We ended up staying five nights at Lo de Marcos, we just couldn’t pull ourselves away from the beach and the town.  It was so easy to stay.  Every day or so a man would come by with a truck full of vegetables for sale, and one day two pretty young women quickly talked Derek into buying some fresh lobster, which we cooked up that night for dinner.

Fresh lobster, couscous and veggies.

On our last night there we went with some fellow campers into town for some tacos.  We ate great tacos, had a beer and then visited a churro stand for desert.  The entire evening cost us about 10 or 12 CAD…when does that ever happen at home?

But it was time to move on;  if we don’t keep driving we will never make it to South America.  So we headed south through Puerta Vallarta and then towards the coast to camp at a small hotel north of the small fishing village of Tehualmixtle.  The beach was truly spectacular, miles of sand, interesting cliffs and rock formations in the water and a noticeable lack of tourists.  The surf was too rough when we were there for swimming, but I guess it was still good for surf casting as we did get to see a 25 lb or so rooster fish that one of the hotel patrons managed to reel in.

The view from the back of our camper.

Looks ideal in the photos, but the spot that the hotel had us park was next to a construction site and a small pile of garbage, and for 300 pesos per night, without electricity, we thought we could do better.

We continued down the coast to Punta Perula, a small fishing town with a campground on the beach that had been recommended to us by a few people.

Punta Perula

The camp at Punta Perula has maybe 20 sites, many of which are occupied for the winter by snowbirds from Canada and the United States.  Some of the people gather each day on a covered deck for “happy hour”, and we were invited to attend.  We immediately hit it off with a few of the longer term residents, and that night went for dinner with two of them, a couple from Nelson, British Columbia.  We so enjoyed our night out with them, and we were invited back to their trailer that evening for more stories and a night cap.

The next day, after a swim, we found a restaurant on the beach with a lot of Mexican tourists in it, and ordered some drinks and fresh oysters…11 for 120 pesos….was suppose to be a dozen, guess that got lost in translation.  Piper was able to hang with us at the restaurant, but she definitely needs some etiquette training, as every table was a potential source of extra calories.  Later Derek played frisbee with some the guys from the campground on the beach.  Kind of a perfect afternoon.

We ended up joining the couple from Nelson and another couple from Vancouver for dinner the next night.  The conversation was easy and we wish we could have had more time to hear about their past adventures and their current passions.  Over our two night stay at Punta Perula we met cancer survivors,  a holistic nutritionist, a yoga teacher, a former helicopter pilot who had worked all over the world, a man who helped prove the tectonic plate theory by mapping the ocean floor around Hawaii, and others with stories that we didn’t have a chance to unearth.  Interesting group of people with a real sense of community among them.

But that is it for beaches for a while.  We are headed inland to the central mountain communities of Mexico!