State of Oaxaca. Zipolite

Zipolite, first impression : We arrive at our hotel Posada Brisa Marina, around 5 pm after a 7 hour trip in a van that had everything of a rodeo. The baby shoe lace road passes over the mountains and turns sharply to more than 90 degrees every 5 to 10 meters. One of the passengers even vomited when we stopped. My husband and I were sitting in the front of the van, I took my precautions. Idid not drink too much water so I did not need to pee too often but stopping in a small town, not knowing where was the bathroom, I decided to pee behind 2 pickup trucks near a wall, the place seemed deserted. When I zipped down my shorts and started to pull it down, a lady came out of one of the pickups that I thought was empty to say: "no se puede! no, you cannot. Then, I heard children laughing...

 The day before, we booked a "deluxe" room, one of the only ones left in a not so cheap hotel near the beach. Zipolite which was a village with chickens and pigs wandering on the beach in the 80s is now a place crawling with tourists. I was shocked when we saw our hotel overlooking the ocean, it looks very run down and we had booked a room for three nights. I stay on the edge of the street because it was impossible to roll my suitcase in the sand and Chris went to the reception. We got the luggage on the second floor through a wooden and derelict staircase that seems ready to collapse by putting our foot on the crooked steps. The room is nothing like what we saw on the internet. On the website, the room, the sheets were colorful. The photos had to be taken at another hotel and the positive comments surely falsified. Finally, it looks clean. Shortly after our arrival we walked on the clean beach, usually rubbish of all kinds littered on most Mexican beaches. A good point for the tourists, is that they clean the beaches of their garbage. Then, we were suudenly surprised by a storm. We had to take refuge under the palapas of a restaurant waiting for the storm to pass. Later in the evening we went to meet friends of one of Chris's sisters in a bar and there I realized that Zipolite is not a place for me at all. I love Mexico and most Mexicans and we avoid places where tourists abound and feel at home because they are among their peers. Here, Mexicans seem to be props to serve the tourists even if the tourists are friendly and respectful. After a few hours, I desperately wanted to be somewhere else but I told myself that after a good night sleep in our shabby hotel, I would feel better. This was the case, the place is clean and quiet, the owner friendly. We decided to stay another night in the same place and leave the next day, Tuesday instead of Wednesday, to continue our trip to Puerto Escondido about two hours from here or even directly to Acapulco at 8 hours from Puerto Escondido.

 Ready the next morning, we called Alberto the taxi guy who brought us here from Puerto Angel 2days before and he tells us to wait for him 20 minutes. A taxi arrives 20 minutes later and I ask him if he is Alberto, he says yes but I do not recognize him. We think that Alberto is too busy had sent us a colleague. He offers to bring us directly to Puerto Escondido for 500 pesos instead of going to Puchutla for 200 pesos in addition to the price of the bus, which would cost us more and would take much more time. We are gone and it is almost arrived at Puerto Escondido that Alberto calls us on our cell phone ... He is more than 40 minutes late and I cannot see myself explaining to him in the noise of the taxi that we are already very far from Zipolite and we thought he sent us someone else. Poor Alberto, we feel sorry for him but there is nothing we can do. After, everything got a bit complicated. We decided to go directly to Acapulco because the city seems too big, noisy and unatractive. The taxi leaves us at the wrong terminal and we have to take another taxi because the other terminal is way too far to walk. Our wait is over 3 hours. We wait, eat at the local restaurant, buy dried bananas, water for the trip because we will arrive too late for dinner. We also have cookies and "chapulines" which are grilled and seasoned locusts that I had the curiosity to taste in a restaurant in Oaxaca. The trip was very, very long but one of the two bus drivers was funny and reminded me of Eric Idle, a member of the Monty Python group. We were treated to 5 films of which only one was interesting: the life of Andrea Boticelli and the others were bad comedy or were very violent. At a certain moment, the traffic was blocked and the funny driver left the bus with his flashlight. The other driver got in behind the wheel and we realized that the first driver had gone  to find a way to escape blockage on several kilometers. For an hour at least, it would have been faster to walk and we arrived in Acapulco two hours late and after midnight. We had to wake up the hotel security guard to open the door but our room in the hotel Posada Misión is clean and quiet.