Agua Verde to Isla Coronados

Goats in town, Agua Verde. One of our older guide books describes Agua Verde as overrun with goats. Not really true, but the cheese is very good.

Our next stop was Agua Verde with SV Jo. We anchored in the northwest part of the bay, and they settled into the central part, nearer town. We met up to eat at the restaurants in town. On our first night in, we tried one of the restaurants on the beach, Faro San Marcial, that had a couple of young men sitting at the other table. The waitress took our order and soon after, the young men took off. They came back shortly with a grocery bag that looked like it contained our dinner ingredients. They were doing the grocery run. The next day we all went for tacos on the beach at the other restaurant. The fish tacos at Brisa del Mar will now be on our list as a must do every time we’re in the area.

The welcome to Agua Verde sign. The big sign tells what’s available in town, but not necessarily where they are located. We eventually found the tiendas, tiny grocery stores, but we did have to ask for local help to locate one of them.

Clockwise starting top left: Gypsy at anchor (the boat on the left); the sign for the last part of the road going down to the beach that reads Peligroso solo 4×4 (danger 4×4 only – even that was optimistic); different views from the road. Once past the sign the road isn’t too rough.

From where Gypsy was anchored, you can dinghy into town, or walk up the road that goes around the cove. We hiked the road into town. It was definitely not a road you could walk in flipflops and the maximum driving speed on most of it would be 5 mph, assuming you had the ground clearance to actually be able to drive it. There were some campers on the beach that actually made it down. The walk in had spectacular scenery with many of the plants in bloom. When we got into town, we hit two of the three small tiendas in hopes of goat cheese. No luck. We were told it was dry season, probably because there were baby goats.

Spring in the desert. The flowering bush in the top left photo is Ironwood and the
cactus with the bloom on the lower left is an Old Man Cactus.

We also walked to the small cemetery over the hill mentioned in the guidebook. It was a small family plot, located seemingly in the middle of nowhere. At a fork in the path you could wander through a palm grove that had big, curving palms on the ground.

Looking down on the cemetery. It turned out to be a a small, family cemetery that was showing signs of neglect and how harsh the climate here can be.`

Palms on the ground. You can see how big the trunks are with Bill standing by them. We could only guess why they were growing horizontally, strong winds and saturated ground, maybe from a hurricane. That might be why they were on the ground, but the curving trunks were strange.

Other animal life in Agua Verde. The pig was tied up and asleep in the shade of someone’s front yard.

The next day, we headed on to Puerto Escondido, while Jo’s destination was Candeleros to check out golfing options at the resort there.

Fishing on the way to Puerto Escondido. Nina refers to this as catch and release salad. It was the only thing she caught.

PE has changed since we left. Rates have increased. There are more large motor yachts. And there is construction on the seawall entering the harbor for a cruise ship dock. The channel and the Elipse are getting dredged. The restaurant is now run by the marina, and the prices there have gone up, too. We spent a couple of nights on a mooring ball and headed back out. Before we left, we caught up on laundry, showers, reliable internet, and with friends.

The south side of Isla Coronados was lovely and we had it to ourselves. We saw dolphins while we were out in the dinghy and were joined by a glass-bottomed tour boat that kept driving through the pod and a panga that stayed back from the pod. The other boats left, and we got some more dolphins! And bees looking for fresh water.