Puerto Ángel

Mar 4 – So here is our typical day at the beach: coffee in our room courtesy of the hotel, leisurely yogurt, cheese and tortilla breakfast in bed, courtesy of yesterday’s walk to the store. Down to the beach to alternately swim in the crystal clear water and sit in the shade of a restaurant umbrella.

Back to the room to shower and change for lunch, which is our main meal of the day.

Sometimes we eat at a beachfront restaurant with other tourists. This is a cold seafood and avocado concoction called vuelve a la vida, or “come back to life”. It is just about the most delicious food I have ever eaten.

Sometimes we walk down a little street to where the native fishermen get their meals. Incredibly fresh seafood, cooked just for us by a native lady who makes breakfast for the fishermen in the morning, but is not busy in the middle of the day. One day she grilled us a whole fish, freshly caught, the next day she offered us shrimp with garlic. No choice here, just whatever she has on hand.

A leisurely talk with Edgar, an 80 year old with excellent English from working in the US, and few remaining teeth, about politics and the state of Mexico and the world.

After an afternoon siesta, we swim in the pool, then walk up the street to the food store to buy anything we need for tonight’s dinner or tomorrow’s breakfast. Here they have canned or refrigerated processed food and drinks, and packaged tortillas, but no fresh bread or fruits or vegetables. In the states, this would be described as a fresh food desert.

On Sunday evening as we walked to the store, we met a funeral procession coming down the hill to the cemetery. About 50 people, dressed in tee shirts and flip flops or barefoot, some carrying flowers and some singing. A red casket carried on the shoulders of four men. We stood quietly until the procession passed. Later we walked into the cemetery, but couldn’t find where they had placed the new addition.

A block from the store is a woman sitting with her small children in front of her house, selling stringy bits of chicken and onion swimming in picante sauce on a corn tortilla – four for a dollar. When Jim asked her for eight of them, she warned, “they are spicy”, and gave him a taste before she wrapped them up. Every day, well-meaning people warn us that food here is spicy, but it’s not really – on a Taco Bell scale, it would be considered mild.

We eat whatever we have purchased for dinner, share a beer and read or watch tv in the evenings. Tv is how folks learn English to the extent that they learn it here – foreign languages are not taught in school.

That’s our week in Puerto Ángel! Hope you enjoyed traveling with us!

Mar 1 – This morning we bid adios to Huatulco, and took the bus to Puerto Ángel. Unlike Huatulco, cruise ships don’t stop here, and Jim remembered it fondly as “real Mexico” when he traveled here in his youth.

It was a one hour ride on a big air conditioned bus, which in my little mind went right along the coast, so I wasn’t prepared for the rocking, rolling mountainous route we took. Whee! Who needs roller coasters when you can ride buses in Mexico?

The chatty taxi driver who took us from the bus station to our hotel asked if we knew about the earthquake that Oaxaca had experienced last week. He wondered if we had heard about it in Virginia, and we told him that we had. He said the houses shook “like paper” and it was very scary, but no damage.

When we got to our “hotel”, La Casita de Marlen, I got a bad feeling. Although it had gotten some high reviews on Booking.com, we stood out in a courtyard while the lady told us that the apartment with kitchen we had booked was not available, and instead she offered us a sad, bare room with a flimsy metal screen door, one lightbulb, no air con, no warm water, two sad flat pillows… Whoops, I just used the word “sad” twice in the same sentence. This was a sad place. We walked down a steep hill to check out the beach, past shacks and shanties, with people cooking out in the yard, and places that appeared to have no electricity. Poor and sad.

Although the beach was beautiful, we had to walk back up the steep hill to arrive, breathless and sweaty, to our poor, sad room.

Jim got back on Booking.com and was able to cancel our reservation without penalty. As “real” as it was, I just couldn’t picture us spending a week there.

So now we are on the other side of the same cove, in a happier hotel, La Cabaña. (Look at the guy photobombing Jim! He was very pleased that he got in our picture.)