The beaches and bahias of Huatulco, San Agustin

All the beaches of Bahias de Huatulco are beautiful, and they all have their own particular characteristics and quirks. Yesterday morning, as often happens on the weekends, I got a message from Rob and Anita, two Americans from Albany, New York, who live here most of the year with their son, Robbie: “San Agustin, 12ish ne1?” They are great organizers, these two, the same ones who got us together to go rafting a couple of weeks back. So I called for directions, talked to Anita, was offered a ride in the back of their pickup, but I wanted to take mi moto; it was a glorious day, and while it knew it was relatively far out (about 25km), I’d also been wanting to go for a longer ride than to Super Che and back. Anita told me to go past the airport and then left at the next intersection (directions in Huatulco tend to be just that simple) onto a dirt road. “Is it passable by scooter?” I asked. “Well, it’s a bit bumpy, but sure,” she said.
Round about noon I met up with Gary, my very English English teacher colleague and friend, who happens to be bike buddies with me as well. He has the same model Zanetti, purchased the same day from Super Che, only blue. It was a lovely, early Sunday afternoon ride through mountains, surrounded by jungle, even less traffic than usual, the highway much better maintained than the streets of Crucecita where we live. Passed the airport after about 25, 30 minutes, found the turnoff to San Agustin. Dirt, yes. Road is a more generous term for what we found. More like a collection of potholes, bumps, rocks, and deep, straggling runnels strung out in a twisting line through hilly jungle. Gary, showing an unexpected lust for adventure (having got lost [through no fault of his own] in the jungle for two hours just the day before), said, “Let’s just start and see how far we get.”
Which we did. If the picture of my scooter isn’t clear, let me tell you that what we have are street bikes. Our suspensions basically consist of one big spring between the seat and the rear wheel, which, like the front, is very small, hardly big enough to go over a golf hole let alone the divots and cracks on this road. So after about 10-15 minutes, we’d barely covered a kilometer, with 6 or 7 more to go, when Rob, Anita, and their truck packed full of people, bags, equipment and Chester the dog come rattling up behind us. The group is understandably amused, although Anita does apologize, claiming the road was much better during the dry season, which it probably was. Then they tell us about the river. Apparently, to get to San Agustin, you must also ford a small river, which at the end of the rainy season, we are told, is a couple of feet deep. Our engines are about 5 inches off the ground.
Mark, a retired expat who’s lived here for years, tells us there’s a safe place we can leave the scooters, and then hop in the truck for the rest of the way. It’s another of kilometer of bumps and weaving, but we make it to a little store, not much more than a shed with a log bench, where we park and take a break. There’s some good-natured ribbing about the idiocy of taking our 90cc street bikes down this road, but I can’t help feeling a small amount of pride in having made it as far as we did. And truth be told, it was far more comfortable than the back of the truck; at the very least, on a scooter, you can drive around many of the worst holes and bumps. In a truck, you can only go over most of them, and if you happen to be squeezed with five other people and a frisky young dog into an unlined bed, you may start thinking it wasn’t so bad on the scooter.
Nonetheless, we all made it at last (the river turned out to be only 20 feet across or so, and not as deep as we’d been told, and thus mildly anti-climactic. Still would’ve swamped our engines), and as usual, worth the journey. A long, breathtaking curve of pale sand, scattered with bits of white coral, lined with palapas (beach restaurants), bordered behind those with jungled hills, all of it enclosing blue, crystalline water punctuated by a couple of small, rocky islands. But the most notable feature of Bahia de San Agustin is under the water: a coral reef that covers most of the sea floor and stretches almost to the beach, thus making it perfect for snorkeling. The locals take care of their reef; if someone is foolish or careless enough to actually stand on it, they quickly and vehemently yell at them to get off. It’s a community; behind the palapas are small homes, where it seems many of the owners and workers live. Mark told us they’d only gotten electricity in the last year or so, and all the drinking water has to be trucked in still.
We went to a palapa called Charly’s, where its namesake greeted us warmly, sat us down at tables under a thatched shelter with two hammocks strung from the side posts. We nearly had it all to ourselves. At a rough estimate, there must be at least thirty palapas on San Agustin. Most of them were closed, and of the handful that were open, none of them were full. Which is nice if you’re the visitor, but it’s easy to see that it’s bad for the locals, who are probably waiting anxiously for December and January when business picks up again.
Most of us headed straight for the water, cool at first, but warm and embracing after a few seconds. The tide was just coming in when we arrived, which seemed great initially; the low depth meant we could snorkel very close above the reef, but several of us independently discovered that in certain parts, as the waves pull back, you can get stranded in mere inches of water above the coral, with no way off but to wait for the next good wave and hope it lifts you up and not slams you down. This is the part where I’d love to detail all the fish I saw, but the only ones I could positively identify were the puffer fish. Most were colorful, many were flat and wide, some small and darting; a few tiny, vibrantly blue fish flickered in and out of holes in the reef. The coral itself was mostly a dark red or brown, greenish in the light in some places, and deceptively smooth-looking, rounded and curving over the floor. The water itself was the clearest I’ve seen yet; though all the beaches here are clean and swimmable, some are better than others for snorkeling, either because of reefs like this one, or, especially at the end of the rainy season, worse due to sediment and runoff (it should be noted that there’s virtually no heavy industry anywhere near Huatulco, and it’s sparsely populated. Runoff here means only dirt; while it can certainly turn the water of the bays cloudy and murky, there’s no need to be wary of it).
After we’d all trickled (literally) back to the tables, talk turned to lunch. There was a general consensus about fish, so we ordered two grilled “gallo.” A long time later (the coals weren’t ready yet), they appeared on our tables, nicely seasoned, firm flesh, reminiscent of tuna, fresh caught, with strangely small sides of rice and vegetables. There was a bit of grumbling when we got the bill later; 450 pesos per fish is a little high for Huatulco, but I do still think in American standards, and $45 for a fish large enough to feed 4-5 people is not a bad deal.
Later, some of us went out on Mark’s boat, cruising around the bay, where they caught sight of sea turtles and dolphins; a few of us, myself included headed back into the water for more snorkeling. By the time the boat returned, the sun had begun to set. Because of where Huatulco is in Mexico, the bottom of the curve eastward, and the position of the bay on that coast, I had the rather mind-twisting of sitting on a Pacific beach, looking out over the water with the sun setting behind me. It just didn’t seem right somehow, although still pretty. But no one wanted to drive that road in the dark, least of all me and Gary, so we settled up pretty quickly, shoehorned ourselves back into the truck and headed out.
The return was uneventful, retrieved our bikes, waved goodbye to the others, jounced our way back to the highway, and with the minor exception of a few thousand bugs dying by being crushed into our faces and chests, made it back to Crucecita without incident. At my apartment, I showered off the dust and insect guts, had a small sandwich, and went to bed early, with that pleasant tiredness of adventures survived, and a head full of new memories.