Puerto Escondido

Got to love the beach. We are now heading closer and closer to Guatemala and have just been through a stint in beautiful Puerto Escondido.

After the disappointment of the touristy Acapulco, we were looking forward to the quieter and smaller town of Puerto Escondido. We´d already heard some great things about it from some other travellers we met in Mexico City, so we were looking forward to it with great anticipation.

The bus ride there was long but the scenery was amazing and varied along the way with lots of little stops in small towns along the way. The longer we travelled however, the more more frequent these stops became, and the more apparent it was that these were not ´scheduled´stops. As long as our bus had a spare seat, our driver and his co-pilot were perfectly willing to pick up locals along the side of the road and collect a small fare for wherever they were going. We are pretty certain that those ´fares´ were going directly into the pockets of the driver. Do you think it stopped the driver and his co-pilot from pulling over in the very last town before Puerto Escondido for a 20 minute dinner at a roadside cafe with only 100km to go and us already an hour late??? yah..no!! An absolute Classic!

We finally cruised in that night about 90 minutes late and headed straight to our hostel - the Modala on Zicatela Beach. It was recommended to us by a guy we met in Mexico City and he certainly put us onto a good thing. The Hostel was very relaxed with a nice open courtyard and a few hammocks. When we got there, they were already filled with guests chilling out after a hard day of....well probably just sitting on the beach doing nothing. We got our own private ´cabana´ for the equivalent of about $13 a night and the hostel was about as close as you could get to the beach (a whole 50metre walk away).

Here´s a gallery of our time in Puerto Escondido...



If you can´t see the above gallery, or want to see the photos in a bigger size with comments, check out the link here - Puerto Escondido Pics

On our first night, we got eaten alive by bed bugs and the odd Mozzie, but a quick change of sheets and a bed flip fixed that problem. Unfortunately insects love Lyds and her bites swelled up pretty quickly. This does work to my benefit though as they seem to avoid me completely and go for Lyds, much to her shegrin.

By the first morning, the little town with it´s surf shops, little cafes, bars and restuarants had won us completely over. We quickly decided to extend our stay by a day despite our tight schedule to get to Antigua. It didnt take long to find our favourite brekkie place (Mango´s) and dinner joint (Zicatela´s). Everything was so cheap in town, with the $3 for two burgers and a cervasa at Zicatela´s proving to be a very big hit !!

Our days there were spent largely just lying on a beach chair under a big umbrella, enjoying $2 - 1.2litre Sol´s and working on our tans. We spent many hours watching the local surfers try to catch the ludicrously huge barrel waves at Zicatela beach (I´ve never seen faster breaking waves in my life). Zicatela is known as Mexico´s ´Pipeline´and while we were there, they were actually setting up for the surfing portion of the X-Games. Unfortunately we never got to see them complete as the 12 foot waves we witnessed were apparently to woosey for the big waves surfers (who couldn´t possibly lower themselves to anything less than 15 feet waves).

As the days clicked on we became part of a little family at our hostel. There was only about 10 of us staying there and everyone seem contented to just ease away each night around the hammocks or at a local restaurant. One night Lyds and I headed out early for dinner. The town is so small that before we´d finished, almost everyone from the hostel had walked past, seen us, and joined in.

It wasn´t all about just sitting on our bums though. We did do a couple of nice long walks around town. On our last day we took a cliff side beach walk (which reminded me of the Bondi to Bronte one in Sydney) around to another beautiful little beach (Playa Manzillino). While we were there we bumped into another Canadian-Australian couple we had met on the bus to Puerto Escondido(Carlos and Cherie). We spent the day with them and had an absolutely fantastic time chatting and drinking in the sun.

Sadly we had to leave the next day and took a night bus to Oaxaca...now that is a story in itself, but we´ll save that for the next report...