There's more than tomatoes in Culiacán

Google "Culiacán, Sinaloa" and you'll likely come up with an article on either tomato cultivation or drug trafficking. I've joked with my new Culichi friends that, upon arrival, I was expecting to be served nothing but 'maters by folks who were full-time narcotraficantes. And this has proved to be kind of half-correct. While I haven't met any narcos (yet -- fingers crossed that this remains the case), the city definitely embraces its tomatoes: Their picture graces the license plates here (it literally puts the 'o' in 'Sinaloa'), the local baseball team is named the 'Tomateros' (seriously), and grocery stores overflow with bright red bins of 'em at dirt-cheap prices.

But a visit last weekend to a little piece of heaven called Nuevo Altata proved all of this wrong: There's definitely more than tomatoes here. Nuevo Altata is a stretch of still-mostly-virgin beach located just an hour from the city. There's even a beach-front restaurant that serves up an absolutely divine fried fish, caught right from the Pacific, adorned with a delicious, um, tomato salsa.

So some stereotypes die hard. But the beach is beautiful. Just thought I'd post a picture in case you needed motivation to book your tickets to come visit me...