By The Beautiful Sea

(The Search For The Perfect Beach Town)

By

Turk Pipkin

(Originally appeared in Texas Monthly)

The search for the perfect beach town is for some a quest comparable to the pursuit of the holy grail. For to lose yourself—however briefly—to free your mind from the never ending constraints of time and responsibility, is growing harder and harder with each swiftly passing year. In addition to a beautiful stretch of shore, the perfect beach must also have good food and drink at reasonable prices, not too many tourists, and very little to do. And even though I’ve always considered the quest for such a place its own satisfaction, I recently came dangerously close to finding this perfection on the gloriously blue Pacific Ocean, in the Mexican fishing village of Puerto Escondido.

Until a few years ago most of the tourists who ventured to Escondido were surfers who came to test the powerful waves of Zicatela Beach—the Mexican Pipeline—one of the finest right and left breaking waves in the world. But in recent years the word has leaked out to the rest of the world that this is also a fine spot for wandering up and down soft beaches, eating fresh fish, drinking cold beer or fruit drinks, and taking long, lazy siestas.

To drink from this sacred chalice, you need only fly to Puerto Escondido on Mexicana Airlines from Mexico City, or you can take the one daily flight from Oaxaca City—a turbo prop adventure on Aeromorelos that flies wing to peak with the towering Sierra Madre del Sur which separate the inland valleys of Oaxaca from the Pacific Ocean. Flying just above tree top level, you’ll have magnificent views of densely forested slopes dotted with a few small villages and occasional agricultural clearings—some of which seem to harbor tall stands of marijuana—still a major cash crop for the area despite government efforts to the contrary.

Coming out of a steep descent, the plane banks sharply over the ocean and lands at a small airport where you take a collectivo taxi to your hotel for four bucks. Welcome to paradise.

Like clinging vines, the town of Puerto Escondido has grown up the side of a hill surrounding a beautiful south-facing bay. Just steps from the shore are numerous open-air restaurants, several small hotels, and a modest market selling lots of sandals and a fir selection of Indian crafts. Atop the hill is another area of businesses where the locals do their shopping but the heart of the town is on the ocean’s shore. The weather is tropical, warm and humid almost year round; shorts, sunglasses, and sunscreen are essential packing. From the middle of May thru September; however, it rains frequently, mosquitoes abound, and the weather is HOT with capital letters. No problem; simply go during the nice nine months of the year.

There are two ways to live while you're in Puerto Escondido, one as a tourist and one as a surfer. The top of the line tourist lodging is the American owned Hotel Santa Fe which overlooks the rocky point separating the downtown beach from the surfing beach. One of the best designed hotels in Mexico, the Santa Fe’s rooms are like secret hideouts. With cool stucco walls and tile floors, many have balconies with views of the ocean and, best of all, air conditioning. The Santa Fe’s guests tend to hang out around the hotel’s secluded, palm-shaded pool, at the breezy open air restaurant and bar, or on nearby Playa Marinero which offers sunbathing, safe swimming, and an enjoyable parade of swimsuits and suntans.

The surfers, on the other hand, hang out on Zicatela Beach where the waves are big and the rooms are cheap. The Bungalows Jardin have a nice pool and very spartan rooms with cinder block walls and a safe in the office for your valuables. The whole place is under a dense canopy of tropical vegetation so the fans in the room do manage to keep you cool. The price is just $10 a night per couple. Directly in front of the hotel is Bruno's Restaurant offering the cheapest, most reliable food in town. A big breakfast, American or Mexican style, costs two bucks; the two-for-one burger special at dinner is $3. By contrast the Santa Fe charges $75 a night for a double room, and a big meal runs $20 a person. Both places have their own wonderful style but the guests at the Bungalows Jardin tend to stay for weeks or months rather than days.

There are other good places to eat in town; La Perla Flameante has good views of the town promenade and the best fresh fish served about a dozen different ways. I had red snapper that had been out of the ocean less than hour, and that is a very good definition of fresh. A big dinner with beer was under $10. Il Capuccino is a hip espresso house which plays French, British, and American radio to homesick tourists hungry for news from home. Just across the street is a giant ice cream stand with a variety of flavors that may seriously challenge your grasp of Spanish.

To work up a big appetite for dinner you can take a long walk on an amazing path built at the base of the cliffs on the north side of the bay. With an extensive series of steps and foot bridges, the path winds up and down the face of the rocks, passing below a lighthouse and just above a number of tide pools filled with aquatic life. A half-mile from town, you finally turn the last corner of the cliffs from where you can watch the red sun sink slowly into the ocean.

