The Gulf of Tehuantepec

 When we sailed Mexico's Pacific Coast the big unknown was a stretch of water called the Gulf of Tehuantepec. The Gulf is the body of water that curves around the coast at exactly the spot where Mexico become a very thin strip of land, mostly mountains and which blocks the arrival of strong east winds from the Caribbean, which path I have marked below with a thick red arrow. The orange line was our course on land this past week:

The mountains funnel the winds from the Caribbean across the spine of Mexico and they rush down from the mountains at impossibly high speeds with unnatural force. If you want to know why, look up "catabatic winds" and "Venturi effect" and you'll find out that constricting the flow of wind increases the speed of the breeze, and the reputation of this stretch of coastline is that of a hurricane alley. It's a place where powerful winds blow off the beach pushing incautious boats out to sea in maelstroms of hurricane proportions. It is extremely unpleasant they say and dangerous. Thus novice sailors approach the Tehuantepec crossing with their hearts in their throats. In 1999 we picked our weather and took off under power and motored in a flat calm for 36 hours boiling our brains out under the intense sun and glad to be past this nerve wracking spot. We hoped for the same aboard Gannet 2.

There have been instances where winds were so strong here they have to stop traffic, indeed 90 miles per hour is common when the winds blow, but for us the transit was a non event. Another joy of driving a van... we ignored any weather forecasts  and drove for a couple of hours and the Tehuantepec menace, such as it was, was history. I should also point out that sailors being the kinds of people they are, have a special name for these powerful catabatic winds. They call them "Tehuantepeckers," not surprisingly. Now you know. 

We started the day at our Pemex gas station and Rusty as usual got his morning walk, not a long one but enough to remind us both we had plenty of driving ahead. We were gone before 7 am. The road stretched out ahead and we had just crossed into Oaxaca State when we decided we were hungry. We saw a restaurant at a Pemex gas station so I made a U-turn and in we went. 

Jose-Manuel owns the place and we ordered breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onions and beans and cheese on the side and we got  talking.

Homemade chips and spicy sauce to start. It was a good stop, at a gas station of all places.

He said he had passed us on the highway on his way to work and told his wife he wanted a camper like that as he drove by....so Layne showed him over the van. He was quite excited about it was Jose Manuel! .

He also showed me photos of the latest celebrities to stop by and film from his restaurant, hard to believe but out was Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman on their latest motorcycle ride on electric bikes north from Patagonia and up through South and Central America.              

He said they hired his place to feed the crew as the filming went by. I imagine they ate very well! I got to thinking what threadbare coincidence it was that we stopped and turned round and got to have that conversation with him and I wonder how many good chats we've missed as we move through Mexico.

Much waving and good byes and we were on the road again heading to the windmills of Tehuantepec and me feeling a bit Don Quixotish driving at random through the countryside. We had a debate about the last time we had seen a foreign flagged vehicle on the road and I think I won when I pointed out the Texas tagged SUV north of Mexico City on the Arco Norte ring road around the capital city. That had been weeks ago.

The road was a mixed bag of stretches of ghastly potholes requiring wild swerving and much cursing and then long stretches of decent smooth asphalt. The modern wind generating technology contrasts starkly with life by the side of the road in this area. An old fashioned and always vital tire repair shop:

There were quite a few trucks moving along the highway especially as we got into Oaxaca State, but the roads did not improve, potholes and patches, lumpy expansion joints on bridges and traffic slaloming in both directions to avoid the worst of it:

And the topes  ("reductors") were everywhere, especially where we saw a pedestrian bridge or white stripes painted across the highway. 

For the masses life moves at a different pace. The business owner dreams of a gabacho house on wheels and this guy, I wonder if he dreams of owning a tractor one day?

Our image of romance, the 19th century horse and cart is a survival tool for him, putting the world of the Internet out of reach. I watched the illiterate kids from the last campground watching Brazilian kids' soap operas (in Portuguese!) but unable to do simple math. They had a tablet provided by their parents and the children gave us the WiFi password the parents didn't quite grasp. 

And that is their reality and we drift through like ghosts, living another life, treating our dogs better than they can their children. And as we drive I hug Rusty closer.

After we crossed the potentially windy bit we climbed back up into the hills for one last mountain climb before our destination of Huatulco. This would be another nostalgia stop, the place we anchored before we leapt off to cross the Gulf of Tehuantepec on our way by sailboat (a Gemini 105 catamaran if you're interested) to Puerto Madero in 1999.

It was a long winding drive down the hills to Huatulco and had there been a place to stop I might have chosen to hole up for the night but there were no apparent wild camps, no campgrounds, no tourist infrastructure of any kind, and we drove the winding road through bone dry forests ready for rainy season.

There were pink salt pans behind the sand dune barriers, evaporating under the tropical sun. It was a 90 degree day, not humid but desert dry, the sun twinkling on the Pacific in a most inviting sort of way. I wanted a beach and we were going to get a beach.

Huatulco is a complex of villages created by the national tourism development agency called Fonatur. The word means tree worshippers of some such in the Indio language of the region but these days it might better mean "money worshippers" given Hutaulco's sole function is to attract visitors, a job it carries out with great success.

The government laid out a tourist city forty years ago along a stretch of beach filled with lovely bays and indentations with superb crescents of perfect golden sand. A holidaymaker's paradise. Which is what it is become. 

My photos of the town of Crucecita are I'm afraid rather crap so you will have to imagine streets filled with parked cars, touts selling tours and restaurant meals and hotel rooms. 23 years ago we anchored off the beach at La Crucecita and brought our dingy to the fishing pier and walked our dogs around a town that could best be described as "in progress." To us in 1999 it felt like a ghost town, a place we could own for an hour or two a day walking the streets lined by white walls promising stores and attractions yet to come. In the middle of it all was a little bandstand, and under the bandstand was a nice lady who sold coffees so after Emma and Debs were walked we sat and drank cappuccinos and couldn't believe our luck. Delicious coffee ina. seaside ghost town! The bandstand is still there, half buried by development:

We drove by and Feld back to the highway, across wide sweeping avenues with huge medians and giant kapok trees spreading shade. Puerto Madero is a dusty backwater of squalor and La Crucecita has been developed to death. You can't win for losing! 

We found our beach campground further up the coast. And quite the spot it turned out to be, as we shall see.