On the Beach

As of yesterday I’ve been a beach bum.

From Oaxaca City I took the road south to the Pacific coast (Mexico is starting to swing to an almost east-west angle down here), where the State of Oaxaca has a line of famous beach towns.  It’s the first time I’ve been out of major cities since—well—I want to say Copper Canyon, though to be fair Tepoztlán was really a big town.  At any rate I’m now far from any urban center, in the scratch surfer town of Zipolite, here for a few days with the sand, the pounding surf, the palm trees and the margaritas.  I’ve had to fish out my shorts and swim trunks from the bottom of my pack, and buy a pair of flip-flops and bottle of sun screen at the little shops. 

And remember how mesmerizing it is simply to sit and watch the huge rollers come in, rear up in great foam-tongued pipes of coral and lapis, to crush themselves tumultuously in thunder and hiss and mob up the golden sand.  It’s a good place to sit for a while.

This may be the southernmost point of my drive.

I had a devil of a time trying to book a room here.  My ideal was a little private bungalow on the beach where I could sit, listen to the surf, and work on a couple of sticky points in my novel.  But I spent hours on my laptop in Oaxaca City, scouting up and down the line of beach towns from Mazunte to Puerto Angel to Huatulco, unable to find anything available on short notice.  I had to compromise: I found a bungalow in Zipolite available in a couple of days, so I booked the first two nights at a hostel just down the street.  Oddly, now that I’m here, the town seems largely deserted; I’m the only person at the hostel.  Mysterious...

Zipolite, the town, is a single small strip between the beach and the jungle, a nicely paved street lined with little hand-lettered restaurants small cottage hotels.  It can be walked from one end to the other in a minute or two.  The great attraction is the beach (it’s actually known as a nude beach destination, but I’ve seen little of that), which runs its heavenly golden ribbon in a mile-long arc between surf-misted headlands and rocky outcrops foaming at the base. 

Behind the scrim of tourist amenities is a fly-blown rural Mexican town—enter a patio restaurant from the street and you’ll see the dirt-floored back room with the family squatting amidst unused lumber and propane tanks—and in fact one could say that the charm of Zipolite consists precisely of its unschooled attempt to mimic a tourist beach town.  The bungalow cottages have adopted the Polynesian thatched roof, often in witch-hat peaks, but above a base of naked cement blocks.  My hostel is a three-sided box of cement, two stories high and half-open in front, with a roof of corrugated tin panels on slanted steel beams; my room upstairs is a cement-block cell, badly whitewashed, barely big enough for the bed of hard foam, and lacking an electric socket; it does have a private bathroom, but with no hot water.  And yet Omar and his wife, the elderly couple who run the place, are sweet beyond measure: seeing me writing in the common room (where there’s one electric socket, reached by my extension cord) he urged me not to work so hard and shuffled over to bring me a tiny glass of anis.  Later I had a beer on the beach and a margarita with dinner, and started to adapt my expectations, which I set down here for the benefit of the unwary.

For various reasons, some good and some shameful, I’m thinking that this is where I’ll turn back North.  Further south awaits Chiapas and Guatemala, Belize and the Yucatan—for which many well-meaning people have excitedly prepped me with guidebooks and destinations—and beyond that runs the long, long road to Tierra del Fuego.  All I shall say at this point is that my enthusiasm for it has waned.  Later I’ll perhaps add more detail. 

Northwards still leads into a multiplicity of potential plans, some of which I’ve already mentioned.  I haven’t yet made up my mind between them.

But for now I have a couple of days here.  I think I’ll apply my suntan lotion, put on my flip-flops, find some breakfast along the strip, and head down to the beach.