Idyllic

Yesterday
´this is pretty idyllic, we´re sitting on our balcony in a simple hotel outside the village. It´s actually Playa San Augustinillo, we meant to go to Mazunte 1km further on but decided to stop the taxi. We´re the only people in this big hotel, and the previous guests were a week ago. There is a constant stream of butterflies past us, yellowish white with a canary yellow to green one always visible somewhere and the odd orangey red one once in a while. I don´t know how many are visible at one time. 100? How do you count? If you look left and see 30 and in front 30 and to your right 50 but they´re the same ones travelling across in some kind of migration moving from somewhere upwind in an constant flow.

Just left the sea which is unlike any I have ever been in, Brónagh grazed her leg pinfully, dripping blood from being upended on a wave that I was happily bobbing on 10M out. 70M from where we are now sitting in the hotel they look terrifying - big walls of water curving over and crashing - the foam blowing off in doily sheets and a second ghost wave of a diaphanous sheet drifting down after the mighty crash. They look like they would pulverise a person trapped in the tube as it imploded, and in truth even when the subwave crashes closer to shore it can give you a fair battering. Even the waves 20-30M out, 2M higher than the swell they come from are brown from being loaded with exfoliant sand. If you could only tie things down here you could save a lot of hard work with sandpaper.

Coming here was a good idea, I think, there may even be a little nightlife - I saw a sign in Pochutle for a salsa bar with belly dancing. I might have a shower soon, it´s very humid here and I´ve been sweating all day long - in the plastic seat of the taxi, carrying my maleta? in the shade. The room is cool as there is a breeze flowing through it.

There seem to be many more butterflies than there were - if 100 were before me at all times before it must be 200 now. But the tumult of the waves is ceaseless and changeless except for when I try to photograph or video it when it goes tame for a few moments.´

Later we went to eat - fish in a spicy sauce and rice - while the waves crashed in Mazuntle in front of us. A serious and not very sane surfer, and I´ve seen manysurfers on the waves and their bored girlfriends on the shore basting and browning, like a collection of tennis player´s wives and surfers are not normally worth watching - but this guy was awesome, like the films, on a tiny board surfing into the pipes, and when he did fall off it was not because he couldn´t stay on (when he wanted to finish he rode a wave smoothly all the way to the beach) but that he wanted to try the impossible. He glided off the sea past us and I lifted my imaginary hat off for him.

The lightning started way out at sea and it was some time before you could tell the difference between the roar of the waves and that of the thunder, as the thunder drew in and in gaps between the waves their sound became more shrill in comparison. We walked out on the dark road, exotic birds, crickets, and frogs for noise - crabs scuttling away from us - illuminated like very lights with the lightning in the distance and the deep artillary report of the thunder shaking the sky to find some music but ended up escaping the torrential downpour (and I do mean that - nothing in halves here) and sat in a bar with the owner and chatted. He recommended hiking up the hills to see the flowers covered in hummingbirds and butterflies. Apparantly they were brown last week, they´re lush green now. The rains were a month late and they say they´ve had a month of them in the last week.

Today we slept in of course. And when we woke up we couldn´t believe that something unusual wasn´t happening - that tumult couldn´t be constant. But it is. Took a long breakfast and we are just off to see the turtle santuary now. It´s a bit grey (but not that it wasn´t lovely to lark about in the water this morning) so we will leave the hills for another day. And I really wouldn´t mind a bit of dancing later on. We´ll see - the crowd is younger than Puerto Angel but they all seem much as lazy as we are.