| I’m not much for beach vacations, but I’ll admit I enjoyed lounging around Puerto Escondido’s Playa Carrizalillo reading, drinking beer and waiting patiently for the local sweet ’n’ salty nut vendor to make his rounds.
Speaking of nuts, one day I had a problem that kind of sums this place up. In my bathing trunks I sat in a plastic beach chair under a thatched umbrella, while I faced out over a warm and picturesque Pacific Ocean. Feeling the urge to swim in this little snip of Mexican heaven, I hopped up only to have the cracked centre of the chair come together to give my testicles a nasty, jagged clamping.
While Puerto Escondido’s setting is idyllic, it, like my beach chair, is a bit shaggy. With its cozy seaside setting, the place has many tourists, but it’s also got boom-gone-bust empty commercial zones punctuated with the odd luxury home, ratty food stand and boarded-up hotel. If this or any other resort has been ruined – as people so often say about one or another popular beach destination – it’s been ruined for the likes of me. It’s a painful realization.
I came here in part because I’ve always wanted to go deep-sea fishing. There are a number of charter boatmen who patrol the local beaches offering sightseeing, dolphin-watching and fishing trips to tourists. I instantly liked easy-going Roberto "Boots" Martinez, a stocky, walnut-brown boat operator who’d approached me the day before.
"There is no guarantee that you will catch fish," Roberto explained as we arranged my trip.
He’d also suggested recruiting people to defray the expense of the trip and, I suspect, to soften the blow if we catch no fish. Stacy and Zack, two American students, were fishing with a hand line off the local breakwater. They agreed to come along, but were nowhere to be found when Roberto roared up at 7 a.m. in "Brisa" (Breeze), his white fibreglass boat, its outboard engine covered in a sun-faded red Che T-shirt.
"I know that fishing is about luck," I assured Roberto. "I don’t mind if we don’t catch anything, and I don’t mind paying for the whole trip."
"I like this kind of person," he replied and we were off to sea.
Within an hour and a half, our colourful plastic lures had caught three yellow-fin and five smaller blue-fin tuna.
"That couple, they are not knowing what they miss. I’m truly sorry for them," said Roberto, admiring these silver-blue torpedoes with their thin fins and meaty bodies. We puttered for an hour or so. Mostly, we talked about fishing while Roberto’s 10-year-old son pointed out turtles (tortuga), as they bobbed with seabirds perched on their backs, and dolphins, as they raced alongside the boat catching air with easy arcs.
"I have a friend," said Roberto, "who goes to Canada every year to work as a guide in a fishing camp for pike, walleye, trout. And he is Mexican!" Roberto has been a fisherman for 10 years. His friend, Omar, helped him purchase this boat. "I think this is my life," he said with a hint of conflict. He scrambles for clients, and in the off-season he and many locals find work as labourers in the U.S. to support their families. Paradise is relative.
Back at the beach, Zack and Stacy offered to pay for a tuna shore lunch to make up for missing the boat. They’d forgotten daylight saving time and had showed up an hour late. Roberto filleted a large yellow-fin, giving it to a cook at a small beach shack. While Roberto would sell the other fish, he had no interest in eating this one. "No," he explained, on his way to hustle up an afternoon job, "I get full from just the smell."
"It’s always been Zack’s dream to catch a tuna," explained Stacy over succulent tuna steaks and beer. Timing wouldn’t allow them another chance to go fishing themselves.
"Yeah," he replied wistfully, "it’s really too bad." The two had spent the day swimming and suntanning, however, and admitted that they’d had a splendid morning.
I munched tuna and watched the waves, losing myself in the warmth and tranquillity of the setting. "Excuse me," I said, needing a bathroom break after a second beer. Standing from my plastic beach chair, I was given another vicious testicle pinching. My eyes watered. Just Paradise exacting a little payback for what I’d taken from it. Still, couldn’t it just hit me with a sunburn? Ouch.
For more of Good Listener’s adventures on the road, go to www.goodlistenertravels.blogspot.com |
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