Puerto Escondido & Mazunte travel diary

Puerto Escondido is a small town on the pacific coast of Mexico in a state of Oaxaca. We visited this area on last week of February during our visit to Mexico. The main reason we chose this place was - because during this time of the year, ocean water and overall weather was perfect there, especially if you/your kids love to swim in an ocean water.

Puerto Escondido is mainly famous for its surfing beaches, but we were able to find some of the most beautiful swim beaches perfect for our family.

Playa Carrizalillo: Stunning white sand beach for swimming

Playa Carrizalillo is a small white sand beach, great for swimming, which you can access via stairs work-out. You can find many restaurants close to the beach so you don’t necessarily need to bring your food, but we are vegetarian (plus we don’t speak Spanish, except for few words) so we brought our own food for the day. We happen to find an awesome coconut ice-cream from “a cart seller” when we were going back upstairs, close to the parking lot. And I think that was the best coconut ice-cream of our entire trip.

Side note: I love to try different food when we travel, especially from “cart sellers”. I feel like street vendors are the best way to experience local food! But being vegetarian and also not knowing language, sometimes create weirdly funny and other times really pleasant experiences! Most of the time we manage to find something vegetarian, and can experience local food.

Playa Bocacho: Lovely beach + Baby turtle release

This is a beautiful beach and we went there for a special reason. Here you can release freshly hatched baby turtle back to the ocean. Many Sea turtles visit this area and lay their eggs on the beach. These eggs are then protected by sea turtle conservation project and their amazing volunteers. Every evening you can adopt one (or few) baby turtles and can release them back to the ocean. This was one of the most unique and memorable experience for my son. He thinks about his adopted baby turtle (he named it “Kenji”) almost every day since our trip.

Playa Mazunte: Picturesque beach

In my opinion this was the most gourgeous beach of our trip. The chatty coconut ice-cream seller (at Playa Carrizalillo) recommended us this beach and we drove there the next day. It is little far away from Puerto Escondido, but it is worth driving. We discovered soooo many mango and papaya farms in our drive, and being “MANGO LOVERS” it was just so awesome for our family, especially for my son. Speaking of Mango trees, you will find them everywhere in Puerto Escondido, with tons of mango dangling from the branches & ripe mangoes all over the farmer’s market.

If you decide to go to Mazunte then make sure you watch sunset from “Punta Cometa Lookout Point”. The most wonderful thing about that sunset is “NOT COLORS”, but you will be able to feel the curvature of the Earth and also see the big round sun setting down from that curvature. The entire phenomena creates an experience which you cannot describe or capture with normal cameras! It was just wonderful!

Also surprisingly we were able to find plenty of vegetarian/vegan restaurants in Mazunte, which is hard to find in Mexico! For dinner we went to Israeli restaurant called “Motek”. Everything at this restaurant was delicious, especially their falafels and freshly made pita breads were just amazing!

Mazunte is an awesome day excursion from Puerto Escondido and I highly recommend if you are planning to explore.

Stay in Puerto Escondido

We stayed in Vivo Resort for the entire time in Puerto Escondido. There are many Airbnb options too, but number one reasons for staying in Vivo was - most of the Airbnb accommodations have open window kind of arrangement which is great given the heat in this area but my hubby is so allergic to mosquito bites and he was not sure about the density of mosquito in the area. And so we decided to stay in one of the Vivo resort’s condominium which can be completely sealed when windows are closed. On the whole, Vivo resort is a great place to stay with all the amenities, activities and beautiful beach front (on which you can’t swim, because of the high tide but it is amazing for beach walks and watching sunrise & sunset). The only downside about Vivo is - it is little far away from main town and you need to drive on dirt road for 5 kms from the main road to reach there. We had a rental car and we didn’t mind that dirt road so we were overall very happy with our stay choice.

Shopping in Puerto Escondido

Benito Juarez Market is a great place for local food, fresh produce and also for locally made handicrafts. We ended up going to this market every day for fresh fruits, vegies and handmade fresh tortillas.

If you are interested in local handicraft then Al Adoquín is the street for you. We went there couple of times to have dinner and then walk on the street. At night all vendors take their handmade products out on the street for sell. It is fun to explore this area at night and buy some local souvenirs. I didn’t see as many varieties in product assortment as Oaxaca City but if you are not going to visit Oaxaca City then this is the great place to buy local crafts.