Las Gatas Beach in Zihuatanejo

On Friday I went to Las Gatas beach with August, my friend Lois and her two boys. It is known as the prettiest beach in the Zihuatanejo Bay. If you are at the municipal pier it is directly across the bay. There is no road access to the beach, you have to either walk over the rocks from the end of La Ropa beach, not a long walk maybe 15 minutes, or you can take a small boat from the municipal pier near the basketball court in the center of town.

There are a couple of little windows that you can buy boat tickets from. The price is the same (30 pesos round trip) each window gives out different color tickets. When you get to the part of the pier that the boats take off from, about half way out on the left, the captains will call out white ticket (boleto blanco) or blue ticket (boleto azul), and that is how you know which boat to get on.

It is a nice ride, you get a great view of the city and it only lasts about 10 minutes so no worries about sea sickness. There are life vests on board (amazing) and shade. Zihuatanejo is a lovely city from the water. The cliff-side hotels and rolling hills are almost cliché, you can easily pick out the most famous ones from the water. La Casa que Canta, Hotel Villa del Sol, Villa de la Roca, and the myriad of glamorous houses higher up. It’s neat.

The dock at las Gatas is on a small rock outcropping at one end of the beach. The crescent of restaurants stretches out to end at the oldest place on the beach, Owen’s Bungalows. The businesses are packed in one after another. I guess there are about 20 restaurants with a scuba center and various bating suit and float shops mixed in.

We went to the third restaurant that we came to. This is Lois’ favorite, called, Chez Arnaldos, run by Noyo who has been in the biz for about 30 years. There is a small blurb on Rob’s page. http://www.zihuatanejo.net/restaurants.html. The food was good and the fish fingers we ordered for the kids were reasonable, but the same cannot be said for the lobster and other high end items. Expect to pay about 25$ a dish.

We took a walk down to the other end of the beach, about 10 minutes, and checked out Owen’s place. I have heard a lot about it over the years. Owen came to Zihua in the early 70’s and is kind of one of the founders of the gringo community there. Anyway it was pretty deserted, no one in the restaurant or on the grounds, just some Mexican music blasting away.

The nicest thing about Las Gatas is the water. It is Caribbean turquoise, with no waves to speak of. There is a line of rocks about 25 meters out that was supposedly put there by an ancient Indigenous Mexican king who wanted to make the beach like a pool for his wives. (This is the basis for the name of Zihuatanejo, which in the native language means bay of the beautiful women). There are more detailed accounts of this history on other sites, here is one, http://www.zihua-ixtapa.com/zihua/history/. But that is the gist.

The rocks work wonders, they make a breakwater and a lovely place to go out and snorkel. It is not deep, no more than 14 feet. You can snorkel on the beach side or on the bay side. Lois’ son went out and saw lots of fish including a school of rays. The day we were visiting there were about 10 other people snorkeling. It didn’t seem too crowded. The beach however was very crowded. Most people didn’t start showing up till about 12:00 but then, every boat that arrived was jam packed. Beware, and arrive before 10:00. The boats stop running at 6:00 pm.

All in all it was a lovely day and a recommendable outing, especially if you have children or love snorkeling.

Electricity in the third world

Electricity is a good thing. We ran the hotel for two seasons off the grid, and although now we have 6 years under our belt on the grid and those early days are fading I still appreciate my computer, an A/C at home and all the other luxuries electricity provides. Jim also lived for 2 and a half years at a site with no electricity in the Dominican Republic. I visited him there for 6 months. It’s funny, we are certainly not the “rouging it” types, why have we ended up in places where one of the basics of modern living is well, not so basic? Who knows! Just lucky I guess.

I looked on the internet tonight and found that ~30% of the world population doesn’t have access to electricity at all. I also found out that Americans use about 6 times as much juice per capita as we south of the border-ians use. (USDE). I suppose there is a lot of incentive for us to conserve here in Mexico as we pay 3 times the price per kWh as Americans do. Yikes.

I have learned more about electricity since I moved here than I thought it would ever know (and not all from the internet). We now own our own transformer (cheaper rates) and have in house meters. We love our tri-phase system, and have regulators on everything to help with the brownouts. They are actually worse than total power outages as motors, fridges and AC burn out in no time running on half power. Generators aren’t worth the trouble, and, always have gravity flow water so that even when the electricity is out you can still flush the toilet!

