Sunday, October 19, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Thursday, October 16, 2014
How to get to Zipolite
Let us mention some alternatives to get to Zipolite , one of the loveliest beaches in the State of Oaxaca. First we discuss the way to get to Zipolite - from Mexico City by air. Then discusses ways to do it, but this time, by land. Both modes are practical and safe, and help us to enjoy a pleasant vacation in this paradise of the Mexican Pacific.
So then, Huatulco Airport, which is located 49 kilometers from Zipolite, Puerto Escondido or received daily flights from the capital and the city of Oaxaca. If you arrive at the airport in Huatulco, it is not recommended to take taxis that are out of the airport because they are too expensive. It is best to leave the airport on foot, a distance of approximately 400 meters and arrive at the main road where transit collective or private taxis and mini buses to Pochutla.
But if you get to Zipolite from Puerto Escondido , we suggest take a collective taxi from the airport and get off at bus stop Pochutla , because it is the closest city to Zipolite. From Puerto Escondido, it is also advisable to take a private taxi to take us to the destination we have been recommending them.
Now it is time to discuss how to get to Zipolite by land. For example, by bus, you can travel from Mexico City to Pochutla, taking a unit of which depart daily from the South Terminal of the Federal District. If traveling by Estrella Blanca Pochutla direct trip coming from Acapulco, are 8 hours of transfer , however, if you travel with the company Christopher Columbus live Pochutla journey, through Salina Cruz, the transfer takes about ten hours.
If you intend to know the beautiful city of Oaxaca and get to Zipolite thereafter recommend tackling a Suburban type vehicle, which make daily trips to Pochutla. It is time to identify the various options to get from this point to Zipolite. And so tourists can do this by taking a bus, minibus or a jeepney from the city of Oaxaca to Zipolite . These vehicles operate in that route every day of the year and in the most varied hours. Once in Zipolite, alight from the vehicle in front of the church or restaurant Zipopilas. The site is not large, so that once was there, i am just going to the hotel you have booked, installed properly and after that, start enjoying this wonderful corner of the state of Oaxaca.
Skinny-Dipping or Snorkeling in Zipolite, Mexico April 1, 2014 By Jonathon Engels
Skinny-Dipping or Snorkeling in Zipolite, Mexico
Zipolite’s Beautiful Coastal Stretch
I chose it because the beach was of a clothing-optional variety, and coming from a fairly purist Southern family, I’d not seen a lot of that sort of thing: strangers’ boobs set free in nature and whatnot. I couldn’t very well tell my girlfriend at the time (in the coming year my wife-to-be) that we were going to Zipolite for the excess of exposed skin. There had to be a better reason. So, I scoured the guidebooks for one and discovered Byron.
Byron, according to Lonely Planet, was something of a aquatic mammal whisperer, able to summon giant lung-laden swimmers at will. And Zipolite is on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, famed for its migrating whales. Emma, the aforementioned romantically-tied travel companion, just so happens to be a tremendous animal-spotting enthusiast. She is the kind of person who changes her “favorite animal” with each new one she sees. She’s also the sort of animal lover who will not go to zoos or aquariums because the animals are “in cages”.
She had never seen a dolphin, she’d never seen a whale, and her desire to do so was my ticket in. We were going to Zipolite for the wildlife, not the wild life.
In Your Bucket Because…
- Truthfully, this is one of the most stunning beaches I’ve visited and still barely a dot on Mexico’s map. It’s far enough away from the resorts but accommodating enough to have an easy-going time.
- Bare skin and wildlife—it’s not the classic combo I’d usually promote, but let’s just say that Zipolite and the surrounding beaches supply some unique experiences, like turtles, giant unclothed mammals of all descriptions, and undertows.
- Great for nature lovers, animal lovers, yogis and that sort, beach bums, exhibitionists, good swimmers (the tide is perilous), and those ready for a real getaway-from-it-all type thing. Maybe not the place for wholesomely modest families or televangelists.
The Beach
Giant Mask in Lo Cosmico Courtyard
The beach in front of our hotel, Lo Cosmico, was littered with rocky outcrops and less so with people. The tide rolled in powerfully, erupting into massive sprays that would come crashing back down on the rocks with a wet slap. We sat in the little hilltop hotel café—three tables next to an open kitchen—in the morning, looking down passed the thatch-roofed bamboo huts speckled along the stone staircase. We waited for orca and humpbacks to breach the gold-dusted water. We’d stayed nearly a week with no sightings and no sign of Byron.
There had been only a few unclothed people, mostly male. There was a guy in a pretty impressive sombrero who walked up and down the maybe mile-stretch of coastline all day, giving a little wave-smile-wag as he strutted by, only to return a few minutes later. Mostly, the beach was empty. It was off-season and some days there were less than a dozen of us toeing the surf and baking ourselves. Neither Emma nor I had dared to don nada while doing so. We cringed at the thought of the sunburn possibilities.
