One Long Weekend Coming Right Up

The excitement builds as Day of the Dead approaches UMAR Huatulco.

La Veva- a new favorite restaurant

Found a great restaurant 2 weeks ago with an atypically affordable menu in Huatulco a few weeks back. I was at the little computer shop across the street and spotted some UMAR students who said the food was good and the prices were cheap. I found it lived up to all the hype. service is great. They offer a lunch menu with drinks, starter, main course and dessert. I can pop in there on my way from work and be in and out in 20 minutes, better fed than if I´d eaten at home. I eat fast. It´s an old habit.
Anyone coming our way should check it out. Just off one of those side streets from the zocalo on the Casa Mayor corner. Or just remember the pictures. You should spot it easily.

Motofest 2010

Some fun things were happening in our town last weekend but some bad directions steered me the wrong way. Worse, I passed on those same directions on to other people. I missed the Motofest rock concert on Friday evening and almost the helmet awareness ride.

It seems to have been a wild Saturday night. One friend had lost the battery to his scooter earlier in the week. Another had the lock stolen to his. When I got ready for the ride early Sunday morning, my speedometer and license plates were missing. They were there. I just couldn´t see them. Somebody had sprayed them with black paint. Worse, the freaks sprayed a neighbor´s shiny truck.



There were no bikes gathered in the square when I arrived. Oh well. I was awake. It was a beautiful fresh morning. I gassed up for a nice ride on my own and that´s how I came across the Helmet Awareness Ride, more or less by accident. Somebody gave me a fresh T-shirt and we were on our way. It was a longer ride than last year. We circled through town twice, making a lot of noise. That´s how my friend found us. Luckily his girlfriend brought her camera along. Mine was broken.



I bought a new one right after the ride. Within minutes I ran into a pack of UMAR students down at Chahue. My first picture with the new Samsung. May it have better luck than all the cameras before it.

Daybreak at Playa Organo

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A few weeks ago, I was driving home on the lunch break with my visor up, enjoying the sea breeze, when a hornet smacked me in the face and stung me under my right eye. I had to pull over and cry for about five minutes. Of course that didn´t stop me from riding. I´m just more conscientious about the visor now.

That same week, I was behind Autoaccesso, having a cigarette, when I saw the biggest snake I have ever seen outside of a glass cage in a zoo. I assumed the rustle in the bushes was a startled iguana at first. Wrong. I backed up against the wall and gave it lots of personal space. This thing was big enough to hurt me even if it wasn´t poisonous. Did that stop me from camping on Playa Organo with the gang that weekend. Not at all, but it came down to whether or not I could find a snake proof tent. Richard helped me out and off I went.

Generally I keep to the rule of never swimming in the ocean after dark. I break that rule at Santa Cruz pretty often because the water is calm and the shore is well lit. I broke it again at Organo that weekend and I´m glad. The water was relatively calm and we had a nice fire on the beach to serve as a beacon. It was one of those nights of phosphorescent water when every stroke you take sends out bright sparks of luminescent light. There is nothing like it.

We live in a beach resort but no one I know wakes up to a view of the beach. It was such a treat and the beach was all ours. Good times.

The Rainy Season Slowly Peters Out

This year's rainy season has been heavier than any other I've experienced before. You can tell it's almost behind us. There are occasional blue skies, sometimes even for whole days.

Our wet vacation is long behind us now. There were a few mishaps. One of our staff wiped out on his motorcycle on a rainy road. My own accident wasn't related to weather, just bad driving. At least I wasn't hurt. I came across a surprise tope at night and yanked on the brakes. The scooter wiped out and I jumped right off, landing nicely on my spongey new sneakers. Lost a mirror. I miss it. A bit of gasoline spilled out of the tank. I wonder if this machine would explode in a head-on collision, like in the movies.

When is an arroyo not an arroyo? Rainy season. This is our usual path to Playa Organo where the water was rougher than I've seen before. It felt a little dicey swimming out there some times.

Summer vacation ended and summer school began. The rain kept coming. When it isn't rainy season, I like to blame all the stupid things I do on the heat. What else is there? Maybe a sleep deficit. Yeah, that's it. It's not like I'm chronically forgetful and leave my card in banking machines every day.

