We welcome the arrival any new business offering bicycles and accessories for sale or rent. There are already too many cars, golf carts, and ATVs in town, and anyone who shows up with a non-motorized form of transportation should be welcomed with open arms. We know there have been mountain bikes and even beach cruisers available for rent here and there, and there are a couple of repair places along Miramar, but what our new guy offers is something more.

The new guy is Baldomero Miguel, who arrived here from Mexico City about 5 months ago. Baldomero hails from Spain originally, and has worked in the bike business all his life, he says. What he has on offer at Sayubicla, his little shop on Revolucion, on the right across from CVIS as you come into town, are all kinds of bikes for rent on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis. His are primarily street bikes, designed for riding around down, not for the mountains, but simply for the streets and beaches of Sayulita and nearby areas.

He even has a tandem bike for rent, and better yet, surfers, he’s got on offer bikes with special, custom-made surfboard racks, built by him from his own design, so you can throw your board onboard, and head down to the surf, no gasoline required.Along with the side racks for individual boards, he’s got bike trailers that will tow kayaks, SUPs, or multiple numbers of surfboards. And he does have some brand new bikes for sale as well.

In another twist on the basic bike rental, try the lunch cycle, a bike with a built-in lunch box on the back end. Baldomero will rent you the bike and provide the lunch and beverage as well, making sure the food and drink is good and healthy fuel for cycling. He’s trying to make a living, yes, but he’s also trying to get a few more people out of their cars and onto his bikes, getting healthier, keeping the streets less clogged, and generally enhancing the good environmental vibe of Sayulita. Viva Sayubicla! On Revolucion just past Miramar. Email sayubicla@gmail.com, cel 322-122-2416, facebook.com/sayubicla.

December 11 and 12 will not go down in the annals of great surfing days in Sayulita, but these days, any surfing days qualify as memorable, and we certainly bagged some fun waves this past week. While much of the summer and fall were, well, flat, all the local surfers are praying to their various surf gods that the north swells of winter will kick in soon, and we’ll get some big ones.

Meanwhile, yes, we had some waves. A small swell, with a short interval (meaning there is little time or space between one wave and the next) still coming from the south, although there was some west mixed in. You can see in some of the photos how crossed up are these swells. The two guys carrying boards walked up and down the beach a couple of times, trying to figure out where to paddle out. It was a little crazy mixed up there. However, according to the forecasts, the next few days will bring some north swell, which will be the first of the winter, the first of many.

Our Sayulita waves are kind of messy these days. We’re hoping for a big blast of a north swell, perhaps coupled with a full moon, to really push a lot of water in and out of the bay, and reorganize the bottom so that the rights and lefts are once again more defined, rather than this “all over the place” kind of surf where you see people going left at the right, and right at the left. The inside break, down by Don Pedro’s, continues to be ideal for beginners, and they are out there on their soft tops and paddleboards, having a ball–but the rest of us are still waiting to get bombed by big waves from the distant north, where winter storms soon should be brewing up some large ones. As even those among us who are not religious are saying these days, “Pray for Surf!!!”

Surely one of Sayulita’s finest yoga instructors is Graziella Jones, who teaches the highly precise style of yoga called Iyengar, named after the originator of the style, the Indian B.K.S. Iyengar. Graziella also calls her practice restorative yoga. In its concentration on detail, precision, and careful alignment of the spine and body, it is indeed restorative. > Read more

Stand-up paddleboard racing came to town this week, with the first leg of a trifecta of SUP races and meets taking place here in town, to be followed by races in Ixtapa and Manzanillo, down the coast, in the next few weeks. Sponsored by Stand UP Paddle Mexico and called Costa Pacifica 2013, these mixed pro-am races were ideally scheduled, as it turns out, since there was little surf to speak of. > Read more

This week December 4th marked the first day of the multi-day celebration of the life and times of one of Mexico’s most revered saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe, also known as our Lady of Guadalupe, who has been the patron saint of Mexico since the year 1531. In that long ago year, according to legend, a man called Juan Diego had a vision of a young girl on the hill of Tepeyac, near Mexico City. Though this young girl spoke Nahuatl, the indigenous language, Juan Diego recognized her as the Virgin Mary. > Read more

One of the many things we love about Sayulita are the flowers, which are many, gorgeous, and colorful. Coming here from the depths of a northern winter, one can not help but be enchanted by the brilliant floral abundance. > Read more

Like Sayulita’s Friday Mercado del Pueblo, La Cruz de Huanacataxtle’s Sunday market offers visitors and locals a like a chance to shop and buy a fabulous array of artesanal goods, ranging from organic foodstuffs of all kinds through handmade clothing, artworks, dishes, soaps, jewelry, beehives, dogfood, and everything else under the sun that can be made locally. The emphasis on quality control through authenticity—that the sellers are the producers—assures that buyers are getting the real thing. > Read more

A fugu is a type of pufferfish whose liver, intestines, and ovaries, served raw in paper-thin slices, are considered an exquisite (and very high-priced at around $200US per plate) delicacy in Japan. However, these fugu fish organs also contain a natural poison called tetrodotoxin, which is about 1200 times more deadly than cyanide. The poison is so potent that a lethal dose is smaller than a pinhead, and a single fish contains enough poison to kill 30 people. Aside from the golden poison frog, these fishies are the most poisonous known vertebrate in the world. > Read more

One thing you can’t help but notice about Sayulita is the mix of road finishes and conditions, ranging from skanky, barely driveable mud-wallows (you’ll see a lot of this in the rainy season) through hard-packed dirt, mixed mud or sand and gravel, different grades of pavement (with or without potholes of varying sizes), and also cobblestones. Many streets are a total mish-mash of all of the above. In part, this is because there is no real “governing authority” responsible for paving, cobbling, or maintaining all the streets of the town. Instead, the municipality deals with the busiest, primarily commercial streets in piecemeal fashion, taking care of what they must take care when they have no choice, like fixing the bridge when it got washed away in a flood (although this did take a rather longish time), or at last, in the past year or three, finally paving Avenida Palmar and Calle Miramar, both very active streets and former seasonal mudwallows or dustbowls. > Read more

Norteamericanos who live in Sayulita know the drill: every few months or so, there is another holiday to celebrate another revolutionary moment in Mexican history. Mexico has a wild, bloodstained, and still-evolving history, with major unresolved political, economic, and social issues being worked out before our very eyes. The USA had a “successful” revolution and that was that, more or less (the civil war, slavery, women’s suffrage, and a host of other issues notwithstanding), but Mexico is still figuring things out. > Read more