Losing our way

After two and a half weeks in Puerto Escondido Centro we were packed and ready to move to our next AirBnb.

We were fairly adept at flagging down taxis at this point but our luggage is not the "minimalist" ideal so we had to roll our two suitcases and our backpacks plus a couple of grocery bags to the closest busy corner and hail a taxi from there.

A lesson we should have learned about figuring out where we were going next is to properly pin-point the location before getting into the taxi.  So when we got in I gave an approximate direction, the equivalent of "head in the direction of..." that you might use while you sort yourself out with the actual address.  I suppose a companion rule is to have the address copied to both of you so you each have it on your phones...

We had bought an unlimited international data plan before starting on our trip and it has been excellent for us in all the places that we have visited so I was able to use Anne's AirBnb app to click on the "directions to your AirBnb" button and have it show us precisely where we needed to go.

Anne was very disappointed when I let her know that the directions were taking us to a place on the opposite side of the highway from the sea and our hearts sank when we arrived at the spot indicated on the map... it looked pretty run down and nothing like the photograph in the app.

I went inside to ask someone whether this was an AirBnb location but I left Anne's phone with her so when the obvious followup question, "What is the name of your AirBnb" came, the exercise became pretty fruitless.  I didn't even know the name of the AirBnb, let alone the actual address.  

They confirmed that they were not an AirBnb, so I went back to the taxi where Anne had managed to find another address.  The patient taxi driver took us over to that new location where there was still nothing promising in sight.

We were both a little frazzled at this point.  I was imagining a repeat of our experience in Antigua where the Bookings.com location turned out to not exist.  I saw a small local restaurant across the road and suggested to Anne that we let the taxi go and take a seat there, get some food and/or something to drink and plan our next move.

This wasn't a great idea because we had some frozen goods in the shopping bags but at that point I was willing to sacrifice the frozen food for a more careful consideration of our next steps.  It took a few moments for us to realize that there weren't any taxis driving up the road we were on but I was happy to defer solving that problem until we'd sat for a little bit and finished a juice and (in my case) a beer.

A young girl sitting at one of the tables, probably around 10 or 11 years old, was listening to me asking in my rough Spanish if they knew anything about the AirBnb that I still didn't have a name for.  

She said something to me in English and I told her that she spoke English so well.  She said she was from Los Angeles but now living in Puerto Escondido.  The older person at the shop was her grandmother and her mother was working there too.  She said she didn't have any friends because she didn't speak Spanish.  In retrospect I suspect this may have been an exaggeration but I also realized that her family may have been among the many expelled from the USA for being there illegally after she'd spent her childhood there.

She then asked me where the "woman" was (she meant Anne) who had vanished while I was talking to her grandmother and her.  

We looked around for her and I was wondering if she had gone to look for a bathroom when a taxi pulled up with her in it.  She had searched for the AirBnb by name on google maps and then walked to the end of the street, hailed a taxi and told him to pick me up.  

We had a third destination that we were going to make our way to. 

This one turned out to be the correct address and, although I missed my 2pm work meeting I was able to settle in and set up my digital world for the rest of the workday within a few minutes of arriving.

Our new stomping ground was the roughly two and a half mile-long (4km) beach on the South West of Puerto Escondido,

much closer to the very touristy beach at La Punta with its crowded streets and restaurants - including the lovely Chicama restaurant.

where the bar staff brighten your day, and the vegetarian restaurant Piyoli restaurant which also has a branch a couple of blocks from Nick's apartment in Mexico City.

My workday routine didn't change much other than for the fact that this AirBnb has a pool and the beach is not much more than a 10min walk from us.  We discovered that this entire stretch of beach is marked with danger signs (mostly ignored) warning not to swim.

Sun illuminates the waves as they break with a surreal effect

 There are a couple of lifeguard stations along the beach and the waves crash unrelenting on the shore. 

At 4pm we often take a taxi to La Punta where there are more people swimming and the waves are a little less alarming because of a rocky point jutting out nearby that offers some moderation to the swell.

 

There are so many motorbikes and scooters in use here - the streets at La Punta are lined with them and so I took a few minutes to stop at a scooter rental place to find out what they might charge. 

They quoted $400 MX (approx $22 US) a day and $3500 MX ($190 US) for 2 weeks and so I checked with our AirBnb about parking one there and the really friendly and accommodating host told me that they had a scooter to rent for $200 a day if we liked.