If you’d like to get to know the locals, lend a hand when they drag one of the heavy fishing boats out of the water and across the sand for repairs. You can also rent horses to ride on the beach, so even if you're not a surfer, you can still pound the waves. The man renting the horses, I could not help but notice, has what may best be described as cloven feet, and it occurred to me that his occupation seemed almost like destiny.

The further south I travel in Mexico, the more I am in awe of the strange mix of prehispanic myth and western religion around which so many of these people structure their lives. Parked on the street in front of the Santa Fe were two Ford cargo trucks carrying what appeared to be all the worldly belongings of an extended family of Indians—thirty in all—who alternated their time entertaining their babies, cooking on a smoky grill, and hawking fresh oysters to the tourists on the beaches. While I was climbing on the rocky point in front of the hotel, I again encountered this family as they assembled for a religious service before an elaborate makeshift altar constructed of oyster shells, driftwood, and seaweed. As far a I could ascertain, they seemed to be praying to Jesus the Oyster King, assumedly in appreciation for the bounty of the ocean that permitted their roving life up and down the western beaches of Mexico. An hour later they all piled into the two trucks and headed up the coast highway in the direction of Acapulco. The altar was left behind.

I stopped several times on the beach to talk with a fishing guide named Nacho who offered to take me after “big fish” for fifty bucks. We made an appointment for the next morning and I arrived at dawn with Nacho nowhere in sight. When another guide reved a big Merc outboard and backed his 22 foot panga to the beach, I took one look at his brand new Penn rods and reels and scrambled on board.

Still under a full moon, Gilberto Ramirez and I were played out of the port by a military band from the army base just up the hill. Apparently the soldiers delight in rousing the tourists out of bed at the crack of dawn. As we left the harbor for the open sea, Gilberto turned back and dutifully crossed himself in the direction of the city’s main church. At the same time he saw someone waving at us from the beach and he turned the boat back to pick up a couple of diehard surf dudes who also turned out to be dedicated fisherman. They introduced themselves: Walt and Scott (Walter Scott, I thought, at least I won't forget their names.)

Walt turned out to be a Puerto Escondido regular. From Puerto Rico by way of Miami, he spends three months a year here, surfing every day and fishing with Gilberto when he feels like it. He had even brought all of the expensive tackle on board from the States as a gift for Gilberto. Dreaming of a sushi breakfast, we hoped to get into a school of big tuna which could easily weigh three hundred pounds apiece. Growing hungrier by the hour, we chased them across the ocean, watching for them breaking on the surface as they fed on smaller fish marked by dive-bombing brown boobies and giant pre-historic looking frigate birds. The eight foot wingspan of the Frigate birds is quite a spectacle, especially since they must steal fish from smaller birds in flight as frigate birds will drown if they get the feathers wet. How a young frigate bird learns this all important lesson, I’m not really sure.

Some of the less-experienced fishing guides here forego the use of hooks, substituting frayed nylon which tangles instantly in a marlin or sword-fish's bill. The knowledgeable fishermen dismiss that as cheating because it eliminates the skill of keeping the fish on the hook, the possibility of catch-and release, and the opportunity to catch tuna and other fish without bills. I felt fortunate to have ended up with Gilberto, even though we never enticed a tuna to strike the large orange and red skirted plugs we trolled through several feeding schools.

No matter, I was more than content with the constant parade of dolphins dancing under our speeding hull and the rapid skirting sideshow of tiny flying fish sailing fifty yards in an amazing burst of aerial speed, a feat accomplished with the assist of a lower tail fin three times as long as the upper, a surfboard, if you will, with a turbo prop drive.

I was scanning the horizon sleepily when I saw a tall sail fin screaming towards my lure. Though the drag was set so tight I could barely pull off line myself, the clicker began to scream as the fish stripped fifty yards of line off the reel. I was tied to a big sailfish, maybe eight feet in length, and his airborne acrobatics combined with deep water runs made it a long half hour before I could bring the fish near the boat. That's quite a fight for a sailfish (or for a writer) and the fish made several last minute breaks, during one of which he nearly came into the boat of his own accord. I’d hoped to release the fish—even though I’d be obligated to pay Gilberto for the loss of the sale of the fish’s meat—but this fish was exhausted beyond survival.

Whenever possible, catch-and-release needs to be the policy of all bill fishermen, especially in Mexico. In Cabo San Lucas, an estimated 20,000 marlin are boated each year, a practice that will eventually decimate both the fish population and the income of local fishermen. Many sport fisherman will argue—probably correctly—that the main threat to almost all salt water fish populations is from commercial long-line, drift and gill net 'factory' fishing ships which seems bent on seining the oceans of the world down to just water and salt. Catch-and-release, on the other hand, is still an important conservation tool.

