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High quality accommodation for the La Punta area (especially well configured for surfers) and friendly staff, but our experience on the surf lessons and other services varied.
We stayed in Room 7 with AC. The bed is large and comfortable and lots of space in the room. The AC unit works well, the room holds the chill, and the windows don't get any direct sun to combat the cooling. Shower has hot water, which isn't a given in this area. The whole property is well designed, with nice communal areas, outdoor shared kitchen, and filtered water dispenser. After surfing, it is easy to handle the boards and yourself with the outdoor shower. Our package also included use of the boards outside lessons, which is super convenient if you want extra practice. Extremely short walk to La Punta beach and right next to a lively food and bars street.
The surf lessons missed the mark for us. While the instructors are all very nice, the prevailing style of lesson we observed across La Punta (not just Puerto Surf) geared towards assisting you onto as many waves as possible, navigating around both challenging and hard to read surf conditions and sometimes dense crowds. This certainly can be fun, especially if you are relatively new and primarily want to experience the thrill of getting on a wave, but our hope had been to improve our beginner skills to achieve more independence. While I caught some cool waves, and some bigger than I had before, I didn't make any progress towards that goal, which was our primary reason to come here at all. If you just want to spend a few days riding waves with help, Puerto Surf's instructions will do it with big smiles; if you want to make a step change up from beginner to intermediate level of surfing, you might need to go somewhere other than Puerto Escondido entirely for appropriate conditions to practice.
We also had mixed results with additional services. In both examples below, more proactive information from Puerto Surf, our local experts, would have helped us pick the best experiences for us and avoid the poorer ones.
• We booked tours via Puerto Surf, Zipline and Bioluminescence, with two different outside providers. Zipline was excellent fun, exactly met expectations from the pamphlet with great English speaking guides. Bioluminescence, on the other hand, was entirely in Spanish, and around 4 hours of transit total between a huge number of pickups and other admin delays for ~30 minutes activity. The pamphlet said 1 hour drive, plus I would expect to be put with an English speaking guide to explain anything (or at least informed since we only ever spoke English with staff).
• Our package had 2 photo sessions, which we wanted to split over different days. One day the instructor who usually does photos was surfing with us, so an alternate photographer was offered. What was not explained was that the other guy takes photos from the beach instead of on the water with you. The first session's photos were not good (far away, low quality, and very few - this guy takes photos of everyone to sell, and he had offered to us on a previous day for half the price); the on-the-water photos are really wonderful. We absolutely would have swapped instructors if we understood the choice. As it was, we paid the same for the poor and the great sets of photos. - via 