Jerry Hulse served as travel editor of the Los Angeles Times for 31 years. After his retirement in 1991, he resided part of the year on Kauai. He passed away in January 2002. He was among the most highly respected travel journalists of his generation.
Sunday, April 11, 1965
Ajijic, Mexico: We have found a new paradise: a town with 4,300 people and only a single telephone.
Not only that, in Ajijic, a haircut can be had for three pesos (24 cents), beer sells for 18 cents a bottle, golf lessons cost 80 cents, 
horses rent for only 40 cents an hour, and the key to a home with two and three bedrooms comes to $40 a month, sometimes less. (One far-sighted Yank took a lease 10 years ago—at just $10 a month.)
Mexico Eden
The setting of this Eden is Lake Chapala, Mexico's biggest body of water, something like 60 miles of dew with a 14-mile breadth. All of it lies 400 miles west of Mexico City or 33 miles outside Guadalajara in the sunshine state of Jalisco. Besides its ridiculously low prices, Ajijic and the slightly bigger town of Chapala are blessed with year-round summer. The combination of cut rate costs and favorable weather is the draw that's attracting so many American retirees as well as tourists.
(Above: Here’s a scene of San Andres church from the intersection with Calle Colon. Note the flooded street. That sidewalk to the left is the plaza. Photo from the collection of Linda Samuels. )
Tequila Still
We have hung our sombrero at Posada Ajijic. (Once upon a time it was a tequila still.) Outside our door rivers of bougainvillea spill beneath coffee trees, banana trees, avocado and plum trees. Blasts of perfume rise up from rare tropical flowers. All this time a parrot named Joe chatters at guests both in English and Spanish. And when morning comes, coffee is ground fresh from the trees and guests pick their own fruit if they wish.
Posada Ajijic is run by an ex-Hollywood film and television producer, Sherman Harris, and his wife Jane, who seem dedicated to the idea of 
spoiling their guests for any other life. A popular pastime involves nothing more strenuous than luxuriating in the sun beside the pool and gazing off at fishermen who spread their nets across the lake. Sometimes when ambition overtakes someone he buzzes off in an outboard for a picnic on Scorpion Island.
Should this sound tempting, $15 will get you meals as well as a roof for two with private bath, comfortable beds, and a fireplace for when nights get nippy. Singles (with meals) come to $10 and suites are $18. Finally, Mexicana Airlines will jet you to within an hour's drive of the gate in three hours from Los Angeles.
(Above Right: Forty years ago women walked on one side of the street and men on the other when they participated in religious processions. Photo collection of Linda Samuels)
Holds Court
Harris holds court each evening in his cantina. Previously he produced the Lone Ranger for movies and Lassie for television. And do you wanna know something? He doesn't miss Hollywood a flicker. (For $2 he will mail you his booklet telling how to retire in Ajijic.)
Candles burn in his cantina and a wood fire warms guests who sip rum drinks while trying to forget the time for leaving may be only another tomorrow. They close their eyes and the room fills with the lament of three Mexican guitars, the melodies rising to the straw roof overhead.
In the summertime theatrical electrical storms send bolts of white fire crashing across the lake. And the rain, like the lightning, comes only at night so that the days are flawless and a person walking on the opposite shore is clearly visible. Sherm Harris allows how a place in New Zealand has climate equal to Ajijic—but why bother, he asks, when it's quicker, easier, and infinitely cheaper to visit his town?
(Above: Local women regularly laundered their family's clothing in Lake Chapala until the late 1970s. Photo collection of Linda Samuels)
The town is old and mysteriously quiet, and in the evening when the sun goes down and it gets chilly, the Mexicans sit on the sidewalks because they still hold the heat of the sun. Not far off the Pepsi-Cola king of Mexico, a Mexican himself, lives in a $250,000 mansion with stables and a guest house and two swimming pools, one for the servants.
If someone gets a phone call in Ajijic, someone from the telephone office must run to get him. For there is only the one telephone. The telephone office is just down the street from the beauty shop, which operates out of the back of the butcher shop. Some claim there are bandidos in the hills of Ajijic. But they never come into town. Neither, on the other hand, do the townspeople go into the hills.
Bob Week, a retired painting contractor from Pasadena, will build a house for $3.50 a square foot on a lot selling for $3,000. He also raises vegetables which he trades for drinks in Sherm Harris's cantina.
In Ajijic and Chapala, one can live well on $300 a month, and that includes the hiring of a maid. Ken Anderson, a retired Army captain, built a two-bedroom home for $3,200; he plays golf, sells insurance and teaches English to the local high school students. He claims he's found his contentment.
Houses for Sale
Listed in the want-ad section of the Colony Reporter is this item: "Looking for a cozy, charming, comfortable private two-bedroom cottage, completely furnished? The Angel Flowers house has all this and more. Owner asking $8,000." Another reads: "Four bedrooms, 2 1/2 baths, drawing room, dining room, bar, dinette, study, servant quarters, front and back gardens, boiler, $22,000 cash."
Of late a restaurant called the Montecarlo is operating under the management of Cesar Balsa and guests dine, if they wish, under the umbrella shade of an Indian laurel. African tulips and a jacaranda bloom nearby, and soon Balsa will build an inn with 80 rooms and there will be a thermal well to supply 15 Roman baths.
But please, no telephones, amigo?
Editors' Note: We were quite amused to note that the concerns addressed in this 40-year-old article are the same ones that we all discuss today. Without question, Ajijic has changed over the decades and so have the prices, but there is something about the mindset of area residents that is wonderfully the same.
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