Oaxaca (24th - 26th March)

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After the suprise success of Mexico City, we found ourselves eagerly awaiting our next destination, Oaxaca City, some 40km Southeast of Mexico City.

We left MC at 7am on 24th March, having picked up our bus at TAPO Bus Station, which easily ranks as the best bus station to date. It´s basically what you´d expect from an airport and you go through exactly the same formalities, including checking your luggage in, which makes life so much easier! The buses themselves weren´t bad either, reclining seats, A/C, T.Vs and an onboard WC. Was just a shame that were were only going to be on it for 6 hours!

The ride South out of MC was certainly an interesting one. The city is enormous, spanning some 2,000 sq km and while the centre is dominated by beautiful colonial architecture, the suburbs quickly decended into something that resembles a shanty town rather than a cosmopolitan city. To give you some idea of how cramped the slums are around the periphery of the city there were people walking their dogs up and down the grass verges that separate the opposing lanes on the roads.

As we continued further out of the city, the shacks of corrugated iron gave way to open fields coupled with snow capped mountains in the distance and possibly a volcano (it seemed to be smouldering!). The scenery was at times spectacular and completely unexpected. We´d always percieved Mexico to be a land of cacti and desert, not fertile fields and alpine like mountain ranges. However, we were not to be disappointed. AS we headed further south, the terrain changed and became much drier and with the dryness came the cacti, hundreds and thousands of them. It made for a very impressive sight and was quite unlike anything we´ve encountered on our travels so far. There were also quite a few different birds to be seen, which is always good and proved to be a welcome distraction from worrying about the many cliff edges we passed as we wound our way through the mountains.

We finally arrived in Oaxaca at about 1.30pm and after checking into the Hotel Paulina we headed straight out in a bid to try and find the Expediciones Sierra Norte office, which runs ecotourism programmes in the nearby reserve. The office was supposed to close at 2pm, according to the LP, and we got there with about 2 minutes to spare, only to find that it hadn´t been open all day! This was a real pain as we´d pinned our hopes on doing a bird watching tour with these guys and as the office would be closed the following day (Sunday), we wouldn´t be able to arrange a tour before we were due to leave on Monday! (all a little confusing!)

And thus we set about trying to find some other tour operators mentioned in the LP, but alas, one had just closed and the other had shut down two years ago! So with that, we decided to give up on that idea and grabbed some lunch at the Zocalo (main plaza). We had had a good look around the city while we were trundling about trying to find the tour operators and were very impressed with what we´d seen. There are no high-rise buildings, unless you count the stunning Cathedrals, and for the most part, Oaxaca City had a very colonial feel to it with lots of colourful stone buildings, straight streets, shady plazas and a generally very chilled out atmosphere. The people seem really nice too and are quick to offer assistance even when you haven´t asked and don´t speak the lingo!

Oaxaxa State has seen wide spread protests in recent months (end of last year) and was actually closed to tourists, however, with the exception of a bit of grafiti, there is no sign of the earlier troubles, (so we thought!).

All in all, a very decent place that we´d highly recommend.

After lunch we updated the blog and set about trying to plan out the rest of our time in Mexico, so as to avoid incidents like today! We spent a good 5 hours doing this before heading out again for some more food at another restaurant on the Zocalo, which was excellent!

The following day, after much consultation with the LP, we decided to grab a bus to the ruins of Mount Alban, 20 minutes West of the city. As it turns out, entry was free on a Sunday so we decided to acquire the experties of a guide, which was, in hindsight, was an excellent move! The tour was brilliant and gave us a really good insight into the history of the place, which was first occupied around 500BC and served as the capital of the ancient Zapotec Civilisation for over 1000 years. The ruins stand on a flattened hill-top, some 400m above the valley floor and offer amazing views of Oaxaca. It is easily one of the most impressive sights we´ve seen so far. The area that had been excavated and is open to the public, was the centre of the city, where the politicians and priests used to address the public. All the buildings are aligned with the East and West as the sun placed an instrumental and complex role in their religious beliefs (we would explain but we don´t understand).

