The Oaxaca coast: Great-tailed grackles, magnetic sand and fat-fighting trees

It might sound spoilt but we were beached out. Lara has absorbed more sunrays than Brighton beach did in a year; I’d ingested enough saltwater than the Gray Whales cruising off the coast.

It was time to get away from the bracelet-braiding hippies and the bongos of Mazunte, the nudists and the rudists of Zipolite and see some birds of an altogether different plumage.

And where better a place to spot them than Ventanilla lagoon, a murky tract of water and dense mangrove swamps tucked away off a beach just a short Camionera ride away.

Half an hour later we found ourselves gingerly crossing Ventinilla beach in flip flops, the sand too hot for bare feet.

The dark patches streaking the sand denoted the high iron content of the sand, something proven to us by our young guide who whipped out a magnet which, quite extraordinarily, instantly sprouted a Ken Dodd-style hairdo when passed near the sand.

Perhaps the unusual geology also helped explain the wreck of an old aeroplane, lying in the surf up ahead like a prop from Lost.

According to local hearsay it was running drug smugglers, who then cut and run (excuse the pun) - the locals must have had a big party.

More unusual sights awaited us as we clumsily clambered on board a small rowing boat and headed out into the lagoon.

It was like entering the Lost World, a multitude of strange birds call ascending our ears, calling and cackling, whooping and whistling.

Our eagle-eyed guide, armed with a well-honed knowledge of the lagoon and the creatures that dwelt within it was soon picking out a veritable menagerie from the shadows that this short-sighted Englishman would have glided right by.

The birds came in all shapes and sizes - from tall, elegant fish-eating egrets to tiny, flitting seed-eaters - and were painted in the most fantastical palate, a range of surrealist colours which might have come from the mind of Syd Barrett.

They had suitably bizarre names too, to match their strange appearance, reading like a list of characters from a Roald Dahl book: boat-billed heron; yellow-rumped cacique; pelagic cormorant; tropical kingbird; green kingfisher; pileated woodpecker; great-tailed grackle.
But no Norwegian blue.

The waters beneath held no less impressive an array of creatures.

It being the tropical south we encountered crocodiles, passive yet disturbing in only the way a crocodile can be, their eyes and the scales of their backs just breaking the water, lying still, all brooding malice.

Turtles poked long, thin necks up out of the water into the brilliant, seemingly unconcerned by the deadly killing machines eyeing them from the banks.

Back in Mazunte’s turtle centre we had seen these creatures up close, staring out at us from behind plastic windows, their expressions strangely human. When a staff member told us that turtles could cry, I believed him.

Mexico boats seven of the world’s eight species of these incredible creatures yet, strangely enough, it wasn’t until 1990 that the government banned their hunting.

Old, faded posters, dating from this time, are displayed in the centre, seeking to puncture the popular myth that turtle eggs were an aphrodisiac.

Two feature different people which appeal to Mexican machismo: one a scantily-dressed woman posing below the caption ‘My man doesn’t need turtle eggs’; the other featuring a lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) legend, Santo ' vs. those who eat turtle eggs’.

Back in Ventanilla, we edged further in, out of the green waters of the lagoon into the dark recesses of the mangrove swamps.

The trees closed in, the water grew shallower. Here dwelt the red mangroves, bizarrely-shaped arboreal wonders, upside-down organisms reflected the right way up in the water.

These trees are crucial to the local environment, serving as natural barriers against the encroaching sea, filtering out pollution and in the process turning the water a dark, brackish colour, their odour eggy and pungent.

Dead bodies of their larger brethren scattered the narrow waterways, victims of 1998’s Hurricane Paulina, which laid waste top large tracts of the Oaxaca coast.

Green iguanas scuttled amongst the trees, crazy patterns down their backs descending into a long, thin whip of a tail. Prehistoric-looking creatures in an primeval-looking habitat.

The forebears of this lagoon’s inhabitants dwelt on this planet long before Adam started eyeing up Eve, long before the happy couple’s descendents discovered the potential of burning carbon, and certainly long before billions of these buggers swarmed all over the planet, heating up their home and threatening to turn it into an uninhabitable place once more.

Back to the ancient gloopy stuff out of which they once crawled? Certainly tearing up the mangroves won’t help avert this.

These extraordinary habitats are the most threatened in the world, with only 1% of the planet’s mangroves protected.

In Mexico they are destroyed to make way for shrimp farms and new hotels, their durable wood harvested for western markets.

