If you've ever seen 'the Shawshank redemption,' Zihuatanejo is the town where Andy and Red end up at the end of the film. The last scene in the film shows a beautiful, long and quiet beach and I was extremely excited to see it in person as I sat on the bus from Acapulco.

After arriving I found a hostel run by a Canadian man and his Mexican wife and immediately asked them where to find the beach from the film. It was obviously not the first time they had Been asked and they both laughed before explaining the end of the film was in fact shot in the Dominican Republic. If I was upset by this news I was even more disappointed to find the beach in Zihuatanejo was neither long, beautiful or quiet.

By this point in my time travelling in Mexico and Belize I had reached beach-saturation. Just like church-saturation in Rome or Temple-saturation in Bangkok, beach-saturation in Mexico had made it difficult to be impressed with a beach unless it was extremely special. And Zihuatanejo wasn't extremely special. Saying that, it was a nice place and i'm sure had it been the first beach in mexico I had visited I would have been very impressed.

As usual it didn't take long to make a fool of myself in a new place. The setting this time was at the large indoor marketplace in the centre of town. I found a small stall to have some breakfast and did my usual trick of pointing at something written down that sounded like food and hope for the best. A few moments later the stall girl put a massive plate of what looked like nachos and meat on the counter just to my right. I assumed that since I was the only person sitting at the counter that it was mine so I picked up a handful of nachos all stuck together with cheese and scooped up some meat before shovelling it down my neck. I had just enough time to congratulate myself on my choice of breakfast before an angry Mexican ran to the counter and grabbed the plate. It turns out it was this Mexican who had ordered his food and been standing chatting not too far away waiting for it. He must have been too shocked to see some gringo munching on his nachos to act sooner. Unfortunately my Spanish was too bad to explain so all I could do was pull my most apologetic and sheepish face and sit in silence until my breakfast (which was vastly inferior to the nachos) was served and make a swift exit.

After two days of swimming, lying on the beach and stealing nachos there wasn't too much more to do in Zihuatanejo so I wandered up to the station to catch the night bus north and after a 4 hour delay I was on my way further up the coast, heading to Puerto Vallarta.