This coastal area has a great history. Before the Spanish opened the port in Acapulco, the bay of Santa Cruz de Huatulco is where the spanish galleons arriving from Asia would offload their wealth and passengers, from here everything went by mule overland through Oaxaca and Mexico City to Veracruz and back to Europe. So, in 1579, this was where you came to plunder if you were an English pirate, even a respected one like Sir Francis Drake or Thomas Cavendish. The bay of Puerto Angel is small, calm, protected and guarded by steep rocks you could easily hide a masted ship behind. Later on, coffee began to be grown high on the mountains, which reach a peak of eight or nine thousand feet within just a few miles of the coast, and Puerto Angel was where they shipped it out. Other than a road over the mountains to Puerto Angel from Oaxaca, there were few ways to get into this area without mules and ferries until 1974, so it remained pretty unspoiled.
At this time, Puerto Angel is a little fishing town stretching around 3 sides of the bay, it attracts tourists during the winter but in early November, there is just not much happening. The main town has a fishing beach in front of it, a few open restaurants. Above town on fairly steep hills there are many small places to stay for about $20 to $35. Though some like the hotel La Buena Vista are quite pretty, you still have to hike up several flights of stairs to reach your room and restaurant. So instead we stayed at the Hotel Cordelia, at Playa Panteon or ´cemetery beach´, it's right on the sand. The rooms are up a floor, you walk down and out through the lobby/dining room past some toucans, and parrots, who say 'bueno?' and 'hola!' and also bark like dogs and cry like babies, and then you step into the restaurant which is a huge shaded palapa right on the sand. The beach has clear coarse clean yellow coral sand which feels absolutely great, and the snorkeling is awesome. The fishermen gather just offshore but the beach is very nice and there are friendly local dogs and each afternoon the local kids come in swimming. The Cordelia also has great hot showers which have a view of the ocean also, hot water now and then is great as most nice coast places still only have room temp showers. At the Cordelia, a large airy room with a great view but with a small double bed, is $35; for 2 beds in a huge room, it costs $60-70, somewhat negotiable. On the hillside just behind the hotel is the town cemetery and since it was still just past Day of the Dead, it was covered in yellow and orange marigolds and people were tending it. Really pretty. Next to the hotel are a couple of other beach restaurants on the sand, at night each one sets up tables out next to the waves with little hurricane lamps, very romantic.
The ocean here is a very nice temperature and has beautiful fish to look at, also tasty dorado-mahimahi and octopus and squid and shrimp to eat. Puerto Angel has a flotilla of 30 or 40 open fishing boats and each evening they cluster off our bay, the Cemetery Bay, to pull out small silvery fish to use as bait for their morning fishing. Off our bay, in the rocks, are all the nice colorful reef fish and also large schools of these small silvery guys. Usually its quite clear.
Just east of Puerto Angel over the headlands there is another small quite narrow bay with two little sandy beaches with small not great palapa restaurants, just out of town, kinda isolated, called Estacahuite; we hear the snorkeling can be great, but it was more cloudy and surgy the day we hiked over there.
The real draw along this coast however is the set of 3 beach villages, Zapolite, San Agustinillo and Mazunte, where you can get little rooms pretty much on the beach and go surfing or swimming. You can get to them easily by colectivo taxis, from Puerto Angel or from Pochutla where the buses stop.
Of the 3 we really loved the middle one, San Agustinillo and we by accident found the beautiful 6 room hotelette, Mexico Lindo, owned by Fausto and Leila, a very handsome and gracious youngish couple from Tabasco via Mexico City (email fafinyleila@latinmail.com). They started this charming hotel+restaurant about ten years ago, about 6 rooms some upstairs and 2 downstairs, right on the beach at the west end of town. We paid 350 pesos, $32 usd a night but in full season they are $50 a night, I think they are usually pretty full. Our little room was downstairs, right on the beach; it had a small but comfy 4 poster with mosquito net, big shutter windows opening onto the beach through our little private `front yard`of fenced in and roofed sand with a hammock and easy chair. Our room temp shower and bath were just fine and the charming way the place is built made it really special. At night we left the windows open to the beach and even though the waves are not high, they make a lovely thunderous noise all night long. There is a great kitchen staff and the only waiter besides the owners is an exceptionally nice local guy named Ramon, and a great kitchen staff; everyone working there seems to be sophisticated, handsome and absolutely charming. It just seems to be their pleasure to have you, to make you limonadas and bring you a cold beer to sip in your green adirondack while you sift sand with your toes in the shade and look out at the open halfmoon swimming beach, 500 meters long, where a few people are body surfing and boogie boarding and surfing and just bobbing in the water. There is a handsome european guy David who you could hire to teach you surfing, and they rent some equipment. The place gets pleasantly busy midday because lots of people who are at other lodgings come to settle in, but it's absolutely tranquil mornings and evenings, at least at this time in the season when the restaurant closes early.
This is just a small part of the San Agustinillo beach which is three fourths of a mile long and has some adjoining beaches. It has a string of 2 story places along it which do not overwhelm it and a lot of it is still pretty wild feeling. Until the last 20 years, San Agustinillo was a turtle factory site and icky; now, with tourism and ecotourism, it is just for fishermen, and hotel owners, and taxidrivers, and a few german/italian expats, and a few aging surfers, and then, tourists like us. Yes, rich people are buying up some of the hilltop land to build retreats, and some of the small hotels on the beach are being turned into luxury-style, and slowly the price of lodging is going up (we found new Balinese-style cabanas down the beach charging $80 for a small double bed in a pretty small room) but so far it feels pretty far from it all.
