Puerto Escondido

Our first impression of Puerto Escondido was not a good one. We took an amazingly beautiful, long, scary bus ride from Oaxaca City (enjoying the incrediable steep vistas is difficult when you can see your bus tires mere inches from the edge) and arrived on the coast at about 9pm. Bus stations are never the most inviting but as we hustled across the Pan-American highway to our hotel it struck us. This puerto was not escondido (hidden). We parked our bags in our room and went out to the chained off street that serves as the main tourism center in Puerto. Midway through dinner Sarah observed, "This is kind of like a Mexican New Jersey shore, I think we should move on soon." Puerto Escondido attracts many different kinds of tourists but primarily it is a surf destination. There is a huge crowd of international surfer boys who own no shirts, have great tans and a uniformly stupid looking shoulder length, bleached blonde haircut. There are also plenty of Mexicans getting out and enjoying the lovely beach, sportsfishing and the imported gringas. There is also probably the most international selection of awkward, pale white tourists in any place I have visited. I agreed with Sarah that this wasn´t really our scene but we stayed for a couple days and strolled down the very long beach. The length of the beach turned out to be Puerto´s saving grace. As we meandered further and further out the people thinned out, the waves became less crowded (that is to say, not crowded at all) and the main road running next to the beach turned to dirt. We have found lovely, cheap lodging and are thinking of passing some time here with no real goals other than getting a nice tan and improving our surfing (I refuse to get the haircut, though).
-Dirk