“Mexican pipeline...”

Well, we’re sitting in our hotel in Puerto Escondito, home of the Mexican pipeline. Playa Zicatela to be exact. It’s named after pipeline on the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii because the wave is very similar. Very hollow, big, scary, and breaking over very shallow water. I’ve never quite seen anything like it before. We spent quite a bit of time watching people surf from the beach. You can’t really see the sets coming along, they just get very big very quickly, and it seems as though you have a very short time to catch the wave before you get thrown to a violent end.
Yesterday the waves were a little bigger than today, so it wasn’t as fun watching today, but more people were getting tube rides today. Not many manage to make it out, although I saw one guy this morning disappear for about 10 seconds before coming out the other side. Needless to say, I’m not setting foot into the water there. Yesterday we walked as far as we could in both directions, which is quite a long ways. Probably about 5 km of beach all in all. At the very far end, the east end I suppose, we found a nice little point break. On the other end, the far west end, closer to the middle of the city, there were no waves at all, but a very unique cement walkway along all the rocks for quite some distance.
Puerto Escondito, or “hidden port”, is about 55,000 people, so it’s a fairly big beach town, but doesn’t really have a city feel to it at all. The port was established in 1928 to ship out coffee beans from the cool forest canopies of the Sierra Madre Sur mountain range. The coast highway that we drove in on was constructed during the 1970’s, but apparently very little has changed since then. It’s quite a pleasant place, not unlike Sayulita, but with more room to breathe. All of the Mexican families seemed to be gathered at the far west end of the beach yesterday, where there are no waves, but plenty of dirty boats and garbage. Today we ventured down to the east end after a morning of watching the good surfers. The waves here were much smaller, but just as busy as the main beach. As it was a point break, there’s pretty much only one place to catch the waves, with everyone waiting in that same spot. The problem is that a lot of beginners were hanging around. They lack a lot of surf etiquette and just try to paddle for every single wave, even if someone is already on it. This was the case for most of my session.
I managed to catch a lot of waves, but not many without some fat guy on a long board just happy to be alive paddling for a wave that I’m already on and riding. Oh well. I think we’ll go back there again tomorrow, because it just felt so good to catch a tonne of mellow waves with little consequence and fear of death. Hopefully the sun reappears tomorrow. It made a brief appearance today at sunset, which was quite spectacular due to all the clouds that we’ve had for the last couple of days.
Denielle has been relaxing on the beach with me watching surfers, and catching the odd nap today while I was out in the water. She could keep working on her tan if that sun would come back. We’ve also been on a quest to pilfer free wireless internet. We found some yesterday at a restaurant we ate at, so Denielle phoned her sister and Pete, but having to eat out to get internet could add up. So tomorrow morning she’s going to get a coffee from a cafe and try to get the password so we can continue getting internet from our hotel. That’s all for now, more surfing in the days ahead...
Tyler.