Day 1

Huatulco is a confusing place. It isn't really a town, a state or any single place. It's like an amalgamation of little villages on the shore of Oaxaca State. I found this out through a super helpful article on the internet. La Crucecita is the closet town to the airport and it has a hostel. It seems pretty safe. That's where I'm heading today.

My flight is early in the morning, and it's a whole 6 hours long. That seems excessive, but I guess I am going quite south. With the timezone difference, I will land at 4:30pm.

Landing in Huatulco is an experience. The airport consists of a series of hay huts. You have to walk across the tarmac to get to customs and it feels very third-world. But I like it. 

There is a gush of warmth and sticky humidity that covers you as the plane opens. It's 32*C. I see a sign that shows me a direction for "Authorized Taxis". I had read that the taxis here were pretty good in the sense that the fares were clearly listed and didn't require negotiation. This was only partly true.

There was a chart with prices at taxi counter and it had the price to La Crucecita listed as 190 pesos. At today's exchange rate, 190 pesos is around 11 USD. The story that follows is agonizing and dull, but I'm writing it this way to convey my feelings at the time: 

That price seemed fine, so I requested a taxi. He then informed me that the price of a taxi would be 500 pesos. I pointed at the screen behind him and asked why. He explained that 190 is the price of a shared taxi and 500 was the cost of going alone. I didn't mind going with others so I said I wanted to take the shared taxi. He told me that wasn't possible because he only had non-shared taxis available. I asked when a shared taxi would be available and he told me in 30 minutes, so I said I'll wait for it. He asked me to pay and I pulled out a US 20$ bill, expecting that he would give me something around 10$ back. He didn't take the money and informed me that the cost was 30$USD. I asked how that was possible when we had just agreed to 190 pesos, which clearly equals 10$. He told me the exchange rate was different at the airport and USD was going to cost me more. I was not interested in being a fool, so I left the counter. 

As I exited the airport a big lineup of local taxis waited. I inquired the price and he said 250 pesos. I asked why it was more expensive than the 190 of the authorizes taxis. So he said that he'd take me for 190. So 10USD it was. I was on my way in a rickety old cab with a cracked windshield and ripped up seats, but I wasn't being fooled as badly. 

I got to my hostel and paid the 70USD for 5 nights.

The place was surprisingly clean and neat. The only person in the communal bedroom at the time was a 50-someting year-old man. It wasn't the demographic I expected to see at a hostel, but I greeted him anyways. He's originally from New Jersey, but lives in Portland now. He doesn't work, and since him and his wife divorced, he's been traveling all around. He had been through the entirety of South America and was phenomenal at giving me a tip for every single destination I mentioned. He had even been to Cuba. I inquired how he did that as an American, and he explained that Americans can travel to Cuba if they fly from Canada. The issue, as it turns out, is not whether or not Cuba will let you in as an American, but rather whether or not the US will let you back without trouble. 

He explained to me that, while Clinton was in office, the relations between Cuba and the US were eased. You still couldn't catch a plane to Cuba from the US, but you weren't going to face any consequences for going through Canada. Then, he said, Bush got into office and the relations became incredibly strained again. Apparently, Americans who returned to the US with a Cuban passport stamp were being given hefty fines. This guy had a brand new passport, valid for 9 more years after his Cuba trip, so he asked the Cuban border authority to not stamp it. There was some miscommunication so it got stamped anyways. He says the stamp was the tiniest stamp, but it still worried him. In his case, he did manage to return to the US without issue. A few months later, he headed out to Asia and asked a Malaysian border guard to stamp right over the Cuban one, thereby hiding any evidence of his trip to Havana.

This man has traveled far and wide, but he carries with him an air of despair; I can sense he is tremendously depressed and terribly lonely. This is confirmed to me as we speak a little more. He says that, after his divorce, travel became an addiction for him and he can't stop now. He tells me I look like a young Sarah Silverman and follows it up with saying it isn't a bad thing. He then clarifies that he wasn't sure if it was my looks or my bubbly personality.  

We chatted for a while as I got settled. He told me that he had just been in Puerto Vallarta and was scheduled to fly back to Portland yesterday. But, upon checking the weather forecast in Oregon, he decided that he wasn't coming back to rain. So he ditched his Oregon flight and booked a new one to Huatulco instead. He had been here many times before and assured me the town was safe. I finally asked him his name and he said Chris. 

After our little chitchat, I thought about my top priority items. I needed to do a few things in the town right away. The first thing was getting some pesos. The second was buying sandals. I had shown up with only runners and it was far too hot. The third thing was adding credit to my Mexican sim card, which I still had with me since my Christmas trip. 

