The story of how we ended up crashing a boat tour
Once we got off the cruise ship, Fei, Jia, and I took a shuttle to the Mazatlan port where we immediately began asking how to get to Stone Island. The staff directed us toward the exit gate of the ship port, and told us that it would be about a 10 minute walk to the Stone Island ferry terminal if we kept left. They said that it’ll be unmissable as there is nothing but houses on the walk there. We followed their directions and eventually made it to a small fork in the road. One road went straight and had a small sign on the fence and the other went left to a large restaurant/boat dock. Many busses and taxis followed the left road, and
so we decided to follow the majority of the crowd of traffic. As we came upon the restaurant, a group of Carnival passengers were just getting off a bus, and were hurriedly walking past the restaurant toward a waiting ferry at the dock. We joined the crowd of people not really knowing where else to go, thinking that this must be the ferry to get to Stone Island. There was an employee on the dock counting the number of people getting onto the ferry, so I quickly stopped to confirm if this ferry would take us to Stone Island. He said, “yes,” and so Fei, Jia, and I climbed the steps onto the awaiting ferry.
15 minutes into the journey, the crew of the ship started asking and passing out free drinks. We then noticed that there was a small bar set up at the back, and uniformed people that looked like guides for a tour. At that moment, Fei and I sinkingly realized that this was indeed not a ferry to Stone Island, but instead an open bar boat tour of Mazatlan that (excluding us) these Carnival passengers had paid to be here as part of a sightseeing tour package.
Once the shock wore off, we were then absolutely thrilled to realize that we were on an open bar boat, and that we had completely unknowingly crashed a tour! We laughed about the situation for the rest of our hour-long tour whilst sipping on our free pop drinks ;)
We jokingly asked each other if we should just follow the people back onto their tour bus once we got back to the dock. As honestly, the tour guides hadn’t seemed to mind us or had even noticed we had joined their group haha :)
The ending of the story? We asked our way to the Stone Island ferry terminal. It was a small yellow building on the other side of the restaurant/boat dock we were at now. Now can you guess it? Yup, it was a walk back to the fork in the road where we were originally supposed to go straight. The small sign on the fence? Said “Ferry terminal to Stone Island.” It was pretty easy from there on in our journey.
