ChrisJenTravel.com – Honeymoon Trek

The resort area of Huatulco in Southern Mexico is actually a collection of small resort communities set on a series of beautiful bays, called Bahias de Huatulco. As overpriced and void of Mexican culture as the resort town of Ixtapa to the North, we weren’t interested much in the sights of Huatulco. Rather, we planned to stay there for 2-3 days before heading to Guatemala since it is the closest town to Barra de la Cruz, a world-class surf spot 20 miles to the South. Barra was a quiet fishing community surfed only by a few lucky locals and travelers passing through until it was thrust onto the world surf map this past June by an international contest. Millions of surfers around the world, myself included, watched the live internet broadcast of the contest for 3 days straight as the best professionals in the world swore it was the best wave they had ever surfed. Hoards of surfers, mostly Californians flying in for quick surf trips, have flooded the spot since and caused the town to actually start charging admission to the beach. However, as it was along the way for our trip anyway, I couldn’t wait to give it a try. Luckily, we arrived at Barra on a day when it wasn’t too crowded and I was able to surf some amazing chest-high right hand pointbreak waves for hours with only a few other people in the water. Later that day, however, nature struck back.

Despite all the warnings we’d heard, we’d thrown caution to the wind so far in the trip and eaten virtually anything we wanted – roadside taco stands, fresh unpeeled fruit, condiments of any kind – with no problems. We were actually getting a bit cocky, telling each other we’d probably beat the “Montezuma’s revenge” by eating like the locals. Jenny had been complaining of some stomach pains for a few days but, since she is much better than me at handling pain, I didn’t know how bad she was feeling. The day we arrived in Huatulco, my stomach started with something resembling hunger pains, then got worse. By day two I couldn’t keep anything in, and could barely get out of bed to walk around. Jenny was about five days ahead of me, so she was feeling just as bad. Needless to say, we spent the next week in our dingy hotel room recovering. My own personal hell came when I had to take a flip-flop with me to the bathroom in the middle of the night to fight off cockroaches while getting sick. Oh yeh, and I missed the best week of surf so far. But, on the bright side we caught up on some bad American TV reruns, got plenty of rest and found a new appreciation for American food.

After fighting off the bug we spent two more days in the area waiting for the wind to die down to get back to the surf, but it wouldn’t cooperate. We finally left after losing about 8 days of travel time, knowing we’d have to juggle our schedule a bit. We’d kind of had our fill of beach towns so we decided to make a detour inland to the Spanish Colonial town of San Cristobol, with maybe a side trip to the ruins of Palenque.

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