A number of years ago....

...we took 3 month and tent-camped all the public beaches we could find from San Blas to Puerto Escondido. Once we set up camp we house shopped the area looking at housing available for our fulltime retirement. As PE is not the fly-in tourist destination that Zihua is, it has more of an 'untouched' feeling than here. This is either a good thing or not. The good is lower prices in restaurants and housing, the 'not' is the lack of competition for tourist dollars. This lack of competition was felt in poor restaurant service, ho-hum service in stores and lack of marketing effort. The town itself felt humdrum and dusty and there didn't seem to be any pride of ownership in anything. Another observation was a huge police presence and fear of security that far exceeds that of Zihua. All stores, both small and large like the XOXO's, had a gun-toting guard at the door. A realtor showed us 4-5 houses for sale and each one was surrounded with high fences and electric gates. Two of them had shotguns stationed by the front door and all had steel bars on all the windows, even on second story windows. And the final blow for us to buy there was the road to get there- Hwy 200. The last 80 mile stretch to get there had a speed bump (tope)about every 300-400 yards. There seemed to be no restriction on who could put on by their coconut or candy stand. You would rarely see 30 MPH on this section of Mex 200. We never looked back when we settled in Zihua lemmetellya.