If you have not the least interest in having your picture taken next to a giant dead fish, I recommend a ride in a panga, either for the joy of the cold spray in your face or for a picnic and swim on one of the more remote beaches in the area. The best day long excursion is to Chacahua National Park—a naturalists' tour of three coastal lagoons with numerous mangrove covered islands loaded with exotic birds, game and plant life. Some of the sights include ibis, roseate spoonbills, black orchids, mahogany trees and alligators, so don't forget your camera. Tours depart from the Hotel Santa Fe and other well-marked offices on the pedestrian street, Avenida Perez Gasca. Prices run about $40 per person, including ground and boat transportation, and may also cover lunch at one of the rustic restarants near the lagoon which serve local specialties like snook and blue crab.

Hertz rents cars on Perez Gasca for the standard exorbitant Mexico fee of $90/day, but thankfully there are better ways to get around. You can catch a bus ($1 at the Oaxaca Pacifico/Estrella del Valle station on Avenida Hidalgo) or a cab from anywhere in town ($30 and worth it) for the 35 mile ride down the coast to Puerto Angel, a smaller even more laid back version of Escondido featuring Mexico's only official nude beach. A majority of Angel’s visitors come from Europe, and I’ve been told all the women are beautiful and all the men have severe sunburns.

Puerto Angel shares one downside with Escondido and that was posted in an advisory on the door of my hotel room that cautioned guests not to walk on the beach at night as there have been some robberies of tourists. The well lit and police-patrolled main street, Avenue Perez Gasca, is however considered completely safe. Besides, you'll be so tired from doing nothing all day long that you'll be asleep by nine o'clock anyway. There are several bars open late at night but this is not really a mind-numbing, party-hardy town like Cabo. It's more like a Lyle Lovett line I've always admired: “An Acceptable Level of Ecstasy.”

As the world's great paradises are one by one sucked under by a giant wave of tourists, you have to wonder if this one will survive. Luckily for those who enjoy this place for what it is, the powerful Mexican tourist development board, FONATOR, has not targeted Puerto Escondido for massive over-development like they have the lovely Huatulco Bay just seventy miles down the coast. Huatulco, in just five years, has become the home of numerous major hotel projects from Club Med to the Sheraton Huatulco, none of which are an improvement on the natural beauty of the area.

What may save Escondido is the reluctance of the big hotels to build here because the dangerous undertow at Zicatela Beach is considered too risky for family swimming. I'm not a surfer but I could sit all day and watch those big waves roll in from the South Pacific. Though the actual number of surfers is not that great, the regulars tells me that several surfboards are snapped in half by these powerful waves every day. If you bring a pair of binoculars you can see both the triumph on the face of a surfer miraculously reappearing from inside a six foot pipeline and the wide-eyed panic of someone catching a big ungainly wave with no place to go but the bottom of the ocean.

Being a strong swimmer, one afternoon I pushed through the breaking waves for a long swim beyond the riptide. Well away from shore, I found myself stroking just twenty yards outside of the surfers who were awaiting the next good set of a New Zealand swell that had been building all day. They paddled towards me with big grins on their faces.

“Where's your board, hawg?” one called. I grinned like the fool that I was for being there and paddled on. “Hey,” said another. “This dude's swimming to Acapulco.”

I stroked on, the waves rolling beneath me in their never-ending rhythm—a pulse stronger than all the clocks in all the world. Time stood still and there was only wave and water. I drifted like the giant tortuga we had seen on our return from the fishing trip. Scott and I had stood in the bow watching the graceful giant swim slowly to the south, wondering where it was going.

“What day is it?" Scott asked. “Friday?”

“No, it's Tuesday." I told him. “I think.”

“Tuesday?" he said with surprise. “Wow.” There was a long pause before he spoke again. “So what month is it?"

I thought about it for a while, and though I'd only been here a short time, I really didn't know.

Hotel Santa Fe (Doubles: $75, tel. 958-2-01-70)

Hotel Rincon del Pacifico (on pedestrian street, Ave. Perez Gasca (Doubles: $25, tel. 958-2-00-560)

Hotel Arco Iris (Zicatela Beach, Doubles: $20, 958-2-04-32)

Bungalows Jardin (Help: My guide book may be listing this place as the Bungalows Acuario but I can’t find a phone number for either one)

Sportfishing and boat trips with Gilberto Ramirez, Look for Boat No. 053, “Marissa”