The reason that the electricity issue comes up again and again is that our on the grid situation is not reliable. As many of our guests know, we have electricity outages about 3 times a season for no apparent reason, (luckily they usually are fixed within a few hours) and, for your information, we have tons more in the summer.

It’s the rain, and the dust – when they get together, they make mud and one thing transformers and fuses and all things electrical certainly do not like to be covered in – is mud. We have seen transformers at night with lava flowing out of them (who knows why). Last night we had about 10 drops of rain, the first 10 drops of summer and those equated to 10 hours with out electricity.

Growth!

Development of the beach here in Troncones is always a popular topic of discussion. Property prices and who is building what never go out of fashion. Anyway, I was curious, how much has Troncones *really* grown since we arrived in 1996 (October).

I can’t be completely accurate about the numbers in 1996, but the Troncones area was generally undeveloped back then. The “lot-ified” beach area is comprised of 300 lots spread over about 3 miles of beachfront. When we arrived in ’96 most of the development was to the south of the main beach entrance: all told about ¼ mile of beach and maybe 5 houses, one B&B, and a couple of restaurants. On the other side of the entrance, to the north, the development also covered about ¼ mile of beach and amounted to 2 B&B’s, a restaurant and a few houses.

In total at that time there were 3 places to stay, The Burro Burracho (where we stayed for a week), Casa Ki and La Casa de La Tortuga (where we also stayed for 5 weeks). These three places had 16 rooms between them. There were however already a few new places that were being built. We bought our property in ‘96 and started building in April 1997. By the time we finished our project there was another B&B opening at the same time, Casa Delfin Sonriente, we were the 4th or 5th place to open bringing the total rooms to 28.

Today, Jim and August and I went on a drive down the beach cataloging all of the development. We also tried to count the total number of rental units. We focused on the beach side first.

Total on the beach side of Troncones on June 11, 2005 there are:
98 buildings, of those 98, 61 are private homes, 12 are B&B’s, 3 are Small Hotels (Eden) and 10 are restaurants. 13 of the 98 are under construction now.

Of the 61 Private homes 27 are rental properties

On the opposite side of the road where there was nothing to speak of when we arrived there are 25 finished buildings and 8 buildings under construction.

The last number was a bit harder to come up with as some places I wasn’t sure exactly how many rooms they rented, and, does a big loft with lots of beds count as one room or two? Anyway, a close estimate is about 210 to 215 rooms to rent on the whole beach, including the village.

So in almost 9 years the rental numbers have gone from 16 to 215, that is a ~133% increase every year or 1340% over nine years. Excuse my math, it’s not perfect, but you get the general idea.

Whoa.

Construction in Mexico

We have had good experiences with construction here. Although there have been trying moments and overruns, I imagine they are typical of building in any country. Jim and I had never built anything before we arrived in Mexico so our learning curve was a fairly steep one.

How long does a construction project really take? That is the question we are asked most, and, I think this is mainly where conflict arises when building here. In a way, we are lucky as all of our construction projects are forced into the 6 months that we have for our off season. At the moment we are in the throes of our most ambitious project. The 4 suites, along with the landscaping, many meters of walkways, gray water system and new public bathroom is a lot to do in 6 months! We have set up a detailed spreadsheet with weekly goals and are having the workers work on Sunday.

Technically, this should be the approach of every new home builder. The fact is the longer something takes to build the more it will cost. If you make a point to finish as quickly as possible, with weekly goals and a fixed finish date, you will save money.

There are a few things that are bound to raise the costs of any construction project. Inflation is a killer. It is more than 10% in Mexico. And, construction materials are always the hardest hit. To avoid price hikes we try to make deals with the materials folks in advance and buy everything upfront. The supplier holds the materials on their lot until we use them. Trying to save money by having less workers doesn’t work, even if you have 3 guys working they will take longer than twice as long to do the work of 6 guys. It’s interesting, there is an energy when things go up fast. It somehow inspires the workers to keep up the pace. The best way to save money is no changes! Changes are the ultimate budget killer.

This is one of the many reasons that we love our current Architect/contractor team. They have made the plans on computer so we have had three months to make changes and see, on screen, how they look. Hopefully, by this stage in the game nothing will change!

How is Mexican Labor? Our motto is “You get what you inspect, not what you expect”. We oversee every project personally. If no one is checking, the work will not get done, or the materials won’t be ordered or or or…At the moment, our contractors have a Forman, Ivan, who is at the site every day. It makes a huge difference. The workers on our current project work from 7:30 am to 7:30 pm with two 1 hour breaks in the day for meals. They work in the full sun, in 90 degree heat, and keep going all day. Brutal!