People are working very hard to restore the local turtle populations and it is working. The beach that the turtles still lay on, La Ventanilla, which is just a mile or two north past Mazunte Beach, has no development allowed and no lights, which discourage them from coming ashore, and it also has a mangrove swamp where you can take a punt boat in and see the lovely birds and a few crocodiles as well.
This time of year there is greenery on and around the coast, the weather is warm but not usually overwhelmingly hot and hardly anyone is around, most beachfront restaurants have just a few clients at a time. In fact Fausto and Leila close, for all of September and October, and we were there just a week into their winter season. At night they closed up so we would go to the nearby italian-owned pasta/pizza restaurant or down the road to Mazunte to eat more seafood on the beach palapa restaurants.
We went out to the ocean with this morning, paying 150 pesos each to the owner, Efren, and Miguel, for a little dolphin-turtle-whale tour and what a tour. At the last minute Fausto also joined us and that was great, because he and the owner are great friends and they took us all over. Fausto had heard that overnight a huge number of turtles had arrived, in the hundreds or even thousands, and out on the ocean, we found sea turtles all over, we saw at least 40 in an hour. He said 6 of the 7 known species of sea turtle are found here, and 3 of them nest here. We probably saw 3 species according to Fausto. Sometimes they hang out resting, bobbing on the surface before going down for a snack, often staying still enough that seabirds come rest on them. Several were paired up, apparently turtle lovemaking lasts 24 to 48 hours during which time they just float along, and some were courting, circling each other. We found one caught in a Dorado fishing line and Efren freed it and I saw there was another nearby just underwater, perhaps its girlfriend or boyfriend.
During the same trip we also had a great time also out there with about 5 pods of dolphins of 3 different species, and saw the dolphins swimming with freshly caught dorados in their mouths and saw one dorado, which is a mahimahi, hiding by swimming directly under a large turtle, but the dolphin was too smart and saw it and chased the turtle-mahimahi pair down in the depths. At the time we were snorkeling to get a better view, and I was amazed at how crystal clear the depths were and how long it took to see them disappear, way way down. We were in and out of the water constantly, depending on where Fausto and Efren wanted to go. Then suddenly up off the very long, open La Ventanilla beach we saw whales, the first pair they had seen all season, very close to the shore (40 feet at one time?) and very close to us. We followed the whales down the shore for about 6 or 7 breaches and got in the water to see if we could see them go by in the deep but no luck. I´m not sure what type of whale, not huge and not small. Dark color and sort of nobbly.
Mostly however we have not been doing anything organized, we have just been swimming, a little snorkeling and frequently eating and drinking what the local restaurants have to offer, fish with garlic, fish with garlic and chile, fish with sauteed vegetables chillies and tomatoes, fish with lemon, etc. I have eaten so much fish. Can´t wait for peanut butter, or chicken, or something, anything but fish! just kidding... mostly. We have taken little colective taxis and covered trucks to the local beaches generally comfortably. The place has been a bit more expensive than we had thought and than it is in the guidebooks, prices are up some, but we felt we were seeing something in this rural coast area that is soon to disappear and we felt privileged to be here NOW. I would recommend seeing this part of the world soon before it is more costly. We spent as much as $65 a night. Mexico Lindo cost us $35 a night but in full season they are $50 a night. So for mexico coast it is more than we thought. But you can still find a beachside room with a very small bed or maybe a hammock, a shared somewhat dirty bathroom, for muchless, $15 or so if you are young enough to do this. As for transportation: because of having too much luggage we did take taxis ($30 USD from Puerto Angel to Puerto Escondido) but you could definitely get by cheaper with combi taxis (5 or 10 pesos for a short distance, sometimes in these covered pickup trucks with high roofs) and local buses which are reliable and quite cheap. Our last day, we took a cab for our luggage from Puerto Angel to the Huatulco airport, $30; we met an american guy with a single roller carry on who had paid $3 to take a local bus all the way from Puerto Escondido, 90 minutes away. The buses and combis all let you on and off just outside the airport so if traveling light, definitely would be the way to go.
We went to Puerto Escondido also for a night, found a great hotel there, the Flor De Maria which we'd definitely recommend because it is extremely lovely and has a great rooftop shady area with hammocks and a small pool overlooking the bay and beach, which is a great change from the hot beach, but even though many people absolutely love Puerto Escondido, it was just too hot and the souvenirs too cheesy and the beach too unsafe for our taste - you are told you should not walk the beaches at night.
So we spent 2 nights at Puerto Angel, 1 night at Puerto Escondido, 2 nights at San Agustinillo and a final night at Puerto Angel to reconnect with some luggage and get back to normal mexican village life and email. We had a great time today just wandering the beach and pier of the town snapping little shots of people and boats as the sunset glow faded.
One more story. Our second night on the coast, as we walked the Playa Pantheon after dinner, we heard Iz, singing Somewhere over the Rainbow, coming from one of the restaurants, so we went close. Turns out, that there is a special Mexican celebration 9 days after someone dies, and this restaurant's owner had just passed away. So, they were watching videos of him, to Iz's music and eating tamales and coffee together. They asked us to join but we felt a little shy, so we went off into the darkness back to our hotel listening to Iz's voice.
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