gone south

This area is a 25 kilometer beach, black sand on the Gulf of Mexico. The highway goes by maybe 200 meters away and every kilometer or so there is access to the beach. We stayed at a campground 50 meters off the beach, so nice we stayed for 3 days. Just walking beach and watching fishermen. They set gillnets, or use cast nets from the beach. We also saw them trawling with a 20′ skiff, pole lashed to midships to spread the net, just go along slowly  just off shore. When they haul-back, they come around and pull mini-doors & trawl over the side by hand. The cod end is about the size of a wheelbarrow. Just south of us was an estuary harbor where the fish is unloaded & sold. We bought a kilo of red snapper for 100 pesos. They had shrimp. oysters, red-fish, snook, mackerel, and more unidentified seafood. Yesterday 3 locals came by for a day on the beach. They drank a case of beer by 10AM, swam a little & fell asleep on the beach for hours. When they got up it was for a few steps before dropping into sleep again. In the afternoon they washed off and got right back into the beer. Very friendly and by all appearances enjoyed themselves immensely.
Today we headed south again 200 miles to Catemaco, small town in the hills on a large lake. Walked the village malecon looking at the lake. Craig got a haircut for $3, even with the language barrier it came out well. On the trip we bought 10 kilos of oranges for less than $5. The country has gone from pineapple growing to tobacco and cattle again. If you can take your eyes off the road (which the driver can’t) the views of clearings on the hills are fantastic.

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Travel. 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.