I loaded the map directions to the Oxxo, where I would load my sim and potentially buy some sandals, as well as the ScotiaBank ATM. Downstairs in my hostel, a grandma and grandpa played dominos. They spoke French and looked like hippies. It was endearing to see such old people living in a hostel.

As I began walking, a partly-drunk Englishman was trying to entice an American middle-aged couple to go and grab beers with his daughter and her boyfriend. I tuned in because I could hear English and stopped to hear all of his recommendations for food. 

I was noticeably a little creepy standing behind this group and obviously listening to them, so when they turned around to ask me what I wanted, I asked if I could accompany them to the restaurant they were headed to. They were very open to the idea! The British were going to the local pub to have beers, but the American couple wanted actual food, so they were going to a dinner place. I was quite hungry having gotten off the plane and decided to join the Americans for food. 

Mark, Billie and I made our way to Los Gallos, a restaurant that seemed typical of Huatulco because it was set in a shack with a hay roof. The Englishman spoke very highly of it. The menu was very traditional -- so traditional, in fact, that it was in Spanish only. Since I had gone straight to dinner, I hadn't managed to update my sim card, which consequently meant that I had no internet, and therefore no translator. 

In the little Spanish I did understand, I noticed that one thing on the menu was served on only Saturdays and Sundays. I thought it would be a shame to not try the special item on a Sunday, so I ordered it. When it arrived, it looked like a nice bowl of soup. The broth was fine - a standard Mexican tomato/pepper thing. I wasn't exactly expecting a soup, but figured it was a good thing I got one. The last time I had been in Mexico, I got a nasty travel bug and figured that a thoroughly simmered soup would probably be lowest on the list of things to get food poisoning from. But as I scooped with my spoon, I noticed some interesting chunks. They tasted horrible and had a variety of awful textures. Some were giggly, others were tensely chewy, and absolutely none of them tasted good. 

A local man explained to me in broken English that this was a soup made from the insides of a pig's stomach. Yum.

At least the atmosphere was better than the food. I got to know Mark and Billie, who were an absolutely lovely couple from Phoenix, Arizona. They were staying at an AirBnB on the beach owned by the Englishman, who had a cool story: He had come to Huatulco 2 years ago for a vacation and had never left. He had married a local woman who was a micro-famous singer in the town and now ran an AirBnB. His daughter from another marriage in the UK and her boyfriend were visiting Huatulco, as was the Englishman's mother. Mark and Billie had their own interesting story, though.

As I would find out, were on the first month of what they estimated to be a two to five year vacation around the world. They had taken out their Mexican residency permits, crossed the border and begun their journey through the country. They had been to Puerto Vallarta and La Paz already and were now in Huatulco for 3 weeks. 

A local man named Jorge started telling us about his family and eventually asked Mark and Billie if they had decided to do this trip as a retirement celebration. Indeed, they had recently retired, but there was more to their story. 

For 43 years of their lives, Mark and Billie had been members of a cult. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. The leader of their church called himself The Prophet and his word was directly from God. The Church dictated what they could wear, and how to live their lives. It also took 10% of their income. They estimated that to have added up to upwards of 750000$ over the course of their working careers. The Church also had an element of polygamy, and though never Mark and Billie were never polygamous, Billie did think she would eventually have to share Mark.

Mark had revelations about the problems with the Church 10 years ago. When he brought them up to Billie, though, she told him that he had been taken by Satan and distanced herself and the kids. After that, Mark stopped bringing anything up to Billie, but slowly put seeds of doubt into the kids' heads. Eventually, one of their daughters sent Billie an article from the Washington Post that explored how the Church had become one of the wealthiest entities in the US. The Federal Government was investigating them and had suspected their earnings to have been suspicious. 

Billie worked in banking and, after reading through a rabbit hole of information, came to Mark to devise a plan to leave. Soon thereafter, they did all leave the Church. Their family members speak of them as though they're dead because they consider them to have died a spiritual death. They believe Satan took them and that they won't get to be together in "the eternity". 

After that ordeal, Mark and Billie retired, sold their house and everything they owned, and decided to go on a journey of self-discovery. They said they hadn't ever drank or used bad words until the last 2 months, so this was some sort of awakening for them. 

For people who had gone through what they had, they were actually incredibly open-minded and happy. They asked me all about Europe and where they should travel on their 3-month Schengen Visa, and bought me the dinner to cover it. On the way back from dinner, they walked me to an ATM so that I could take out cash safely and then right to the door of my hostel, where they shared their YouTube channel with me. They invited me to see them for another dinner in a few days before I leave and praised me for what they called "the intriguing bravery of going on a journey through South America so young and alone."

Not a bad first day, I have to say. Not nearly as lonely and isolating as I had expected.