Puerto Escondido Part 1: We’re Not in Brian Wilson’s Surf City
Almost everyone in Puerto Escondido falls into one of three categories.
First, you have the locals–a hearty laughing, generous, only occasionally overly-Catholic people. Then you have the middle aged white people (most commonly Canadian, American, or German in that order) who have come to collect tropical-themed shirts and wide-brimmed hats. Finally, there are the hippies. And I mean all varieties of them, representing seemingly every country on the globe.
I’m talking the full spectrum of hippie—surfers, smugglers, burnouts, trip-heads, punks, traditional long-hairs, and of course your everyday freaks. The surfers and the freaks are perhaps the most common. The former–whether male or female–are generally strong, beautiful, somewhat daft Australians, Mexicans, or varied South Americans, while the latter–almost exclusively male–are scrawny, dreadlocked, filthy, feral looking creatures who always seem to enjoy the affections of the prettiest and most legally-age-dubious young women or girls on the beach. Just about all of them are wasted all of the time on booze, weed, speed, wide-ranging hallucinogens (strangely enough peyote seems to be the most common), and virtually every mind-altering pharmaceutical ever concocted.
This is not Brian Wilson’s Surf City. We’re talking Californiacation here–the Red Hot Chili Peppered, bro-junkie tendrils of SoCal grown wild.
I’m not sure where I fit in these categories. Somewhere between middle-aged-guy-looking-for-a-good/bad-hat and smuggler, burnout hippie perhaps. I do know that Puerto Escondido is a fine place to spend a winter, even if you do risk arrest and subsequent demand for bribery every time you try to enjoy a joint on the beach after sundown.
I’m seemingly the only person I know in town under 40 who didn’t get arrested for dope, though the cops certainly tried their damnedest by searching me every chance they got. In a way, I feel left out. Kind of like that window back in college when I was the only person who didn’t get the clap.
Having spent a total of four months in PE—two of those during the hot, humid, stormy off-season of late summer a couple of years ago, the other two now during the somewhat cooler, somewhat more raucous high-season of winter—I finally feel that I have accumulated the authority to report on this beautiful, bizarre, contradictory town.
But where does one begin? With the beaches or the bars or the bikinis? These are probably the first things that leap to mind when people consider any Mexican coastal tourist trap, whether it’s an established moneypit like Cancun or an emerging honeypot like PE.
No, I won’t begin with the three B’s. Instead, I’ll start with an entirely different “B”. I’ll start with the buzzards.