Is a contractor necessary? We have done it both ways. It is way better and totally worth the money to get a contractor. They will come with a team and experience; most contractors down here are aligned with an architect which makes things much easier. Although you can easily get someone to draw up plans at home and shop for bids down here. We have done that too.

That brings us to the last point: cost plus or fixed cost? So far we have always used cost plus as it is the easiest way to work with the locals, contend with the vagaries of inflation and design changes. However, we currently have a contract for fixed costs with Karina & Gustavo. I will have to tell you how it works out. Our completion date is the first of November.

Fingers crossed!

That summer feeling

The best thing about summer in Troncones is the rain, and the worst thing is waiting for it to start. This is the first May since Jim and I arrived that not one drop of rain has fallen! Is it global warming? I do wonder about that since the locals have gone crazy with the field burning this year. It is amazing, 90% of the fields along the road to the highway are burned. It is a bit disturbing, but a custom that seems to be pretty well entrenched.

During the season many of our guests ask us “what is the summer like here?” “How hot does it get?” Well if you look on http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/local/MXGR0136?from=search_city you will see that it isn’t really even that hot, 90 in the day and 70 a night. The thing that is tricky is that the weather people say that it is raining all the time. Let me tell you that ain’t so!

It is hard to tell on the weather map where we are so here is a map of Mexico. Troncones is directly south of Lubbock Texas.

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The only fun thing about waiting for it to rain is the wild “rain bugs” that go off before it starts. They are like cicadas, and make this alien noise that isn’t unpleasant, but can be REALLY LOUD. It is difficult to talk on the phone outside when lots of them are singing. As soon as it starts raining they stop all at once. Then the frogs start in! It is a world of natural wonder here in the summer. The plants go crazy, the frogs are everywhere and bugs in spades. It’s great (well if you don’t mind bugs)! The hills will be green within two weeks of the first rain. It’s like magic. Can you tell that I am really looking forward to it?

At this time there aren’t many people on the beach. There is really that slow down Mexico feeling in the air. We love it! People are always asking us if the development of Troncones has effected us negatively. Well really it hasn’t. We can still go out to the beach almost any day of the week and there will be no one there or just one other couple. Maybe it is because many of the new homes around us are vacation homes not businesses. I don’t know how we got so lucky on that front.

That being said there are a few new places going up right on Manzanillo bay. A guy from Santa Barbra is building a HUGE place at the former municipal beach. It will be 18 months in construction. There is another place to the north of us, maybe 5 lots away, that is also being built. It is slated to finish the first of November, just in time for the wedding of the owner. Stress!! It doesn’t seem like either of those places will change the scene here very much, thankfully.

I love the summer.

Eva Myrth

First Post

Hello from the “Bright Side”. I have started this web log to keep in contact with our friends and guests on a more continuous and personal level. Sometimes there are so many things happening around here that I feel like I should put a new section on the web site, but then again, really, most events are transitory and perfectly suited to this medium. We also have long periods where absolutely nothing happens, so who knows how this is going to work out!

I am open to questions and topic suggestions so go a head and write, evaandjim@aol.com or comment. I don’t keep up with the Zihuatanejo message boards by Rob Whitehead at http://www.zihuatanejo.net/ or Joe Lagaduchi’s site at http://www.zihuatanejo-ixtapa.com/ they are both good places to find information on the area; I have put the links permanently in the links section at the right. I will post other good links for Mexico accordingly. However, my intention is to focus more on the home front or at least the beach in front of Eden.

Another inspiration for starting this blog now is that we are making a major addition to the hotel. We are currently in the throws of constructing 4 new suites. Here is a photo of how they look today. The speed at which they are going up is incredible! The started working on the 5th of May

As you see the suites will be situated on the south side of the courtyard. They will officially finish the square to make it more typical Hacienda style. We are adding some cool features to the suites, including central air-conditioning and (hopefully) internet hookup. We went to Patzcuaro a couple of weeks ago and bought a fountain for one of the patios that I think will be especially nice.

Karina and Gustavo Jasso are our contractor & Architect team. They are great, and have made some very nice renderings for us. Which you see here. The drawing includes some things which will not be included in this summer’s construction as well. The dome topped spa and the two rooms on the end of the main part of the hotel. Got to have something to look forward to!

Well i could go on and on, but the most important thing at this moment is to get this posted so that I can start working on the next one!

Eva Myrth