The perfectly crescent-shaped beach at Mazunte is snugly nestled in a row of beaches on a sparsely populated coastline in Eastern Oaxaca. Until recently, Mazunte was better known for slaying turtles than as a tourism destination, because it was home to a turtle slaughterhouse. Fortunately as realisation of the turtle’s status as an endangered species grew, the operation was shut down and beachside bars and thatch huts known as palapas springing up in their place.
Getting to Mazunte from Puerto Escondido wasn’t difficult, thanks to Mexican public transport, which doesn’t seem to run to any kind of timetable but usually turns up when you need it. Finding a nice place to stay in proved more difficult – not for lack of choice, but because there wasn’t much on offer for a reasonable price.
The huts were either in new-age hippy retreats and far to expensive, or didn’t look habitable. One place we checked out offered us a bed for a bargain basement 50 pesos ($4) a night. The only catch was you would have to share the room with the landlord!
Eventually we found a thatched hut right on the beach for 120 pesos ($10) – it reminded me of a treehouse, as you had to climb up a ladder to access it. The top half of the front wall was open, affording a stunning view of the ocean. Thankfully the bed had a mosquito net otherwise we would have been eaten alive as there were no windows to keep the bugs out!
I’m glad we didn’t pay more for this place as the facilities were pretty basic. There was a problem with the plumbing, so we had no running water for the first 2 days, giving us another opportunity to refine our bucket-washing technique. The toilets didn’t work even with the water back on, so we used buckets to flush those too.
The place didn’t appear to be set up as a proper guesthouse. It was one of two rooms attached to the front of a series of huts where a family lived, and we shared the toilets and shower with them. They were really nice people but at times it felt like we were intruding on their lives, because every time we needed to use the facilities we would stare straight into their kitchen.
But with the room’s prime location – 40 steps from the ocean – these things were easy to overlook. Mazunte is a prime swimming beach, with stunning clear green water and waves that break close to shore so it is easy to swim up and down. I did laps a couple of times, and saw heaps of fish, including parrot fish, puffer fish and stingrays burrowing furtively in the sand.
One time I was cooling off after lying in the sun and I was gazing at some fish through my goggles when I felt a sudden, stinging pain spread over my face. I had been stung by a jelly fish! I think it was more the shock than anything else of having something wrapped around your head when you don’t expect it. I was pretty terrified, but the sting didn’t turn out too bad after I put ice on it.
Mazunte has lots of restaurants with chairs right on the beach – although thankfully they did not hog all of the sand, as happens in some places. The place had a nice quiet vibe, which was great for relaxing during the day, but it seemed eerily empty at night, Apparently we were there during low season (although to me this seems the perfect time of year to visit – hot, dry and no rain or hurricanes) which could have explained the lack of people. The other end of the beach, where the new-age place was, was slightly more abuzz with people but these were mainly annoying hippy deadbeats whiling away the time juggling, fire-twirling and not washing.
One night we took a bus over to neighbouring Zipolite, which has more going on in the way of bars and restaurants. Originally we had thought about staying here but the surf is supposed to be really rough (again, probably about on par with Bondi Beach) and not safe for swimming. The surf did look pretty rough, and we would not have been able to swim laps up and down like we did in Mazunte.
Zipolite’s long beach was lined with bars, and back one block the main street was filled with restaurants. We drank at the bar of an accommodation place that offered, among other things, hammocks for 50 pesos per night. The hammocks were strung up in a row, so if you slept in one, you were about half a metre away from the next person, which I think would do my head in!
I regretted our choice of cheap-looking restaurant as soon as our food was served. We ordered these giant taco things made on plate-sized tortillas called tlayudas. Instead of being crispy they were disturbingly chewy and there was hardly any filling in one of them – the lady had simply neglected to add the meat.
The buses back to Mazunte stopped well before we did, so we had to cab it back instead. We couldn’t find one anywhere in town, so we hiked up to the highway to try and find one.
Sure enough, we walked past a house and a guy ran out, asking us if we needed a ride. Turned out there was a taxi sitting right there in his front yard. The only catch was that it wouldn’t start, so we had to push it down the hilly driveway before the driver let the clutch out and ground the gear stick into reverse.
After five days of doing very little, we felt totally refreshed and ready for some more travel. Our next stop is the southern state of Chiapas, home to the mountainous colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas, tropical forests and indigenous Maya people.
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