I had rather a strange morning. I awoke to the sound of rain. Not a torrential downpour, just a good steady, Vancouver style rain that lasted for at least an hour after I awoke. I don't know how long it had been raining before I heard it.

Now you ask, "What is so strange about rain in Vancouver?" and I reply, "I wasn't in Vancouver. I was in the state of Guerrero, Mexico", where, the locals tell me, it hadn't rained during the month of March for twelve years. One resident told me it was forty years. At any rate, rain in that part of Mexico, during the early part of the year, is extremely rare.

What made it even stranger was that the sun didn't come out after the rain. The clouds thinned during the day but never dissipated and as evening drew on they became thicker, blacker, and more ominous.

In the early evening I went to visit some friends who live in a typical Mexican style building on a busy street in Zihuatanejo. The building is uninsulated and unlined. The walls are constructed of concrete block. The upper portion of two of the walls are decorative block with patterned openings to allow hot air to flow out. The roof is corrugated sheeting and mounted on wooden cross members with air spaces between it and the walls.

My friend's house is in a business district with a busy bus stop, where the busses stop for some minutes, directly out front. On one end of the building is a CD store, on the other end, a shoe store. Needless to say the noise level, inside, is quite high, night and day. This night there was also a band playing, on an open stage, directly across the street.

If you can imagine the decibel level from four lanes of traffic, busses parked out front, pedestrians and bus passengers, a music store, and a live band, you will realize it was very hard to communicate with my friends, inside their home.

Through the decorative blocks I could see lights reflecting off the trees in the back yard. My friend corrected me, saying, it wasn't lights but lighting. I opened the door to see. I was nearly bowled over by the wind.

The night was bright from a constant display of sheet, and fork, lightning. The wind swirled through the palm fronds and thunder was a constant rumble now that the door was open and it could compete with the other noises.

As I watched, a large pepper tree, the cracking of its branches audible above the roar of the wind, slowly toppled over. Its final fall arrested by its branches mingling with those of neighbouring trees, and a clothesline that stretched but didn't break.

As I was closing the door, I was assaulted, from behind, by a fine spray of rain coming through the ornamental bricks in the front wall, bringing with it the accumulated dust that sat in the openings. As I was determining the source of this fine spray of mud that I, and the interior of the house, was being showered with, the lights went out.

The band across the street, having their own power supply and thinking they were on the Titanic, continued to play.

Using a lighter, as there was no candle, my hosts were collecting containers and positioning them under the leaks from the roof.

Opening the front door I watched as busses and taxis, despite driving through six inches of water that covered the street, continued to disgorge passengers who would dash into the band stand.

As the lights from the stage attempted to compete with nature's display of lightning, waves of water, propelled by gravity and the churning wheels of the traffic, rolled down the street.

The waves of sound continued from the band's speakers and eventually won out over nature's kettle drums as the wind, rain, hail, and thunder subsided. We were surrounded by the eye of the storm.

After awhile the lights came back on and though we could walk outside without getting wet we could not enjoy the calm of the eye as we were still assaulted by the rock and roll from across the street.

Zihuatanejo is surrounded by mountains and was spared the brunt of the storm which hit the outlying districts, blowing down trees and ripping roofs off of houses. Winds of more than 100 Mph, drove frozen rain through windows of houses and cars.

When the eye of the storm had passed the rains and winds returned but for a shorter period of time and with less intensity. Later, as the rain began to ease up and the lights went out again, I decided to walk back to my hotel.

Once off the main street, and away from the headlights of the traffic, avoiding the pitfalls of Mexican sidewalks, I stayed in the middle of the street. As I was wearing sandals and shorts I didn't mind the water, which was about a foot deep. I slowly shuffled my feet along, feeling for branches and other obstacles, and keeping my weight on my feet as much as possible, so the current wouldn't sweep them out from under me.

By the time I reached my hotel my T-shirt and shorts were soaked but I was still warm. Ahead, I could see the Coleman lantern of the hamburger man. He had moved his cart under a canopy and had a line of customers. After taking my turn in the line up, I enjoyed the best hamburger of my life.

Inside the hotel I felt along the wall until I found the box with my key in it and then gingerly felt my way up the stairs and into bed.

CLOUDY SKIES

Taken from the roof of the hotel the morning after the cyclone.

Early Saturday morning the sun burned off the last of the clouds. The hotel called in crews to replace the roof that had blown off the stairwell and broken the water pipes, leaving the building without water.

El Centro.

Downtown Zihuatanejo. The early morning sun catches sweepers cleaning the basketball court after the storm.