Huatulco is also known as the Bahias de Huatulco. The bays stretch along the coastline for miles, and many of the western-most bays are part of a National Park. We purchased tickets to visit them as they are a sanctuary that requires a permit of 20 pesos a day per person, around $2.00 US. We{ll be heading up into those nice anchorages before leaving for El Salvador. We may skip anchoring and checking into Guatemala, but will travel there from El Salvador instead.

Huatulco is lovely. We have not had super hot weather here and breeze every day keeps things nice. We re-built the boards in our dingy and spruced her up plus are using the new motor we got in Alcapulco since the 20 year old one died. Other boat projects such as changing and washing sails haven{t been too labor intensive, plus you get wet as a bonus. The hard part comes when we tackle the deck to replace the wooden plugs as when you get further south, leaky plugs are a bear to fix since the climate won{t let things dry out, so it{s really impossible to get a good fix while down there.

Otherwise, we have walked a lot, Mike has his bike going and has done rides along the coast to find surf. He did this morning! The two towns, Santa Cruz and La Cruisisita are modern--this is a development of Fonatur, a Mexican effort to create places for cruise ships, marinas, towns to support hotels, etc. That makes everything clean and relatively modern with less unfinished buildings and more pavement. There are still places that somehow fail and stand vacant, but less of them. We also have explored the bays in the dingy, gotten together with friends on Our Tern, a family we met last year, who went all the way to the Galapagos and had lots to tell us about exploring all the countries in Central America. We got together for dinner and collected lots of great tips of things to do and places to go. At the marina now are a couple that live at the Balboa yacht club right by the canal. They are a wealth of knowledge about Panama.

Watch for photos of the Huatulco area and the turtle reserve which we will visit tomorrow.

In the first week of January, we traveled south and east along the coast from Zihuatanejo to Alcapulco. We didn{t expect to enjoy Acapulco as much as we did. It is a city of a million people, but nicely organized in areas that are easy to explore by walking and bus. The buses are airbrushed with different themes. Some probably violate copyrights in the US, but they make the trips interesting. Every bus ride is 4 pesos--about 40 cents, and for airconditioning it{s one cent more. Look for photos of the camions. Also, taxis are cute VW bugs that also have names and neon lights. We enjoyed a group from South America in the zocolo playing flute, drums and guitars one evening. We adventured int he city with our friends Marilyn and Brian on a boat called Icarian. They are canadenses--canadians. We went to a beach with lovely views of an island all within Acapulco, had a beach-side dinner of fish and enjoyed the evening, all a walk away from our boat. Also visited the fuerta de San Diego, a famous fort in Acapulco where the Manilla galleons came to trade from the orient. This trade route existed for over three hundred years between Manilla and Alcapulco as the colony of New Spain administered the spanish colony in Manilla. The museum inside the fort was wonderful--look for the photos. We also had some times swimming in the bay that were lovely. The water is refreshing and clean most everywhere. We did not do everything as towns further on were beconning us....

After about a week we headed to Puerto Escondido and Puerto Angel. We did have an overnight sail and did a lot of sailing along the way. These towns low key. Pto. Escondido is a surf town and Mike went out boogyboarding with a Canadian pal on a boat, Float on-- we were there with them alone in both towns. We didn{t stay long because we anchored on a sea mount and got our chain wrapped around a rock about 47 feet down. Once we got the chain up we decided to head out.

Puerto Angel is very small and charming with cliffs surrounding the bay. Lovely place to swim and snorkel. We had breakfast in town and walked all over. The navy came and boarded our boat. First time we had experienced that. The foot soldiers have to carry around heavy guns all the time and have heavy-duty boots as well. One of them nearly feel into the water and his gun scraped the side of our newly painted boat. They were somewhat gruff, searched around for a bit, not opening any cupboards, however, and then left. We were a bit worried about our 20 year old friends on the other boat, but their boarding went ok. Steve did have to provide an old expired American registration for them, because the Canadian one didn{t look official enough. Sometimes the language barrier leads to these situations! We headed on to Bahias de Huatulco and arrived here yesterday morning, only about a 5 hour trip from Puerto Angel.

It seems funny to be traveling almost due east into the sunrise. If you study a map of Mexico, you will see that Bahias de Huatulco is just up the coast from the Gulfo deTehauntepec, not too far from Guatemala. The T-peck for short, is our next big hurdle as it is sometimes very windy due to the winds coming throught the Chemela pass directly from the Carribean.