Pretirement

sorry, i want to tell a great story or something but honestly there’s a parade outside and i can’t be asked to organize my thoughts. if you want to send me a text, my mexican number is 777-224-1119. i don’t remember mexico’s country code but i think it’s on the internet somewhere.

oh god, they’re all doing samba, ok here’s the deal, i posted something on the bootsnall forums that says where i am, so i’m reposting it here because it’s all written.

well, i’m an expert now. puerto escondido is full of surfers and others who just generally love the beach, and they’re all sure that there’s simply nothing up the coast until you hit san blas. that’s the consensus among backpackers here as far as i can tell. here’s what i did.

two nights by myself in acapulco. very boring by yourself. very resort-ey. k3 is the hostel there, right in the mix with all the highrise hotels. i can’t say whether that’s a nice place or not.

one night in pie de la cuesta, just around the western headland from acapulco’s bay. it’s chill there, relaxed small town twenty minutes from acapulco. there are quieter, cheaper, less touristed places, but they’re not twenty minutes from acapulco. the current is strong right now. you can swim but it’s not that great because you keep getting washed down the beach. there are two ships wrecked there since a month ago. one of them’s a ferry. you can climb all up in it. it’s smelly and old and dangerous. i’m putting it on my list of cool places you weren’t supposed to be in just ahead of abandoned hospital.

next place i stopped down the costa chica was marquelia, two hours south towards puerto escondido. that’s where you get off the bus. the better known beach there is playa ventura. i didn’t go there but a backpacker in cuernavaca recommended it, saying it was nice but maybe a little too boring on the weekends. he was also by himself.

i didn’t make it to ventura because playa volcana was much easier to get to from marquelia, where the bus station is. if you really want to go to ventura, i don’t think it’s more than a combi or two from marquelia, and anybody in town can tell you how to get there. but volcana is five minutes down the road. it’s a tiny fishing community. in two nights there (i stayed two nights because the combi driver offered to take me to a rodeo the second day. it didn’t happen and i feel a bit cheated out of what could have been an extra day here in escondido) i saw no tourists except for a group of forty retired people from mexican city.

food is a bit expensive. 60 or 70 pesos for fish a la diabla, or however you want it cooked, but it’s going to be fish. on the other hand, the owners of a restaurant let me hang my hammock for two nights in their ramada free of charge. and when they noticed that i didn’t buy dinner from anyone my second night, they offered to share their family’s meal with them that night. i declined and was asked to explain why my government makes it so difficult for mexicans to come and work. interesting place, like i say i was a little bored, but if you want something out of the way, go for it.

bored as i was, i went straight to escondido, but there’s another decent sized town somewhere in between. patineta nacional or something. *that’s definitely not the name, but it does start with a P and end in Nacional and it’s along the highway in southwestern oaxaca*

right by puerto escondido there’s also a couple quiet places. zipolite and mazunte. my guide book specifically says that mazunte is currently some kind of backpacker hot spot. here i haven’t heard anything about it, but everyone seems to love zipolite. if you want a place that’s convenient but small enough that you can have a fire and some beers on the beach, that’s where to do it.

or go to puerto escondido! i love it here.

wow, i wasn’t ready for all the support i got for my broken heart letter. thanks! i’ll try to rack up a couple more. my heart’s doing much better now, but sadly my ass has regressed. they say immodium is bad for you because it interferes with your body’s natural defense against intestinal infections. but with a going away party tonight, a morning of horseback riding, and a five hour bus ride to acapulco coming in the next 24 hours, i’m saying “you can relax now, guts. that’s why god made antibiotics.”

three weeks of spanish classes have me cussing like a sailor. i started uploading my photos but they’re still private because i’m naked in several of them and i’m worried flickr might shut me down for distributing pornography. please bear with me a few more days while i figure out how to blur out my junk and we’ll get some gravy on this blogging biscuit, ok?

by far the best thing you’re going to see in those photos will be my trip to achichipico last week. go ahead and look for it on a map. it’s not there. the weekend started with a friday afternoon excursion with my grammar class to a water park by a stream in the mountains. my new watch gave up the ghost after a few trips down the water slides, so we used it as a diving ring on account of its bright yellow color and worthlessness. we failed utterly to retrieve it from some slimy rocks at the bottom of a chilly four-meter pool, so that’s where my new watch lives. if you have any leads on a $12 watch that lights up in seven different colors of indiglo, i’m in the market!

then my teacher and her boyfriend invited us three students back to her town for the weekend. i was the only one who accepted. the others had boyfriends or something. anyway we went for a long combi ride, stopped to buy me some cowboy boots, and took another combi to arrive finally in achichipico. kendy’s family fed me like a king morning and night for the next three days. i shared a bed with her boyfriend, luis.

friday night i learned to drive a combi. we picked up a dozen kids around town before stopping in a street to drink tequila from someone’s mom’s store. welcome to route 51, serving achichipico! i’m felipe and i’ll be your gringo driver this evening.

saturday i rode with kendy’s brother on his combi route, running back and forth between achichipico and yecapixtla, a bigger town nearby. not that i could ever find my way back, but if you wanted to get to achichipico, i think you have to ask for yecapixtla first (Travel Tip: the kids call it yeca!) and then hop on the 25. we charge 7 pesos, but i promise it’s money well spent!

saturday i took my new cowboy boots and a borrowed shirt to the rodeo. they call it jaripeo (that’s when they ride bulls) and the bullriders are called jinetes. i didn’t learn the word for standing in a downpour for three hours using folding chairs and plastic tables for cover, but i did get to learn a lot of swear words. we paid extra to get right down ringside and we saw a ton of action. i’ll prove it later with the photos. after the bulls and during the rain, lupillo rivera and his band played and everybody danced and got wetter and muddier, but we sure forgot about the cold. i learned to danse the paso duranguense, for which cowboy boots are absolutely essential. a cowboy hat is good too, but it just so happened that everybody with a spare hat that night had a tiny little head.

we spent sunday at a filthy little water hole in some tomato fields in the hills. you’ll see the pictures soon. those are the one’s i’m naked in. the plastic sides if the hole were steep enough you would (did. several times) fall in if you failed to hang onto the prickly weeds lining the edge. we chucked a sinful amount of tomatoes at each other. then, in what i consider the sad climax of the afternoon i had a bucket of slimy green water chucked at my feet where i was standing, naked, at the top of the plastic slope. when the water hit my feet they flew out from under me. i landed flat on my ass and slid naked down fifteen feet of plastic, ending in a green sludgy splash at the bottom. if there’s a scientific explanation for how i avoided dying of dysentery and tetanus and plague from that soaking, i’d like to see it.

then we climbed up the hill, ravaging every field we found along the way. as best i can figure, i ate twenty oranges, ten peaches, four and a half chirimoyas, and three avocados. i also smashed two melons which i was told were inedible. we posed for a photo with the volcano Popocatepetl and returned home like proper men, carrying an impressive load of fruits and vegetables in a bag we found. we were rewarded with meat. i had a nice shower. not a running-water kind of shower. they use a bucket of cold water and a bucket of hot with a little bowl to mix up warm water and pour on yourself. i can tell you, it washes off green slime and that’s more than enough for me.