Adios Guadalajara, hello Oaxaca!

Friday the 26th of February seemed a blur. I had spent the previous 48 hours saying good-bye to my friends, packing my things, and cleaning my apartment. I departed the Guadalajara bus terminal around 3:00 pm on Friday after a hasty ¨throw everything is the bag and figure it out later¨ exit from my life in Guadalajara. Tama and I arrived in the Mexico City bus terminal eight hours later to meet my friend Kyle, who I had provided me with much laughter during our Semester at Sea and countless other instances. We found him strumming his ukelele in fron of the ticket purchase moments later. We were relieved to spare the time of finding him since our bus to Oaxaca was leaving momentarily. Six hours later, during the wee hours of the morning, we arrived in the city that gave birth to Benito Jaurez, the famed Mexican president who resisted the French occupation, overthrew the empire, and restored the Republic. Not to mention he was a Zapotec native and was the only indeginous Mexican president. My first time in Oaxaca, I was excited.

Instead of getting on another ten hour bus ride to Puerto Escondido, we decided to spend the day in Oaxaca city. We visited the famous pyramids of Monte Alban, built by the Zapotecs around 500BC. The day was hot, and Kyle fell ill from the sun, or perhaps the garlic prepared crickets we sampled in the market later in the evening. Thankfully, he was better after a nap and a sessions of vomitting. At 9:00 pm, we boarded our bus. We were exausted from the day so the ten hours seemed fewer during the night of undisrupted sleep. I did wake up at one point at see snow outside on the ground forgetting that Oaxaca sat almost 7,000 feet above sea level and we were climbing higher to cross the Sierra.

Puerto Escondido´s vibe is uncomparable. It still remains a small port town, though the tourist´s mark continues to construct its way southward down the beach (where the best waves are). Puerto Escondido is considered one of the 10 best locations for big surf waves and though we didn´t experience any while there, thank God, we did have a good time doing our best to shred the waves. We stayed in a couple different hostals, not the cleanest nor best smelling, but were shielded from the blood suckers with our provided mosquito nets.

We spend a few days in Puerto Escondido, surfing, burning our skin, and lounging in hammocks until we we´re ready to head to our next spot, Chacagua. This was a ¨mythical¨ place we had only heard of by word of mouth but we were ready to find it.