Descent to the Underworld and Rise to Salvation: Escaping The 15 Dangers of Puerto Escondido

I've spent the past three-ish weeks in Puerto Escondido, a coastal town in the south of Oaxaca state that is best described as a hive of scum of villainy. It's an end-of-the-road surf town, where the days are lazy-dog hot and at night the entire moral fabric of society seems to crumble in one big party. It's been three weeks of witnessing the worst of human behaviors, hiding from (and hanging with) a group of nefarious Australians, dodging danger, hostel romance, and striving -- like a kayak crash victim with a slowly leaking floaty -- to keep my nose above the water. Abstain from judgment as you read. We're only human.

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I climbed into the front seat of the passenger van that would take me from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido, bubbling over how supposedly dangerous the road was. I popped a couple of Dramamine and gave the driver my best white-guy, lips-together smile.

"You do this trip a lot?" I asked him.

"Every day," he told me. "And the road..." He gave me a side-eye. "Oof," he said. He held one hand up and snaked it back and forth, signaling that it would be, well, back and forth. "Seven-and-a-half hours." Then his hand started going up and down, like a wave. Up and down the road would go. Then his hand started shaking, spasming. That one I couldn't even interpret. But it didn't seem good.

At the very least, I found out, I was catching the driver on day 1 of his shift. He did the Oaxaca-Puerto Escondido route twice a day -- fifteen hours of driving -- for 20 days straight. Then 10 days off, to relax with his wife and son in Puerto. Then back to 20 more days. Day 1 had to be safer than day 20, I figured. Just to be sure, about halfway through when I heard him say to his wife on a call that his phone was about to die, I pulled out my portable battery and lent it to him. Karma is real, and if we tumbled off the side of the cliff or got swallowed into a sinkhole, I wanted a kindly and generous offer to be more recent than me committing war crimes on the all-you-can-eat buffets in Oaxaca.

This notion of karmic scales -- that good deeds completely erase any wrongdoing and land you squarely on the bouncer's list for heaven -- will be quite central to the tale of Puerto.

Seven-and-a-half hours later, after a windy, up-and-down road dodging stray dogs, landslides (which I suppose were the trembling fingers?), and potholes the size of the passenger van we rode in, the driver pulled into the bus stop at Puerto Escondido and gave me back my portable battery. I jelly-legged onto the pavement, started sweating instantly and profusely -- a process that would continue for the next three weeks, rain or shine, waking or dreaming -- and took my first steps, unaware that the drive would be the least of my safety worries.

A visual depiction of the route, from the mountainous, peaceful Oaxaca into what awaits.

There are, I discovered, 15 things more dangerous in Puerto Escondido than the bus ride. Follow along on this Orpheus-inspired descent into the underworld, with a hopeful return to the good and righteous at the end, and we shall explore the 15 dangers of Puerto along the way.

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I checked into my hostel in El Centro, and Solomon, a nice young Canadian lad, gave me a tour. He showed me a flight of stairs leading up from the rooftop terrace.

"Up there is another roof," he told me. "It's good for sunsets. Just look out for the stairs."

View from the upper roof

It was about sunset time, so I dropped my bags by the bed and tested the roof-above-the-roof. Nice sunset. And then on the way down, I placed my foot and punched right through the step.

"Sol," I said, having found him at reception. "Give me a hammer and some nails. That thing is a fricken' disaster. I am now a certified deck-building, hammer-wielding, emotion-suppressing man. I'll blast that darn set of stairs together so good it could hold an elephant."

Sol laughed. "Nobody works in Puerto," he told me. "How about a beer instead?"

Well, twist my arm!

I vowed to never touch the stairs again until I had a chance to fix them. Little did I know, at 3 AM on a Monday morning, head swimming with Coronas, heart bursting with new love, I'd hop up the stairs like a jackrabbit, brain too full of jackrabbit things to even consider the static load carrying capacity of rusty nails and soggy wood.

Danger #1: Staircase.