We’d planned on staying two or three days, but it was until our fortuitous seventh evening (we kept telling the hotel owner “one more night”), sat on rocks at sunset with fresh Coronas in hand, that the reason for coming—Byron—appeared like a mirage. We booked a tour for the next day.
Whales and Dolphins and Orca, Oh My: A Special Day at Sea
Out to Find Some Dolphins
Byron’s “tour company” basically boiled down to his boat, and as we skidded across the little inlet where he kept it, he dropped in a baited line to drag behind us, smiling our way: “Lunch.” The boat headed west for about thirty minutes into what can only be described as the vast ocean. Land became a shadowy figure in the horizon then disappeared all together. We stopped in a place that looked no different than anything around us. “This is where they like to come,” he said, reeling in his fishing line—nothing.
We sat for a while, a long while. Then, we skidded off to another spot they liked to come and sat again, but nothing came. I scanned the water yearning for a fin, a flipper, and big fat whale tail, all the while sinking a little deeper into despair: We’d come for the wild life, and gotten an old guy in a sombrero; we’d come for the wildlife, and not even a dolphin had shown. Finally, Byron the Mammal Whisper looked at us, shrugged, and said, “They are wild animals. There is no guarantee.”
On the way back to the mainland, we stopped at secluded snorkel spot where we spotted an abundance of puffer fish, rays, trumpet fish, and all sorts of colorful fishes that I couldn’t begin to list. And, without a doubt, the snorkeling itself warranted the twenty-dollar fee we’d paid for the tour. Still, I couldn’t help but check behind me every time I came up. No whales ever spouted a geyser, no dolphins ever sprung into great leaps, and no orcas came sliding in to eat us.
An Explanation
Bashfully in the Waves
As we boarded the shuttle back to Lo Cosmico, I apologized to Emma that we’d not seen any dolphins. I noticed she, who had never seen a dolphin, was much more upbeat about it than I, who had seen them several times. Then, she confessed: She’d made a deal with the gods of fish and mammals that, if Byron didn’t catch his lunch, she could go without a sighting that day. And, as agreed, Byron had returned empty-handed.
The next morning, the sun still hidden low behind the jungle-y palms around the village of Zipolite, the beach largely vacant, not even a naked guy in sombrero stirring, I slipped out of my trunks and into the water. Sometimes you have to make your own sightings, even if no one else—especially if no else—is around to see. At least, Emma had the chance to spot a water-bound mammal au naturel.
Practicalities
- Our trip with Byron was still pretty amazing, and he was a great host. We recommended him to another couple we met, and on the next day, they got to video a pod of about sixteen dolphins swimming around the boat. Every day is different. Every hotel in Zipolite knows him so just ask them to get you in touch.
- Zipolite is not a super swimming beach because of it horrendous riptide. We did so at our own peril, but it’s possible to visit calmer beaches like Mazunte, just north, which is home to a sea turtle hatchery that you can visit.
- Buses don’t go all the way to Zipolite. They stop in Puerto Angel, not actually on the coast, and you catch a shuttle the rest of the way. Once there, it’s easy to hop rides up and down the coastal road to visit the other beaches.
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Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Viva Tom Zap!
Viva Tom Zap!
Nancy & Tom Penick
Tom and Nancy Penick are a quiet couple who spend most of the year in Leander, Texas; they are also, as the the creators of Tomzap.com, one of the major promoters of American and Canadian tourism to the Pacific Coast states of Oaxaca, Colima and Jalisco. Just in the month of January 2014, the site received 56,000 unique visitors who together viewed a total of 1,500,000 pages!
What would-be visitors to Puerto and other places on the coast find here are comprehensive lists of hotels and restaurants as well as tourist attractions. There are very clear maps showing not only towns and highways, but also elevations, plus street maps and aerial photos of the coast taken from Tom and Nancy’s Piper Arrow. (They have been flying to the Pacific Coast from Texas in their small plane since 2009.)
Tomzap also features 12 different visitor-comment forums for communities ranging from Manzanillo to Oaxaca City and Zipolite. The most popular are for Barra de Navidad-Melaque and Puerto Escondido. The posts on the Puerto forum can be silly and infuriating, but they are also the best source of information in English about what is happening in Puerto, be it an impending storm or a protest that has closed the highway. You must register with Tomzap in order to view or participate in the Puerto Escondido forum.
Tom and Nancy began the website in 1994 when there were no commercial Internet sites in Mexico and few in the U.S. “It was an interesting time,” Tom says, “we had this new tool and we weren’t quite sure what to do with it.” Tom is an electrical engineer who designs circuit boards and LED lighting, besides being vocalist and lead guitar of a rock band also called Tomzap. He does all the technical work involved in keeping the site up.
Nancy is a technical writer, and since 2003 she has been in charge of moderating the forums. Religious and political topics are not permitted, nor are attacks on other users. Over the years, she has had to ban people who wanted to hijack the forums for their own purposes.
Tom and Nancy first visited Puerto in the early 1980s and have been back many times since them. Not to be missed are the aerial photos they took of the Playas of Oaxaca from Chacahua to Huatulco in 2009.