I fell asleep one lunch break and managed to wake up on time to throw the essentials in my backpack, head out the door and forget my keys. That's such a horrible realization. Sometimes you don't feel in your pocket before closing the door but you look in your pocket and they're there anyway. Not this time.

This meant no scooter. I'd have to grab a cab to school and worry about the lock later. probably best to let someone else do the driving on a stupid day. I turned around before I realized I was trapped between my apartment and the locked gate that keeps intruders off the top floor landing. No one was home at the other upstairs apartment and, since I was already running behind, the chances of any coworkers walking by were nil.




I tried calling the school. My phone was dead. A huge pothole digging rainstorm started up. All I could do was finish my nap on the cold dirty tile with my pack under my head for a pillow. I even thought about pulling out my laptop and sending an email but the battery has been dead for months.

I lay there, trying not to think of anything that would make me want to use the bathroom. Eventually Mike called me. I can still receive calls when my phone time has expired. He spread the word and promised to look in on me later and arrange a locksmith rescue if necessary. Caryl covered my classes.


By a miracle, the woman below came out of her apartment. Her mother is the administrator for the building and they were just going out for an early dinner. I didn't know it at the time but my next door neighbors wouldn't be back until quite late that evening. She got the backup keys for the apartment and passed them through the bars to me. I was free. And only 15 minutes late for my first class but Caryl already had that under control by then.



Summer school is behind us now. The skies are gradually clearing. We're all set for a brand new semester here at UMAR Huatulco.

Roadblock Surprise

The journey from Oaxaca back home to Oaxaca is long enough but this time a little civil unrest stretched the trip out by another five hours. We stopped for a lunch at a little blip on the road called Jalapa for half an hour, pushed on through Salina Cruz and came to a full stop about 20 minutes later. Locals from some place even smaller than Jalapa had made a roadblock of trees and were stopping all traffic in both directions.
I walked up to the front of the line, less than a mile up the road, to check the stiuation out. I think we would have missed the show entirely if we hadn’t had that lunch stop.



The trees I’d heard about were little more than large branches, more of a symbolic roadblock. There were enough of us trapped there to have pushed our way through but everything was peaceful . The military sent a couple of representatives and negotiations began. When we finally got through, they were letting 15 vehicles at a time go every half hour, just like real hostages. By that time the traffic may well have been lined up all the way back to Salina Cruz.




It felt good to be home. My sympathy went with the group of young volunteers I met from England, operating on very little sleep to begin with and pushing on to Puerto Escondido.

Have Shoes, Will Travel

With fresh bouncy sneakers on his feet, what else is a boy going to do but walk? There’s a big stairwell in Oaxaca that takes you to the top of a hill for a panoramic view. It even has a name. I read about it years ago in a guide book but I can’t remember it and I couldn’t be bothered to look it up.
If you can see the bandstand high on the hill, just head towards it. That’s what I did, on a general sense of direction, turning right and left here and there,

taking in some old colonial style streets I’d never seen before.

This is where it begins.



Head on up until you come to the mouth of a tunnel. Don’t be afraid. Go on in and don’t let the graffiti put you off. The area is watched over fairly carefully and kept as clean and safe as possible.







Some views of the town? These pictures blow up very nicely if you want to save them.




A sidewalk runs for miles with regular exit trails. I have no idea how far it goes. Maybe as far as Monte Alban.







Back at the hotel, I took a novel to the table outside my room where the light was better. I might have read two sentences before a 5 year old boy, whose grandmother worked the front desk and whose mother ran a little jewelery kiosk, came over to entertain me. I’d met him the day before dressed as his alter ego, Batman, helping his grandmother out by collecting keys from guests. I recognized him right away, even without the cape and mask. I thought he might go away when he saw the book didn’t have any pictures. When you’re a bored little boy spending the day in a hotel lobby, anything can be a game. He pointed out the words he recognized: “the” “an”... We ended up having an English/ Spanish lesson until it got dark and I went back to the room to settle in . There was a knock at my window. My buddy’s grandmother passed in a plate of dessert.