Puerto Escondido: life is everywhere

Puerto Escondido is on the coast, on the Pacific Ocean. It's tropical. This means that it is always warm and humid this time of the year. The temperatures here fluctuate here little, probably 70 and 85 degrees F. The humidity and temperature drops a little overnight, and then rises all day. Honestly, we are sweaty most of the day, though (not surprisingly) the locals all seem much better adjusted to the temperatures than we are. People on the street are often wearing more clothes than we are, and no one seems to be perspiring. Everyone/everything moves slowly. We'll see if our bodies adjust at all over the next couple of months.

Being in the tropics also means that life is absolutely everywhere. We have arrived at the peak of the mango season. The trees throughout the city are heavy with the orange-yellow-reds-greens of mango. We all eat between 3 and 6 mangoes a day. Delicious and fragrant. They regularly crash with a loud bang onto the tin roof of our rental house. One tastes like pineapple and mango. Another like coconut and mango.

This is our backyard. Three huge trees. Right now, it is just like fall with apples in the Northwest, only more delicious and more dangerous. Look out for falling fruit.

Birds are also everywhere. They are unavoidable. Warblers, flycatchers, grackles, hummingbirds, orioles. Almost all of them are colorful and showy - some intensely so. Here a few photos of the birds that we see regularly:

black-vented oriole................................................altamira oriole


white-throated magie-jay......................boat-billed flycatcher

We wake up every morning to the surprisingly loud bark of geckos that are crawling across the inside walls of our house.


On the streets, we step over the industrious traffic of ants moving leaves and vegetation and other resources from their sources to their distant underground empires.

Here is a photo of Jeremiah next to a stick bug that was climbing around our front door.


And finally, here is a poem from Liesl. On her first day of school, her assignment was to write a poem. She chose, as her subject, the 2-ft. iguana that distracted her classmates during school that day - wandering along a wall with mango in its jaws.

Iguana, laughing at us in the afternoon sun
Moving his scales to the beat of his laughter, shimmering
The juice from the mango in his mouth drips down his chin,
Finding a warm place to "splat" on the cement wall below him
He tosses it up in the air then catches it again squeezing more juice out
Sensing danger, he slips away down the wall
To a safe shady spot.

(And in spanish, courtesy of google translator, for all of you bilingues)

Iguana, riéndose de nosotros en el sol de la tarde
Moviendo sus escamas al compás de su risa, brillando
El jugo de un mango en la boca gotea por la barbilla,
Encontrar un lugar cálido para "plaf" en la pared de cemento debajo de él
Él lo lanza en el aire y luego la atrapa de nuevo apretando más jugo
Presintiendo el peligro, que se escapa por la pared
Para un lugar con sombra segura.