In the afternoon we went on a mission to find a book shop (again!), which the guide had recommended, so that Dan could get a book of Mexican birds. It´s been driving Dan crazy no knowing what the different birds are, so we had to find a book to keep him quiet! The book shop was worth the search though and turned out to be really good, better than most book shops in the UK! We could have spent a fortune there, though we ended up leaving with just two books, one on the Birds of Belize (it´s close enough) and Charles Darwin´s “Voyage Aboard the Beagle”, which should make interesting reading befote visting the Galápagos. We then grabbed a bite to eat and chilled out befote returning to the Zocalo for dinner.

The following day it was time to move on again, to Puerto Angel, a “sleepy fishing village”, a couple of hundred km´s South.

Our bus was due to depart at 9.30am and so just before 9am we tried to get a taxi, only to find that there was a taxi strike on… bit of a bugger. The station was a good few km´s away and so we didn´t think we´d make it in time if we walked.

As luck would have it, after about 10mins wait we managed to get an illegal red cab (apparently the very cause of the strike!) who agreed to take us.... though it wasn´t going to be that easy! The taxi drivers on strike had barricaded the main roads around the city and were not letting any traffic through, and so with about 5 minutes to spare, the taxi driver dropped us a few blocks away from the station and pointed us roughly in the right direction. We absolutly pegged it as the next bus wouldn´t be leaving until 9.30pm (!), harassing various passerbys to give us further directions. We made it wo the bus station at 9.29am. There were loads of people still waiting around, which we took to be a good sign until we realised that the crowds were there because nobody had been allowed to leave the city. Basically the taxi drivers had also blockaded the roads coming into, and going out of the city, and as such they weren´t letting any traffic in or out, which meant that we weren´t going anywhere for a least another 4 or 5 hours or possibly not at all!

They recommended that we wait for further news which we did for a couple of hours before we contacted the hostal and asked if there was any other way which we could get to Puerto Angel. After making a few enquiries, they told us that they could get us out in a "truck" that would be leaving at 1pm. After some deliberation as to what exactly a "truck" meant and whether it was worth hanging around for our original bus, we opted to get a refund and go for it. There was another English couple and an Australian chap (Scott) in the same predicament and while the couple decided to wait it out (they´re still there!) Scott joined us on our little adventure.

We tried in vain to get a taxi back to the hostel (we needed more info on the "truck") and finally grabbed one of the local buses that was operating around some parts of the city. It dropped us off about 20mins walk from the hostal and then after recieveing some directions from the guys at the hostal it was another 20mins walk to the "truck" warehouse. The "truck", much to our relief, was actually just a van, not unlike a white version of the A-Team van and the tickets were only 120 pesos (half what we were due to pay). We had half an hour to spare and so grabbed a bite to eat before heading off just after 1pm.

We´d only been on the road 10mins when we came across the first of the blockades, in the outer suburbs of the city. There were about a dozen taxis strewn across the road and they were preventing any vehicles from getting on the main highway out of the city. However, just before we got to the blockade, we hung a sharp left down a dirt track which skirted round a small settlement of corrugated iron huts and eventually rejoined the highway about 20mins later. From there it was pretty good going for a couple of hours before we hit another blockade at Miahuatian, where we were once again forced to go across country for a good few miles. It was a bit bumpy to say the least and I don´t think the driver knew where he was going. He kept having to back up when we hit a dead end and basically seemed to make it us as we went along, though he obviously did a good job as we made it through.

That proved to be the last of the blockades, now it was time for the mountains! For the next 3 or 4 hours we drove through some absolutely stunning scenery, the terrain went from desert to cloud covered rainforest within a matter of minutes and the combination of the windy roads and the fact that the driver refused to go below 50kmph at any point meant that it was like being on a rollercoaster.....we felt quite sick.

We finally reached Pochutla at about 8pm and along with Scott, we grabbed a taxi to Puerto Angel. We´d made a resevation at Cordelia´s, which is where we were dropped off. There weren´t any rooms for Scott, and as we had two beds in our room he stayed with us for the night.....

Photos to follow!!! In the jungle at the mo. while they have internet they don´t have the facilities to upload photos....

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