The van with wings

Apologies for the delay in posting, the wifi/cell signal has been very spotty since the hurricane on Monday. We’ll get to that, but first I’d like to talk a bit about our journey to Puerto Escondido, as that was an interesting experience.

Before coming to Oaxaca, I did some research on how to best get to Puerto Escondido from Oaxaca City. There were 3 options:

Take a 40 min flight from Oaxaca City to Puerto Escondido
Rent a car and drive ~8 hours to PE. While it is not a far distance as the bird flies, there is a large mountain range between the two, causing this to be a much longer drive through zig zagging roads along sheer cliff faces.
Take a 10 hour overnight bus on the same zig zagging mountain roads

Given the options, it seemed like the flight was the clear winner here, so I decided to book us flights. At this point I realized there is only one airline, Aerotucan, that operates this flight and it only runs once a day, with 12 available seats. So I navigated to their website (which is only in Spanish and appears to have been built in 1993 and never updated since) and booked the last 2 tickets for our departure date (I think? I never received a confirmation email but took a screenshot of the confirmation page just in case).

We show up at the airport Saturday morning about 45 min before our flight (we read online, there is no reason to show up more than an hour in advance, as there will be nobody working the desk), checked in with our names and received hand written boarding passes, which was a first. When it was time to board, we walked out on the tarmac, to the smallest plane at the airport and climbed on board. I didn’t really realize how small this plane was until we actually got inside it. It was literally a van with wings. It had 4 rows with 3 seats each and everyone had their carry-on luggage in their laps. I never get nervous flying, but I’m not going to lie, sitting in this plane prior to take off had me a bit queasy and I did question whether this was the clear #1 option to get to Puerto Escondido.

Once we got in the air, it was an easy flight, with some amazing views of the mountain range down below. Before we knew it we were in hot and humid Puerto Escondido. We went and checked in at our Airbnb, where we learned that there was bad weather rolling in the following day. Not just any bad weather, but apparently the first named hurricane of the year, Agatha was coming to join the party. I actually didn’t even know that hurricanes could form on the Pacific side of Mexico, but apparently that is possible and this storm was looking to be the most powerful May hurricane that had formed in the Pacific ever.