Zihuatenejo is otherwise known as the poor man’s Ixtapa. Ixtapa only has $200+ per night high-rise luxury hotels, well out of our price range, even on a splurge. But Zihuatenejo, just 15 minutes away, is a much smaller and cheaper beach town. Though the beach isn’t as nice, it has frequent, cheap buses to Ixtapa. Much more our style.

We arrived in Zihuatenejo from Acapulco by mid-afternoon. Even though it was only a 5 hour bus ride, Lauren and I had spent more than 375 hours (15 days!) on buses since arriving in Buenos Aires in April, and they were really wearing on us.

We found a taxi, and yet again, he wasn’t exactly sure where the hotel we wanted was. But he thought he knew the general area, so we were off again on a hunt. This time the hunt wasn’t as long, but when we arrived at the hotel, we discovered it was closed.

We let the taxi go, strapped on our packs and started hunting for a hotel. Pretty quickly we discovered that prices had more than doubled since our guidebook was written — the cheapest rooms were $40 or $50.

We hadn’t eaten all day and after hiking several blocks away from the beach to find yet another $50 hotel, Lauren was ready to give up. But I pushed on and just down the street we finally found a $30 room. It wasn’t much to look at, but it had air-conditioning and seemed secure, so we took it. The guy at the front desk told us it would take a little while before the A/C could cool down the room, so we left to find food, settling on a humongous brick-oven Hawaiian pizza served with salsa and jalapenos.

When we returned to the room an hour later, however, we discovered the room was still broiling hot. After a very long time of arguing and having multiple people fiddle with the A/C, we ended up moving to a windowless room. At least this A/C worked very, very well.

That night, we wandered around the town until we stumbled on a bar advertising $1 beers. I had thought Mexico was going to be the land of $1 beers, but for the most part, we hadn’t found much less than $1.50-$2.00. We sat down on a couple of couches, ordered some beers, and started working on our budget. Lauren was psyched that Bon Jovi’s greatest hits was playing.

One beer turned into two which turned into three. I called it quits at that point, but Lauren had a forth while I nursed a bottle of water.

The next morning, we both had a small hangover, making us feel pretty pathetic.

After running some more errands, we found the bus to Ixtapa and jumped on board. For just 70 cents, we were on our way to one of Mexico’s biggest resort towns.

We arrived and walked through the Emperio hotel to get to the beach. I was tempted to ask about room prices, but I didn’t want to tip off the staff that we weren’t guests.

On the other side of the hotel was the clean, pristine beach. A black flag was flying, though, with a sign that said that a black flag meant the water was extremely dangerous and no swimming was allowed. Despite the sign, we saw plenty of people wading in.

We were starving, so we stopped at a restaurant and checked out the menu. Hamburgers were $9. Horrified but too hungry to bargain hunt, we settled on sharing some $6 nachos, and a few minutes later we saw a girl with the most pathetic hamburger walk by. If that was $9 hamburger, we worried, what would our cheaper nachos look like? Lauren started getting worked up that we were going to get a tiny plate of 5 chips when our food arrived. It was a medium sized plate, but after our hysteria, we decided it would do.

We ate while watching people play in the ocean. Lauren struck up a conversation with the Mexican waiter, who commented on how good her Spanish was. He explained that it was Mexican high season and that he never sees a lot of Americans or Canadians this time of year. Lauren and I tried to figure out where Americans go in the summer (to American beaches?) before leaving the restaurant to go walking down the beach.

At the end, we found a quiet spot with no hotels and we took turns going in the ocean. The waves were crazy, more than six to seven feet sometimes, but they crashed more than thirty feet out in the ocean making it pretty safe to stay closer to shore.

We went back to Zihuatenejo and grabbed a taxi to the bus station to buy our bus tickets to Puerto Vallarta for the next day. The taxi driver told us he had taken that route before and that it’s a really winding road. Lauren and he discussed (in Spanish) about how both his wife and I get motion sickness in buses and Lauren proceeded to tell him about every time I’ve thrown up on this trip (a lot). He could not stop laughing, and asked how we say vomit in English. She explained how we always carry plastic bags on the buses because I get sick so much and he joked that we’d need 16 bags for this bus ride — one for every hour it would take to get there.

At the bus station, we checked out our two options: one for 10 in the morning at the other at 20:10 in the evening (they do bus times on military time). We chose the evening bus.

Back in the taxi, Lauren and our driver started chatting again in Spanish. He pulled over when he reached our destination he and Lauren started discussing immigration and workers’ salaries. I could follow most of it, but the taxi was sweltering hot and the conversation had no end in sight. I tried opening my door, but Lauren didn’t get the hint. I didn’t want to be rude, but at this point I was tired of Lauren’s increasing fluency in Spanish. I finally whispered to her, “I’m hot and I want to go,” and she finally got the “hint” and we said goodbye to the driver. He told us that he’d pick us up the next night (if he remembered!) at 9:30pm, in time for our bus.

Earlier in the day, we had spotted a higher-end Mexican restaurant and decided we wanted to try something a little higher quality than the taqerias we had mostly eaten at. So we headed there for dinner.

