Sunrise on Wednesday, January 1

Christi woke up at 0500. Keith woke up at 0600. Both were grouchy and out of sorts all day from not getting a full night of sleep. 

Here is a photo of the cute little birds that keep pooping all over Kosmos. 

When Eric rinsed down the boat this morning, he was horrified to find that they were building a nest aboard!

Yesterday, Eric had stopped by the marina office to find out about booking a tour and doing our paperwork to check out of Mexico. The office had closed early for the holiday. He checked again this morning – the office was closed today for the holiday too. 

We decided to head south to Playa Linda to get lunch and check out the area. From what we could tell from the online map, most of the beach side of Playa Linda was lined with homes on long skinny lots, with a public beach near the end of the stretch. 

Not wanting another bad meal, we picked a restaurant that seemed to be popular, called Villas de las Orcas. We made a right turn onto the highway from the marina entrance. We passed the entrance to the navy base, and shortly thereafter, the buildings along the beach-side highway became residential, and most of the homes were higher-end. The other side of the street was less consistent, with many vacant lots, some properties that looked to be agricultural, and all types of homes, ranging from nice to dilapidated. 

After only a few miles, we pulled into one of the residential properties along the beach, which had a big sign indicating it was a restaurant. We immediately realized this was a day-resort. There was a pool, palapas and chairs, hammocks strung between trees, and lots of people playing along the water on the beach. A large sign was posted that listed the fees to use each of the various amenities.

While the resort had a lot of people milling about, the restaurant portion was mostly empty — which we took as a bad omen regarding how good the food may be. We decided to leave as soon as we realized the restaurant was cash-only — we didn’t think we had enough cash with us for a meal here.

We checked online and saw there was taco stand that looked popular across the street from the public beach, so we hopped back in the car and continued south. We lucked out and found a parking spot with relatively little difficulty, which was surprising since there were so many cars around. The taco stand was actually a “real” restaurant. It also had a pool that was packed with people and was blaring incredibly loud music. Something about the place made us uncomfortable, so we decided to keep looking around. We passed a few more restaurants as we walked towards the beach, and all of them had pools crowded with people. 

Along the edge of the sand was a walkway lined with palapas on both sides. 

Most of the palapas housed venders. Some were food stalls making food, some selling merchandise, particularly beach merchandise. There were some palaces that were simply seating areas, which were all occupied by groups. The beach itself was packed with people, too. 

After seeing Playa Linda, a few things made more sense now. Tapacula was a city of 500,000 and it didn’t have a beach — clearly, when people from Tapachula wanted to go to the beach, they went to Puerto Madero and/or Playa Linda. Since it was a day trip for people from Tapacula, that explained why there were so many restaurants but so few hotels. We realized that the restaurants with pools probably primarily made their money from pool fees and beverages – the food was probably a secondary source of revenue.  

We also had another realization that was hard to wrap our mind around: it was January and in the low 90s Fahrenheit. This was the coldest it got in this part of the world! 

The setting was too chaotic for us, so we retreated back to the car. We headed back to the Baos, the restaurant in the marina, for lunch. While it was also busy, it was not at all chaotic, and we knew the food would be good. Eric ordered a regional dish called Cochito, which the description said was pork bathed in the local mole sauce:

Christi had ordered bananas flambee, hoping it would be done tableside. To her disappointment, they made it in the kitchen. It was served with a vanilla-lime ice cream, giving it a more tropical twist than the traditional plain vanilla

Since Christi and Keith were tired, we spent the rest of the day puttering around the boat.