Zipolite
May 2nd 1995
Zipolite. The name means something along the lines of "death beach" in the local indigenous language, as i came to understand in a very vivid way later on. But i didn't know that when i walked off the road and onto the dark-coloured sand of the beach. It was certainly good to see the ocean again. The Pacific - the same ocean i'd been swimming in in Thailand a couple of weeks before. The same ocean i'd swum in in Australia hundreds of times over the previous nine and a half years. I walked along the beach and found the Posada del Tiburón, where Paula was staying. The name means "The Shark" guesthouse.
The beach at Zipolite is in a gently curving bay, about a kilometre long, with a rocky headland at each end. It was lined for almost all of its length with guest houses and restaurants, all constructed with palm-thatched roofs on timber frames. There wasn't much in the way of walls to be seen. Most of the guest houses provided a roof, a couple of ropes to hang a hammock from and a hammock, if you havdn't got your own.
The best thing about Zipolite was you didn't have to wear clothes. the worst thing was the currents were so strong and unpredictable that even good swimmers stood a fair chance of getting drowned if they went out further than about knee deep. I'd been in some fierce rips on australian beaches, but i'd never seen anything like this place, where the currents were powerful and constantly changing.
Well, Paula wasn't there when i got there, she'd gone off to the bank, which is a couple of hours away in Huatulco. I started talking to an oldish american geezer called Bill, who was also staying at the Tiburón. Bill was a vintage hippy from the sixties, not quite so hippyish any more, perhaps, but still a vegetarian. He was at Zipolite to sort out renting one of the guesthouses on the beach, which he'd lined up on his previous visit.
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The next day, i saw a copy of La Jornada. It was a left-wing national daily paper, generally pretty radical in its political stance - for a mainstream paper anyway. The big stories in the 2nd of May edition were about the massive May Day demonstration in Mexico City the day before. For the first time there hadn't been an official march, called by... well, basically by the government really, as the mexican government seemed to have somehow absorbed virtually all political outlets that existed in that country. But that May Day a million people had assembled in the centre of Mexico City spontaneously.
There was a big show of support for the EZLN, who were struggling for indigenous land rights in the south-eastern state of Chiapas, and a bunch of anarchists had had a party gluing up cash machines in banks all over the city. Needless to say, i was severely pissed off when i realised i'd left the place only hours before the march action had started.
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Friday, May the 5th, was the second public holiday of the week. This one, i think, was to commemorate the battle of Puebla, where the mexican spanish successfully defeated the french army who were trying to take over Mexico, some time in the past.
I'd just had a lateish breakfast, in a restaurant a few places up the beach from El Tiburón, and i was sitting at the table looking out over the ocean, when three people suddenly got into difficulties swimming more or less in front of where i was. There were a few volunteer lifeguards at Zipolite, mainly visitors who were staying for a while. Four of them quickly began to swim out to help them get back to the beach safely. But with three people to go for and the currents moving them around quite rapidly, it wasn't an easy job. They managed to get two of them out eventually, one having to be almost carried up the beach, but the third one, a woman disappeared from sight in the waves.
After what seemed like an eternity, some of the lifeguards managed to get out to where she was and slowly struggled back through the waves and the currents towards the shore with her. She'd been under for quite a long time and it seemed obvious to me that she was past saving. I sat there watching the whole thing and it made me feel really depressed. I went back towards El Tiburón, but stopped at the place before it and decided to have a beer. Bill joined me not long after. He was a bit of a pisshead too and he felt like a beer then for the same reason i did. We sat there, having our own private little wake for the woman who'd drowned, while they were bringing her body ashore and while they spent an hour or more trying to resuscitate her. A large crowd was gathered around them the whole time they were working at it.
Eventually they gave up and carried her body into a half-finished building, about twenty feet from where we were sitting. Pretty soon, some locals came and told them they shouldn't have moved her, because they'd get locked up for it when the cops came. So off she went, back down the beach again. If it wasn't so sad, it would have been funny.
After a while, when she'd been lying there for a good couple of hours all up, a couple of plain-clothed cops came, wrapped her body in plastic and took it away.
She was really young, a Mexican from the hills near Oaxaca, there with her boyfriend, probably just for the day or the weekend.
That same day, another person drowned in an unconnected incident. He just got washed out by the current and disappeared below the waves - never to be seen again.