Most of the menu was out of our price range, but one section had three or four dollar meals, so we ordered two to share — a tamale and a quesadilla. In the meantime, they brought us chips with three different types of salsa. The salsa was some of the spiciest we’ve tried in Mexico, but it was so good I couldn’t stop eating it.

The tamale came wrapped in a cornhusk and was delicious. The quesadilla was actually wrapped in cheese and fried. Unreal and uber-delicious.

Afterwards we had to go home because I had a stomach problem (my first in over a week), probably from all the spices, and we spent the rest of the night in our hotel room surfing TV.

The next morning we packed and checked out of our hotel, leaving our bags at the front desk. We had a whole day to entertain ourselves before our bus left at 10pm.

We grabbed some breakfast and blogged, wasted time at an internet place and wandered around, looking at tequila shops. We had planned to wander down the beach, but it was pretty small and not very pretty. Around 4pm, we stumbled onto another bar with $1 beer specials and a free ladies night starting at 7pm, so we sat down and had a couple of beers before we decided we were ready for dinner.

Next door was a fancy pizza place. We decided to spoil ourselves and sat down. The Italian owner came out and enthusiastically told us our options, and we settled on a pizza with mushrooms, ham, olives and various cheeses. He then put on his chef’s outfit, complete with a white hat, and started rolling out some dough.

When the pizza came out, it was clearly real Italian pizza. We scarfed it down, very pleased with ourselves. When the chef came out, eager for praise, Lauren played her part and complimented him by saying “este pizza es de Italia!”

Around 8pm, we went back to the bar and ordered a couple of free rum and cokes. While we were waiting for our drinks to come, I asked Lauren to look at our tickets again so I could figure out when I needed to take my Dramamine.

She pulled out the tickets and looked at them confused.

“Why does this say 20:10?” she asked. Suddenly, I realized that 20:10 was 8:10, not 10:10pm. I looked down at my watch. It was 8:05.

“Oh, Lauren,” I said. “We’ve really screwed up.”

“What do we do?” she asked.

“We’ve got to run for it,” I answered.

Lauren looked at me skeptically, but I grabbed my bag and ran out the door. Lauren stopped to tell the bartender to cancel our orders. We sprinted all the way back to the hotel, panting when we arrived. I barged into the manager’s office to grab our bags and flagged down a taxi outside while Lauren considered asking whether they had a room available that night.

On our way to the bus station, Lauren showed the taxi driver our tickets. He casually looked over them until Lauren pointed out that the bus was leaving at 8:10. It was already 8:09.

“Oh!” he exclaimed and started driving a little faster.

I was praying that this bus would not be the first bus in Mexico that was actually on time. If we missed it, I was terrified the bus company wouldn’t refund our tickets and we would have lost another day and $50 on our folly. We were also only a week away from home, and we had very little room to miss buses and still make it to Tijuana on time.

Lauren and I came up with the plan that she’d run into the bus station when we got there and try to stop the bus. I’d somehow get our 70 pounds of bags out of the taxi and follow her.

We arrived at the bus station much faster than we had expected, rolling in at 8:17pm.

Lauren ran in while I paid the taxi driver.

“Is this bus here?” she said in Spanish to one of the men working behind the counter. He looked at the ticket and shook his head.

I called out to Lauren to see was still here. She shook her head. My heart sank.

“Well, what should we do now?” she asked the man behind the counter, but he ignored her. “Are there other buses leaving tonight going to any city north of here?”

I drug the bags over to the counter and asked the same thing. Everyone was ignoring us.

“Well, what do we do?” Lauren started demanding in Spanish. “What do we do? We have these tickets, so what do we do now?”

Finally, one of the other guys looked at the ticket.

“The bus isn’t here,” he said again. “It will be fifteen or twenty minutes. You should wait for it in there” he added, pointing to the waiting room.

Suddenly we understood — the bus wasn’t here… YET. They must have thought we were the pushiest Americans demanding to know what we should do since the bus was late! We started laughing with joy and the guys behind the counter started smiling too, we hoped, finally understanding that we thought we had missed the bus. We went to the waiting room, and Lauren ran to the bathroom to quickly change her beach clothes to long pants for the ride. When she got out of the bathroom, still putting on her belt, the bus finally arrived. We managed to make it, but I still shook from the adrenaline rush of it all for the first half-hour of the trip.

Since the road was supposed to be incredibly windy, I convinced Lauren to take some Dramamine on this trip. I had bought a box of full-strength (i.e., full-drowsiness) Dramamine at a pharmacy earlier in Mexico, so I had plenty to share.

We each swallowed one and then decided we should lock our bags shut and lock them to the seats in case someone tried to steal them while we were sleeping.

A movie came on — X-Men 2 — and we watched a couple of hours of it before dozing off.

The next morning I woke up around 10am, and we were on the outskirts of Puerto Vallarta. Lauren woke up 10 minutes later and could not stop marveling at how well she had slept on the bus. She finally understood why I had spent most of the 300+ hours on buses unconscious — with the aid of Dramamine. She had just become a convert. Too bad we only had two bus rides left.

Lauren: Ya, too bad.