Puerto Angel is a working fishing town. The main road is not paved and the amenities are basic, but it was a good home base for our week. (The main grocery store was well stocked with Principe cookies, of which we ate approximately three family-size boxes. For produce, we hit the region’s largest market, which takes place on Mondays in the nearby town of Pochutla.) There was a beach near the house, Playa Estacahuite, at the foot of those cliffs up there, a seven-or-so-minute walk past a few driveways and down a series of stone steps that made our knees wobbly. It was beautiful, a chain of small aquamarine coves with a few palapa restaurants on the sand, all serving seafood, cold beer, and whole coconuts with a straw for drinking. Our favorite beach, though - because that’s what you do on vacation: you devote your brainpower to ranking beaches - was a fifteen-minute drive to the west, at San Agustinillo, where the beach was less rocky and the water slightly warmer.
Apparently, the local beach protocol is thus: upon arriving, you choose a palapa restaurant, stake out a table, and that’s your camp for the day. You can leave your belongings there while you swim, and so long as you order food and drinks at some point, you’re welcome to stay as long as you want. On our first day at San Agustinillo, we happened to choose Restaurant Alejandra, mostly because they had an available table in the shade. (NB: there is generally little to no signage on the beach side of these restaurants, only on the street side. Restaurant Alejandra is toward the westernmost end of the beach.) As it turned out, we liked Alejandra so much that we spent three more days there, once even arriving in time for a breakfast of chilaquiles and staying till after sundown.
For lunch, we ate a lot of camarones al mojo de ajo, head-on local shrimp cooked with garlic and chiles and served with rice and a salad, and I usually had a Corona alongside. At some point in the afternoon, I got crazy and switched to a margarita. We also got waaaaaay into their camarones al coco, shelled shrimp that had been butterflied, pounded, breaded in freshly shredded coconut, and fried until they resembled latkes, also served with rice and a salad. You can also order any number of ceviches or other freshly caught fish and seafood preparations, or even a hamburguesa, but most of the tables around us ordered shrimp, so we adopted the habit. The local shrimp were fat, sweet, always perfectly cooked. The four of us could spend an entire day at the beach, eating two meals each and drinking beer, fresh juices, and water, and the total bill would maybe top out at 700 pesos, or about fifty U.S. dollars. Then we would drag ourselves back to the car and up the road, clean up with a brisk shower - our house, like most in the area, did not have hot water - and meet in the kitchen to muster dinner, which sometimes consisted largely of Principes.