When we last left off Mur, Margee and I had gone up to Hierve el Agua for a dip in the springs up there. It was fantastic.
Duh – that shouldn’t be a surprise  …

After more eating {which really is never ending on trips with the Perdues 🙂 } we returned to Oaxaca for the night and then headed down to Mihuatlán the next day. Mur and I totally lucked out – we met up with one of Margee’s friends who happened to have a car and loved to shop 🙂 he showed us some of his favorite places between Oaxaca and Mihuatlán to find amazing Mexican crafts. AMAZING. I couldn’t help myself – everything was so beautiful! And all of it was handmade and super cheap. I feel like I got quite a few things but seriously, I wish I bought more!! I know what I’m doing next time I go down – shopping lots!

There was black pottery …

… amazing wood carvings! 

This one is actually not from this trip but was a gift a few Christmases ago. This at least gives you the idea about the amazing pieces we were looking at!

… lastly, there were textiles. Quite possibly the best purchase I made on the whole trip was this shawl. It is really hard to see from this but it is really large, warm and wooly and of course, beautiful! It was amazing up in the mountains…

So after a long day of shopping, driving and eating we crashed {Thanks Salvador!!!} and headed up to San Jose Del Pacifico the next day. With my rusty Spanish skills and a pretty archaic map (Thanks Margee! 🙂 ) Mur and I got on a bus instead of taking a taxi up there. But hey – it was an experience!!

When we got up there, we were amazed at how beautiful it was!

We stayed at Cabin 17 which was waaay down the side of the mountain. A good workout, that’s for sure! And town was really close so it was nice to be able to just trek our way there …

In town I felt like we hit the Jackpot! While I love Mexican food, I also love just plain old bread. And wine, instead of beer. It was what I needed right at that time and we found it all in this tiny tiny town.

We came back to the cabin, plunked down on our deck, I took photos, Mur drank wine and we chatted until it got dark and cold. It was amazing! We then ordered food and was even able to have it brought to our room! It was one of the best meals I had the entire trip – soup with rice and a big huge chunk of chicken. Simple but again, soooo amazing! 

ha … gotta love self timers! hooray! happy Mexico trip 🙂

In the morning we made the windy-steep-curvy-mountainous ride down to Mazunte which was a lot less nauseating than I had anticipated. I had worked myself into a tizzy hearing the horror stories of pretty much everyone getting sick on their way to the coast but really, it wasn’t too bad! And boy, the ride was WORTH it!  … see for yourself!

When we got there the surf was so huge that it wasn’t safe to swim in this area. That worked out well since TropicalBStorm-LeatherFace rained on our parade and we had to head to the other beach anyways. We got to our abode for the next few nights and saw this from our porch:

not.too.shabby! It was worth the hot and tiring hiking despite what my facial expressions said at the time 🙂

And the beach was also the place that Mur fell in LOVE with Piña Coladas. As a note, they are definitely better had on the beach in Mexico instead of your kitchen in the dead of winter in Minnesota. Maybe we can compromise and take a pitcher of goodness down to the beach in Minnesota this summer. I bet that would be good!

And just for good measure, how about one more photo from the beach…

… ok! Part 2 – in the books. Stay tuned for the 3rd and final chapter of ‘Mur and Jess see Mexico.’