Playa Paraiso

Mexico City, Circa 1999.
It was a cold, polluted Mexico City afternoon, it felt like a Thursday but smelled like Monday and the rain barely touched the streets. It was one of those days on which you could barely see the silhouette of the WTC, far away in the distance, behind a misty grey smog screen. I heard a knock on the door and to my surprise it was my dear friend Santi. Tall, thin and pale, his sunk eyes and the unmistakable blond mullet.
"- Hermano" he said as he greeted me with great joy, like he always does.
He had just arrived from Helsinki and had brought along a couple of his friends from Finland, one of them was Ville, whom I had met on a previous occasion. Ville is quite the character: not as tall as Santi but taller than me, a 6" Nordic in his late 20's who works at a shipyard in the Finnish Lapland's at sub zero temperatures, I think he resembles one of those a-ha members who never appeared on the videos. The other friend, whom I had never met till that day was Ponu. Direct descendant of barbaric Viking ancestry, big, tall, pale and simply put he's a guy you wouldn't want to mess with.
They had come to Mexico with a decisive plan: get high beyond reason and drown in Tequila. This, of course was an occurrence that somehow seemed to repeat itself year after year.
"- Gerber" said Santy
"- Let's go to the beach, somewhere tourists don't know about"
I knew just the place, and a few hours later we were on the Bus to Playa Paraiso. How I miss it, it is a beautiful beach on the State of Guerrero, roughly 90 miles from the port of Acapulco, surrounded by palm trees and well, nothing more.
We arrived there by dawn and promptly set our tents and hammocks under a palm tree covered area, which is part of a restaurant run by Dona Guella, a dark skin, tough lady with indigenous background and long straight grey hair, I guess she must have been in her 60's then. Dona Guella was a very humble woman with a heart of gold, someone I considered an adoptive mother.
Her family, mostly fishermen, helped her run the place. A shack/restaurant located on this magical uncharted beach which actually is a sandbar. It must measure miles in length and only a couple of hundred feet across and sits between the ocean and a fresh water lake.
Blow dryer? stereo? No, there's not electricity, or streets or even brick and mortar houses and the closest telephone is 2 miles away.
Then the sun finally came out, shining bright through the palm tree plantations. The coffee was as always warm and disgusting and the company unparalleled.
After a filling breakfast we gathered $100 pesos, which is roughly ten bucks, with which we bought half a pound of pot, It was quite a stash. once gathered, on the mess table, I proceeded to form a mountain shape with it, a volcano at which the four of us stared in awe, since it resembled that one of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Santi and Ville got a bucket full of ice and Coronas, while I showed Ponu how to mix Absolut with coconut ice cream. Oh yeah baby, it was vacationing all the way.
I spent hours on the beach, watching pelicans flying in jet fighter formation on the crest of waves, I was in standby mode, relaxing in the Mexican comatose.
The rest of that evening went by very much uneventful, we sat around a campfire, cracked jokes, talked about life, the Leningrad Cowboys and made rolling paper origami, which we later smoked. Eventually I lit my diesel lamp and headed to my tent, sometime around an hour later silence covered the place like an old blanket, and I fell asleep. Well, I was, until a deafening scream ripped the night in half
" - Pablo!!!!, Paaabloo!!!"
It must have been Ville, yelling in complete horror, Santi and Ponu followed suit and in a split second they stormed my tent. " - Pablo!!!!, Paaablo get up, NOW"
I jumped out of my skin only to see their pale, long faces, as if they had seen a ghost. Tsunami, I thought. I ran outside my tent with them to see what was the commotion all about, and that is when they stopped me, put their hands to my mouth and told me to hush. " -Shhhhh!" they said in unison. " - wait", whispered Santi "...just wait" as I stood there with all my senses wondering WTF what had happened.
The night was still, quiet, I even saw a firefly flick in front of us, and that is when the screaming returned " - THAT!!!, WHAT IS THAT ????" they screamed while pointing at the blinking bug.
" - RUN !!!" I said. And these Vikings took off running down the beach, terrorized like teenage girls in a Tel Aviv mall during a bomb threat at Victoria's Secret.
That is how I learned that in Finland they don't have fireflies.
I also learned that shredded reindeer antlers don't really do a thing.
And perhaps it's time for me to pay them a visit.