May 14, 2016
If you visit a butterfly farm/zoo and you don’t see any butterflies floating around at the entrance….do you think they’re just being kept in cages?”!
Cycling Stats
Start Point: Mazunte, Oaxaca, Mexico
Destination: Barra Copalita, Oaxaca, Mexico
76.9 km trip, 6:08 time, 49.6 km/h maximum speed, 12.5 km/h average speed
Route Description:
You climb for 7 kilometres to get back to the highway. Once you’re on the highway it remains one lane in either direction with no shoulder for another 40 kilometres. As you near the tourist city of Huatulco the road widens to include a shoulder similar to that on a cuota highway. You enjoy this for about another 10 kilometres and after the turnoff for Huatulco it’s back to the no shoulder single lane in either direction. You climb continually through the day with undulating hills of no more than 200 meters. There are however lots of climbs and you end up climbing more than a 1000 meters through the day and drop the same 1000 meters. There are many towns and stores available along the way for food and drinks.
Accommodations:
We found a hopsedeje in the town of Copolita for 200 pesos. There is also a hotel on the highway that wanted 500 pesos.
What happened…
Andrew writes: For whatever reason, I’m sure it was a good one at the time, we were up at o’dark-thirty, and ended up spending about 30 minutes waiting for the sun to come up so that we could start cycling this morning. We had a lot of ground to cover, and we know that the winding, coastal road can be a challenge, especially combined with the heat and humidity of this part of the Oaxaca coast. It was a pleasant enough ride, although truthfully there isn’t anything that really stands out for me. It seemed as though after we passed Pachutla, that we were out of eye-shot of the ocean, and I lost track of the number of times we would coast down a hill, turn a corner and start back up the next. Trying to add a little something something, I spotted a sign for a Mariposa (butterfly) and Iguana park. It looked interesting, and we cycled about 1.5km off of the highway to check it out. We got about as far as the entrance, and the man operating the park wanted 100MX each to enter, but it would cover camping too. On one hand I wasn’t ready to fork out 2/3 of my daily budget for this dilapidated looking park, and I didn’t even see any butterflies flying around or iguanas lounging about near the entrance. Of course the man said they were just inside a bit further, but I wasn’t buying it – quite literally. I also didn’t think that we had the food/water on hand that I usually do for camping, since I had hoped to be in a nice air conditioned suite at the end of the day – and so we turned around and went back to the road.
There are two Copalitas, we stopped in Puente Copalita for an icy cold Coca-Cola, and started asking about lodging options. Sure enough, just a few km down towards the coast were all manner of air-conditioned hotel rooms, at about $100+CDN per night. Ugh, no thanks. So we crossed the bridge (the puente), into Barra Copalita and found a posada. It was a little run-down, and there was only a fan to keep us cool. It was right beside the busy highway. It was downright awful, and I don’t know why Amanda agreed to it. In the end though, it worked out fine. I got to making friends and practicing English/Spanish with the owner Ernie, and made the best of it.
Amanda writes:I don’t have much to add to Andrew aside from I agreed to it because the price was right. And I didn’t find it that bad. As Andrew said it worked out fine.