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I learned about the Puerto nightlife that first night, which was Wednesday, because Wednesday is "a big night." The hostel hosted a salsa lesson -- my performance at which earned me charges of human indecency and threats of arrest -- and then we glugged some Coronas, and then the group of us headed to a club called "Congo." I don't know what I was expecting, but Congo was not it. If any place epitomizes the hellaciousness of Puerto, it's Congo.

Hostel mirror affirmations

Firstly, it was a Wednesday. No sanctimonious individual should be swirling Coronas and sweating through their shorts on the dance floor on a Wednesday. But there we were. The place was packed like a French fish -- all of Puerto (mostly tourists) was crammed into the open-air patio, shaking and thrusting to the reggaeton and dance music blasting from the speakers. Beers were relatively expensive at $3 a pop, but they went down like pop. The strobe lights flashed, bodies pressed against each other. I went out in the Crocs and let the baby blues carry me. The whole thing felt something like New Orleans Mardi Gras (where I got my phone stolen in 2018). And everyone there -- everyone -- was beautiful.

I watched someone I flagged as the most beautiful person I'd ever seen dance with a Freddy-Mercury-looking Frenchman, and then they made out. And then I watched someone else I flagged as the most beautiful person I'd ever seen dance with Daniele, a large Swissman from the hostel who earlier that night ripped a shot of mezcal, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and yelled, crazed, "I love girls!" Then he made out with that person. Compared to all the surf-instructor, molly-is-still-vegan, Instagram-influencer types, I was starting to feel like an onion in a petunia patch.

At one point I had to use the little gentleman's room, so I shouted into the circle of Sol and the hostel people "Piss!" and stumbled off to find el baño.

If Puerto is understood to be hell, the bathroom of Congo is Satan's altar. Upon walking in I was assaulted, grabbed, prodded, by a line of men and children.

"Cocaina?" they asked, tugging at my shirt.

What the heck is this? I thought.

"Marijuana? LSD? Exstacis?"

They were all selling drugs, and you had to fight through a line of them just to shake the proverbial hose. Some of them truly were children, like 11 years old. Kind of a sad sight. "Amigo, you should be in school," I told one little fella.

"Puto, it's Wednesday!" he responded. "Wednesday's a big night!"

I had my little wee and walked out, seeing the world a little darker than before. Not long after, I told the troops I was ready to retreat. The ugly, trying-to-be-moral duck. We made it back to the hostel, and I dreamed of all those little individuals who should be in English as a Second Language class, but instead are learning the small-scale mathematics of drug dealing.

Danger #2: Club drugs.

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That is, I suppose, why I say that Puerto is the underworld. It's ungodly, inhumanely hot. Nobody's ever wearing clothes. Children sell you (not me) drugs. Day drinking is a sport and a profession. Just now, at the hour of 11AM, there's a group of nefarious Australians who I would label as bad people shotgunning seltzers by the pool and playing poke-the-iguana with the iguanas in the tree. Admittedly, I'm kind of friends with them (the Ozzies). They call out to me. "David! Get a beer!" They're playing a game with the only objective, as fas as I can tell, of pulling each other's shorts off. I decline. Nose above the water, shorts on my butt (for the most part). More on the Australians coming.

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Hostel Romance

Forward to Sunday. Another "big day." Sundays take place not at Congo but at a place called Punta Vida, which is the concrete shell of an abandoned hotel on the beach. A group of people organizes a barbecue at La Punta Vida, which, as the night progresses and the sun goes down, I was told quickly turns into a techno rave. One minute, you're nibbling a chicken thigh. The next, everyone's making out.

Hanging on to the back of a colectivo

At the hostel we decided to make our way over to La Punta Vida for the barbecue/orgy. We had a large group, maybe fifteen deep, and we were going to La Punta via colectivo -- a mode of transport that is essentially a pickup truck with a tented tarp in the back that you can crawl in, for which the driver charges about 60 cents. Half the group filled the first colectivo that stopped for us, and I watched as the young Canadian Sol hung off the back of the truck with one foot on the ladder and a four pack of beer in his other hand. In my head I said a silent adiós.

