One day this winter, some Canadians who I was practicing my tour guiding skills on - something halfway between clients and friends - told me one of them had fallen ill and there was an open spot I could take on an all day snorkeling excursion with Hurricane Divers. I'd snorkeled most of the bays on my own over the past year, but had never done a proper tour of the bays by boat yet. After doing some snorkeling at the most distant bay in the Huatulco chain, San Agustin, we were motoring back toward our lunch stop at Bahia Chachacual. I saw an unmistakable sight ahead and called out "whale!" We slowed the boat and saw that a mother and calf were occasionally coming to the surface near a submerged rock outcropping. They never seemed to leave the area, suggesting that maybe they were using it as a scratching post.

    Before long the calf seemed to realize it had observers and began to demonstrate its breaching skills. One time after another it went sailing out of the water, to land with a colossal splash. Even a very young humpback whale calf is a large creature, but the size of the adults defies belief up close. They go from about 40-50 feet long and can weigh around 40 tons!!! I had seen humpback whales on a whale watching trip in the Dominican Republic, but had never stumbled across them up close like this by accident. The mother could have smashed our 25' panga to pieces effortlessly with a mere flick of her tail. Some of our passengers began to worry about that when our observation began to verge on outright harassment, as the local driver chased after the whales every time they surfaced.

    Humpbacks pass through Huatulco every winter, but the locals know very little about them and even the Canadian divemaster was too absorbed with getting video for the business to recognize that we were starting to seriously piss off the mother. At first most of us were caught up too in how incredible it was to be so close to such magnificent creatures. But when we got so close at one point that the mother inserted herself between the boat and her calf and started bodily pushing the calf away from us, we got concerned at the trauma we were causing. Humpbacks don't feed during the winter in their tropical calving grounds. The mother has to depend on all her reserves stored away from the rest of the year up north to nurse the calves through the winter. A calf requires about 50 to 100 gallons of milk a day, which is a bit taxing for a momma! While nursing, calves grow at an amazing rate. They add another inch and 100 pounds ever day. Humpback whale milk is one of the richest milks in the world, nearly 50 percent fat. Not for the diet conscious! In any event, the last thing you want to do is cause a mother extra exertion during the calving time, nor cause a possibly weak calf any stress. To my surprise, I had learned that killer whales show up occasionally in Huatulco in the winter as well, and they like nothing more than ambushing humpback calves during their journey back up north.

    It finally took a minor mutiny among the passengers to convince our boat to back off and leave the whales be. I had learned in the Dominican Republic from a whale expert there how difficult a time she'd had educating the locals and establishing rules for the whale watching boats. It's one thing to sit there at idle and let humpbacks play up close to the boat if they choose to, but you should never hound them by chasing them all over. In this case, it was all our responsibility who knew better to speak up, and we were less annoyed with the driver than the divemaster who should have told his driver to back off.

    We had a spectacular lunch at Playa India, an isolated little beach in the heart of the National Park, with some great snorkeling. Pauline, the English wife of the Dutch owner of Hurricane Divers, makes gourmet lunches for all their snorkeling tours and the food is far beyond what you'd normally expect of a picnic lunch. Our next stop was one of my favorite bays, Cacaluta, which I normally hike into. This is the bay the trio ended up at in the great film Y Tu Mama Tambien. It's also home to one of the best coral reefs of all the Huatulco bays. We thought we'd had as perfect a day as one could desire, but one more surprise was in store. Coming near the cliffs by the Santa Cruz lighthouse, a mile from the marina, a juvenile humpback whale was cavorting happily. It put on its own aerial display that we enjoyed from a more respectful distance, before finally motoring home.  I told my friend Rolf who had to bow out of the trip that I normally would never wish sickness upon anyone, but I had to admit that his misfortune was my fortune and I wouldn't have missed this day for the world!

I was considering writing a telenovela based around these girls they provided so much never-ending drama and entertainment. They were spending a month working as chef trainees at resorts in Huatulco as part of their chef school training. Five girls and one gay friend of theirs were all packed into a small two bedroom condo two floors above me.  Some of my memories from the time:

Day one. The girls piled into my car and we went on beach and snorkeling adventures yesterday all day. Later on they all left to work at the hotel except Maru, who seemed to be the one who wanted me to herself in the first place.  I’d ignored them when my visiting friend Max got drunk with them one night, reasoning they were more suited to his age. Due to a miscommunication, I thought for the whole time they were in town that they were between 17-19 years old, rather than 20-23. Maru and I traded all the standard banter about why we were single,  Maru because all men were dogs and cheaters and liars and me because I occupy my time with confused girls telling me these things. We went to the movies with her friend Itsi after snorkeling, but wasted time eating and talking til after the movie started so came back to their place and started drinking with her roommate Tannia. Maru had told me earlier that she thought Max and I were gay. She thought I'd ignored them when Max was drinking with them because I was jealous he was spending time with them. Telenovela imagination!  

