A Dance to Remember: Todos Santos, Mexico
The posters for the annual festival of Dia de los Muertos boasted that the best mariachi band in all of Mexico would be playing in the village square of Todos Santos at 7 p.m. So we arrive a bit early to the small town on the western coastline of Los Cabos to find the food vendors just setting up and the crowds yet to arrive. I’d forgotten to figure in the local approach to starting times. At least we got a good parking spot.
Two hours later, the festival is in full swing. No mariachi band yet, but the square is packed. We’re surrounded by people in phantasmagorical costumes that mirror bizarre, half-woken dreams. Reserved seating is up close to the stage, and the sides and back of the square are lined with picnic tables and food booths. Children climb the trees around the square for a better view.
On stage we enjoy a costume contest, talent show, doggie-in-costume contest, an ex-pat trumpist and children’s group performances. All of Todos Santos seems to know everyone else on the stage. We sit at a picnic table with a protective father and his three adolescent girls, and I ask them questions in my broken Spanish. We take turns wandering the crowded path around the square, getting more delicious food, more drinks.
The mariachi band, Mariachi Nueve Jaliciense, arrives about 11 p.m. A mosh pit forms around the stage where the dozen musicians in light blue tuxes play — and they’re pretty great. People dance next to their picnic tables, in the paths, on their picnic tables. We are dancing under the trees, the string-lights swaying, the ground itself almost vibrating.
I look over at my often dancing-challenged husband who is moving arms and legs and even a bit of stiff torso with abandon. He is grinning. I grin back.
This was not the part of our vacation we expected to remember the most. At the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula, Los Cabos offers a landscape of mountains, sea and desert that attracts tourists who fly in every day and immediately go to resorts that line the Sea of Cortez. Many guests spend their entire vacations at these resorts.
When we planned our trip, we thought a timeshare week at Pueblo Bonito Sunset Beach, a luxury resort perched in the hills outside Cabo San Lucas, would be our highlight.
Our “room” there was an expansive suite, a huge terrace with a hot tub, padded lounges and panoramic views of the Pacific. Champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries greeted us. The resort was lushly landscaped, with multiple pools. There were diverse dining choices: casual buffets, a sports bar with U.S. teams playing on big screens, high-end specialty restaurants with views and attentive waiters. The resort was so large that a week passed and I never did find the sushi restaurant that was on it. We felt like we’d been dropped into an episode of Vacations of the Rich and Famous.
Compared to the resort, our next stop only 30 miles up the road should have been a real letdown.
Our airbnb casita was two cement-block rooms with a tiny covered patio. It was part of a group of casitas that faced each other along a twisting path, the cars parked in a lot at the entrance. The separate casistas shared wi-fi, as well as a secluded, tiled pool under a broad palapa. An open-air café (the only restaurant for miles) was run by a local couple, and they opened it each afternoon to serve drinks and fish caught that morning. Not little filets, but whole snapper, broiled to a dark crisp in the wood-burning oven.
This area — in addition to allowing us to enjoy and dance at the local Day of the Dead celebration — was just a short walk on a sandy path from Playa Los Cerritos, one of the few swimmable Pacific beaches in southern Baja. It’s a broad circle of compact sand, ideal for long beach walks. Families spread out with picnics and dogs ran loose and played. We found a tent facing the ocean with massages for $25 an hour. We felt our blood pressure dropping, a quiet peace as our minds stopped racing.
For travelers, serendipity is when chance encounters in ordinary circumstances of another culture or location bring us unexpected happiness. We’d expected that the luxury resort (and it was pretty wonderful in many ways) would be the ticket to vacation bliss. But for us, it is the funky, budget “add-on” that we remember. That’s where we want to return. It reinforced what we tend to forget: spending more money does not mean creating better memories. Go serendipity.
