Zipolite to Puerto Escondido
June 21st 1995
Solstice
I ended up on the bus between Pochutla and Puerto Escondido at the exact time of the solstice - which is the southern hemisphere new year. I guessed that must have had some significance, but i was buggered if i knew what!
There was nothing particularly inspiring about Puerto Escondido, but it was somewhere to be - and i had to be somewhere! It was reasonably pleasant, although i had no doubt in the high season it would be far too crowded for me. There were a few too many Americans around for my liking but it was ok.
I found a place to stay, along the beach away from town. It was a reasonable sized hut, with a concrete floor, a bathroom and even a gas cooker! It was across the road from the beach and it was relatively cheap, although it was more than i really wanted to pay for a bed for the night, but it wasn't too bad. However, it was very dusty and there was a lot of mould in the air, which made it a bit unpleasant at first, till i'd aired it out a bit. And at night the mosquitoes were horrific. Normally they don't bother me too much, but there they were a real problem. I even went to the extreme of buying mosquito coils. They looked like the asian ones, but they weren't - they were some nasty american chemical fake, made in Mexico, but undoubtedly by an american chemical company. And they didn't work. Not at all. The mosquitoes didn't give a shit. I've never known the asian ones not to work well, but not this synthetic chemical shite. And for certain they would have been much more toxic than the asian ones... I dunno, it was beyond me!
I slung up the hammock which i'd bought in Zipolite a couple of days before and spent most of the time lying in that and reading. It was a nice change to sleep in a bed though.
I stayed there three nights. It wasn't a bad place, but i couldn't stand the mosquitoes and the mould - which was giving me an allergic reaction. And anyway, i just wanted a change of scenery. I got a room in a hotel up in the town, a little way from the beach, which was five pesos a night cheaper, but wasn't plagued by mosquitoes or mould and was generally more comfortable. The only thing it lacked was somewhere to hang the hammock. I missed that.
During this time, the sickness that had more or less gone away came back again, not so bad, but still a real drag. I got diarrhoea and began to feel spaced out and weak again. I was almost beyond caring though, it had been going on for so long i'd more or less got used to it. I should probably have done something about it, but i hated doctors - i didn't trust them or their poxy chemicals - and i reckoned it would go away eventually, everything always does. If it doesn't kill ya, that is!
I got a bit sick of hanging around, but i had a fair bit of writing that i wanted to do. However, it was a real drag to have to write it all out by hand, knowing that i'd have to type it up later. I really wished i'd brought my laptop with me instead of mailing it from Darwin to Britain. Then i could have written straight into it and saved a lot of work. It actually prevented me writing a lot of the stuff i wanted to write.
I never used to be able to write direct onto a computer, although i'd always been able to write straight onto a typewriter. But not long before i left Melbourne, i'd picked up a second hand, rather beaten up old laptop and i'd found i could write really easily directly onto that. I didn't know why it was, maybe because i could move it around and put it in a position where i felt comfortable enough to write, or, more likely, it was because it hadn't got a great big, ugly and radioactive television-like screen staring at me while i wrote and also the keyboards on desktop computers are really horrible. But it saved so much work and it made me really reluctant to do it any other way - knowing i could be doing it so much more easily. Oh well, i didn't have it...
I was waiting for the new moon. Partly because the person i had to meet up with wouldn't be back in Mexico city much before then, and partly because i wanted to wait for the new moon and go to Mexico at that time.