   The best part was Alejandra, the hot mother of 3 whose husband finally showed up a few days ago, looking with a wide-eyed stare through her window at me carrying Tannia up the stairs on my shoulders. And that was without her able to see the bottle of Oso Negro vodka I was carrying and the grape juice from the tienda. But what she saw pretty much ruined my reputation anyway, I’m sure! The moral sacrifices I have to make for my writing material! Maru got peeved in the end because of how much of a caballero I'd been to Tannia, and she told Tannia she was a slut for wearing her pajamas around me. At some point in the evening when Tannia had been laying on her bunkbed talking to the rest of us, her breasts "accidentally" fell out of her shirt. I was looking toward the other girls at the time, but they felt sure I must have seen it and were equally sure that it was one of Tannia's "whoops, I did it again" moments. We went out again late at night searching for more Fresca to mix with the vodka, and I had to carry Tannia around some more because she was pretty much passed out by then and had no shoes on. I was being a perfect gentleman, just trying to take care of my inebriated chiquitas, but that made it worse with Maru!

Day Two. Tannia spends all afternoon here chatting with me in my place because Mariela and Maru won’t talk to her for different reasons and everyone’s off at work or out anyway. She speaks in a low slur that is almost impossible to comprehend, which I find out isn't just me. Hardly any of the other girls can understand her half the time either. I show Tannia around and she complains that my bed frame that I built is too high, so that she has to almost leap up on to it. I tell her it's perfect for me. She sits on the edge of the bed and reiterates it's too high. The obvious thing to do at this point is to demonstrate to her how well-suited it is to me, but I am not so easily ensnared by feminine wiles. She will not have me this easily. (My male friends all say in unison - "you did nothing? Are you insane?!!!) Maru doesn’t say hi to me down at the corner tonight when we’re both working on our laptops so I assume she’s pissed off at me over Tannia. So much for being honorable. I’m trying to cook beans later when Maru knocks on my door tonight and asks to talk. She lays it out again that she’s only pissed at Tannia for being a lush and flaunting her breasts and her pajama-clad self in front of a visitor and that she (Maru) feels like the mama of the group and thinks that behavior is unacceptable. Though she stresses she’s no prude. I am still dubious at her denials of jealousy since pajamas hardly strike me as the most inappropriate clothing in the world. Then Maru explains she’s divorced with a kid and her ex-husband is coming tomorrow who she still gets along with fine and he won’t have anything to do when she’s at work so could I please hang out with him and talk to him some because he’s about the same age as me? WTF!! All this results in me burning my rice. This material can't get any better. My telenovela will be called Bayside 008.  Among my neighbors there’s a Customs official, a Federale, and a guy who works for Continental. And of course the radiant Alejandra, who I need to stir into the pot some more. The first time I saw her she passed by my open door about four times in a few hours and looked directly in at me each time. The last time she passed she made a sort of open mouth expression of curiosity that nearly put a dagger through my heart. Married women aren't allowed to do things like that to susceptible bachelors like me. Especially ladies with three children that can't act on it.

Day 3 with the girls of 208. Things have thankfully reached an even keel with my promotion to fatherhood and my moral compass is no longer threatened. I spent the whole night chatting by the pool with Maru and Mariela, and Maru declared that I was like their new father and I suddenly had 6 young daughters. (They added another friend from home who isn't here. "And you know how expensive girls are!" they said.) I told them I was pobrecito papa, I had nothing but sage advice in bad Spanish for them. Mariela declared me Bad Daddy, Papi Malo.  It became a fine thing of mirth, our variations on a telenovela plot where they all show up at my gringo door and say "Papi! Your long lost daughters are here!"  I'm tragically sorry I missed when three of them came banging on my door at 11:30 the night before last because there was a ghost in their apartment. I can't hear the door very well from my bed so I probably ignored it as coming from somewhere else - or thought there was a ghost in my apartment and was ignoring it - but I was still awake then. What man doesn't dream of opening his door late at night to frantic beautiful girls? And here I ignored their plight. My Spanish is improving at a staggering rate now I have them giving me lessons everyday whether I like it or not. Maru - who has a smattering of very broken spoken English - had me rattle off a long story in English to see how much she understood, and she faithfully recited the thing back to me almost perfectly in Spanish. Just her memory of everything I said was astounding, even more so getting it right language-wise. Too many ugly Americans make the mistake of thinking if people can't speak the language, they can't understand it and talk freely in front of them. All too often they understand exactly. Though I can speak Spanish far better than she can English, I could not do as well at translating when she told me a story.

