Highway 200 Road Trip!

Our destination today was Lagunas de Chacahua, a National Park here in Oaxaca state. I can only tell you, it has nothing on Banff! I'm sure the Lagoon is beautiful, but the set up to get the boat tours is chaos. No one speaks english, which isn't their fault, this is clearly a spanish country and we don't speak the language. With our broken spanish we did get the message that the cost for 2 people by boat is 800 pesos (down from the original quote of 1200 pesos). That is 64.00 for a boat ride with a non-english speaking tour guide. Nope didn't do it.

We did check out the local beach which was called Cerra Hermosa, not really swimmable, but the nude guy didn't agree...funny how Adrian always spots the nudists, with my eyes, I keep thinking they have skin colored trunks.

On the dirt road to Cerra Hermosa, we came upon this sign:

CAUTION Zone of the Crocodiles

We didn't swim here... and it wasn't just because of crocodiles, ewwww!

For some reason we keep getting stuck behind livestock on these back roads.

Once back on highway 200 we continued West, or as some people like to think of it, North. Take a look at a map and let me know what you think. The highway is very skinny, but it is pretty smooth and I'm sure we might have hit about 80 km/hr at times. 

As hunger hit us we decided to find a restaurant at the nearest town of San Jose del Progreso. A nice little place serving beef tacos and topas (spanish for sandwiches).  Le Cuenta (the bill) came to 52 pesos, which is $4.10 CDN and add a 40 cent tip..... cheapest meal ever.

The place looked clean and the cook/owner was friendly. Another patron in the place spoke english and translated for us a bit. Mostly by letting us know our next destination was not reachable as the road was closed for some reason. The guide book raves about Pinotepa Nacional which is about 145km from Puerto Escondido. The Market there is supposed to be great. Probably another demonstration closing the roads off, last week it was to the East of us toward Huatulco, some neighbours in our villa had to take 2 taxi's to get back to PE from Huatulco one on each side of the demonstration.

So instead of trying to beat it, we turned around and headed back. One short stop in Rio Grande to look for fruit. I found a Papaya for 3 pesos, roughly 24 cents. 

A little further down the highway we saw a sign "Playa 1" so we took this little dusty road to a deserted beach, the water didn't look clean, off shore there seemed to be a oil rig, and to the East there was some sort of plant that had pipes into the water, either sucking it out, or pumping something in.

Hasta Manana!

On our way back we stopped at Roca Blanca for a swim and a beer, watched the fisherman catch long needle fish and Dorado right from shore.