This is tragic: the world needs mangroves. These vital ecosystems support a huge diversity of wildlife, preserving endangered species, providing local communities with the essentials of life, protecting coastlines from erosion by the sea and even absorbing the impact of tsunamis.

And Mexico needs them too. Even if you are the most landlocked citizen, even if you don’t care for the environment think of the fatties, for here the mangrove’s bark has been used to treat diabetes.

Given the obesity crisis facing the country - now the second ‘fattest’ in the world and the accompanying diabetes crisis (this disease is now the number one cause of death amongst Mexicans, threatening to financially cripple the country‘s health care system) it looks as if these trees might be required to strip a little bit more.

That’s unless Pepsi’s new computer game, designed to help kids live healthy lifestyles can reduce waistlines instead.

Obesity-fighting computer games? Perhaps it was time to head back to the beach.

You can help preserve mangrove forests by buying environmentally-sustainable products. When buying shrimps or wood products check the label to ensure that the product you consume is not contributing to the destruction of mangroves. Visit http://www.mangroveactionproject.org/ for more information

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How to…travel around Mexico

Mexico is all about buses. There are no trains - apart from the Copper Canyon Railway from the desert mountains of Chihuahua to the Pacific coast at Los Mochis and something called the Tequila Express, a tourist special that we are yet to find - but the buses are good and many.

The roads in Mexico have tarmac and bus journeys are pleasant. There are various classes of bus and hundreds of bus companies to choose from, often departing from different stations across town. The list below is based on experience, of first class buses, minibuses and collectivos, and hear-say, about second class buses. Not that we usually travel first class, but we were advised by many that travelling first class greatly reduced the risk of thievery and highway robbery because these buses use the toll roads. So far we have been lucky, but apparently it does happen.
First class buses are more direct, stopping less and using the faster toll roads. There is no lunch or toilet stop unless there is a major town on route. The buses are hideously over air-conditioned, so even in the hottest of climes take a jumper or two. Luggage is checked into the hold and you are given a receipt. First class buses vary:
*Luxury - the crème de la crème. With only eighteen seats these buses are more like a lounge than a bus. The seats are like plush arm chairs, there is a non-stop showing of recent films with personal headphones, a packed lunch is provided, tea and coffee are available throughout the journey and the toilets on board are clean and usable.
*Executive - more seats than the luxury bus but they are still large and soft. The film selection is good and drinks are sometimes provided. The quality of the toilets is more variable.
*Primera - more like your standard National Express with comfy, reclining seats but not as much leg room as luxury or executive buses and the film selection is much more dubious. The toilets are okay.

Second class buses are, apparently, reminiscent of an old National Express or Greyhound bus. Less comfortable, less direct (not using toll roads) and stopping more often, therefore making for a longer, less predictable journey.

Minibuses - some routes simply aren’t suitable for large coaches, such as Highway 175 between Oaxaca - Pochutla, so smaller minibuses take the direct route leaving the larger buses to take a detour on the larger roads. It’s a minibus, so fellow passengers are few and leg room is limited. There are no films, no toilets and no frills. But the driver will stop whenever you want/need to get out for the loo, to eat etc.

Collectivos - are large shared taxis. In cities they are normally minibuses, on the coast they are open back vans. They pootle along picking up and dropping people off where they want. You just have to flag one down and clamber on the back. They’re cheap and usually connect to larger transport hubs for onwards travel.

Buying a bus ticket can be an ordeal. Buses do book up in advance, especially around holidays when we were travelling, so it’s best to book ahead. The easiest place to do so is at a bus station. Here you can compare timetables and prices between the different companies ploughing the same route. Some companies, such as Autoexpres Atlantida between Oaxaca-Pochutla (951 514 70 77) and ADO/OCC in Pochutla (958 584 0274), allow you to make a reservation over the telephone and then pick up and pay for your tickets an hour before departure. Some companies also have provision for booking tickets on line including http://www.ticketbus.com.mx/, ETN and ADO.

If you cannot book in advance, you can just turn up at the bus station and hope for the best. As we did at 2am in Los Mochis. The bus station staff couldn’t tell us when the next bus to our destination would turn up, nor if we would be able to get a seat on it. You just have to wait and hope. Luckily at 4.30am we got some returns and took the last two seats on a bus to Mazatlan.

