Surfing at Puerto Escondido

21.03.2011 - 28.03.2011 33 °C

We could not really figure out how Puerto Escondido was laid out at first. We arrived in town, but according to Lonely most hostels were located closer to the beach where the famous break, Mexican Pipeline, is. We stayed at the cheapest bungalow we could find called, Eddas Cabañas. Pretty basic, but definitely ok for the price. For some weird reason there were loads of Italians staying there. They were all pretty nice, but there wasn’t too much atmosphere there.

After going for a walk we found out that Puerto Escondido consists of three different surf breaks, except the Pipeline which we had no intention of surfing, there was another beach break in a beach on the other side of town called Zicatela, maybe 40 min from where we stayed. We ended up going there the first day and went into a surf shop to ask around. The guy who had the surf shop was a really cool guy named Roger Ramirez an ex pro surfer. He told us that this was the easiest break in the area and we went out for a few hours to warm up. The waves were super slow and easy which was perfect for us the first day. The only thing was that you had to wait 20 min between the sets and most of the sets were actually only one wave.

The second day we went back again, but Roger told us that it would be better at the third surf spot called La Punta at the other end of Puerto Escondido. We went in car together with Roger and two of his kids. It was perfect for Laura as Roger gave loads of tips to her. Though the waves were pretty mellow at Punta I was pretty scared of hitting the rocks or getting hit by someone else’s board. It’s always great with point breaks, but some of them, like this one, just gets ridiculously crowded. Also a problem is that the locals goes so close to the rocks, sometime even standing on them and throwing themselves into a wave, that they always “own” the wave. Pretty annoying with these bloody surf rules sometimes. We tested to surf at Zicatel in the afternoon, but it was no waves at all during nearly 2 hours, we were just laying around sunbathing on our boards.

After that we were pretty skeptical to Zicatel, so we decided that since we will be surfing mainly at Punta and our hostel was kind of boring, that we should move out close to Punta. It was a great decision, as we moved into this amazing beach bungalow place called Buena Onda. Directly met loads of friendly people and the area was much nicer too. This was true surf lifestyle, walking barefoot everywhere, surfing from morning, go back, chill, eat something and go surf again, then drink a beer watching the sunset just outside from our bungalow.
We surfed at Punta for a few days, but then one day it got pretty big. I was rented a board and was just about to go into the water, when a saw a few gigantic set breaking far outside of the point tumble drying the 40 surfers or so that were too close to the point. No way I was doing going out in that. I got a few good shots of real surfers at least.

The good thing about having three different breaks is that when one goes too big the smaller one work great. We went to Zicatel for the rest of the days and got some really good surf days. I had never taken so many waves in a day in my life, must have gotten at least 20 good waves on one of the days. Laura was getting pretty frustrated now though as she was trying to surf properly now where the good surfers went. I was trying to calm her frustration and explaining that all surfers goes through at least for three weeks or so. However all she wanted to do was to catch a real big long wave and ride it herself. Finally on the last day I looked up and saw someone riding a nice wave. It took a while to see it, but it was Laura. Later on a saw her take at least one more big nice one. I was so happy for her. She was so relieved and said “great finally I did it, now I don’t have to surf ever again”.
Laura chilling outside our beach bungalow