12/4 Beach.

It occurs that I’m no longer crying every day. It’s still most days, still pretty effusive. But it’s no longer every day.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving and I’m in Puerto Escondido, aka the beach.

I think this might be a thing. Leigha and I also met here last year for Thanksgiving and it’s a delicious way to spend the holiday. I spent many years hosting Friendsgiving, which as any dedicated cook knows is the ultimate culinary test in planning, timing, and execution of any holiday. Then I alternated, my family, Mike’s family and so on, rarely having the chance to to perform myself. And now, I avoid the whole rigamorale and it begins to feel like a giant metaphor on where I’m at in my life itself. And now I beach.

I got in mid afternoon, a few hours after Leigha, on the shortest flight, maybe 45 minutes. It’s a small airport, so they wheel over stairs to exit a plane by and you’re just immediately wrapped in a sticky warm embrace of humidity. Leigh had red eyed her way down and was napping when I arrived. After she woke, we swimsuitted up and headed to Playa Carrizalillo and its mountain of stairs. As always, the water was deliciously warm and salty. It’s so salty that you don’t need to tread to stay afloat, it just carries you.

This is a perfect beach. It’s an inlet, so a bit protected, the steep hillside offers a beautiful view lush with vegetation. The sand is perfect. And it gets deep quickly. It’s has enough wave to be interesting, but they’re substantial rolls and there’s very little choppiness. The water is only slightly cooler than the air, so it offers some reprieve from the heat, substantial relief from the humidity, and no shock to one’s system, no required period of adjustment. Surfers hang out on the outskirts of the bay, waiting for a wave to ride to shore. There are a few palapas bars. One sells deep fried quesadillas with queso Oaxaqueño and a deep bowl of guacamole.

It’s just heavenly. We watched the sunset from the stairs heading up.

If it wasn’t on the ocean, this place would be a humid hellhole. But it is. And the breeze makes the rest bearable. I woke up bright and early at 6:30 and it was already 76 out. Leigha both sleeps later than I do normally and is on west coast time, so I made some coffee and headed to the rooftop to do a little studying. But I mostly just enjoyed the warmth. I am a warm, dare I say hot, weather person. It’s something I didn’t truly know about myself and something I’m realizing with greater clarity with each passing year. Not that I can’t delight in a spate of rain or the cleanness it brings to the air, the intense softening of sound a blanket of snow brings to a city, the joy of seeing spring emerge, or the fun of daylight that doesn’t end till 10pm. But I love being warm. My body just feels better for it and being by salt water. I wanna be old and wrinkled with sea salt and sun. Cooked, if you will.

And I’m off to a good start, having burnt myself a bit. I slathered on sunscreen, but apparently did not reapply with sufficient diligence. I am pink. Not red. But solidly pink. Like that part where despite knowing that you skin won’t really crack through and bleed out, you do have some concern around bending your knees. So now I’m chugging water and never stray too far from my aloe. Oops.

I don’t think I’ve been here for a year.

It’s a hard place to be. It’s a bit haunted. We came here so much, it’s seen so many phases of my marriage. It’s held dreams for us. It’s been witness to disappointments, to firsts. I think it’s the place that made him love travel and in some ways, made us us.

But it’s also easy here. I have my routines. It’s a small little life of stretching in the sun, going to the beach, seeing amazing sunrises and sets and eating raw fish.

Puerto Escondido is situated on the Pacific Coast in the state of Oaxaca, the second most southern state in Mexico. It’s a rich and humid subtropical environment with papayas and mangos and avocados. An amazing thing about Puerto Escondido is that it runs west to east, as Mexico curves down to Central America, meaning you see both sunrises and sunsets over the ocean. This was an old school surf rown. Zicatela (#6) is known as the Mexican Pipeline and there’s an international surf competition held every year in November. I briefly tried to learn more about this for y’all, and got to triple header barrel wave and realized it was gonna take more commitment than I was really willing to invest. But it sounds like an intense wave. When Mike and I first came the area around Carrizalillo was only very slightly developed. We needed my not so great Spanish.

All the beaches are distinct and fabulous in their own way. Bacocho is long, not great for swimming, but it’s where the baby sea turtles are released. Next, and missing from the map is Playa Coral, this is only accessed via a hotel or by scrambling over the rocks at Bacocho. It’s a very lovely little inlet with good swimming. Carrizalillo is one of the best beaches in the world with surfers out at the mouth of the bay and some of the saltiest, floatiest water I’ve ever been in. Puerto Angelito shares a bay with Playa Manzanillo, a bit easier to access than Carrizalillo, this is a great family spot with a slower descent to swimming depth, very few waves and enough rock for decent snorkeling. The Playa Principal is also part port and usually busy with ships, but does offer sandy beach and swimmable water. It stretches into Zicatela where the waves can be daunting and surfers rule. Past La Punta (the point), the waves calm a bit and the beach extends to a long stretch of sandiness known as La Barra. I’ve actually never been all the way down there.

