these items alone, but it was marvelous beachcombing.

One considerable shortcoming of San Blas is the no-see-ums, known locally as "jejenes." They appear in numbers around sundown, though they are well-represented throughout the day. And they take little bites of one's skin. The bites sting a little, but if one had only one or two they really wouldn't be too bad. But after a few days one notices a fair accumulation of bites, and then one's tolerance is gone and one begins to lose one's mind for the itching and scratching. My ankles were a shocking landscape of scabsâ€"from old bitesâ€"and pink dots from new ones. Nights are indeed long when one's ankles and arms are on fire and there are jejenes fluttering about, waiting to contribute to one's misery. We have no-see-um netting, which helps a great deal, but on warm nights feels too much like a blanket covering the window. Being shut up in the boat on beautiful, balmy full-moon evenings is kind of a letdown.

San Blas is really what we came on this trip for. It's a genuine tropical town with things to do and warm weather and good food. Fortunately the jejenes are there to stay or we might have been tempted to stick around even longer.