Crazy Beach Trip

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Arriving at Potchutla at 5am wasn't a pleasant experience. After leaving the coach we were swarmed by around twenty taxi drivers. After being rudely wrenched from poor quality bus sleep, I wasn't up to dealing with this many insistent people. We had planned to catch a connecting bus to Zipolite, had no where to stay, and didn't really want to arrive at 5.30am. The coach had gained two hours on its expected arrival time. Plus - I'm now a savvy budget traveller - a taxi is well beyond my means. We dragged our gear to a bus station and sat and waited.

Being the rainy season in the tropic of cancer, there was a huge thunder storm, so much water fell, we had luckily found a dry spot - a bus shelter - it must have been the only dry spot as stray dogs started arriving also. The bus shelter started to flood - damn it... the packs were on the floor. Fortunately one little area remained almost dry, stacking the packs on top of each other meant that none of them got wet. We all slept sitting on a bad bench - each of us trying to stay awake to look after the packs.
At 7am we gave up looking for a bus and got a taxi. At 7.30am we arrived in Zipolite, at 8am the first of the backpacker hotels started to open - we got a room... dropped the packs and all slept for about 5 hours.

Zipolite is a village with a population 800, it caters for the backpacker tourist, rents out hammocks and cheap rooms. The backpackers in return, do very little, pay very little and some of them wear very little. The beach is also known as a nudist area. After the sleep we went down to the beach, most of the people there did where swimsuits - but as expected the really grotesque looking tourists wore nothing.

After only a few hours - it was really hot - also my malaria tablets do increase sensitivity to sunlight - I returned to the hotel, sat/lay/lounged in a hammock and read for several hours. The hotel dogs cavorted, and scratched, and scratched some more. They were riddled with fleas. One scratched its belly and just like in the cartoons hundreds of little black dots ran from its muzzle and found sanctuary in harder to reach places... poor thing. One other thing about the dogs here is that they all have bollocks.

After eating in the evening we wander along the beach looking for some where to spend the evening. There was a party... a bonfire and a bar serving cheap beer. Several ... erm many beers later I returned to the hotel and passed out.

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