We traveled out of Puerto Escondido with another guest from our guest house there, Sheila, down the coast a couple of hours to Mazunte. Sheila had found this great little hostel right on the beach and insisted we had to stay there with her. It doesn’t have a name yet (UPDATE: it's called Hostal Colibri) and was just reopened a few weeks ago, but the place where we’re staying (50 pesos per person per night, plus 5 pesos kitchen usage/p/n) is pretty nice. Some of the rooms are ultra-ultra-basic and musty, but the new owner Steve is working on it and it had a to offset that there is a deck that looks out over the water and steps that lead down to the sand. Oh, and a fairly nice book swap that I am enjoying. Absolutely nothing else to do in town, but really… what else more do you need? Sheila unfortunately had to head out of town the next day (hope all is well!), which was unfortunate but meant we could move up to her old room (sorry). It’s up a ladder through a trap door at the top of the hostel where you can see the waves out the window and listen to them all night. It even has a convenient hole in the roof where the morning sun shines /right/ in my face at an unknown (we lost our alarm clock in Poza Rica and still haven’t found a decent replacement) but relatively acceptable time to get up in the morning. They’re planning to fix that soon since if it rains, then a hole in the roof sucks...but as long as it doesn’t rain, I kind of like it.
So we moved up into the attic, and I went out to play in the waves. The beach here is very different: after you go out very far, it gets very rocky – a little smaller than fist-sized, it seemed. And they swirl every time a wave comes along, which generally gave the effect of being in a washing machine with a bunch of boxing midgets. But I looked around a bit, and found a part of the beach that stays sandy farther out.
The other thing about the rocks is that they mean it’s relatively deep here, and so the waves break closer to shore. I had noticed this before, but learned it first hand when I got caught up in a nice big wave I thought I could use to propel me back into shore until I realized it was going to break almost on the sand. My shoulder got jammed into the ground -- really hard -- and my back snapped over top in an uncomfortable way. Then I had to awkwardly lurch, on all-4s-minus-1 and with a stiff back, out of the froth before the next wave knocked me around some more.
It was the most acute pain I’ve ever experienced in my life -- I honestly thought I had broken a bone in my shoulder somewhere, and my arm was all-but immobile. And I assumed I had thrown my back out along with it. But I wasn’t concussed and seemed to still be relatively mobile, so held my shoulder and made my way back up to the room. I called up to Petraand she started coming down the steps, and I told her I had hurt myself really bad. And Petra sat down on the steps and said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
And that’s how I knew that Petra /really/ loved me.
I know how much she loves me from other times, too; over the years we’ve both shared experiences where we’ve shown how much we care for one another. But it just showed me the real depth of her feelings again that being able to move Petra, who is normally the most here’s-the-plan-now-move person you could ever hope for in a clutch, to the point of illness just because I had hurt myself.
Then she got back up and we hobbled down to talk to Steve, who looked at my shoulder and said he didn’t think it was broken and things should be okay. But Petra still felt really ill all the next day, which I’m /really/ sorry about. I love her, too, and definitely don’t want her to go through that again and so will try to think things out more fully from now on.
So we kept an eye on it the first night and applied an ice-aspirin-tiger balm strategy. Of course, our room is at the top of a ladder but the bathroom is at the bottom, and swinging on and off the ladder was a bit tricky. My back was also stiff and sore, so movement in general was out for a day, and Petra was wonderful in looking after me. But we stayed pretty much completely inside our room for a couple of days.
So now I feel like we’ve become the old crazy couple in the attic, the ones that make the creepy moaning sounds but whom no one ever sees -- except for sometimes, late at night, in front of the book swap. But the shoulder has healed way faster than I thought it would; it still hurts, but a couple days later and I’ve pretty much got full mobility back and at this rate in a few more all will be back to normal.
I don’t mind staying.
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