“Foreigners often complain about Mexicans shooting off cohetes (rockets) for certain feast days,” said my neighbor Jorge.
“But what is now a tradition was once a necessity. When people lived scattered among hills and valleys, far from towns, without benefit of telephones or vehicles, the noise of exploding fireworks told them that a major event was taking place, to which they were invited. These fiestas represented a welcome break in an excruciatingly hard lifestyle.”
I’m quite sure there is a similar practical explanation for what I call “The Saturday Night Blast.” Anyone who has hiked to a so-called lonely spot in the middle of nowhere, carrying camping gear upon their back, will have easily discovered that neither the highest mountain top nor the deepest canyon is sufficiently far from a rancho with a radio ... which will typically be turned on (at maximum volume, of course) shortly after you’ve pitched your tent, just about the time you’re crawling into it, utterly enraptured by the chorus of crickets all around you and the muted hoots of two owls getting acquainted up in the tree tops.
Yes, that’s the precise moment – somewhere between 9 and 10 p.m. – when a wall of noise from the Saturday Night Blast hits your tent like a bomb.
What to do about it? The quickest and simplest solution is earplugs, of course, but I must confess that for 29 years I used the ordinary sort for sale in pharmacies and never found a brand that entirely shut out the never-ending Boom Da Da Boom. A year and a half ago, however, I decided enough was enough and I launched an all-out search for something that really blocks out the noise. On Amazon, I found four brands of earplugs reported effective by nearly all users, and one brand of “earmuffs” beloved to people who frequent shooting ranges. I bought them all and proceeded to test them under sundry circumstances, from the Saturday Night Blast out in the woods to the most diabolical racket my noisy neighbors could devise. Here are the results:
I rate Howard Leight Max earplugs as far superior to any other brand, including various kinds of wax balls. The trick is to get them to seal well, which for me is best accomplished by wetting them and then inserting them as deeply as possible while pulling the earlobe with the other hand. Having established a good seal, I’ve found that the pounding of bass notes can no longer be heard and I can sleep peacefully through most Saturday Night Blasts. High notes, however, are another matter. Children’s screams, sorry to say, are capable of penetrating even the marvelous Max, which, by the way, is marketed as “disposable,” but in my experience can be reused hundreds of times.
I found the ClearArmor Safety Earmuffs (34 decibel NRR) worthy of their reputation and the ideal thing to slip on while reading in bed. Background noise of all kinds usually vanishes completely once you put them on, and if it doesn’t, combine them with the above-mentioned Max earplugs. Of course, these industrial-grade earmuffs are much too bulky to sleep with, but if you’re looking for a couple of hours of peace and quiet while reading or listening to music through earbuds, ClearArmor is the way to go.
Other solutions to avoiding noise in Mexico include talking to the noisemaker in a friendly manner. You may not believe it, but most of these individuals have no idea that there are people in the world who don’t like their kind of music. The great majority of them genuinely believe they are doing their neighbors a favor. So, if you remain calm and ask the noisemaker to “bajar el volumen un poco, por favor,” 90 percent of the time he will comply, though he may later tell his compañeros about the crazy gringo who doesn’t appreciate good music. I always explain to these people that I need to sleep or to concentrate for work purposes (What strange habits we foreigners have!), in order to let them know that I’m not just trying to annoy them.
On a final, more positive note, I should mention that there are some campsites in Western Mexico where music and noise are not allowed at night. Among these are El Tecolote Parque Ecoturistica (parquetecolote.com), located four kilometers east of Mazamitla and Agua Dulce Campsite in the Primavera Forest (see Chapter 7 of “Outdoors in Western Mexico Volume 2”).
Just in case you are now wondering where in the world was the quietest place I ever slept in nature, I can say without hesitation it was inside Ghar Al Hibashi Lava Tube in Saudi Arabia, which has a meter of loess (very fine dust) covering its floor, guaranteeing you would never hear any creature trying to sneak up on you, whether it was a beetle or a wolf. If, however, you want to try the same idea in Mexico, better bring along a tent to discourage the bloodsucking chinche hocicona (big-mouthed bedbug), not to mention those pesky vampire bats.
You can get a pair of Howard Leight MAX-1 Foam Ear Plugs, Uncorded, for about $US5 Amazon.com, which also sells the ClearArmor 141001 Safety Ear Muffs for about 25 dollars.