Malpica, Sinaloa, Mexico

This week we are challenged to post a photo that depicts street life. View the original challenge post here. I submit for your viewing pleasure a street view of Malpica, Sinaloa, Mexico. In 2008, our family and significant others traveled to Mazatlan, Mexico for a short winter vacation. My son and his wife were celebrating their anniversary having been married in Mazatlan in 2006.

During our stay, my wife, Lynn, and I elected to take a bus tour of the countryside around Mazatlan. One of the towns we visited is a sleepy burg known as Malpica. The small town is located about 35 minutes from Mazatlan, just off Mexican Federal Highway 40. According to Wikipedia, the highway is also known as “Carretera Interoceánica” (Interoceanic Highway).

The roads in the town are narrow and there is no place for a vehicle as large as a bus to turn around. Our tour bus driver drove the short distance from the highway to the edge of town, and then when we left, the driver had to back up the entire distance to the main highway.

During our short stay, we visited a tile making facility and a bakery. The panera was warm and fresh out of the oven so we brought some back to the hotel to share with our family. We also brought home a souvenir tile that we had seen made by hand (well, not that exact tile, but one just like it, anyway.)

I hoped to find some more information on the Internet about the town to share. Amazingly, there is precious little information about Malpica available. I found a couple of blog posts that feature some of the sites we photographed as well. There was a Trip Advisor reference and an entry in Facebook. I couldn’t find population or other demographic data and even the venerable, if sometimes inaccurate Wikipedia had no information for me to reference.

The Trip Advisor reference had only a link to a travel security warning from the United States State Department warning against travel anywhere in Sinaloa with the exception of the tourist areas of Mazatlan itself. The state of Sinaloa has been the center of drug cartel wars. You can read the travel warning for yourself here.

Frankly, we enjoyed travelling to Mazatlan, and have also stayed in Ixtapa, but in recent years, other than our recent cruise ship stops, we have avoided travel to Mexico. It’s a shame that Mexican tourism is being held hostage by the cartels. We would love to return to Mexico but will stay away until the drug wars subside.

John Steiner