  Three weeks later...

I let them scour every file they could on my computer one night in search of dirty secret pictures, porn, whatever they could find. Very few guys would allow girls to do that, but I keep my computer secrets well hidden. Maru spent a frustrated hour at it and couldn’t find anything. I told them I was pure as the driven snow. So as not to leave them completely empty handed, I had to point them in a direction where they could find an old drunken Tahoe shot of my bare ass mountain biking naked into my bathroom. 

After one too many Daddy Yankee Taxi rides of taking the whole group to the beach when I only invited a few, resulting in an altering of plans so I had to take them to the local tourist beach and go off and play by myself because I had no interest in their group dynamic, I swore off them and decided petulantly not to deal with them til they left in a few days.  But I was roasting a large chicken the night before they left and Maru walked over to the thatched hut by the pool where I was sitting and fondly rubbed my bald head and I thought, dammit, how can I cold shoulder such a cute little chiquita who does that? So I had her share dinner with me. She was very sad she was leaving and I joked to her and Itsi who stopped by later that I’d find her stowed away in a chest in my living room after my parents arrived. They’d say “what is this?” and I’d explain “Es mi chiquita. All the houses here have a chiquita.”  Itsi thought that wildly hilarious, though Maru only grudgingly so. Good to know I can tickle funny bones in Spanish now. Just when I thought I was cursed with daddy-hood, the girls are sitting around my place with all their luggage yesterday after vacating their apartment, and Maru thinks she should give me a little parting gift. "Quieres una tanga?" she asks.  I hear wrong and am perplexed.  A conga?  "Sexy underwear, Papi," Mariela translates beside me.  Maru apparently thinks some of her thong underwear would be nice for her Papi Malo, and opens up her suitcase and displays a few numbers. I’m looking at Mariela to see if they’re being offered to her. Maybe I’ve heard wrong because I get about 25 percent of what the girls say when they talk in their normal chatter, but they appear to be offered at me.  I offer non-committal shrugs to each offering, afraid of embarrassing myself - is it a Mexican custom for saucy young ladies to give their Papi their scanties? - and just when she seems to have settled on some she decides she likes them too much and decides to buy me something at the market, which ends up being a coffee mug (after I’ve just bought 6 freakin’ mugs at the market for myself).  Damn! I could have saved myself the future trouble of every guy's embarrassing scenario of a girl discovering another girl's panties in the house by boldly starting a "wall of panties" so that they were there up front. There would be no hope of explaining I'd acquired them innocently anyway.  I could have yet lived up to Hunter S Thompson’s maxim of “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”. 

    I knew of the existence of this canyon long before I was able to find a way into it. The last and largest waterfall on the Class V Zimatan River whitewater kayak run - which has been said may be the best kayak run in Mexico - pours into a small twisting granite canyon before spreading out into a tree-lined calm and gentle river. I had heard the waterfall from the road above numerous times on my way up to the Copalitilla waterfalls much higher in the mountains, but the drop-off from the road was so steep and the view blocked by trees that I could never see down to it. I assumed it was only accessible by kayakers who had the skills to navigate the treacherous eight mile run from the upper slot canyon all the way down to there. Then I saw a mention of a place in a Canadian adventure website that I knew could only be that canyon, and I realized there must be a way into it from lower down in the valley.

      One day I found a turnoff from the Zimatan-Xadani road and nursed my Subaru around boulders, rocks, and tree stumps to make my way down to the river. There was a well-worn path used by local Zimatan villagers that led upstream, crossed the river, and climbed up the canyon walls. I was dumbstruck by the size and beauty of the canyon. I had seen kayaking photos of the waterfall, but had no idea about the majesty of the place. Cupped and chiseled water-worn walls of granite twisted in all kinds of marvelous shapes. The rock was dangerously slippery in tennis shoes, and I made a note to hike it in bare feet or grip soles in the future. Above the waterfall a trail continued upstream for miles along the beautiful boulder-strewn river, with lush green trees on either side providing a striking contrast to the brown hills of dry season above. Somewhere along the way I found a nice armadillo shell that was long dried out and smell-free that I brought home to hang on my wall.

     Over the next few months I brought a variety of people up there, and the awestruck wonder was universal. Despite there being any number of other incredibly gorgeous natural places around Huatulco, most people declared it the highlight of their trip. Because of the difficulty of the rock canyon trail, I took some older folks up in kayaks so they could paddle up to the base of the falls, and that worked out perfectly. Another group that had people that couldn't swim, I had them wade upriver til it got too deep and then sat them in a kayak and towed them up to the falls by swimming.

