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There are places on the Las Tuxtlas coast which are even more difficult to reach. This is not on the visitor-friendly loop from El Tropico past Roca Partida through Playa Hermosa, Montepio, and Sontecomopan before looping back to Catemaco. No, the map indicated that before your scribe could get to La Perla del Golfo, he was going to have to pass over some unpaved roads. (Turns out there was a different way, but this was not discovered until it was too late to evade two days of busses, each a class lower than the one before.)

The overland journey begins from a familiar terminus, the main bus terminal in Veracruz. From there, Acayucan is only about three hours away on the hyper-comfortable ADO-GL Volvo bus.

At a busy bus station like the one in Acayucan, you don't wait long for a connection. Travel light. It was a pair of sprints, one from the arrival bus to the UNO ticket counter; the second from the counter to the bus to Oteapan. Another air-conditioned, first-class bus for a run of less than half an hour.

In Oteapan, the travel became a bit more classic. From Oteapan to Tatahuicapa, the mode of transportation is a second class bus. School-bus style coach. Individual seats, but little recline and no leg shelf.

Tatahuicapa is a bustling little city in the mountains of the peninsula. It's the jump-off point not only to La Perla del Golfo, but also to San Juan Volador, a place still yet to be explored. But neither is to be visited on the day of arrival in Tatahuicapa. No departures late in the day.

And when depature time arrives, the vehicle is a camionetta. The current crop is mostly four-door Nissan pickups with a hooped canvas cover over benches in the back.

Transportation • Transportación

For land transportation, the camionetas are pretty much it, except for the occasional taxi willing to trust its suspension to the unpaved roads in the area. Which brings us to the valuable lesson learned on this trip: Always check for alternative means of travel. Turns out that there is a boat traveling between Sontecomopan and La Perla del Golfo. Meaning that La Perla del Golfo is really only about two hours from Catemaco.

   
   


MapaTuxtlasí   art submitted by Alejandro Negrete

But it's not a day trip, even by launch. Seems that the trip FROM Sontecomopan TO La Perla leaves at the civilized time of 4-4:30 pm. But the trip FROM La Perla TO Sontecomopan leaves the beach at seven-bloody-o'clock in the bleedin' MORNING! After all, it's for the convenience of locals needing to market, not for non-existent tourists. So, unless you hire a private launch, you're going to need a place to stay...

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