Puerto Escondido
New Year's Eve in Mexico: Way Down Here, You Need A Reason To Move
So, back to Puerto Escondido, Mexico, where the boundary between undersea and shore worlds feels, at best, a little wavy. There’s definitely something special in the air, all surf spray and sand and stars. Maybe it’s the margaritas talking. A procession of Stetson-wearing locals will swagger down the road on horseback playing trumpets, and you’ll rub your eyes and wonder if you’re seeing things, which of course you are. Listen, I don’t want to sound like I’ve swallowed The Lonely Planet — which would say something like, ‘Cast off your jacket of troubles, drink deep from a heady hit of maritime magic, moonlight and Mezcal, throw yourself through the glassy wall of a 20ft wave and find your Oaxacan winter wonderland, shimmying with the shimmering sea people of Puerto Escondido all night long’ — but it is like nowhere I’ve ever been.
Everything and everyone here is friendly and hot. 31°C hot. Stray dogs amble up along dirt tracks to woof hello. Strutting chickens rule roost and road alike. A fringe of violet and orange bougainvillea vines frames every brightly-coloured thatched-roof house. Brightly-coloured 1960s Volkswagen Beetles beep along the roads. Bands of cloud slink off down the Oaxaca coast, turned away at the door — ‘you’re barred, mate, sorry’ — leaving the skies bright blue. Palm trees wave … a little flirtily? Have I mentioned the margaritas? Mmm, hot.
Our plane swooped over forests and salt flats on 29 December, dipping low over the Pacific, its cabin bouncing with excitement, or turbulence, or both. I was beside myself. Saskia was asleep. We dropped out of the air, then dropped our bags off at a hotel that I’d worried wouldn’t exist — it had no reviews, zip, nada. But it turned out to simply be new, a lurid fuchsia, green and blue hostel called Kahlo. ‘It looks like the magical house from Disney’s Encanto,’ one of Saskia’s friends messaged to say, which was true, although the magical house from Disney’s Encanto would make short shrift of the malodorous plumbing problems plaguing the pool.
Of course, we were sad about leaving Los Angeles. We cried. But we’re already in love with Mexico. Our friend Christa was in town for a few days, not by coincidence — we heard about her New Year’s plans and hopped aboard like big, sopping rats onto an unsinkable party ship. Christa is our captain, and we are getting strapped in, Christa is the captain of our ship. No one? Anyway…
‘Let’s go find Christa,’ I said. ‘She’s not here until tomorrow,’ pointed out Saskia. ‘Oh,’ I said. So we settled down on the beach for some tacos at La Principal Cantina Del Mar, which I’d read rave reviews about (it was fine) and which had great views all along the twinkling coastline, the twin lighthouses of La Punta and Puerto Escondido winking at each other from either end of the bay.
You’re always going to meet good people with Christa. It is one of her many gifts (she also does an impression of Cher which is so good that it’s surely a lawsuit waiting to happen). She’d brought together friends — Finn, Evie, Toby, Lauren, Max, Totie, Frank and Emily — on a two-week tour of Mexico themselves, a dream team fresh off the plane (or in Frank’s case, not so fresh off a night bus nicknamed the ‘vomit comet’) from Oaxaca City, which Sask and I will get to later in the month. We had a whale of a time. How could we not? We saw whales.
Christa and friends kindly invited us along on a boat trip — a seafari?— out into the Pacific. I thought we might see a dolphin. You always see a dolphin. But I’d set the bar too low. Right off the dock, we nearly bumped into two vast humpback whales, swatting their great grey tails against the water, just mooching around. ‘Maybe they’re on a date,’ said someone. They were majestic, jaw-dropping. We and a handful of other boats buzzed around like the paparazzi, racing after them every time they resurfaced. A bit awkward, really.
So we ploughed off on, solo this time, our captain (not Christa; an actual captain, named Captain Edgar) pointing to manta rays leaping clear out of the sea, their little white bellies flopping on the water with a satisfying ‘thwack’. I tasted salt in my mouth from the sea spray. Great brown gulls flew low over the waves. A sea snake slithered past. Then one, two, three, four! Stately sea turtles, each making their slow and solitary way across the great open ocean, paddled past us, miles from shore. ‘How does it catch anything?,’ said Max, peering out at one. ‘It barely moves, it’s so slow.’ The first mate tapped Max on the shoulder, handed him a fishing line and told him to tug … and a great Mahi-Mahi the size of Saskia came flying out of the water. We let him go, or he let us go. It had looked a king among fish.
Then, dolphins — tens, hundreds of dolphins, perhaps thousands, maybe millions?! — were everywhere. It was astonishing. This was more than a pod, it was a delirium. They surged around the boat, inches away, looking back at us, jumping out the water in great, arcing, 180-degree flips. The Captain put on ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC and cut the engine. ‘Do you want to get in the water?’ he asked. We got in the water. The dolphins, who were not idiots, swam away, so we ducked our heads under the surface to listen to them sing, whistle and click. It was one of the most amazing spectacles I’ve ever seen, and the most amazing sound I’d ever heard. Suddenly, so far out in the open ocean, with a whole, mysterious world down there somewhere, lurking beneath my pale feet, I felt very exposed, a Fishwick out of his depth, and got back on the boat. ’I’m going to get a tattoo of a dolphin listening to AC/DC,’ said Totie. Whales, turtles, manta rays, sea snakes and dolphins— how’s that for a safari ‘Big Five’?
And then it was New Year, and we were dancing on the beach to Hector Lavoe’s El Cantante, everyone in white, fireworks blossoming down the coast like dandelions of light and colour. Now we were in a conga line, waves crashing upon the shore, a sea breeze rolling in, the bars empty, everyone on the sand, sparklers in hands, Auld Lang Syne on the lips, salsa in the hips, and everything was speeding up, everywhere, everything, all at once. Now it’s 2023, and has been for some time, and now we’re on a rooftop singing Tears For Fears’s Everybody Wants to Rule The World, and Toby is leading everyone in a rendition of the theme from White Lotus, and now pancakes … and now it’s tomorrow. As I said, it’s like nowhere I’ve ever been. It was Hot Glastonbury, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the baking midwinter. There are worse places in the world to deal with a hangover. I sat on the beach all day reading a book about the end of the world.
If we had our time here again, we would spend less of it at the indistinguishable ‘XX’ beach bars along the Playa Zicatela, which are overpriced (£40 for the worst pizza of our lives while listening to two beach club dub playlists clash furiously and nursing NYE-sized hangovers) and a little listless, and much more of it at the Mercado Zicatela, a beautifully-painted tin-roofed market on a hilltop a few minutes walk from the beach, where Saskia and I watched the sun set over the ocean and a plate of fish tacos. But we wouldn’t want our time here again, because our time here was priceless, and precious, and fun. From our bedroom in our new, slightly nicer, significantly cheaper hostel down the road at a place called Kelly’s, we can hear that sound of the surf. Tomorrow, we’ll head down the coast to the tiny village of Mazunte on our own. We hope to stay in a treehouse. Watch out, world, we’ll write again soon.