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Mark & Silvia, his lovely Spanish teacher

After two weeks we’ve left Puerto Escondido. For the most part it was a great stop, the second-longest (after Puerto Vallarta last January) since we left Boston well over two-and-a-half years ago now. There’s definitely something to say about stopping for longer periods like that, though in practice there’s so much of the world still to see that it’ll probably be a couple years before we start slowing down significantly.

Puerto Escondido is a pretty sleepy, quiet place, particularly up in the area where we were staying. Thus we had a pretty standard routine: Mark had to get up by 6:30 to have time for coffee & breakfast before heading off to his 8:00 AM class. He wasn’t real fond of that early morning schedule. I had more leisure, and better breakfasts: a little restaurant five minutes from our hotel made the world’s greatest cheese-and-chorizo omelet (seriously – it was amazing) but it didn’t open until 8:00 so Mark only got it on weekend mornings. You could get that great omelet and a nice little bowl of fresh fruit for a little under $4.50. Just one reason we love Mexico.

Adelina, who owns our hotel with her brother, drove us to the bus station on our way out. A new mother – her baby was just seven weeks old when we arrived – they own two little hotels in Puerto Escondido that they built from the ground up, and that are at the top of TripAdvisor’s list here. And they’re building a third hotel down the beach an hour or so. And her husband has a chemical business in Mexico City. So yeah, they’re a little busy.

Then it was beach, lunch on the beach – typically ceviche as an appetizer and then some cooked fish, all very fresh, maybe listening to some Canadian at the table next to us explaining to his Canadian friend how American politics works. (He wasn’t as smart or insightful as he thought himself to be….) Then back to the hotel to rest from all that excitement. We found three or four restaurants along the five- or six-block strip near our hotel that we liked and would bounce back and forth from one night to the next, typically with our sociologist friend Scott and always after a pre-dinner drink at Revolucion.

I did manage to get some errands done, the kind of stuff that you need to be settled a bit to take care of. I got new lenses for my glasses (at about a third what it would have cost in Boston), we both got our teeth cleaned (at half the cost of a cleaning in Boston), replaced some shorts that had too many holes even for me. And we got all the SIM card stuff working on our phones which has made a huge difference for us. Now our phones are online pretty much all the time and – this was a surprise to us – the phones work as wifi hot-spots for our iPads, meaning they’re online too. SO much better service than we had with AT&T when we were paying four or five times as much.

Our last night in Puerto Escondido at Revolucion, the little bar where we’d start the night with a little glass of mezcal. The woman on the left was the owner. Next to her is Scott, who’s spending a couple months down there on sabbatical, and Fani, our favorite bartender.

Now after a lovely two weeks meeting fun people and hanging out at the beach we’re moving a couple hours down the coast on our way overland into Guatemala. First a couple days on another beach and then we head inland toward San Cristobal and some Mayan ruins. We see a lot of ruins…