Danger #3: Public transportation

Then the next colectivo came, and I found myself sitting next to a very beautiful person in a very green dress.

As an aside, one time two years ago I was playing a drinking game with my roommates in which one roommate says something true about another, and my roommate T told me I had a total of about 6 shirts, which, at the time, was true. So at another point in time, months later, I realized my bank account was looking healthy and I could afford to get myself some new shirts, so I went online and found the cheapest shirts I could, and I bought two, one of which was in salmon. And then I wore that salmon T on a warmish day at the start of summer in Boston when my friend organized a mixed drink walkabout, and, at some point I realized that the cheap salmon shirt made me sweat like a tomato on gazpacho day, particularly under the nipular region. Of course I brought that salmon shirt to Mexico, and of course that was the only relatively clean shirt I had on that day. So it goes.

There I was in the colectivo, next to a woman who would make me sweat if we'd have run into each other in the Arctic, still feeling like an onion in the petunia patch, and sweating even more under the nipular region because of that dumb salmon shirt. Except I was sweating even more, because it was also 95 degrees outside and we were in the back of a 1960's pickup truck under a tarp that functioned like a Betty Crocker easy bake. I was baking.

I tried to hold eye contact while Nora from Ireland told me her name was Nora from Ireland. She lived in Vancouver now, she said, and was in Puerto to visit her cousin who was traveling around. She said she was enjoying the downtime to be able to read, since during her daily life as a social worker she was too busy to have much time to do anything. We talked about books and I mentioned Sally Rooney since she's an Irish author (points for feminism and cultural competence). With my moobs swimming we talked about Vancouver, and Nora told me she liked it because it was a wholesome life, doing social work at a hospital and spending time in nature when she could. And then it hit me.

Golly wiz, I thought. Wholesome. "Wholesome" is like the one niche I can actually fill. I can do wholesome. I might have a shot, here!

So I gulped up some of the sweat running down my nose and folded my arms over my chest. "Did I ever tell you," I asked, smooth as iguana skin, "about my job teaching underserved youth?"

It took off like a rocket.

At La Punta Nora and I talked more about wholesome things. Skiing. Children. Family. We got a bunch of Coronas, ate the barbecue chicken. She had a big smile and big brown eyes and she didn't speak a word of Spanish, which I got a kick out of. It was going well. And mother nature noticed.

Bang! What was that? Crash! Boom! We looked out over the beach to see lightning start flashing down, big streaks and rays illuminating the sky. Soon, everyone was gathered standing, watching the show. And then the rain came, heavy sheets and waves moving in off the water. We all stood there getting soaked and watching the storm. And then, as I was told happens kind of frequently in Puerto, the power went out.

Our hostel group held an impromptu huddle, everyone soaked in rain and me soaked mostly in sweat. "What do we do?" Sol, the de-facto leader, asked.

There was rumor of a backup generator coming to kick off the techno rave thing. Someone posited going back to the hostel. We shuffled our feet.

Adam -- a 35-year-old Republican ice cream store owner from Michigan who came to Puerto to surf and buy drugs from kids in the target age range of the Magic Treehouse series -- said one of the better quotes of the month. "All I know is, if we stay, we're going to have to get greasy."

In the circle we looked at everyone in the eyes. Nora and I held contact a count longer. "Let's grease up," we said.

And the night was on.

The generator kicked in and someone started playing music. We gathered in a crowd all in the dark in front of the speakers, rain still coming down. The shoes came off, shirts came off, the Crocs stayed on. A funnel emerged, and I watched as many a hostel creature sucked mezcal out of thing like a shared playground lollipop. But the chicken settled, the rain slowed, and, eventually, most of our group was ready to boogie on back to the well-lit hostel. On the way, we stopped at a convenience store for more beverages, and we spent the remainder of the night around the dining table, listening to music and talking garbage.

Eventually, at like 3 AM when everyone was drunk and looking at their phones and Nora and I were looking at each other, talking about how the world needs less business people and more teachers and social workers and firefighters, she leaned in and said she would like to kiss me. (Yeehoo!!!) And did I know a place?

