La Crucecita (Huatulco) and Oaxaca City

January 17th - Hello from the beautiful Marina Chahu’e in La Crucecita Huatulco, Mexico.
We sailed into this beautiful new marina only a couple hours from Bahia Jacaral. Captain Nancy brought the boat i

nto the slip as I handed our docklines to four helpful dock hands and welcomed us to the marina. This is a lovely place!

We’ve met some of our cruiser “neighbors” who stopped here only for a week… but they said that was two years ago and they haven’t left yet! Another couple has been here since April, also intending to stay only a few days. We even met “Crazy George,” a recluse who lives aboard and admittedly is a bit strange…but we did learn something about satellite radio while taking with “Crazy George”. Satellite radio is supposedly available only a short distance into Mexico, but here we are a couple hundred miles from Guatemala and “Crazy George” is listening to it. He placed the antenna into a aluminum colander (for straining salads) and strapped this outside his boat, the colander acts like a miniature satellite dish and brings in his signal absolutely perfect. There’s a very fine line between being “crazy” and being an “eccentric”, but how do you know the difference? I’ll ask George!

We jumped on our folding bicycles for a trip to the harbor master to pay for our slip for a couple weeks, then to the Puerto de Capitán at Santa Cruz (1 mile away) and check in. Santa Cruz is where the cruise ships dock.

This city is a real treat for any cruiser to visit and wait for a good weather forecast for the much feared Gulf of Tehuantepec. This is where we’ll wait for a good weather window to cross the Gulf of Tehuantepec (in a week or so ), do necessary repairs, and get Windfall battened down for a serious sea crossing. Nancy wants to start sewing a shade cover to cover the topside that will reach from the mast to the stern and provide us with cool shade and rain protection while in the hotter tropic areas ahead. Taxis are about 300 pesos (under $3.00) to take you anywhere around town, laundry is available from the marina and delivered to your boat, free WiFi is available from the marina, large grocery stores are close by, and the produce vendors (with wonderful fresh produce) are located at the town square just a mile away. Sounds nice!

Oaxaca - We took an 8 hour bus trip to Oaxaca (pronounced wa-ha-ca) and it was great! What a wonderful and cultural place to visit! We stayed three full days and didn’t see it all where we met people from Denmark, Russia, Canada, and the US too. Friday we walked around the town, checked out the local produce stands, and visited some very old and beautiful churches, complete with real gold ceilings, reaching several stories high and one larger than a shopping mall! Oh those Catholics, they do know how to build big beautiful churches.

We went to interesting places including ancient ruins, old churches, mescal distilleries, handmade carpet weaving factory, wood carvers, and visited a “frozen” waterfall that is actually the minerals left from a huge waterfall and pools cascading from the top of a 10,000’ mountain. Very nice!

Saturday morning we went with our guides to the Monte Alban Ruins that were founded in 500 BC! Yes…that’s right, 500 BC! The sheer size and craftsmanship of these ruins were amazing! The ruins included a palace, a ball courtyard (for sports), temples, alters, and even some tombs! How cool! We felt like we were in an Indiana Jones movie! Although I forgot my hat and whip (used only to help keep the crew in line)!

From the Monte Alban we traveled to a woodcarver. This area is famous for their colorful and detailed wooden fantasy and zoological creations. We watched as the master carver started chopping his machete on a green Copal branch, transforming it to a matched pair of 16” high animal legs he will use for his next colorful creation. The Copal wood is very soft to carve while green, but after 30 days it dries to a very hard wood lasting for generations. The colorful details are incredible! They use needles to make tiny dots and form the painted detailed patterns covering the wood. From here we had lunch at a local Mexican buffet where the food was heated in large ceramic pots sitting over hot charcoal embers, then onward for a tour a 16th century monastery that was amazing!

After all this we visited the world’s largest diameter tree… “The Arbol de Tule” that’s over 14 meters thick and still growing! Because the water table has lowered dramatically over the last few decades, they now must pump water to the roots of the tree to keep it alive…5,000 liters each day! That’s a LOT of water!

Saturday night we went to the town square called the “Zocalo”, this is where everything happens… cafés, entertainers, vendors selling everything from balloons to blankets, and more people than you can imagine! As we walked past an outdoor café we were called over to a table where our guides from the tour were sitting! Before long we had guitar players at our table playing and singing traditional songs, Nancy even knew the words to one particular song and was an instant hit by everyone as she sang along… the enormous beers helped! Nancy bargained (in Spanish) for items offered by the local vendors coming to the table. I told her NOT to make “eye contact” and to keep her hands in her pockets…apparently this didn’t too work too well as the vendors scored nicely that night.

The next morning we were to meet our guides for another tour…apparently they weren’t feeling too well from the last night’s activities and called in “sick”. But, we jumped into the tour van and headed off for a wonderful day filled with adventures. We started at a mescal distillery…made with 12 year old Agave plants that are trimmed into pineapple looking shapes the size of a microwave, smoked in a huge hand-dug pit for 14 days, then chopped into smaller parts and placed on a large stone surface where a 1500 pound stone wheel is revolved by a horse walking endless circles to crush from the agave before they pack it into large vats and add hot water to ferment.

The juice is distilled for alcohol, then distilled twice again and made to the very best mescal and fruity mescals available; some of the mescal is aged 8 years in barrels. And what is the difference between mescal and tequila??? Mainly it’s the methods of production and the agave varieties from which both are made. Only will you find mescal is made in Oaxaca...and it’s mescal that has “the worm” in the bottles. And, along with the mescal is a special mescal salt made with salt, chili peppers, and ground up worms that live in the agave plants! (It’s actually pretty tasty!...and after several shots of mescal you’ll start praising the bottled worm!) We purchased a bottle of Passion Fruit Mescal that is sweet and delicious! (They get about 2 liters of mescal from one large “pineapple”).

Our next stop was at a Rug Weaver who hand-makes beautiful traditional woolen rugs …with dyes made from traditional plants and insects. The vivid red colors come from the “cochineal” bug that lives on a cactus. The bug is scraped from the cactus, hand ground with a stone mortar, and then mixed with water. This makes the most beautiful deep red color imaginable. Lime juice is added to turn the red to orange, and then baking soda added to the orange to make purple. Green color comes from a specific moss; Blue from the indigo plant (of which he used 3 TONS each year), yellow comes from marigold flower peddle, and black from the mesquite tree.

Our next stop was at the Doña Rosa’s Pottery Shop where she developed the process to make the famous Black pottery. It was also here where Doña Rosa discovered that if she polished the ceramic with crystal stones it made the black ceramic shine – now a standard practice in their pottery making. Even Jimmy and Roslyn Carter visited here to see her beautiful black ceramic works of art.

After a full day of touring, our bus from Oaxaca back to the marina was available only at night. We got the last two seats available on the 9:30pm bus, and arrived back in town to our boat at 5:30am to crawl into our soft comfy bed for a few hours restful sleep.

A couple nights later we went out for dinner with four cruiser “neighbors” to one of their favorite spots where we got 5 tacos and 2 beers for $500 peso…that’s about than $4.16!! Wow!!! They were delicious! Then, we went for ice cream at a great little place next to the zocalo (town square)… a great place to people watch. They pointed across the street to a favorite pizza place where they cook the pizzas in a HUGE old brick oven…we can’t wait to try their pizzas!!

They say some marinas are like Velcro and won’t let you go…Now we know what they mean,we’ve decided to stay a month here at Marina Chahu’e. Plus it’s very beautiful, warm, and sunny here to say the least….now about those cheap tacos and beers……