Weekend

This weekend (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday), six friends and I took off for Oaxaca (pronounced woe-huack-uhh, who knew?) in the south of Mexico. The flight was pretty normal, I still think the same of airports and flying in general, see previous post entitled "Airplanes". At one point one could see a mountain peak out the right window with snow on it, and the ocean/tropical sandy beach of Mexico out the left window, which apart from watching the child in front of me bother his mother, was the highlight of my two hour long flight.

The trip this weekend, aside from its exotic destination, superb scenery, revealing cultural subtitles, stellar food, and amazingly low price tag, would have been no fun without my travel companions, so I'd like to take a moment to introduce the cast:


From the left we have Laura (Spain), Andrea (Spain), Nico (France), Jan (Germany), Atte (Finland), Myself ('Murica) , and David (Spain), who is actually shorter than all of us.

Jan, the world traveler extraordinaire and one semester veteran of Monterrey, handled most of the transportation and lodging arrangements. He booked us two rooms at what I referred to as a "Five Star Hostel", as this place had a large sundeck roof terrace, a superbly manicured fifteen by fifteen patch of jungle, a full three course breakfast included in the roughly $10 price tag (for the room), and the companionship of twenty students from the Rhode Island School of Design. The first night we were there, there was quite the party happening on the roof, so we decided to check it out. What I found solidified the fact that through my conduct and general demeanor, I have removed myself from the stereotype of Gringo tourist. The aforementioned twenty RISD art students were hammered, like one would expect a group of not quite-twenty-one-year-olds in a foreign country to be, dancing wildly and breaking empty bottles of tequila. When I ran into them again at breakfast, I was met with a few apologies and re-introductions, which made my morning.

That afternoon, we made it out to tour some ruins close to the town. The site was highly commercialized, and it cost a surprisingly steep $15ish dollars for the ride there, admission, and the tour. The tour was given by a woman in bright yellow pants who was extremely knowledgeable, a PHD in archeology I believe, but she made the horrible, horrible mistake of confusing us for people who cared a lot about what she had to say. This led to her giving us a solid twenty minute lecture before starting our tour, and regimenting our time quite strictly once we were inside so that she would have time to lecture further, which I deplored. She graciously gave us fifteen minutes to explore the main site. What a sweetheart. The ruins were old, abandoned, full of other sunburnt people, and fun to take pictures of. I recommend them.

The City of Oaxaca was a really agreeable place, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Prior to the show put on by the art school kids, we headed out to the town center (an awesome concept that's sadly absent from American culture) where there were tons of people milling about on a Friday night. In the middle of the square there was a group of about thirty people surrounded by numerous neon colored hands with uplifting messages on them (e.g. "Where is the Mexican Obama?" and "Arturo Garcia is a Sonofabitch") who, we soon found out, were on day six of a hunger strike against a corrupt local government (a concept not sadly absent from modern American culture). As I read their message between bites of my tostada, I couldn't help thinking how much it would suck to be on hunger strike so close to the wide variety of restaurants present in the square.

We pranced around town, taking too many pictures of everything, which made us hungry, which led us to a restaurant that I deemed too expensive ($7-$12) but Jan talked me into as we were going to eat food typical of the region. This was an awesome idea, as I now know that Oaxaca is home to the best cheese in the world. It's kind of like string cheese, only way better and not made by Kraft. It's white and thin in form, but it has a taste all its own. The best part is that it takes a solid minute or two to masticate through one of the slivers of cheese, which creates much value in your paying for it. The menu should state "Forty Five minutes of cheese...........45mxp".

That night we also decided to look into a car rental. I had seen youtube videos of a famous surf beach called Puerto Escondido and have always wanted to go try my luck on the world-renown waves. (http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ_S30Th1BI&feature=related). We rented a surburban for a sky high ten dollars per person per day and made plans to set off promptly in the morning.




As you can see on the map, Puerto Escondido is roughly 300km away from Oaxaca. That's roughly 186 miles. Let's be conservative in our estimate and call it 230 miles. If we push our Surburban along at a modest 60km/hour, that puts us there in 5 hours, tops. And that's going 60km. Which is slow if I'm converting correctly. So we planned to leave Oaxaca the next morning after breakfast around 9AM, which we did.

We reached Puerto Escondido that night around 9PM. Ouch. What happened? Topes (pronounced toepays) happened. This hellacious little Mexican twist on the speed bump plagued our journey from start to finish. Don't get me wrong, I like speed bumps as much as the next guy, but these were quite harsh, seen as frequently as metro Atlanta Starbucks stores, and placed in the strangest of locations. I'm talking the middle of a four lane divided highway, the on-ramp to a different highway, the middle of a deserted stretch of road, and tenfold in every town we passed through. The worst part by far about topes is that they were not very well advertised. Many times, the driver (Atte, Jan, or myself) would stumble upon one of these bad boys doing a stout fifty miles an hour and start shouting apologies to the rest of the car while forcefully applying the brakes in order to minimize the oncoming thump. At least its a rental. Apart from the topes, we had to cross some pretty serious mountains that I didn't know about. Should have looked at a geographical map. Not only was the road outrageously curvy, but there were topes here as well, sometimes a car length away from each other, so that just as one's back wheels cleared the first one, the front wheels struck the second one. Ugh.

The good thing about a car ride as described previously is that we had plenty of time to make fun of each other. Perhaps my favorite is David's impression of an American. I can't possibly do it justice here as I lack the ability to type his accent, but it went something like this: "Hey man. Get off my property man. I'll shoot you with my shotgun if you don't get off my property man." I fired back with the fact that he was the only one of us to bring two bags, girls included, and affectionately called him princess the rest of the trip.

The next morning, I awoke optimistically in Puerto Escondido, ready to realize my two to three long dream of surfing waves that aren't on the east coast of Florida. We walked down to a beach next to our four star hostal (this one was also very nice, had a swimming pool, Jan drove us there from memory - he had been a year before. Absolutely amazing.) and to my extreme surprise, there were no waves. Wrong beach. I asked where THE surf beach was, got directions, and arrived there shortly after. We rented some surfboards and I was ready to go. All the while that this was happening, I kept mentioning that the waves looked a bit small, that maybe we're just not in the right season or what not. The seemed to be about 3 feet tall and easily surfable. Next thing I knew, I was fighting for every joule of energy that my little shoulder muscles could muster in order to paddle out past the break. The waves were not 3 feet tall. One receives a true perspective on wave height when one realizes that he or she is about to not make it over the top of the next swell before it breaks. This happened to me during round one, and after the gallons upon gallons of water had pushed me down towards the sandy bottom, I thought to myself, "That was a tall wave." Turns out that the official surf report labeled them as 4-9 feet tall, which, by the way, is too much for yours truly. By the end of the day we found a stretch of beach with some more starter friendly swells and had a grand old time.

We spent the entire day on the beach trying our best to surf and when we all left the water for the last time is when all realized that the scoreboard looked like this:

South Mexican Sun: 5 Light Skinned People of Various Nationalities: 0

Laura applied the skin therapy. Jan took it like a man, Nico took it like a Frenchman.









I apologize for the length of this, I assure you that much was left out, but I wouldn't be doing the weekend justice with a paragraph. The rest of my pictures can be seen here:











http://picasaweb.google.com/RJandsomenumbers/20090126OaxacaPuertoEscondido?authkey=ObYf8rW725Q#

All in all, as far as weekends go, despite two horrid journeys through the mountains to get to the beach, this one was probably the best I've ever had. Mexico is much more than tacos and immigrants, I urge you to look into it for your next vaycation. Just bring sunscreen.