A little about Playa Zipolite, The Beach of the Dead . . .

Playa Zipolite, Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, on the Pacific Ocean. A little bit about my favorite little get-away on this small world of ours.

Zipolite, a sweaty 30-minute walk west from Puerto Angel, brings you to Playa Zipolite and another world. The feeling here is 1970's - Led Zep, Marley, and scruffy gringos.

A long, long time ago, Zipolite beach was usually visited by the Zapotecans...who made it a magical place. They came to visit Zipolite to meditate, or just to rest.

Recently, this beach has begun to receive day-trippers from Puerto Angel and Puerto Escondido, giving it a more TOURISTY feel than before.

Most people come here for the novelty of the nude beach, yoga, turtles, seafood, surf, meditation, vegetarians, discos, party, to get burnt by the sun, or to see how long they can stretch their skinny budget.

I post WWW Oaxaca, Mexico, Zipolite and areas nearby information. Also general budget, backpacker, surfer, off the beaten path, Mexico and beyond, information.

REMEMBER: Everyone is welcome at Zipolite.

ivan

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Relaxing Sound of Ocean Waves (Baby Sleep)

Presentan en el Surf Festival Zipolite 2019 by Panorama | Ago 19, 2019

Presentan en el Surf Festival Zipolite 2019

by Panorama | Ago 19, 2019

Durante dos días surfistas de la Costa disputarán el pre selectivo para los Juegos Nacionales de Surfing y competirán en el abierto de surfboard con bolsa de 30 mil pesos.
Zipolite, lugar mágico que debe adoptar el surf como deporte oficial, señalan organizadores
Por. Patricia Pacheco

Organizadores y participantes señalan a Zipolite como la próxima meca del surf en la Costa de Oaxaca.

ZIPOLITE, POCHUTLA. – Posicionar a Zipolite como una playa prototipo para la práctica del surf a nivel mundial, así como potencializar el desempeño de un semillero de jóvenes talento en el deporte de la tabla, son los principios que dan origen al primer Zipolite Surf Festival 2019.
Organizado por promotores locales en coordinación con autoridades municipales y la Asociación de Surf del Estado de Oaxaca (ASEO), el Zipolite Surf se realizará los días 24 y 25 de agosto y forma parte de las dos sedes –la otra se desarrollará en Puerto Escondido- para el pre selectivo para integrar la selección rumbo a los Juegos Nacionales de Surfing 2019.
Zipolite, nueva meca del surf

Durante dos días unos cien participantes disputarán el pase para la selección estatal y el torneo abierto de tabla.

En conferencia de prensa, organizadores y competidores del torneo local explicaron la importancia de que por primera vez Zipolite sea un polo de atracción surfista en el que desplieguen su talento participantes de la más alta categoría de toda la entidad.

“Queremos que Zipolite sea la segunda meca del surf en la Costa de Oaxaca; contamos con olas público, turismo y competidores de alto nivel y nos gustaría ser sede de competencias nacionales e internacionales”, manifestó Fernando Coronado Ferrer, promotor de surf y director del Festival.

Selectivo de bodyboard y open
El también empresario explico que el día 24 tendrá lugar el pre selectivo de bodyboard (tabla corta) con un torneo en el que se han inscrito a la fecha 35 competidores y cuya cifra podría aumentar hasta 60; mientras tanto, el día 25 se realizará un torneo abierto de tabla al que podrán acudir todos los surfistas de la zona con una bolsa a repartir de 30 mil pesos.

Por su parte Fernando Fernández, directivo de la ASEO, señaló que Zipolite es un lugar idóneo para la práctica del deporte de las olas, por lo que se solicitó el respaldo de autoridades auxiliares y municipales encabezadas por el agente Antonio García y la edil Saymi Pineda Velasco, respectivamente, y éstas fueron receptivas para colaborar en la organización y seguridad del evento.

Afirmó que la competición cuenta con el aval de la Federación Mexicana de Surfing y el respaldo de la Comisión Estatal de Cultura Física y Deporte (Cecude).

Buscan que Zipolite sea sede de juegos nacionales

Zipolite cuanta con un semillero importante de jóvenes surfistas.

“Nos interesa mucho que Zipolite despegue como emblema de la práctica del surf, que sea el deporte oficial y estamos solicitando que los juegos nacionales se realicen en Oaxaca y que sea Zipolite la sede, ya que es un lugar mágico en todos los sentidos”, destacó.

Fernández advirtió que es importante desarrollar el talento con disciplina de los jóvenes surfistas de la zona, pues ya quedó atrás el estigma de que el surf era un deporte de vagos y se trata de un deporte olímpico.

