The alien birdsong was the giveaway. I knew, academically, that I was waking up in Mexico. I knew we had spent the previous day on a sojourn to Puerto Escondido, flying, walking, and taxing our way across North America to lay our heads down in a villa within eyeshot of a beach we couldn’t see in the dark of night. The lodgings, however, were doing their best to obscure this truth. The air conditioning was blunting the oppressive heat and humidity, the bed was a comfortable substitute for home. My family was there. It could have been normal.
The birdsong, though. The birdsong was wrong. A Great Kiskadee perched out of our window and let out a warble I’d never heard before, and another answered. Two more unfamiliar birds joined them. Merlin had no idea what they were, because we needed to download a new file for Mexico. We were not home. We were here.
Puerto Escondido in a nutshell
Planning for this trip involved trying to find a destination that sat at the intersection of three requirements: scenic, quiet, and safe. Stephanie found all three in Oaxaca, the south westernmost state of Mexico. A high percentage of English speakers was not a requirement thanks to the, frankly, mind-boggling amount of proficiency Stephanie has made in learning Spanish.
One travel guide classified Puerto Escondido as “Part tourist trap, part beach bum town, part third-world country.” I find that classification a bit crude, but not exactly inaccurate. The infrastructure amounted to small, lightly regulated and often dirt-path roads. Cab fares made up a large percentage of our expenses here. Cabs mostly had working seatbelts, and mostly had working windows. You can’t flush toilet paper. You can’t drink the water. I think I bought more single-use plastic water bottles in that one week than I have in the past four years.
The water was vital, though. The heat was intense. Most days hit 90F, and the humidity was surprisingly relentless for a semi-arid climate. I am not sure why I was expecting dry air in a waterfront town, but I was caught off guard. Fortunately, the beach is also a great way to stay cool, so the heat only bothered on the rare moments away from the waves.
You would have had to remind me that this was Spring Break season. Beaches were busy, but the town was quiet and certainly not overloaded with college tourists. The town wasn’t overrun with kids partying.
I found myself considering Gandalf’s opinion of the Shire. The world at large hasn’t seemed to notice Puerto Escondido, and I remain grateful for it.
Playa Carizalillo is perfect.
The beach adjacent to the hotel was Playa Carazilillo, tucked in between two cliffs. It was warm, swimmable water with plenty of elbow room to body-surf in peace. All of the beaches in Puerto Escondido are gorgeous, but not all of them are swimmable due to rough waters. Playa Carazilillo was safe enough to swim, but still rough enough to be entertaining to the little ones.
The beach was lined with several restaurants, each with a lineup of rentable beach chairs. This became our routine: get there in the morning, stake out our spot, order food through the day, and head back to the hotel in the early afternoon. The beach food was delightful (more on food later), and that’s very very important, because leaving and returning would have been a chore.
Remember those cliffs I mentioned? The “private path to the beach” that the hotel had advertised as a feature was…stairs. A hundred stairs and ramping walkways switch-backing down the cliff. It was a price worth paying for the spot, but it certainly made staying the beach for longer stretches of time more attractive than coming and going.
Food
Food was always going to be a challenge. Traveling with two somewhat picky eaters in a foreign country is a recipe for anxiety, and one can only eat so many quesadillas before scurvy sets in.
The small cafe in walking distance of our room, the upscale hotel restaurant, and the taco stands at the beach provided the majority of our meals. Going elsewhere was fraught, balancing between two risks.
- Too local, which will probably use local water that residents are used to and we are not.
- Too touristy, which will be low-effort and risks food being prepared poorly
The latter is what bit us with our one serious case of food poisoning during the trip. While entirely regrettable and definitely un-fun, I’m honestly surprised we didn’t fare worse.
Fresh fruit unexpectedly stole the show. We found ourselves ordering fruit bowls everywhere we went. The cantaloupe, pineapple, bananas, and watermelons were all practically different foods from what we were used to, and might have spoiled us forever. The fruit was key to keeping a well-balanced diet with the little ones in this strange place, and the fact that it was all fantastic likely saved us.
Well, except for the papaya. Fresh papaya, we all agreed, tastes gross. Not all lessons are tasty.
Costs
Costs of traveling to Puerto Escondido were…average? They were certainly higher than I expected, mostly because I had bought into the popular belief that living is cheap in Mexico. This is still a beach town, after all. Beach days were ~$60 each for lunch and chair rentals. Most meals were ~$40 for four people. The cab rides that made up our primary means of conveyance were usually $10 each way. Certainly cheaper than seaside destinations in the US, but not much cheaper than eating out at home.
