July and August are vacation months for the Mexican people. And where do they like to go? The beach, of course!

Mazatlán has been filling up with Mexican tourists, and the it feels very festive and fun. And different than in the winter, when it is full of American and Canadian tourists. For one thing, there are more cars, since many of them drive here. For another, they do at least some of their own cooking. You should have been at Mega yesterday morning, it was a zoo!

Paul and I read the paper every day and today had a couple of interesting bits that I thought you might be interested in:

The Secretary of Tourism listed the most popular destinations for Mexican tourists in the summer – the figures below are estimates for 2008.

Makes sense to me since Acapulco and Veracruz are pretty easy driving destinations from Mexico City.

Then, there was an article on the cleanliness of the beaches. The water was tested at a number of beaches and the cleanliness is measured by something called “enterococos.” I tried to look it up and can tell it is some kind of bacteria but don’t know much more than that. Here are a few statistics:

The beach testing information was provided by Greenpeace. Recommended enterococos level should be less than 100 enterococos/100 ml.

The article didn’t say the cause of the bacteria – summertime waters are warmer and I am sure bacteria occurs naturally as well as due to human causes. I would like to know more about this, unfortunately the article in the paper didn’t explore it in depth.

We are happy that Mazatlán’s beaches seem to be extremely clean. And the 311,552 tourists expected this summer are probably happy about that, too.