The picture is not from Puerto Escondido, sorry. Maybe I will post a photo album later.

I went on my longest busride ever to get from El Salvador to Puerto Escondido on the pacific coast of Mexico. At first around 11 hours in a bus from El Salvador to Guatemala before I had to wait for 7 hours in Guatemala. Then a 13-hour busride to Puerto Escondido, which in total meant that I spended 30 hours on that trip. Phew, I was trash when I got there.

In Puerto Escondido I rented a nice little room at the front street of the Zicatela beach. It was a nice little hotel with a pool and okay good wifi, and the location was just perfect in the middle of the beach street just next to bars, restaurant, surfer shops and a Oxxo (the Mexican 7-11).

Puerto Escondido is a proper surf area. Its one of the bigger beach towns I've visited around Central America, and a 10 to 20 minutes walk would take me up 'downtown' where the local life was going on. Nice and easy, and at night it could get pretty wild, anyway.

But the nice thing that makes Puerto Escondido a good town for surfers is that they can provide waves for every level of surfing. Zicatela is one for the very advanced surfers with huge waves and a stong current, so that wasn't where I had my debut on a surf board. :-)

But a few minutes in car to both sides of Zicatela you find La Punta which has medium waves and another small beach with small perfect-for-beginners waves. So if you have a dream of becoming a great surfer. Rent a house and a board for a year in Puerto Escondido and you'll have plenty of opportunities to develop your surfing skills.

I only spended a week there, so I'm still a beginner. :-) But Puerto Escondido is great if you don't surf too. There are many bars and restaurant and the prices are fair, so it's definetely easy to have a great time there with beautiful sunsets behind the massive waves and lots of beers and nice food.

If you're looking for some great nights out it would be a good idea to find some locals and ask them where it is going on the different days. Like many other surf spots in Central America the bars in Puerto seems to have made an agreement of which day each bar will peak. Monday is one bar, tuesday another and so on, so you might go out one day and find a lot of dead empty bars, but if you research a bit and find the 'bar of the day' there'll be plenty of people and lots of partying.

Salud!