Today was the last day at the beach. Having had such a good experience with our previous excursion — at least the part not involving the overpriced hotel — we decided to book a day trip with the same people. We looked over the options and decided that Chacahua Lagoon National Park looked the most interesting. This is a large brackish lake located about an hour north of Puerto Escondido on the road to Acapulco. As you can see from the map below, there are actually three lakes here and a river. As I understand it, at the height of the rainy season the whole thing can become one large estuary.
The area is famous for the amount of bird life there, and our trip was to be devoted first to looking for birds and after that for some recreation. It sounded good, and it was overall a fairly good experience. Our guide picked us up at the hotel in a minivan. His name was Ivan.
He spoke a little English, not nearly as much as Job. We were not sure yesterday whether there would be other people as well. But when we looked at the van, we were pretty sure that would be. We made three other stops. As it turned our, there were eight of us. I should have noted down people’s names and taken pictures of them. We had a young couple from Querétaro. They were very cute; both of them were finishing university. There were two woman traveling together from Mexico City. One of the had spent some time studying at UCLA and spoke better English than my Spanish. And there were two men, one a younger Mexican, and the other a pale European whose English was flawless but slightly accented. We think they were a couple. He was Swiss but mostly worked in England teaching Latin. Not being particularly clear on the difference between the dative and the ablative, we talked about other stuff mostly.
The ride to Chacahua seemed to take forever, and the little towns were passed through reminded me that while the city of Oaxaca and the coastal resorts are reasonably prosperous the rest of the state is one of the poorest in Mexico and sends many migrants to the United States. Oaxacans, not Koreans, are the largest ethnic group in Korea town.
We finally parked and were put on a powerboat. The lagoon is enormous but quite shallow. There are numerous mangrove “islands” in the lake and the are home to different kinds of birds.
We law lots of herons.
But there were also cormorants, pelicans, and hawks.
And there were some birds I can not quite sure what they were. Our guide names them all in Spanish.
After we had been on the lagoon for about ninety minutes, we were taken to a rather depressing center for the conservation of crocodiles. Even though it was supposedly run by the national park, this was nothing like the tortoise facility. It seemed like the worst kind of third world zoo. The poor creatures seems crammed into pens that were far too small for them. I took pictures anyhow.
I also had to take a picture of this sign. I am surprised somebody even thought it was necessary to put this up.
After this, we went back in the boat and had a short ride to an area right by the place where the lake opened to the ocean. On both sides of the mouth of the lagoon were beaches covered with restaurants. As usual with these things, there seemed to be a connection between the tour operator and a particular restaurant. What made this area interesting was that the tables were so close to the water.
In fact, when the tide started to come in about half of the tables were actually in the water. Yet nobody seemed to care … or even notice.
We spent more time here than I wanted to. The food was okay. I did not much feel like swimming in the water here. Around four in the afternoon, Ivan led us up a long path up a hill. I thought we were returning to the van, Instead, we found ourselves at a small lighthouse. Walking up to the top, we did have a great view of the lagoon and up and down the coast.
As we were leaving a group of local boys scrambled to the top and acted like … boys.
After this, we finally went back to Puerto Escondido. It was dark by the time we were back at the Santa Fe. I was strangely exhausted. John and I went to a like restaurant on the beach that billed itself as sort of a biergarten. The food was pretty mediocre.
We have an early morning flight to Oaxaca tomorrow and I need to pack. I have overall enjoyed our time here.