So Anne and I revisited our earlier reservations about renting a scooter and that Friday evening we were off to La Punta on a little blue and white scooter along the back-roads of Zicatela for a swim, dinner and a ride back in the dark again along the sandy pot-holed back-roads.

It was a great feeling to be scootering around the town despite linear ruts in the paved roads that had our front wheel occasionally latch onto the direction of the rut for a second or two before popping out again.  It was enough of a wobble to raise my anxiety just a little bit.

Early morning street dogs with the linear ruts in the street

We visited the huge Zicatela market on the Saturday,

this time braving the highway for both the trip there and back.  The market has a hangar-like roof over small brick shops that sell everything from meat and fish to clothing and a number of different grocery specialists including incredibly fresh vegetables and fruit.

  The side walls have beautiful murals on them.

Anne's photo of one of the murals in the Mercado

It reminded me (in spirit) of the Victorian Market in Melbourne, Australia, although the concrete brick structures inside lacked the elegance of the wooden stalls of the Melbourne market. 

Anne has always been a little highly-strung.  She startles easily even on a relaxed afternoon, and so I decided to give our scooter rides a running commentary so that none of what I was doing would be a surprise to her and cause unexpected reactions behind me.  In particular I'd announce the moments when I took advantage of the many speed-bumps on the highway to cross in front of oncoming traffic knowing  that they had to slow down a lot before proceeding.

Our last taxi ride back from La Punta on the Thursday night had a price increase from $50 MX to $80 MX so I felt good about the $200 MX a day for scootering around our town and to La Punta in the evenings and we did this for the first week.

On the Thursday I had to work late but it looked like we would make it to the beach in time for sunset so we set off on the scooter onto the highway and then an exit to a local road to the beach itself.  The first speed-bump after the exit felt a little sharper than expected and as I accelerated after it, the back wheel spun out a bit under us.  My running commentary to Anne was: "I think we went over a patch of sand, no worries" as I accelerated again the scooter did a 180 degree spin around although fortunately at this point we were going very slowly.

We got off and saw that the rear tire had separated from the wheel and my immediate thoughts went to the small details of how far we were from the AirBnb, how little we knew about how to get this fixed and where the hell would we park it for the night until we figured out what to do with it.

Anne's text messages to the AirBnb got a neutral response that wasn't much more than a "message received" at that point and so we wandered up the street a bit and I asked someone who was replacing a wheel on a small panel van if he knew where we could get a flat tire repaired.  He said "no" but I'm not sure if that was because he misunderstood me.   It turns out (after the fact) that "punchar" and "pinchar" means "to prick" and the various verb conjugations of this could mean "you prick" or "fucking" as in "pinche policia".  It also means "kitchen assistant".  What it doesn't mean is "puncture".

So my statement:  "tengo una pincha" would quite literally mean "I have a prick" followed by "do you know where I can fix my scooter?"  This would result in the answer "no" in most countries.

I saw a sign across the highway that said something about a "Moto" and there were clearly some motocycles there and people working on them so we made our way over there and found that the person behind the counter spoke English very well and said if we brought the scooter over he could have someone take a look at it for us.

Literally minutes later we were informed that the wheel was fixed and the person behind the counter explained that a wheel like that, if under-inflated could lose all of its air quite suddenly, for example when you went over a bump in the road.

We hadn't realized that the scooter wheel was flat in our trips back and forth to the beach, and it must have been given to us flat to begin with.

He refused to accept payment for re-inflating the tire after seating it correctly back on the wheel but I insisted on leaving a tip anyway.

He also complimented me on my Spanish - which was a first.  This came because I had had a little conversation with him about where we were from and how my accent isn't (really) a USA accent.  I still speak like a South African despite the 20 years we've been in the USA.

After the scare with the back tire (and realizing that we hadn't been using the scooter outside of the single trip to the beach every day) we decided that it was costing more to rent the scooter than the taxis would have cost every day so have stopped using it.  We'll take another run at scooters, motorcycles or bicycles in some other destination.

We have enjoyed every trip to the beach.  

Even though the waves break close to the shore, you can still get some pretty good body surfing in.  The beach gets pretty crowded close to sunset at La Punta where everyone also applauds the sunset as the last rays touch their skin.