De su lado, Luis Felipe García Arvea, comisionado de Turismo del Ayuntamiento de Pochutla, consideró que el Zipolite Surf Festival puede constituirse como un producto turístico que atraiga a una gran cantidad de visitantes de la zona y el estado de Oaxaca y ello derive en un aliciente de la economía local.

Maximiliano y su sueño

4. Max, de apenas 10 años cumple su sueño y participa en la competición local.

Cada que trepa una ola y logra vencer su extraordinaria inmensidad, Maximiliano consigue hacer realidad su sueño.

Pequeño, serio y aferrado a su tabla, Max, originario de Zipolite, con tan solo 10 años de edad- seis de ellos practicando bodyboard ininterrumpidamente- no duda en responder con firmeza y pasión qué es lo que lo motiva para practicar el deporte extremo.

“Hay que tener disciplina, fe y cumplir tu sueño, tener esperanza”.

¿Cumples un sueño cada que trepas una tabla?, se le cuestiona.
Me siento emocionado. (Me gusta) La diversión, la adrenalina, la emoción que se siente al bajar una ola. Es muy impresionante. Se siente todo el trabajo que hiciste para llegar ahí.
Aunque se preocupan por su seguridad, los padres de Max lo apoyan incondicionalmente en su carrera como surfista, y él sostiene, que no le toma tanta importancia a los riesgos latentes en el deporte, porque a él lo que más le gusta es cumplir su sueño. Max es uno de los 35 competidores inscritos en la competición.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

En la cena Naked Sushi de anoche, cosificando este año a un cuerpo masculino 😜😜 #Budamar #FestivalNudistaZipolite

PGM 233: Hidden Sanctuary 3 by Journeyscapes

Mexican Women Use Sunlight Instead of Firewood or Gas to Cook Meals The solar cookers are low-tech devices that use reflective panels to focus sunlight on a pot in the middle.

https://thewire.in/world/mexican-women-use-sunlight-instead-of-firewood-or-gas-to-cook-meals

Mexican Women Use Sunlight Instead of Firewood or Gas to Cook Meals

The solar cookers are low-tech devices that use reflective panels to focus sunlight on a pot in the middle.

Reyna Díaz checks the marinated pork she is cooking in a solar cooker at her home in a poor neighbourhood of Vicente Guerrero, Villa de Zaachila municipality, in the southwestern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The use of solar cookers has made is possible for 200 local women to save on fuel and stop using firewood, providing environmental and health benefits. Photo: Emilio Godoy/IPS

19/AUG/2019

Villa de Zaachila (Mexico): Reyna Díaz cooks beans, chicken, pork and desserts in her solar cooker, which she sets up in the open courtyard of her home in a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of this town in southwestern Mexico.

“My family likes the way it cooks things. I use it almost every day, it has been a big help to me,” Díaz told IPS as she mixed the ingredients for cochinita pibil, a traditional pork dish marinated with spices and achiote, a natural colouring.

She then placed the pot on the aluminium sheets of the cooker, which reflect the sunlight that heats the receptacle.

Before receiving the solar cooker in March, Díaz, who sells atole, a traditional hot Mexican drink based on corn or wheat dough, and is raising her son and daughter on her own, did not believe it was possible to cook with the sun’s rays.

“I didn’t know it could be done, I wondered if the food would actually be cooked. It’s a wonderful thing,” said this resident of the poor neighbourhood of Vicente Guerrero, in Villa de Zaachila, a municipality of 43,000 people in the state of Oaxaca, some 475 km south of Mexico City.

Also read: Can India’s Solar Revolution Help Meet Its Paris Agreement Emission Goals?

One thing the inhabitants of Vicente Guerrero have in common is poverty. But although they live in modest houses that in some cases are tin shacks lining unpaved streets and have no sewage system, they do have electricity and drinking water. The women alternate their informal sector jobs with the care of their families.

Diaz used to cook with firewood and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), which she now uses less so it lasts longer. “I’ve saved a lot,” she said.

Women in this neighbourhood were taught how to use the solar cookers and then became promoters, organising demonstrations in their homes to exchange recipes, taste their dishes and spread the word about the benefits and positive changes that the innovative stoves have brought.

The solar cookers are low-tech devices that use reflective panels to focus sunlight on a pot in the middle.

Their advantages include being an alternative for rural cooking, because they make it possible to cook without electricity or solid or fossil fuels, pasteurising water to make it drinkable, reducing logging and pollution, helping people avoid breathing smoke from wood stoves, and using renewable energy.

The drawbacks are that they do not work on rainy or cloudy days, it takes a long time to cook the food, compared to traditional stoves, and they have to be used outdoors.

In Mexico, a country of 130 million people, some 19 million use solid fuels for cooking, which caused some 15,000 premature deaths in 2016 from the ingestion of harmful particles, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi).