Expectations are key. I was expecting that most of the costs of this trip would be airfare and lodging, with everything else being cheap. That’s not how it worked out. That’s fine. It just meant my expectations were mistaken.
Dolphins
All travel is just an extended trust fall. You hand your fate over to the people conveying you, sheltering you, and feeding you. You do this out of necessity, because you cannot convey, shelter, or feed yourself away from home. With Stephanie down sick, it’s in that spirit that the girls and I found ourselves being picked up in a stranger’s van, getting dropped off at another stranger’s boat, and getting sped off into the ocean far enough that we could no longer see land. All expected, of course, since we were going on a dolphin tour.
I’m not entirely sure how long we were cruising, as I spent most of time struggling to understand the Spanish being spoken by our captain and worrying about the intensity of the sun versus how much sunblock my daughters applied. It all worked out, though, with out boat and its dozen passengers being surrounded by white-belly dolphins living their best ocean lives. My attempts to capture them on camera were unsuccessful and few, not wanting to hold my only means of translation and communication over speeding waters for any longer than necessary. You’ll have to take my word for it.
Turtle Release
Hello! My name is Onion. I am a newly hatched baby Black Sea Turtle, born on the Oaxacan coasts. My species is endangered, and some nice people here help protect our eggs and keep us safe, so that we make the important walk from the beach to the sea. We need to make that walk, it turns out, because these really cool magnetic sensors in our heads need to know the way to get back to the sands to lay eggs again.
That’s where my life got interesting. If you donate some money to the nice people that keep us safe, you can walk to the beach with one of us in a basket, let us out, and watch us take our first stroll into the water! That’s where I met two really neat human girls, who seemed super excited to see me! They named me, but nobody will know if I’m a boy turtle or a girl turtle until I’m a year old, so they kept arguing about that until the bigger boy human with them told them they could both be right.
Then the big moment came. The girl humans tipped my basket over and I could see the waves! I knew I had to go there, so I started moving my little feet as fast as I could. There were a bunch of scary birds overhead that seemed like they wanted to get me, but the nice people who protect us kept shooing them away.
It was then that I learned that one of my favorite hobbies is taking long walks on the beach. I started walking sideways alongside the waves, which seemed like a lot of fun. The human girls kept yelling though, saying things like “No, Onion, go that way, go into the water.” I knew I was supposed to, but this was so neat! Then all of a sudden, a big wave came. It picked me up and, whoosh, I was suddenly all the way in the water. I was off to live my new life in the ocean.
I must be really special, because I had so many great humans looking out for me. I probably won’t see them again, but I know I’ll never forget them.
Bioluminescence Tour
Remember that part earlier, about trust? Our dolphin-enabling van made another appearance at our doorstep, this time for an even stranger experience. Rather than driving to a beach, we were brought at dusk to a boat launch at a tidal lagoon called Laguna Manialtepec.
We set off along this elongated body of water, stopping to admire the occasional iguana or exotic bird. We were killing time, waiting until nightfall. Navigating by spotlight, we stopped by a floating tent. That’s the best way I can describe it: a structure of tarp about the size of a small room, framed over empty plastic tanks, anchored to its spot over the pitch black brackish waters. “Jump in,” the guide said. “Swim into there.”
Trust fall. Literally.
I’ll have you know, dear reader, that I was the first one of the four of us to quest out with my feet to see if the water was shallow enough to cause any icky toes. It was not.
We floated into the tent, buoyed by life vests. The tent blocks the moonlight, which is powerful enough to obscure what we were looking for. This lagoon hosts a form of bio luminescent algae. When disturbed, they produce phosphorous and create a small glow. Once under the tent, it became immediately obvious. Any movement of your limbs in the water resulted in a faint glow about them. I pulled my arm out and I could see twinkling on my skin like stars in the night sky.
So there the four of us floated, alongside a handful of fellow travelers. We had trusted, and that trust was rewarded. We had struggled along our journey, and those struggles were worth it. I’ve never found it easy to leaving home for parts unknown, but without doing so, home is all we can see. Sometimes, you need to see something more, to be somewhere else. Sometimes you need to wake up and hear strange birds to remind you that the world you knew is small.
We were not home. We were there.
