Down 1 in Catemaco

The latest arrival of the few handfuls of Gringo residents of Catemaco just bit the dust.
The single, 60+, former schoolmarm  lived in the one and only gringo ghetto on the outskirts of beautiful downtown Catemaco, wrote umpteen pages of an enthusiastic blog about possibly making it here on $900 a month without a car and the lack of local friends, took hundreds of photos and lasted for 2 months, before hightailing to the more civilized haunts of Oaxaca.

There is no moral to the story.
NEXT!

Update Oct 3
As usual it is not over until the fat lady sings.
She did!
This Lorena Bobbit  from the vaunted California educational system has now vented her opinion on settling in her self chosen one and only trailer trash enclave in Catemaco, and dependent on the input of a local taxi driver because of her inability to waddle, explored a few miles of Catemaco and promptly became an expert on local historical, sociological and creepy crawly stuff .
I regret ever having mentioned her name, website, and buying her breakfast..

Cheap Catemaco Hotels

Many hotel owners in beautiful downtown Catemaco are mistakenly under the impresssion that tourists should pay through the nose for spending a day or two along one of the most beautiful lakes in Mexico.

Fortunately the peso devaluation has somewhat mitigated the local frenzy of rate hikes that, in many instance, have doubled room rates in the last 5 years. Mexican peso earners and spenders, though, are still subject to blood letting.

Along came some local neoliberal capitalists and within the last year opened three resonably priced hotelitos, along  bed and breakfast lines. Rates are as low as 179 pesos per double, in clean, newly equipped rooms.

At those rates you can spend an extra month here, and skip Cancun.

See all the Catemaco Hotels here

The Lakes of Catemaco

If Laguna Catemaco would dry up a few meters there would be another lake in Los Tuxtlas. The laguna averages 23 feet in depth and at its deepest central point measures about 34 feet.

But there is a hole between the city of Catemaco and Agaltepec island that is 70 feet deep. Since that island was a ceremonial center for pre-colombian inhabitants, it would be interesting to to see what's lying on the bottom of its murky waters.

There are a total of 6 marvelous lakes and lagunas in the Catemaco Municipio. The most famous and largest is Laguna Catemaco, followed by Laguna Sontecomapan. Catemaco City is surrounded by lagunas Chalchoapan, Nixtamalapan and Amaloapan. On the Sierra Santa Marta side, near Miguel Hidalgo is the small Apompal lake.

All of the smaller lakes are of volcanic origin, are filled with ground water, and are described in Wikipedia as follows: A maar is a broad, low-relief volcanic crater that is caused by a phreatomagmatic eruption, an explosion caused by groundwater coming into contact with hot lava or magma. A maar characteristically fills with water to form a relatively shallow crater lake.

Laguna Catemaco is a true lake, created by volcanic activity blocking off a valley that accepted streams from the surrounding hills. Laguna Sontecomapan is a true lagoon connected to the Gulf of Mexico.

See all the Catemaco lakes and lagunas.