After many downhill twists and turns, at the very end of a road built for Nayarit royalty, is a little lake that could have spilled from a book of fairy tales. La laguna Santa Maria del Oro, in the crater of a long-ago volcano, is near enough to perfect to forever please Christopher French. He’s been […]
Continue ReadingHenry Wadsworth Longfellow waxed poetic about the bronze bells of San Blas without seeing or hearing them. These less eloquent westwords are about the bugs of San Blas, a very up-close and much too-personal accounting with scars as proof of participation. From a distance, San Blas is just another beach town, in the state of Nayarit, on […]
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Larry Herman never expected to live this long. He made no financial provisions for old age. At 69, he and his best friend Lynda, 65, escaped subsidized senior housing in Savannah, Ga., by going back to work. They got away from wheelchairs, walkers and the sadness of people waiting to die. Alas, they soon discovered […]
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Here is a gift for you, good news, a mid-term report from my favorite little Mexican school. Several years ago I told you about Edd Bissell, pharmacist from New Market, Tennessee, who retired to the high-rent district, Punta Pelicanos, in the town of La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, on the beautiful Bay of Banderas, in the […]
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Three Mexican fishermen, lost at sea for nine months and nine days, were world news for a few minutes in 2006. Their survival was a miracle of faith and fierce determination, or the biggest fish tale ever told. As you may recall, shark hunters Salvador Ordonez, 37, Jesus Vidaña and Lucio Rendon, both 27, ran […]
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Really good things keep happening for San Quintin Escuela. How this very rural elementary school has risen from nothing to something special is a stunning success story. The small Nayarit village in the foothills of the Sierra de Vallejo mountains, just 40 kilometers from downtown Puerto Vallarta, is a different world. It is not distinctive […]
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This story starts on the evening of September 9, 1991 at the National Guard Armory in Knoxville, Tennessee. Stan Brock, an unusual Englishman made semi-famous by his role in the TV series Wild Kingdom, had founded something called Remote Area Medical and was soliciting volunteers for a three-week mission to one of the Tuxpans somewhere in the […]
Continue ReadingHow did Robert Mulligan find himself, in August, in a Mexican jungle, running a small flat-bottomed boat up a sleepy little river into the steamy interior, pointing out tiny alligators to the wives of two retired telephone executives from Detroit, Michigan? Three years ago when he left his tenured position teaching literature at a small […]
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Something for Nothing By Robert Richter Publisher: Dark Oak Mystery Series, 2015 Paper: $14.95 US Kindle: $2.99 US Robert Richter’s new novel, Something for Nothing, is his third featuring Cotton Walters, ‘not your ordinary roving gringo’, who is called Algo by his Mexican buddies, shortened from the Spanish word for Cotton, algodón. Although Cotton prefers ‘a […]
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Something Like a Dream By Robert Richter www.oaktreebooks.com Available from Amazon Books: Paperback Also on Kindle and other electronic formats Robert Richter’s remarkable novel, Something Like a Dream, begins like this: “I am outside myself again and watching the charred body of Cullen Bryant Springfield, slung on the back of a burro, coming down the mountain toward us […]
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