Semana Santa

La Semana Santa, or Holy Week, is the week preceding Easter. In Mexico, as in the United States, this is a week free from school as many families take the opportunity to travel and vacation. My roommates and I, deciding to seize the opportunity to see more of Mexico, made reservations at three places in and around Puerto Escondido, in the nearby state of Oaxaca.
In the days that follow, I'll post photos of each of the three places we stayed, but today is dedicated to the misadventure that constituted our trip from Tehuacan to Oaxaca and then on to Puerto itself.
Much of Mexico is connected by a wonderful bus line called ADO. Tickets are fairly reasonably priced and afford the luxury of sitting in an air conditioned bus watching a badly dubbed film while the Mexican desert whizzes by. The bus from Tehuacan to Oaxaca city takes about three hours. The bus was 45 minutes late leaving the station, but as our next bus didn't leave for eight hours, we still had plenty of time. We spent the following hours exploring the city center and arrived back at the station with time to spare. The boarding announcements, though, were made solely in Spanish, and the PA system was fuzzy at best. So it's not entirely surprising that we missed the initial boarding call and that, after fighting our way through crowds of vacationers to squeeze our way onto the boarding platform, our bus was gone.
The road from Oaxaca to Puerto is a mountainous nightmare that, by bus, takes approximately 10 hours to wind and wend. The next available bus wasn't until 2 pm the following day, and after 10 hours wasted in transit, we would have lost an entire day that was meant to be spent on a private beach. To say that we were panicking would be a gross understatement.
Fortunately, though, we found a hostel manned by an incredibly helpful clerk who recommended taking a Combi to Puerto (see my earlier posts about Combis). The Combi was not only less expensive, but it took half the time of a bus. We wouldn't lose our entire day in travel.
Unfortunately, to make a drive like that in roughly five hours requires drivers to fly around the sharp corners of the mountain passes at speeds that made my head spin and my stomach turn. The four of us (Joe, Brittany, Caroline, and I) were crammed into the back seat of a minivan, a mess of tangled limbs and sweat. The air was stuffy and stale, the air conditioner was broken, and after two hours, I was convinced that death by plunging into one of the canyons we were flying around was preferable to the insane feeling of nausea that I was fighting. By the fifth hour, I was more dead than alive, breathing slowly with my face pressed against the window and telling myself over and over again that I was going to survive. I don't know that I've ever been so happy to escape a vehicle.
Fortunately, though, all the pictures I snapped were from our first hour on the road, when we were bored but not struggling to maintain sanity and composure.
At some point my roommates and I intend to return to Mexico and to the places we stayed while in Puerto Escondido. We plan to recreate the entire trip, starting in Oaxaca and traveling exclusively by Combi. I'll be sure to pack my Dramamine.