My 5 month adventure!: Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, Mexico

In Puerto Escondido we stayed at Tower Bridge Hostel. The owner is an English guy but he was away so his brother, Chris, was filling in. We arrived reasonably early and we were pretty tired but before we could relax Chris gave us a tour of the hostel. You have to understand that Chris is absolutely crazy and so it was a reasonably long tour and full of contradictions. He was so relaxed about everything with rules like don't go in the pool after 12 because we don't want people swimming when they are drunk but lots of people go swimming at 3am so go swimming if you like.....??? Also his explanation for everything was "It's Tower Bridge". Tower Bridge was an awesome hostel with a pool, hammocks and lounges outside, and a bar. We also met a really cool group of people and it was really social.

The first day we hung out at Carrizalillo Beach which is the closest to the hostel and was really beautiful. The weather was really hot and humid and there were lots of stairs to get down to the beach. By the time you climbed back up and walked back to the hostel you were hot and sweaty again so luckily we had the pool. That night around 7:30pm we headed down to Turtle Beach to free the turtles. Chris drove us down and we had 11 people in the back of the ute (pick-up truck for those non-Australians). The turtles hatch and then instead of just dropping them into the ocean, if you let them free on the sand and let them walk into the water themselves they remember the smell of the sand and they will come back to the same beach in 10 years. Later we headed out with a group of people from the hostel to some bars down at the main beach. It was ladies night so the girls got free drinks from 10pm-12am.

After a big night we had a pretty slow start the next day and just hung around the hostel and played pool volleyball. Kyle, who I stayed with at the beginning of my travels in Whistler, has rented a place in Puerto Escondido for a month with an American guy so we met up with him late afternoon and grabbed dinner with them. They came back to the hostel with us and we swam and pre drank before heading back to the bars on the beach.

We went back to Carrizalillo Beach the next day and met Kyle down there. Louise and I then decided to check out some of the other beaches, Puerto Angelito and Playa Manzanillo, which were also really pretty. We booked a bioluminescent algae boat trip through the hostel for that night. It was so much fun and such a surreal experience. We left around 8pm so you are driving out into the lagoon in the pitch black with the only light coming from the drivers torch. It was so quiet and you could see the fish jumping out of the water. The algae move everyday so we drove around for quite awhile before we found it. When you put your hand in the water and move it around the algae lights up, it looks like sparkles in the water. Jumping in the water when you can’t see anything is a bit creepy but the water was really warm and the water lit up as we moved. You could lift your arms out of the water and it looked like lights were running down your arm. We swam around for awhile and they took us back to the hostel around 11pm. Everyone was pre drinking back at the hostel so we joined in and headed down to the bars. They were having a salsa night at one of the bars and we all had a bit of a go which was a lot of fun.

We met a group of English people who were heading to a small beach town about an hour away called Mazunte. We had talked about going there as well so the next morning we packed up our stuff and tagged along with them.