A Week in Paradise: Part 1

Hello there! I apologize for not posting for a while, I tried to do it a couple times on vacation but the internet was too slow. But here I am! You want to hear all about our week in paradise? I know you do. I'm going to do it in parts because the whole week all at once is a little overwhelming. So here goes part one! The best part in my opinion.

Not yesterday, but the Saturday before that (March 31), we headed out. First we took a bus from Tehuacan to Oaxaca, chilled around in Oaxaca for a few hours, then got a night bus to Puerto Escondido. It's a ten hour long ride so we thought doing it over night might make it less miserable... but boy were we wrong. I managed all right, but poor Sara got really sick and Jen got a total of 30 minutes of sleep that night... yuck. Luckily, though, we all survived and pulled into Puerto Escondido around 7:30 am.

Here it is on a map:

That lightish blob is the state of Oaxaca and the star in the middle is the capital (also called Oaxaca). Then look down and left from that and you see Puerto Escondido! It's a wonderful place.

So that first day we were there (Sunday) we just found our hostel and chilled around on the beach some. Actually not gonna lie, that's about all we did in Puerto Escondido. They have four or five different beaches, so we spent our days beach hopping, sun bathing, and playing in the ocean. Then around 5 or 6 we would head out to dinner at our favorite restaurant, El Cafecito. We definitely ate there four times in four days. Yummmmm. After that we would do some shopping and then tuck in!

Here are some pictures.

This is a the main beach, La Playa Principal. Oh how I miss it. This one had great sand and lots of people, which made it cheaper to rent a table for the day... Yay for the law of demand!

Just some boats.

I love the beach!

The last three pictures are from our first night out at dinner, before we found El Cafecito. But it was delicious nonetheless! Those things you see us eating are tlayudas, a dish typical to the state of Oaxaca. It's basically a giant folded over crispy quesadilla... kinda. And super delicious. Mmmmmm food.

This is us on a boat! This guy took us out to see a sea turtle (pictures coming) and also to see all the beaches.

Remember how I told you I had crazy toe nails to match my finger nails? Here they are! They matched very nicely with this rope. And got a lot of comments from all the surfer bums we met on the beach.

Turtle! It was a little less cool than we were expecting because they just had this one that they passed around from boat to boat to show to tourists... we didn't catch it from the ocean or anything. Still cool though!

Our hostel! Hostal Shalom. This was way fun. Cheap and full of fun interesting people to meet. I definitely recommend hostels to young travelers. They are the best way to go, hands down.

And me riding the camel out front. Hahaha.

Just a random sculpture on top of some rocks.

A beautiful sunset!

Oh so you remember how I said we met a lot of cool people? Well these guys were two of them. Their names are something like Walter and... something else. Haha. And they're Belgians! Straight from Belgium. We met them at a party at a different hostel and they went out to dinner with us (at El Cafecito of course!) the next day. Such funny guys! Plus we learned some good stuff from them. Like that the Belgians actually invented French fries. And that people in Europe speak a lot of languages... their English was perfect. Sigh.

Good ol' Belgians.

Funny story number two. So while we were spending this week in paradise I realized something about myself. And that something is that the beach makes me a lot more carefree than I normally am. Not crazy, just less obsessed with things like spending money on dumb little things... like henna tattoos... haha.

As we were walking around window shopping one evening, we walked past a guy doing henna and thought, "What the heck, let's do it!" So three of us (Jen, Bonnie, and me) decided to get matching ones. Amanda also got one, just not the same. And what did we get? "Te Amo," which means "I love you." While we were planning it, it was directed at Mexico in general because, well, we love Mexico. It wasn't until after they were dry that we realized that the three of us girls had just gotten matching "I love you" tattoos... awkward. But oh well! They'll fade away in a few weeks.

The fun thing about them is we can point them at random things that we love, like this here surfer.

His name's Angelo. He's half Italian/half Mexican. And not only is he a surfer, he's a PROFESSIONAL surfer. Yeah. Enough said. Bonnie had the biggest crush on him though. Just reference Sara's blog, sarajacqueline.blogspot.com, for the whole story :)

Overall, Puerto Escondido was awesome! We were way sad when we had to leave. When we were making our vacation plans we thought it might be fun to go see some other cities so we made reservations in Puerto Angel... which we ended up regretting but didn't want to pay the cancellation fee so we went anyway. This is how we felt about leaving...

So. Utterly. Depressed. Well except Sara, who missed the "look how you feel about leaving this place!" memo. Bonnie's face sums it up pretty well though.

Puerto Escondido seriously was like paradise. It was great weather, beautiful water, soft sand, really nice people, and very cheap. I will most definitely be going back there sometime in my life.

Coming up... Part 2!

PS. We experienced another earthquake while we were there! And again didn't even know it. It was while some of the girls were surfing and the rest of us were chilling on the beach, and the only thing different was slightly bigger waves. It wasn't until we went on our little sea turtle expedition that we found out there had been an earthquake! But I have now lived through two Mexican earthquakes! Haha.