After sailing we went for holidays. In its true sense, rented a room at the beach on the Pacific coast of Mexico and did no more than feed ourselves with deliciously fresh fruits and vegetables all day long. It turned out that our chosen holiday town, Puerto Escondido, is a surfers dream place and so we did as well initiate our surfers career (that in my case ended up with the ear infection). No pictures of glamorous falls though, but believe us, it is a lot of fun!
Following some street photography from Puerto Escondido and Acapulco 🙂
Ready to discover Mexico we had a look at the website workaway.info to see if there are any interesting volunteering opportunities around.
“Nido de Aguilas”, the eagles’ nest, was our choice. It is a permaculture project lead by this German-Mexican family on a hill close to the town Mazunte. Their goal is to start a Perma school and teach locals about water conservation (building artificial lakes, collecting the rain water from the land and thanks to it grow your own food). It was the end of the dry season in there, indeed very dry.
Together with other volunteers we helped to build a commune house using natural materials: clay, wood , palm leaves. The roof was the most interesting part, we helped constructing a “palapa”, a roof made out of palm leaves. Everyday a couple of indigenous “palaperos” (age 80 something) from the villages in the mountains would come, climb the shaky structure and with an incredible fast manner tie prepared leaves. It was great to see the fruit of our work by the end of our staying in the “Nido”.
We slept in the nature, on a tree house with a view on the ocean, cooked tasty food on the fire everyday and in the afternoons enjoyed “wanna be hippie” community of Mazunte.
I discovered a local beach volleyball group and joined them every now and then. It was pretty easy to be in the moment: work in the morning, go down, have a game, meet people, have a beer, follow the “you know today there is a guy playing guitar in this new place….”, end up on the beach with random group of people by night, climb the hill back home, wake up in the morning , make fire, prepare coffee…. The passion fruit tree was a nice addition… you know, a little falling delicious fruit to start your day with.
Ah, we also made 30 kilograms of organic peanut butter (over 100 jars) and Antonio celebrated his birthday so we prepared a massive pizza in the clay oven and baked a chocolate cake, making the flour ourselves and using real cacao beans… and that is when we got to know how our chocolate is made and from that moment we were bound to follow our taste guts, all the way to the Guatemalan Jungle and a cacao plantation couple of months later. 🙂
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