Growing With Puerto Escondido by Sue Repanellis
Growing With Puerto Escondido
El Lugar
We all know that the Oaxaca — Puerto Escondido Super Highway is well on the way to being completed. What we don’t know is exactly what impact this will have on tourism in Puerto.
We may not know what changes will occur but we can at least hope for the best. People and businesses are starting to prepare for a greater influx of tourists, since we pretty much all have the expectation that tourism will grow. So what are we going to do about growing with growth?
As someone who has run a business/restaurant in the Punta de Zicatela for four years, I personally decided that it was time to look at my own options and see if there was a way to increase my income while keeping the reputation of El Lugar (my restaurant) intact, or in fact building on it.
El Lugar
There were many options; move location to Zicatela where there were bound to be more tourists, or open a second El Lugar in another location, perhaps the Rinconada. And then there was the option of perhaps downsizing and having a more specialized menu.
While I was weighing my options, my partner Gustavo and I were approached by a local business-owner in La Punta. He offered us the opportunity to rent his entire hostel. To be honest, I was quite flattered that now I was considered a part of the local community and that they would trust me with running a business that they had built up over many years.
We took a walk 50 meters down the street to check it out. I liked it. We were both excited at the opportunity, but my concern was that it would be way too hard to run a hostel AND have a restaurant in another location. To make money, you have to work hard and the logistics of controlling both businesses would be near impossible. Another thing to consider was paying rent for two properties instead of just one. I didn’t want the scenario where one business would be covering the expenses for the other. I wanted both to work independently of each other.
La Punta, Puerto Escondido
So I put it forward to the owner that perhaps we could also include in the rent, the surf shop that he had in front of the hostel and we could turn it into the new El Lugar. He thought about it for a while, and agreed that it would be a good idea. So it was to be. Contracts signed, agreements made and we were in.
With a great team (and my poor visiting nephew, James, who had no idea what he was in for) we started the process of growing our business. We had a much smaller space to work with for the restaurant, but all of us put in 100%, worked day and night and, finally, we were ready to make the move in less than two weeks.
We were quite fortunate that there was not a lot of work to be done apart from building a new kitchen for El Lugar. We renovated the new place while the old El Lugar was still running. We built a new kitchen bar and sink with shelves, all with recycled timber. We painted, cleaned, scrubbed and varnished everything. It looked fresh and rustic at the same time. The hostel was in great shape but we had to inject some money to make some personal, essential changes. Firstly, there would be good mattresses, good quality “matching” sheets, shower curtains, toilet seats on all the toilets and toilet paper in every room. Done.
We are almost there, with El Lugar running well in a new, better location, and all small fixes applied to the hostel, we were pretty satisfied that we had done what we could – for starters. There’s still more that we would like to do, and need to do to make it ours, but we are well on the way.
There are many folk out there who fear change and only feel comfortable in their safe space. As you can imagine, being an Australian and making my dream a reality of starting a restaurant here in Mexico, I personally love change. Being stagnant for me is not an option.
La Punta, Puerto Escondido
The funny thing is, that I know that I could have kept the success of El Lugar going (I worked four hard years to get it to where it was) and I could have kept building on that reputation in the old location, but after four years it really was time for a change. Although I am on the same street, in fact on the same side of the street just 50 meters further down, a fresh new approach to the business comes hand in hand with a new location. We are excited about the opportunities this change offers us.
Even if there isn’t a significant increase in tourists visiting Puerto, this change was a necessity for me. As a town, we are constantly changing and shifting. Businesses come and go. Restaurants are increasingly providing a wider variety of cuisines for tourists and locals alike. Quality and cleanliness are important if we are to be taken seriously as a tourist destination.
So we look forward to the future, whatever it may bring. Hopefully I am here for a long time, this is my home and right now I am in a better place (personally) than I have been for a while. I have a great challenge ahead of me. I know it’s not going to be easy, but easy was never an option.
And yet, I am waiting for a new era in the history of Puerto Escondido. And I am ready!
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Tropical system could become hurricane, on track to hit Hawaii's Big Island by weekend Published October 13, 2014A
DISASTERS
Tropical system could become hurricane, on track to hit Hawaii's Big Island by weekend
HONOLULU – A tropical depression is on track to become a hurricane and could hit Hawaii's Big Island later this week.
The storm is headed toward Hawaii Island's Puna region, which was hit hard by Tropical Storm Iselle in August, according to Meteorologist Tom Evans of the National Weather Service in Honolulu.
"This is the last thing they need," he said.
Tropical Depression Two-C was about 920 miles east-southeast of Hilo, travelling 10 miles per hour Monday morning. It is expected to strengthen and become a hurricane Wednesday and then arrive in Hawaii Saturday morning.
The storm is expected to be stronger than Iselle, which hit the islands with winds up to 78 miles per hour. Two-C is expected to blow in at 90 miles per hour.
"If the forecast pans out like we have it, this will be a stronger system," Evans said. "We're looking at bigger surf...Usually it's the stronger wind and storm surge that cause the damage."
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