Oaxaca Coast : Puerto Ángel
27- 28 November 2015
We breakfast
at 8:30 in La Galería, right across the street from the information kiosk in
Puerto Escondido’s Bahía Principal. Paintings by local artists on the walls. Sheila,
trained as an English teacher, settled in Puerto Escondido where her skill
could make her a living. Gina, the greeter at the tourist kiosk, knowing
Sheila’s interests in Jewish genealogy, gave her our card, she emailed us, and
we set up a breakfast date.
Sheila has lived in Puerto about
two and a half decades. We order coffee and chat for a while about Puerto
Escondido and the route that brought her here. We are waiting for a couple of
her friends and after a few moments one of them, Richard, sweeps in. Richard—he says he is from the anarchist
Malmeds; his father carried on with Emma Goldman—is from Albany, but his
dialect suggests somewhere closer to New York’s Lower East Side. He came to
Puerto Escondido with his wife Mimi even earlier than Sheila. They rented for a
time and eventually built a house here. Mimi is at the exercise class she
attends religiously and will not be joining us.
Sheila thinks she may have some
Jewish ancestry, even though her research has uncovered that one side of her
family is from Wales and the other from Scotland, neither of which historically
has been a magnet for Jewish immigration. Richard, who reads widely and is
fascinated by it all and especially by anything touching his Jewish heritage,
has assimilated some of the usual widespread-but-erroneous legends about the
Inquisition, the Expulsion, the American settlement of Jews and conversos … The two of them tag team
grilled us and anecdoted us for a couple of hours. We found it a very
entertaining exchange, and presumably they did too. I’m not sure that any minds
were changed, but some eyebrows were from time to time raised, and the
breakfast was good too.
After
dropping Richard at his place on Zicatela beach, Linda and I drove the two
hours to Puerto Ángel, making a few side exploratories into some of the
crescent-shaped, palm-fringed bays that are a feature of the Pacific Coast
between Puerto Escondido and the Isthmus. What people call Puerto Ángel is
really a series of tiny towns strung out along 15 or so kilometers of
coastline. The biggest are Mazunte (known for its turtles), Zipolite (known for
its waves), and Puerto Ángel. Mazunte in recent decades has become 90s hip, with tarot readers, reiki, and a martial arts dojo. On
the one paved street, which is the coastal highway, tea shops—organic, of
course, and chai, —alternate with stores selling bangles,
bikinis, and sun screen. We did not see a crystal shop but there is bound to be
one squirreled away somewhere. Zipolite’s waves have a nice curl to them, so
there are hippies and tattoos and surf stuff. At one end of the kilometer-long Zipolite
beach is the Nude Hotel (really, that‘s its name!) and a little secluded naturist
beach.

Puerto Ángel used to be the port to
which coffee planters, all up and down the western slope of the Sierra Madre
Occidental, brought their beans for shipment. The concrete pier to which the
freighters used to tie up isn’t of much use now, except as a place to walk your
dog. Kids play beneath it in the gentle surf. Nowadays Puerto Ángel is a
working fishing port, though small time: locals take outboard powered lanchas (that former New Englanders like
ourselves might categorize as dinghies) into the nearby waters to fish for …
well, whatever they can get. Three or four men to a lancha (we’ve not seen any women go out), coiled up nets at the
ready, and buckets that start out filled with chum and return—with luck—holding
a mojarra de mar or a huachinango or two. It’s been interesting
watching the rhythm of the fishing. A time for mending nets, a time for
chumming bait, a time for hauling the lancha
up on the sand, and even time for a spirited game of beach fútbol. Some lanchas
go out early in the morning, but some push off around dusk, and we can see
their lights bobbing on the waves as they puttputtputt out through the narrows of
the horseshoe shaped bay, past the sentinel rocks where the large waves break
and spew foam into the air. On the lancha’s
return the fishermen sell to the co-op or directly to the half-dozen
restaurants along the beaches.
A restaurant is a cook stand and a
dozen tables set out on the sand under a palm roofed palapa. On our beach there are two: one belongs to our hotel,
Cordelia’s, and another, to Suzi’s (“El Lugar Para Chícharo” says the sign
painted on the weathered yellow wall) is right next door. We’ve eaten at each.
A waiter brings out today’s catch —lifted out of its bucket and sprawled onto a
platter— and lets us choose among the mojarra,
bonito, huachinango, and tilapia.

Hotel Cordelia’s (there’s no reason
for the apostrophe: it’s an example of the fad of anglophilia unrestrained;
lest we crow about it, think how many US restaurants serve steak “with au jus”) was recommended by our friends
Melinda and Gene in San Pablo Etla. It turns out to be the nicest hotel in
town, at least at beach level. Modern-ish, with four prime rooms on the bay
side, each with a small balcony and a view. And clima to mitigate the oppressive midday heat and humidity that
everyone tells us is very
unseasonable. We suspect they are saying it to entice us to stay longer or to
come back soon.
What do we do in Puerto Ángel? Not really much of anything. It’s not the sort
of place that dangles attractions in
front of the visitor. I birdwalk early, up in the scrub forests on the hills. I
return to the hotel and Linda and I have a late breakfast in one of the two
restaurants (fried bananas, this morning after our chorizo omelettes, with
gooey sweet La Lechera drizzled over
them). We look at the waves. Linda knits some; I write some. We shower off the
stickiness. We read. We count the circling frigate birds high in the blue sky
over the bay. I go for a paddle in the tepid waters of the bay. We walk on the
beach. We empty the sand from our sandals. We shower again. You know, a
vacation.

I misspoke. There actually is one attraction here worth a visit. In Mazunte the federal government
has built a turtle and tortoise center. It has an aquarium containing various
species of turtles, identified with informative plaques, swimming in tanks with
unidentified colorful fish. Along the beach it has a nursery with tanks of tiny
turtles waiting for their day of release. One of the Centro’s informative
placards says that of the 13 species of sea turtle in the world, 11 nest on the
beaches of Mexico, and almost all are threatened by poaching and by loss of
habitat. The busload of students from
the Puerto Ángel campus of the Universidad del Mar who are clustered at the
turtle nursery during our visit get a lesson on all this by the chief curator
of the collection, and are raptly attentive, even as they take hundreds of
pictures with their cell-phone cameras. I
believe they take more photos than even I do.

We have enjoyed the turtles, the
eating, and, in my case, the birding and the swimming. Still, two nights in
Puerto Ángel with the intervening day are really enough for us. I don’t think Linda
and I are entirely into vacations. For me, anyway, relaxing is hard; I seem to
be happiest when I am on task. Case in point: it’s nearly 9:30 PM and I am not
sitting out on the balcony watching the full moon shimmer on the waves on the
bay (which is lovely) and listening to the toddlers shouting and laughing their
way through one last hilarious game of kick-sand-all-over-your-sister. I am sitting at a desk next to the window
writing on this blog.
By 10:00 the children have gone to
bed. The moon is up high enough to appear to be normal size. The
night-fishermen have left the bay, and all we can hear is the slap of water on
the sides of the bobbing lanchas that
are still in port and the lap and hiss of small waves on the sand. Time to wrap
this up.
We are heading back to Oaxaca in
the morning.
D&L