Having taken the advice to travel first class to stay safe we have, so far, had no problems. Naturally don’t leave bags open or unattended in the bus station or onboard. We were also advised against travelling at night, as bandits are more likely to work at night (either posing as passengers, boarding on route or in the worst instance forcing the bus to stop). However, based on our one night bus experience it was comfortable and trouble free. We’re taking another one tomorrow (for 11 hours) and fingers crossed we’ll be ok on that one too…
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From the highlands to the lowlands

From the American flavoured cowboy desert states in the north, to the sprawling colonial Mexico City built on Aztec ruins in the mountain heartland, to the nudist wave machine beaches on the Pacific coast. In travelling through Mexico we have experienced the highs and lows both in attitude and altitude.

The most extreme journey, to date, was from Oaxaca city to Zipolite beach. This journey took us from a height of 1,455 metres up to 2,750m and back down to sea level. It is one of the windiest journeys I have ever taken and I now understand why the large coaches take a six hour detour to avoid the route we took. But we opted for the ‘direct‘ route in a minibus along Highway 175.

Highway 175 is a spectacular 245 kilometre stretch of road that takes your stomach and breath away as it chicanes its way up and down forested mountains. The road up from Oaxaca is dry, dusty and flanked by cacti. At the highest settlement, San Jose Del Pacifico, the sun sharply cuts through the cool, crisp, pine scented air to illuminate magnificent valley views. It gets cold up here, or so we surmised, given the number of local women selling thick hand-knittted woolly jumpers, ponchos, hats and socks. As well as being naturally high (2,750m) this village is also known for its natural highs in the form of magic mushrooms.

On the winding descent - more stomach lurching and leg rolling - the slopes became greener, still pine forests but more lush and with undergrowth. Then signs started appearing advertising coconuts for sale and banana plants started to pop up amongst the trees. The further we went down the more tropical it looked. Four hours into our five and a half hour journey the minibus driver turned on the air conditioning.

Down and down we wound until we were dumped in Pochutla. An unremarkable transport hub of a town that links travellers to the beaches. Relieved to be out of the roller coaster minibus, our taxi driver gave us a fairly similar experience. His style was, however, more Grand Prix. He chose not to see corners and bends and speed bumps were considered prime overtaking ground. After ten more minutes of being thrown around in a moving vehicle we spotted our first glimpse of the Pacific since we disembarked from MV Hugo in Long Beach.

We were left on the hot, sweaty, windy (not windy) Playa del Amor in Zipolite. Sea level at last. With cowboy boots and jackets packed away we wandered about dazed for the afternoon. The beach was lined with palm trees, hammocks and thatched cabanas and there were scores of naked people (mainly men), try-hard hippies and Mexican families playing and strolling on the sand. Our hostel was filthy in a seaside manner - sand blasted floors and barnacle encrusted bathroom taps that looked like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean. All very laid back. A far cry from the grid patterned streets, pillars and plazas of Oaxaca with its high society dinner and theatre scene. It all felt very odd indeed.
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Happy New Year!

Red (for luck), yellow (for money), with banana or lace? This was the choice of New Year’s Eve pants for sale across Mexico. I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide what we went for…

Oaxaca is a wonderful colonial Mexican city that smells of chocolate and burnt meat. On New Year‘s Eve the zocalo (central plaza) was decked out in fairy lights and beds of poinsettias and was abuzz with families sipping soft drinks (drinking alcohol in the street is prohibido) and buying balloons. The city’s many elaborate Catholic churches were packed full of incense and people reflecting on the year past and present.

Pants are just part of the Oaxacan New Year’s Eve celebrations. You also need to drink cider - not a problem - and eat a grape for each of the chimes at midnight, making a wish with each. Sadly we left ours in the fridge. However, as there was no Big Ben there were no chimes to welcome in 2009, so we wouldn’t have known when to eat them anyway. Instead we waited until the amateur pyrotechnics reached a peak and then surreptitiously chinked and slugged our warm lagers. We know how to celebrate in style!

The rest of the midnight hour was spent trying to dodge the mini-rockets and jumbo sparklers that ricocheted around the zocalo, and keep out of the way of the foam spray and eggs that were being lavishly spread over party goers. It seems to be a tradition to break eggs full of flour and/or hole-punch clippings on people’s heads.

It’s been quite a year for World In Slow Motion. We’ve travelled over 30,000 miles across three continents and sixteen countries. We’ve slept in the wilds of Siberia, worked amongst bears in Japan, eaten our body weight in rice, drunk ‘proper’ tequila, travelled on some of the best and worst trains in the world and got engaged on a cargo ship. With only three more countries to go, we’ll see what adventures 2009 brings…Happy New Year!
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