Following a full week of walking the steep streets of Guanajuato and the much steeper slopes of el Nevado de Toluca, we headed to Puerto Escondido for a week of working on various projects, relaxing and surfing. Since the waves were uncommonly small (what many people call “flat”) the entire week we were there, we focused on activities number one and two.
The familiar salty and humid air greeted us as we descended the mountains after an exhilarating drive along an intermittently good road. Two weeks in cool mountain air had felt refreshing and it surprised me that the sweaty heat of the coast felt so immediately familiar. An earlier me would have been much more uncomfortable.
Puerto Escondido is a vacation town famous for its surf break on Zicatela Beach, known as Mexico’s Pipeline. As I dream of getting barreled in pipes as much as I dream of base jumping without a parachute, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about this break, but something slightly bigger than flat would have been fun.
The mellow conditions did make for some nice snorkeling, however, which we took advantage of a couple times. The shallow and narrow bay of Playa Carrizalillo offered us clear water and hosted at least a half dozen olive Ridley sea turtles, grazing among the rocks. The older ones seemed unimpressed by our attempts to photograph them, but a couple of younger ones acted at least momentarily interested in swimming alongside us. One caught me off-guard by hovering behind me and waiting for me to turn around before darting away. Getting caught nose to nose with a large reptile that you weren’t expecting while underwater is unsettling, to say the least, even when the reptile is as harmless as a turtle. Fortunately, the ocean is the perfect place to wet yourself in fear.
While in Puerto Escondido, we stayed at a hostel for the first time in quite a while. Along with a deaf Canadian septuagenarian and a very nice Englishman of our age named Dino, we did our part to nudge the average age up a couple years. The hostel made for a great office, complete with a pool to take the edge off the afternoon heat. Adhering to the principles of assortative mating, we fell in with the few other people nearest our ages and quickly formed our own little tour group of sorts.
In the last few days of our stay, we decided that we should do something a little more touristy than eating the THE WORLD’S BEST FISH TACOS and snorkeling, so together with Dino, Sarah and Jericho (the last two being a British couple backpacking around Mexico and Central America), we decided to go to the nearby Laguna de Manialtepec and rent some kayaks to see the bioluminescence that the lagoon is famous for. We had seen flyers advertising bioluminescence tours at the hostel, but being adults and having our car (and reading an unfavorable Trip Advisor review of the tour), we decided to do things on the cheap and drive ourselves to the lagoon and rent kayaks.
Once at the lagoon, we found a minor flaw in our plan. Everyone renting kayaks told us that the bioluminescence was confined to a small area about a half hour’s paddle away from any of the rental places. The consistency of this story convinced us that people weren’t just trying to get us to book a more expensive motor boat tour and there were few enough lights along the lagoon’s shores that we reasoned that finding our way back in the dark could be a very unnecessary adventure. And what were the chances of that adventure involving a crocodile? The chance of a surf session involving a crocodile has turned out to be 100% for us in the past, so we decided on the boat tour.
Negotiating a price for the boat tour was Jericho’s chance to shine. His goal in life is never to pay full price for anything and to pay nothing whenever possible. He lives by this creed. Stay in the car, he told us, if they see white people, they won’t bring the price down as much. Sarah, his girlfriend, told us how he would begin haggling sessions with the phrase “Filipino, no dinero!”. We waited while Jericho spoke to a guy at the tour company’s office (shack). The conversation went some minutes and involved expressive gesticulations, head shaking and much arm crossing. Finally, Jericho asked for my translation help to make sure that we were getting the price he thought that he had negotiated. This led to several more minutes of negotiations, after which we finally agreed on a price that everyone seemed content with.
The bioluminescence was worth the trip out. I’ve seen some slight bioluminescence in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, but this was something else. Once the boat captain located the algae, we dove into the warm waters of the lagoon and played around for a while. The luminescence is displayed when the algae are disturbed, which we accomplished by thrashing about in the water. We amused ourselves by setting pale blue fire to our waving limbs until it was time to return to the boat and head back across the pitch black lagoon to the dock.
We had underestimated the amount of time that our adventure would take us and arrived back to the hostel ravenous. Jordan and I made food in the hostel kitchen, while the other three went in search of late-night (10pm) street food. The next day, Dino told us of how Jericho got them free agua de jamaica (hibiscus juice, popular and ubiquitous across northern Latin America) from a taco vendor.
The next day, our friends and fellow overlanders Jon and Jenna came into town and we spent a couple evenings trying to make the best of some unfavorable wave conditions (still flat). After that, it was time to move on. Our six month Mexican visas were getting ever closer to their expiry dates and there remained more for us to see on our way south.
Next stop: Oaxaca City for el Día de los Muertos!