    The more I brought friends up, the more we explored and tried new things. With some adventurous Norwegian friends, I tested some of the deeper pools for depth and jumped higher and higher off the canyon walls into them. It was a holiday weekend, and a large Mexican family observed with mirth from the shallows as Glenn jumped off the highest rock into the river. Cries of "otra! otra! otra!" immediately rang out upon landing. We joked that in a guidebook one day there would be a comment about a special feature of the Zimatan being the rare sighting of daredevil Norwegian cliff jumpers.

     Over time we found new places to jump in at the base of the waterfalls, and we discovered there was a cave behind the falls you could swim into with some effort. From there you could swirl around with the current while a thunderous torrent poured down just feet away from you. Up above the falls, there were shallow pools in the river where you could lay with mini-falls massaging your back and shoulders. The last time up was after the first rains of the season, and it took all the swimming power we had to make it to the top pool beneath the falls. A few more rains and that will be inaccessible for the rest of the rainy season as the water flow increases dramatically in the river and the waterfall becomes a truly formidable cascade. The first few pools then become frothing chaos.

   The great thing is that no tours go there, and few people know about it but the Zimatan villagers and other clued-in locals. Most of the time we have it to ourselves, unless it's a weekend or holiday. On the way out, one of my favorite lunch places, El Sauce, sits on the river by the highway and fantastic plates of chicken, pork, and other dishes all go for about 35 pesos apiece, or $3.50. The pitchers of agua de sandia (watermelon juice) are like a slice of heaven. They also are quick to offer shots of mezcal, housed like moonshine in large glass jugs or plastic soda bottles. Some of my friends despair about the pet coatimundi (raccoon like creature) they keep, but the owners raised Chondo from when it was small and when released from its leash it doesn't venture far - just kills chickens and terrorizes and destroys everything in sight so they have to keep it on a chain.

Well we arrived in the Bahias de Huatulco here in Oaxaca State on the 6th, from Puerto Escondido. The first night we got pre-game drinking started with a solid game of pool against Mexicans as we promised...unfortunately our competition was a 15 year old girl and a 9 year old boy, and the game was not 8 ball it was whoever can put all of the balls down first...yup, we are winners. Anyways after dominating the best Mexico could offer we headed onto a sick niteclub here in Huatulco called La Papaya, fancy, nice sitdown place where everyone stand up everywhere and dances, and chicks in bikinis swim in aquariums at the front of the bar, pretty crazy place...or as its slogan states...La Papaya - Nice Club...like come on, did no one get some english help on the translation, lol, it is officially mine and dylans running joke of the trip... add nice to the beginning of everything.

The next day i was feeling like a bag of poo, and we headed out to an amazing beach recommended to us by some locals from the nite before, called Playa San Agustin, it was awesome, really thick white sand and lots

of coral reef...we snorkelled and saw lots of crazy things, schools of fish, other underwater thingamajiggers. Dylan also got his finger bit by a fish...he then proceeded to get his revenge by eating its cousin for a meal an hour later. Didn't do much at night, just chilled, we were both dead from being in the sun all day at 30 degree plus temperatures.

Today, we headed out on a tour, first stop was a Giant Turtle Museum, was not bad, pretty big thingers...second we went to a beach called Playa Zipolite, its called a nude beach, but most people there are wearing clothing, there were a few not though....the waves here were huge and me and dylan took a pounding from some 12-15 foot waves. Lastly we headed to a lagoon, where crocodiles can be found, and we had a couple sweet encounters and went on somewhat of a jungle safari in this canoe boat thingy. Tonight we are going for some grub in the zocalo and hittin up a cafe on the street for some brews, as all the clubs are closed on sundays.

Giant Sea Turtle Museum
I named this one Akbar, just kiddin.

Mortimer the Crocodile
I made that name up too...

Me and the Croc
I am the new crocodile hunter

Jungle Safari Boat Tour
Us and a Finnish couple and their kids in the boat

Me Holding a Baby Croc
I can wrassle this one.

Me Dylan and our Lagoon Boat Captains
They spoke zero english, and would constantly point and yell at things...we figured that it meant there was some creature that we should pretend to see and nod at.

The trip that made me fall in love with my new home.

I fell in love with Huatulco, it was very pristine and natural.  Tourism has not yet taken control of it.

Las Bahías de Huatulco, "The Bays of Huatulco" is divided into 3 distinct areas: Crucecita, Santa Cruz and Tangolunda. Between the 36 Beautiful beaches are 9 Virgin Bays which can be accessed but are under ecological preservation. Main attractions of Huatulco would be the clear blue beaches, ecological tours, caves, waterfalls, fishing, snorkeling, watersports, market shopping and relaxation!! Locals offer private tours of the bays, waterfalls, mountains, snorkeling etc. I highly recommend this! If you enjoy fishing, whatever you catch can be brought back to your hotel and prepard by the chef for dinner.