Travels With Buddha 10.18 Fiesta La Luna Llena, Tribe Arroyo, Shipwrecks Beach, Cabo del Este, Los Cabos, BCS, MX
“You who choose to lead must follow/ But if you fall, you fall alone/If you should stand then who’s to guide you?/ If I knew the way I would take you home…
I’m sure that part of the reason that Buddha wants to leave is that he is pretty tired of listening to me talk about the good old times. We’ve been at Shipwrecks for about a week and I’ve blasted him with one story after another about this person or that, some cool event from twenty years past, or the way the road used to go along the beach or the way there used to be giant parrot fish on the reef out past the shipwreck. When you have a long history with a place the stories add up. And when you have a newbie to talk to…well I think it can get kind of obnoxious.
Because the past, it seems, is always better than the present. For one thing it is a lot easier to lie about. The past is a fertile garden for exaggeration. For instance….
A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or so it seems, there were these Polish guys who showed up one January….. Let’s say their names were Lukka and Majik. They were camping on the beach, but the north wind started to blow real hard and so they retreated up the big arroyo, which we called the Tribe Arroyo because of the commune family from Upper-State New York that stayed there every winter. Yeah, you got it, they were called The Tribe.
Well somehow Lukka and Majik got them selves integrated with the Tribe and before we know it they have built an oval of upright driftwood palm trees in the wide sandy bottom of the arroyo. They then parked their Volkswagen camper at one end and strung white faerie lights all around and had a table covered with a batiked Indian bed spread and laid out with a couple of laptop computers and a turntable. There were big speakers on the roof of the van and an extension cord that ran to a generator and there might even have been a disco ball hanging from the cliffside behind them, though I might be making that part up.
This was the original Club Poland. It started out one night on the full moon and there was a pretty good crowd there and a nice warm bonfire and DJ Majik wearing headphones and bobbing his head and house/trance/whatever music coming from the speakers. But what I mostly remember is a big bowl of magic mushrooms on the table. People were taking handfuls of mushrooms and washing them down with shots of tequila and…well you can imagine the scene from there. It went all night and I can clearly remember sitting on a granite ledge above the arroyo, wrapped in a Mexican blanket, totally blissed as I watched the full moon setting over the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains as the sun began to rise over the Sea of Cortez.
That, I tell Buddha, was the first Full Moon Party.
And yes, it’s been happening ever since. And yes, tonight is the full moon, so let’s go see if we can find it.
The Full Moon Party is sort of like Brigadoon. It just somehow appears. No one ever really knows exactly when or where. It could be on the beach, it could be up the arroyo, it might be somewhere in Mexico City, you just never know. You can’t exactly plan on it. It is magical like that.
But Buddha and I are determined. So after a quick nap (8 PM to Midnight) we grab a walking stick and wander out into the desert.
The Baja desert on a full moon in the middle of the night is not for the faint of heart. There are all sorts of creatures out there and most of them bite including the flora (cactus, thorns, spiny shrubs). But being an old hand I know a back way, up an abandoned rancho road around Titi’s house, to where there is a well worn path to a steep granite embankment that overlooks the arroyo.
When we finally get there (it takes awhile) we step to the edge of the cliff and suddenly there it is: The circle of driftwood, the bonfire, the Volkswagen camper, the DJ table, the light show shimmering on the granite wall, a laser flickering through the leaves of a ficus tree….honestly it’s like we stepped back in time.
Heavy bass and a thumping beat echo around the arroyo. Young Mexican hippy girls are swaying in the sand. A fire dancer with a flaming hula hoop is twirling off to one side. DJ Majik has a big mushroom-induced smile on his face.
Then as we watch I not-so-young man with giant dreadlocks that reach to his waist comes into the circle and is dancing wildly. The fire dancer is thrown off, some of the kerosene from her hula-hoop splashes out and soaks the man’s dreadlocks and when he twirls by the fire the back of his head goes up in flames.
Now he is REALLY dancing wildly as the flames at the back of his head chase him around the circle.
People run to him and soon put it out, he’s a bit singed, though seems to still be smiling.
Wow, Buddha says, THAT was different….