It hit me. There's a roof. And there's a roof above the roof.

We hopped up those rickety steps like two kangaroos on pogo sticks. Like toads in moon shoes. Like bouncy balls made ignoring the manufacturer's limit on how much bounce you can give 'em. At one point she told me in a thick Irish accent that she found me to be"right fit," and for a minute I felt a little like Benedict Cumberbatch in a Benedict Cumberbatch movie. No longer the ugly duck in the club, the metaphorical onion in the metaphorical patch. At least for that night, I was a goddamn petunia. And the stairs -- not so much as a wobble.

Spending time with Nora was good fun. She was a cool person, and it was nice to talk about things like books and hiking instead of beers and beers. Hanging together felt wholesome. A couple of days later we went with my friend Solenn and her boyfriend Stevan to a beach that has a turtle hatchery, and we paid a little money to the nonprofit and got to release baby turtles into the ocean at sunset. Solenn's baby turtle got grabbed by a crab and dragged towards the crab hole until we called the volunteer over who clapped at the crab until he let the turtle go. The waves came in, the baby leatherbacks tumbled into the water, we sat on a towel and watched the sunset. Nora left the next day, back to the real world of social work in Vancouver.

For me, there's a lesson about travel romance. It doesn't have to mean everything. But it should mean something.

Someone else's photo of the lightning, David Jr. on his journey to the sea, view of party

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Aside: Runderwear

I've been trying to keep up with the running while in this sweatlodge of a town, and when I've been able to wake up early enough to beat the sun to the pavement, I've gotten in some great ones. Mostly in the 4-7 mile range, because beyond that I get so dehydrated that I can feel my eyeballs shrinking. Another issue I've found is that I sweat through my clothes, and then I have to do laundry, which is a task that I've generally been trying to avoid, and so I found a solution: runderwear.

The principle is as it sounds: a dedicated pair of underwear for running. You wear the runderwear, you sweat through the runderwear, you swim in the runderwear, and you leave the runderwear out to dry. By the next morning, you give them a squeeze, and if there's no crunch, they're still good for another run. Also, the same holds for "rhorts," "rhat," "rocks," and the like. (There's no "rhirt" -- "run shirt." I haven't worn a shirt in 22 days).

Before you judge, I'll point out that I watched a drunk Australian drink hostel pool water to chase his shotgunned seltzer this afternoon, and one friend of mine is traveling with a total of two t-shirts in his pack. So I'm a stone's throw from decency, here.

But all that points to Puerto Danger #4: Rhabdo

Run photos

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The Price of Heaven

I am, alas, just a man. Men, history has shown, are prone to folly, prone to stumble, to fall, to slip, every now again, in the promises they make and in their pursuit of grace. As a man, I lament to say, I am prone to do the same. One night I drank too much at a bar called "Mari Juana" and woke up with a few missing pages in the old memory book and in a panic that I somehow left my Crocs at the beach bar.

Danger #5: Irreparable loss (but the Crocs were safely under the bed)

It was time to draw a line. I said to myself, Ya know, enough's enough, guy. This live-fast lifestyle is gonna catch up to you. You could get really hurt. You could lose something valuable, like the Crocs. You gotta do something, ya know, good. Like nice good. Life above the line, and all that.

So I thought about nice good things I could do, and it turns out there was a person staying at the hostel who had been working at a language school and he was leaving, and so I went with him on his last day and talked to the director of the school and said, I'd like to volunteer at your school, please. I even put on real shoes.

"Monday Wednesday Friday," he told me. "4:30 - 8 PM."

I gulped. I mean, I want to go to heaven, but...? Twelve hours a week? For two whole weeks? Friday nights? It's a little bit, much, I thought, no?

I recalled of all the Catholic guilt I felt. I feel Catholic guilt quite a bit, actually, for someone who is not Catholic. Buying a beer will generally do it. Not eating vegetables, sometimes. Forgetting to brush my teeth. Not to mention things like hopping up to the rooftop and blank spaces where my mind should be. In Puerto, I was practically crushed by the weight of the brimstone.

