Escondido to Salina Cruz

The day after my departure from Acapulco my friend Bobby was flying in to join me in Puerto Escondido. Eager to prepare for Bobby’s arrival and to leave Acapulco I made the drive from Acapulco to Escondido in one day. It looked like an easy drive on the map, at only about 400 kilometers or 250 miles long, but it still took over 8 hours for me to complete. I made it into Escondido with time to find a nice spot to stay and to unexpectedly meet up with Charlie and Jessi whom I hadn’t seen since La Manzanilla. The next day Bobby’s plane was on time and Bobby was on it in spite of the difficult to navigate Mexico City airport. Our trip together quickly took us to the hotel’s rooftop palapa for cold beers and a great view of the sunset. Soon after the beautiful sunset we enjoyed the lunar eclipse which made our night on the roof top a real treat.

Before heading south we checked out Puerto Escondido and the Playa Zicatela with it’s world class wave and many surfers. Escondido is loaded with cool shops, restaurants and places to stay. One of our favorite sites in Escondido were the many beautiful courtyards.

From Escondido we headed south with hopes of finding a small isolated beach and were prepared to drive dirt roads and explore the coast until we found such a place. After more than an hour of driving no sign of our beach was to be seen. Finally, somewhere around Puerto Angel the mountains that we had seen on the inland horizon met the Pacific creating a rugged coastline sure to be hiding a few remote beaches. We started taking side roads the first of which took us to a large, new development just south of Puerto Angel.

There was no good camping at that beautiful spot so we made our way back to the 200 and then continued south. About 15 minutes later a small dirt road was marked with a sign labelled Bahia Tepec. With concern about my van’s limited traction on such a steep and rough road we ground our way through the climbs and turns. Eventually the road began to descend and was so narrow and steep that we couldn’t turn around and certainly couldn’t reverse out. After over an hour of banging along this road the view opened and before us was one of the prettiest little beaches that I have yet seen.

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There were three other visitors on the beach that left just after we arrived. After their departure we had the beach all to ourselves until later the next day when the army showed up in force.

Even the most relaxing beaches become uncomfortable when they are covered with machine gun toting soldiers so we headed out in search of another amazing spot. Near Tepec the coastline turns east which made this the southern extremity of my Mexico trip.

Our next destination became Salina Cruz and it’s nearby peninsula. On the map Santa Maria Del Mar looked like a great place to camp with the Laguna Inferior and Atlantic so close together. After missing the turn and then being led around by a local we finally were making our way onto the peninsula. We soon passed through the indian village of San Mateo del Mar in which the women all wore impressive full skirts and beautiful blouses. I am sure that we were the first VW van driving gringos to be seen there in at least a long time. Soon after passing through San Mateo the road turned into a giant washboard and the sun went down. What had looked like a 20 or 30 minute cruise on the map turned out to be a grueling hour and a half torture session for my van’s suspension. I first tried driving slowly which seemed to allow my tires to fall more deeply into the ruts. I then drove as fast as the curves would allow which sounded every rattle that I had ever heard in my van at once. Unable to talk for the noise, we enduringly flew down the dusty rut of a road hoping that we would reach it’s end soon. We finally made it to Santa Maria Del Mar which turned out to be a dimly lit little fishing village. We drove through town towards the beach only to find a graveyard at the roads dead end. With my new headlights blinding all of the locals that we passed I don’t think many of them realized that it was two lost gringos that were driving circles through there tiny town. While backing out of another dead end we were stopped by a well intentioned but difficult to communicate with lady. She did make it clear that we couldn’t get to the beach in our van or camp anywhere near where we were but beyond that the conversation was going nowhere. She seemed to be prolonging the conversation so that she could sneak peaks into the van and at us. Trying to communicate my authentic confusion I drove off leaving her in our dust swirl. She had convinced us that we couldn’t camp on the Pacific side of the peninsula so we went back through town in what I thought was the opposite direction. After a few dusty blocks we entered a rough and rolling open space and passed many men walking back into town. At the other end of the open space we found a bluff above the lagoon and interrupted two men sitting on a log there. They informed us that they were the security guards and that we were welcome to camp for the night which we did. Except for the sulphur smell that greeted us in the morning it was a great sleeping place with no noise and a constant breeze. After seeing the area in the daylight we felt quite lucky to have blindly stumbled into what was probably the only suitable campsite around. After another, slower this time, pass on the terribly torturous washboard road I developed a taste for paved roads which we followed for the rest of the coast.

Jonathan Poole
La Luz, Mexico

Bobby,Charlie, Jessi, Sharpener Dude

 

The wind generators were enormous and in my opinion a beautiful site.  The little peppers were by far the hottest thing that I have ever tried.  The sample that I tasted was only the very tip of one of the peppers but the burning lasted for half an hour.

Posted on March 5th, 2008 by Poolio
Filed under: Jonathan Poole