Puerto Escondido has a sharp divide between tourist land and Mexico. And it’s quite literally the highway. You can see the thick yellow stripe in the map above. On one side, you have fancy restaurants, boutiques, and tall white washed house with palapas roof tops and hammocks. On the other, you have pick up truck collectivos, taco stands, fruit sold on sidewalks, and thick messes of power lines. On one side you have Starlink. On the other you have the smell of diesel and noisiness. But you also have the traditional mercado over there and it is a joy on weekends. Farmers bring in their local crops and line the edges of the markets with fruit, vegetables, and herbs I’ve never seen. Everything is laid out in small piles on a tarp or blanket and that is their shop for the day. If you go early, you can get excellent fish. And that’s what I did. It’s also too freakin’ hot to go later in the day.

l grabbed some beautiful yellowfin, tostadas, avocados, queso fresco, hoja santa, giant radishes and began to realize I was perhaps overdoing it for the walk back.

Due to my early burn, I was hiding a bit during the hottest part of the day, but what delicious permission to do nothing. I napped in a hammock on our roof top. I read in bed in the comfort of the AC. I sat with my feet in the pool and drank a beer with two limes squeezed in it. And then after the hottest part of the day had passed by, I slathered myself in the strongest sunscreen I could find and trekked down to the beach, where Leigha was invariably waiting, having not burnt the crap out of herself, wise girl that she is.
We ordered cocos frios, sucked down the sweet cool water and asked them to cut up the meat. It’s served back to you in shell with a lime wedge. These are not the light weight adorable fuzzy brown coconuts. These are beefy monsters nearly the size of a basketball with a green exterior weighing up to 5 pounds. And the days were mostly rinse and repeat, varying mostly in whether we had raw or cooked fish for dinner. Despite the many beaches, we stuck with Carrizalillo.

For a slight change of pace, Wednesday morning we went out for a boat ride. They had us down on Puerto Angelito (#3/4) for sunrise. This port is mostly used for tourist traffic, while Playa Principal is a bit more commercial with fishermen rolling in early in the morning with the night’s catch. These boats are small affairs for individuals or teams of fishermen trolling, jigging or angling fish.

The sea is robust here, teeming with sardines, tuna, marlin, mahi, red snapper, oysters and shrimp. I spend my whole time here eating ceviches, aguachiles, sashimis, and, of course, fish tacos.

Our guide and boat capitan Israel escorted us and our 7 other boatmates onto a small fiberglass boat with benches on the side and small canvas stretched overhead for some sun protection. Pretty much identical to the boats pictured above. Then we were off. First we skirted along the shore into Playa Principal and up Zicatela. It was amazing seeing those giant waves from this angle. The sun came up behind them and back lit the spray which misted out and fuzzied the line of the wave crest. It was beautiful.

We then coasted around La Punta, watched early morning fishermen casting lines from the rocks, and swung down La Barra before turning out to the ocean. It was a beautifully hazy morning and before long we saw our first dolphins and sea turtles.

Puerto Escondido is home to dolphins year round munching down on sardines. These include, the spotted dolphin, the common dolphin, bottlenose dolphins, spinner dolphins, and white sided dolphins. I’m gonna start this by saying that my dolphin identification skills are pathetic. We saw at least two kinds, and the guide definitely identified one as spotted, or in Spanish, delfines pintos. This was actually the most dolphins I’ve ever seen in my entire life. We encountered school after school of them, popping up every where and stretching for 100s of feet. And now I present a bunch of dolphin silhouettes.

They swam alongside and under our boat, they darted through the wake, they leapt into the air and rode waves. It was pretty darn special.

and more dolphins

After playing about with a few different schools, we headed north to see about some whales.

The humpback whales are here for their breeding season roughly from November through April with pregnancies lasting a year, so this is also a good place to see some baby whales hanging out with their mamas. Humpbacks have three distinct populations, one that winters near southern Japan and heads up to the Bering Sea, one that floats on out to Hawaii and then over to northern Washington, Canada and Alaska. And then this population, the Central American Humpbacks who winter from Mexico to Nicaragua, and then head up north to California, Oregon, and southern Washington. I love the idea that I might have seen the same whale off the Oregon Coast as here. Their migratory pattern also deeply appeals to my own weather related proclivities.

We kept a respectful distance from the group of four, who seemed neither shy nor particularly inclined to show off (a bit of a shift from the more boisterous dolphins). But the slow grace of the humpback has its charm. They’re so freakin’ big and unhurried.

And Thursday, I reluctantly headed home. I will say I struggle with relaxing into the day I know I’m leaving. So while my flight didn’t leave till 4:30 and I did get a few beach and ocean hours in, I felt like I was constantly checking my phone for the time and didn’t feel as peaceful as I’d hoped. The airport is mini and the flight takes like no time, I don’t think it’s even a proper hour though they budget an hour and 15 minutes. So in no time I was back in the bustle of the city.

TACOS OF THE WEEK: The Fish Shack.

Ok this one was a real winner. First and foremost, I’ve been trying to find this place for a couple years now. They’re famous for moving locations and having inconsistent hours. They’re now housed down an alleyway with tables crammed against walls and small inserts into buildings. It feels merry and chaotic. There’s nothing understated here. Strings of brightly colored and mismatched ceramic fish hang from the ceiling every 3 or 4 feet. There were a bunch of cats hanging around to catch mice. Picnic bench style tables are shared. They take your name with your order and various people bring your food as it is finished and call out your name till you claim it.

Because we also wanted some ceviche, we limited ourselves to one taco each. Because we were paying with a credit and had a minimum to meet, we both got drinks. I had a fantastic cucumber lime mezcalita and a coco fried fish taco with cabbage and a very saucy chipotle mayo. It was really freakin’ good. I thought about ordering another. I will go back.