"Sí," I told him, "Okay. I can do it."

Yes pls

So, for the past two weeks, I've traded in the parties and day drinking for educating the youth. I take the colectivo to the school (which feels unnervingly like commuting to a real job), and I talk to the upper-level kids about the difference between the present perfect and the present perfect continuous (I have sinned before, but I have not been sinning since Monday). One time I put something on the white board and they took a picture because they said it was a helpful way for them to remember. That made me feel good. The students are lively and funny, as they tend to be, and they do a great job with the language, and overall, it's been a good experience both professionally and personally. Friday was my last class with them, and I brought in a bunch of Takis and pineapple juice, and we spent the class singing Taylor Swift songs and eating Takis and drinking pineapple juice and taking selfies.

"I will miss being your teacher," I told them (present perfect continuous).

"You are a good teacher," Melanie told me (present simple -- and simply kind).

There it was -- I felt it. The lightness, the weight of my mistakes, lifting. I felt free, unencumbered. Uplifted by the universe's love. It felt good. Almost as good as telling every person I knew that I had been volunteering at a school.

Such, I suppose, is the price of heaven.

The Present Perfect Continuous All-Stars

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What else, what else?

Public Nudity: Last weekend I wanted to escape the party scene, and so I took a public bus out to another town down the coast, Mazunte. I spent two days just lounging around at the beach, reading. The first day I got a Corona at a bar on the beach and fell asleep reading, and then got another Corona and laid down on the sand and fell asleep reading there, too. I'm guess I've been tired from carrying all this moral superiority. Anyway, Mazunte was a cool, sleepy town, like Puerto if nobody lived there. A nice vacation from my vacation.

The second day I decided I should do a long run, so I woke up dogshit early and started slappin' the asphalt. There's a pretty neat coastal highway I followed down into the next town, Zipolite, and I found a lighthouse there to mark a good turnaround point. I got a couple good frightens, one from a big old tarantula doing the eight-legged eight-step across the road, and like seventeen more from dogs that went nutso and chased me as I ran past. At one point, two German Shepards barked at me so hard they must have thought I was the doctor that did neuters, and they ran me down the road, gaining ground, and I said, "Stop, stop, stop," and went into a little whimper, and they said "woof, woof, woof," which I thought meant, "We're gonna get you, fuck-o," and right when they were in biting range one reached out his little tongue and gave me a lick. My heart stopped for a solid two minutes. The dogs will be the death of me.

Danger #6: Tarantulas

Danger #7: Angry dogs

Anyway, on the way back I decided I didn't want to run all the way back because my knee hurt, and I stopped back at the beach in Zipolite. Zipolite, I knew, had Mexico's only nudey beach. So I popped on over, shimmied out of my skivvies, and dunked in. I should say, while much of me is now more tan than before, parts still retain a sort of lactic complexion. I'm sure it was a sight to see for the locals (if they brought a telescope). I put the runderwear back on and took a colectivo back to Mazunte.

Danger #8: Public humiliation

Mazunte sunrise run, tarantula, sunset

Getting chased by an Ozzie with ill intentions

Miscellaneous Danger: Other than dogs and tarantulas and getting laughed off of the nude beach, Puerto definitely does feel like it has an unsavory, unsafe side. There's sunburns and dengue fever (from mosquitos) (#9-10). There's the scooters, which everyone whips around in without a helmet (my travel doctor begged me not to get on a scooter, and I'm proud to say my first scooter trip was on the Mexican coastal highway getting yelled at by taxis and motorcycles while I tried to understand how sensitive the throttle is on those puppies.) (Danger #11)

But most of the danger is because of the nightlife. It's all, I think, gang controlled. You get searched like crazy before you go in anywhere, with the idea that, if you're going to do drugs, you'll buy them from the people inside who sell with impunity. There's also been reports of police and non-police pulling up to tourists walking back late at night, pointing a gun, and requesting a chunk of change (#12). So I've really tried to keep my wits about me.

