Travels of the Bay family and the Yoda Van

In April of last year we took a trip to Mexico.  After we came back from that vacation I checked out a few videos from the library on Mexico, trying to relive the vacation experience.  One of the videos was a super low-budget video about a couple of surfers who quit their job and decided to take 3 months traveling down the Mexican coast to surf.  While I was watching this video I got the idea “Hey, we could do that, too.”  Not surfing, of course, but traveling and experiencing this part of the world.  That is how the idea of this trip started.  In this movie, the ultimate destination of the surfers was Puerto Escondido.
Over the last week we’ve really been struggling with the humidity.  I also haven’t been all that inspired to write for our blog.  (It is hard to be really inspired when you can feel the streams of sweat running down your head between the corn rows.)  We considered moving back into the Mexican interior to get away from the humidity on the coast.  But somehow I felt I needed to reach Puerto Escondido, since it was the end destination of my surfer buddies who inspired our trip.  We decided to make one really long drive in the car (which ended up being 8 hours on one day) to head farther south and make it to Puerto Escondido.  Our campsite was north of Acapulco and it took us over an hour just to make it through Acapulco and start on the 400+ km drive.  The map said it would take 6 hours, but there were so many topes on the road it took us closer to 7 hours.
We’ve been here about a day and the humidity is not much better, but this city is infinitely more enjoyable than Acapulco.  Tonight we made it to Zicatela Beach – that is THE surfing beach here and rightly so.  It is ranked the 3^rd in the world in terms of wave size which is currently around 6 meters (15-20 foot waves).  The waves alone are absolutely impressive, and sitting on the beach just watching people surf them is just as exciting.  I could sit there for hours and watch it all.  I promise you, in my lifetime I will learn to surf.  I love the water, and I love these waves, and it is just something I know I have to do.

The only downside here has been all the bad food we have eaten.  If you sit and eat on the beach you shouldn’t expect it to be cheap.  But if I’m going to pay a lot of money for the food, I at least hope it will be good.  I have never eaten so much frozen shrimp in such a short period of time.  Really unfortunate and really disappointing seeing as we are on the coast!  We also figured that we could afford this trip in Mexico because it would be quite a bit cheaper than life in the US.  Totally false.  Mexico is not really all that cheap and we totally miscalculated how much money we would be spending.  We could easily find good campsites in the states for around $20 (often including a swimming pool and Wi-Fi). We assumed it would be less in Mexico, but the cheapest campsite we have had in Mexico was $20.  In Acapulco we paid $30/night.  Hardly cheap at all.  We’ve also stayed in hotels a lot more than we expected to.  We’ll have to see how this works itself out in the long run.  We’ll either have to find more creative ways to save money, or worst case, we’ll come home a little earlier than we expected.  In either case, we’ve all experienced enough to make the entire adventure worth while.
William and Julian also had a great time tonight playing with a couple of Mexican kids.  Julian is used to the Mexicans now.  Since we arrived in Puerto Escondido, two separate girls snatched him out of my arms so their friends could take their picture of them with our blonde, blue-eyed baby.  William is a bit shyer and this was one of the first times William has dared to speak to other kids in Mexico.  He doesn’t feel all that comfortable with the fact that he doesn’t understand Spanish, but he tried to initiate a game of “Hide and Sneak” with two kids.  He kept trying to explain to them how the game went in English, but they only spoke Spanish, and the game disintegrated into playing tag half of the time, and wrestling the other half.  Boys are boys, in Spanish, English or in German.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Mexico-Guatemala. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.