Lorena Harp (L), head of a project that promotes the use of solar cookers in Mexico, shows retired teacher Irma Jiménez how to assemble the device, in the poor neighborhood of Vicente Guerrero, Villa de Zaachila municipality, in the southwestern state of Oaxaca. Photo: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The main fuel consumed by 79% of these households is LPG, followed by wood or charcoal (11%) and natural gas (7%).

In Oaxaca, gas and firewood each account for 49% of household consumption.

Of the state’s more than four million inhabitants, 70% were living in poverty in 2016 and nearly 27% in extreme poverty, according to Inegi. Twenty-six percent lived in substandard, crowded housing and 62% lacked access to basic services.

Oaxaca is also one of the three Mexican states with the highest levels of energy poverty, which means households that spend more than 10% of their income on energy.

Solar cookers can help combat the deprivation.

They first began to be distributed in Oaxaca in 2004. In 2008, activists created the initiative “Solar energy for mobile food stalls in Mexico”, sponsored by three Swiss institutions: the city of Geneva, the SolarSpar cooperative and the non-governmental organisation GloboSol.

Cocina Solar Mexico, a collective dedicated to the use of solar energy for cooking, was founded in 2009. With the support of the non-governmental Solar Household Energy (SHE), based in Washington, an economical, light-weight prototype was built.

Also read: How Solar Energy Has Empowered Communities in Rural Assam

In 2016, SHE launched a pilot project in indigenous communities to assess how widely it would be accepted.

“I learned while working with the local women. It was hard, like breaking stones; people knew nothing about it. Now people are more open, because there is more information about the potential of solar energy. In rural areas, people understand it more,” Lorena Harp, head of the initiative, told IPS.

The four-litre pot, which has a useful life of five to 10 years, costs about $25, of which SHE provides half. The group has distributed about 200 solar cookers in 10 communities.

Harp said it is a gender issue, because “women are empowered, they have gained respect in their families.”

The southwestern Mexican state of Oaxaca fails to take advantage of is great solar power potential. The picture shows a rooftop at a solar panel factory in Oaxaca City, the state capital. Photo: Emilio Godoy/IPS

Despite its potential, Oaxaca does not take advantage of its high levels of solar radiation. Last June, it was listed among the 10 Mexican states with the lowest levels of distributed (decentralised) generation, less than 500 kilowatts, connected to the national power grid, according to the government’s Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE).

In the first half of the year, Oaxaca had an installed photovoltaic capacity of 6.69 megawatts with 747 interconnection contracts, in a country where distributed generation only involves solar energy.

This Latin American country registered 17,767 contracts for almost 125 megawatts (MW), almost the same volume as in the same period in 2018 -when they totaled 35,661 for 233.56 MW, although there were more permits. Since 2007, CRE has registered 112,660 contracts for 817.85 MW of solar power.

Luís Calderón, president of the Oaxaca Energy Cluster, says things have evolved quickly.

But “there is a lack of precise, reliable information and certainty about the savings achieved with distributed generation, which is generated for self-consumption while the surplus is fed into the grid. In addition, there is no policy in the state,” Calderón, also a member of the National Solar Energy Association, told IPS.

In 2018, Mexico registered a total installed capacity of 70,000 MW, 3% more than the previous year. Gas-fired combined cycle plants contributed 36%, conventional thermal 17%, hydroelectric 18%, coal almost 8%, wind just under 7%, and solar only 2.6%.

But the government of left-wing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December, is driving the exploitation of fossil fuels and standing in the way of the growth of renewable energies.

It plans to modify the Business Ecocredit initiative, led by the government’s Electric Energy Saving Trust for micro, small and medium enterprises for the acquisition of efficient appliances. The measures include eliminating the 14% subsidy and a limit of some 20,000 dollars in financing, but the government has yet to define its future.

Watch: Is This the Dawn of the Solar Age?

In addition, the Oaxaca government’s plan to create two cooperatives for energy for agricultural irrigation does not yet have the 1.75 million dollars needed for two 500-kilowatt solar plants in the municipality of San Pablo Huixtepec to serve 1,200 farmers in 35 irrigation units.

The local women don’t plan to stop using the solar cookers, in a neighbourhood ideal for deploying solar panels and water heaters. “We’re going to keep using it, we’ve seen that it works. We’re going to promote this,” Díaz said, while checking that her stew wasn’t burning.

The SHE assessment found that the solar cookers were widely accepted and have had a positive impact, as nearly half of the local women who use them have reduced by more than 50 percent their use of stoves that cause pollution. Some use the pots up to six times a week, and they have proven to be high quality, durable and affordable. Users also report that the solar cookers have saved them time.

Harp said more partners and government support were needed. “There’s still a long way to go, there are many shortfalls. Something is missing to generate truly widespread use, perhaps a comprehensive policy,” she said.

(IPS)