Australians: I've come to understand that, on the whole, Australians are a force of evil. Permit me an explanation:

After Mazunte I switched hostels, moving down to Zicatela on the beach because my friend Cas who I met in Mexico City is staying in a hostel there. Cas and I split an Airbnb in Oaxaca for Day of the Dead at the start of November because Oaxaca's supposed to be the place to be for Day of the Dead. And Cas had found three other guys to split the Airbnb with us -- the aforementioned day-drinking Australians.

They have human names, I think. But they refer to themselves as a mixture of strange familial relations. "Oz," even though they're all Australian. "Uncle." "Dad." It gives the impression that it's one hive of the same person, a post-apocalyptic cloned army/family with the mission of doing the dumbest shit possible and escaping by the width of their strange stick-and-poke tattoos (a platypus on the ankle, a beer bottle, Bart Simpson).

I've been hanging out with Cas and the Ozzies, to a degree. I'll drink a few beers with them, but I (and Cas sometimes) generally split and head home before things go too far down under. I met up with the group of them one night at a party after teaching and was asked by multiple concerned people what was wrong with my friend.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"He keeps biting everyone."

"Oh," I said. I went and found the accused nether-being. "What's up?" I said.

He grabbed me in a Kangaroo Jack grip, told me he loved me, called me the C-word, and bit me hard enough to break skin.

Or: the other night we went to a pool bar, and we were the only people there since it was a Tuesday, and the Oceanians had amassed a collection of empty glasses and bottles the size of their island neighbor New Zealand on one of the tables. One of Satan's infantrymen lined up a shot on the pool table, and said, in a thick, thick accent, "Oi, if I sink this, we're turning into giraffes with all that gaff we've bought." I mentally worked to translate the communicative puzzle into English -- here's my best guess:

"Dear friends, if I successfully complete this pool shot, we shall imbibe quite a large quantity of the cocaine we purchased earlier."

Giraffe -- quite the turn of phrase. Anyway, I left soon after.

Dangers #12-15: Australians

Nefarious beings from the land down under

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The Mental Open Mic: Reflections

So, there they are, the 15 dangers of Puerto Escondido. Perhaps now, at the end of the journey, as I have one more day in this Betty-Crocker-by-day, Amy-Winehouse-by night town, I can ask -- where does it all leave me?

I've had a good three weeks in Puerto. I've had fun, I've been to some good parties, seen nice sunsets and cool animals and spent a lot of time smiling and laughing at stupid things the way you can only do when you're around friends who are okay with laughing and doing stupid things. It's been a nice time.

Also, though, the three weeks have made me think about who I am and the things I do and the things I don't do. In the past, I was the type of person who would do anything the people around him did. Being liked, being considered cool, saying yes -- those were things I placed a lot of value in. So I did some dumb stuff.

But I don't really feel that way anymore, and I don't feel that way here in Puerto. I'm happy that, when I've been in situations where people are doing things that I would prefer not to do, I've been able to not do those things. When my friends -- the people I hang around with and the people I'll be traveling a little bit with -- are doing things I don't want to do, I don't really feel any compulsion to do them. Truthfully, it hasn't even been that hard. I know, better now than a few years ago, who I am and what I'm comfortable with. I used to think I was defined by the things I said yes to. Now I'm seeing that "no" is a self-defining word, too.

Maybe 20-year-old me wouldn't have survived Puerto. But I've spent three weeks here for the most part keeping it above water, running, teaching, spending time exploring and reading and also partying. As the trip continues, I'm excited to do more of the stuff that I really value, outdoor activities and new experiences and pushing my boundaries. For now, I'm happy to have survived this town with all my limbs attached, more sure of who I am and the type of trip I want this to be. The parties were fun, but the school, the runs, the ocean swims (naked) -- those are the parts that felt like the good life.

The lesson? Say sí sometimes. But not when it's kids selling you club drugs. Then, say no. No gracias.

Ta ta for now, dancing queens. Ta ta.