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Published: March 23rd 2002
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oaxaca
Just a typical colourful street in this gorgeous town I think I mentioned we'd be heading to Puebla from Mexico City last time I wrote, we ended up going to Oaxaca instead. It was a 6 hr bus ride south through some amazing rugged mountain terrain. The driver sped around the sharp curves in true Mexican fashion, us bumping around here & there ... my palms were sweating I was so nervous looking out the window at the 1km drop into the valley just 2 metres away.
Oaxaca is such a nice town nestled between two mountain ranges with clear, fresh air which was a nice change from smoggy M City. We found a nice hotel close to the centre of town and after dropping our things off we found a gorge little restaurant by the zocolo in the shade of the huge old trees. Oaxaca is full of narrow cobble-stone streets & alleys lined with colourful Spanish buildings. It's a remote town up there in the mountains, very cosmopolitan, with loads of alfresco restaurants tucked under the stone arches and columns. Most of our time there was spent eating & drinking at these places - a different restaurant for each meal of the day ... gorgeous. You just
Oaxaca
Iglesia de Santo Domingo sit there & watch the people go by, listening to the many musicians playing , looking at handicrafts offered to you by locals, while sipping a cold cerveca or as in my case ... a frozen margarita. Local women wandered around balancing big baskets filled with 'beer snacks' which were fried grasshoppers & fried ants eggs. I was hesitant but just had to try some. The grasshoppers were just crispy little things tasting like beef stock cubes, and the ants eggs tasted like paprika powder. Whats the big deal. If it were a fried tarantula - different story.
After Oaxaca we went down to San Cristobal de la Casas, a 12 hour overnight bus ride away. We covered the 'things to do' in San Cristobal in the first couple of hours there, and one thing that I fell in love with were the street vendors selling corn cobs on sticks, drizzled with fresh lime, smothered in mayonnaise and sprinkled with finely grated cheese. My mouth had multiple orgasms.
Our second day was a full-day driving up into the mountains where we stopped at two waterfalls, then Palenque, an ancient Mayan city in ruin. It's set in a jungle
Oaxaca
Under the arches at the zocalo and has some impressive temple structures which we learned were all painted red back in its heyday from 100 BC to around the 10 century when it was abandoned. My enthusiasm was at a low at these ruins because it was in the middle if the day, humid and as hot as hell. Dean was the one running up and down the many steep stairs on the pyramid-shaped temples taking photo's while I sat in a pool of my own sweat under a tree. The ride back to San Cristobal was incredibly beautiful on the winding road through the very high mountains looking out over the meandering river in the lush valley below, soaked in gorgeous warm colours from the impressive sunset. If only we could stop for photo's.
We left Oaxaca the next day on an air-conditioned bus bound for Guatamala, not even 2 hours away. The bus dropped us off on the Mexican border where we handed in our departure card then jumped into a car that whisked us off through the buffer zone to the Guatamalan border a few kilometres away. Once out of the car and into the baking 45-degree heat (not humid this time) we
Oaxaca
Other side of the tracks - the main market in Oaxaca had to find our own way through the absolute chaos of this border town. It was dusty, frantic and noisy. I loved it. We crossed paths with six other travellers heading in the same direction as us and to our benefit two of them were Mexican and could communicate with the locals better than us. We should have taken that Spanish lesson back home. Quisiera dos cerveca por favor doesn't get you very far. All of us pooled together and found a driver that could fit us into one small van. It was so much fun. There were eight of us in the back of this beaten-up old van with grinding gears, no suspension and peeling vinyl on the ceiling. The sliding door kept flying open as we clambered up the winding gravel road through jagged and deep limestone gorges. The girl sitting next to it had a heart attack every time it happened, poor thing. Travel insurance doesn't give you much when you're dead at the bottom of a Guatemalan cliff.
We were dropped off at a town called Huehuetenango, then jumped onto the local 'chicken' buses that had enough leg room for anyone under 5 foot. After
San Cristobal de la Casas
Our first morning on arrival changing from this bus and then two others, we made it to Panajachel, a very picturesque town on a huge lake which is actually a volcanic crater. The town is in the shadow of three volcano's on the opposite side of the lake. I can't wait to see the sunset today with those volcano's as a back-drop. Panajachel is a hippy kind of town, small, with two main streets leading down to the clear water. The streets are lined with loads of cafes, restaurants, bakeries and handicraft and food stalls. It's a hive of activity and colour, and the smell of fresh local pastries baking just next door to where I am now are wafting over making me very hungry. Later this afternoon we're going down to have drinks on the terrace under the flowering vines at the Sunset Cafe which Tanya, you recommended, to watch the sun set over the volcano's on the glistening lake.
Well I must go, time for some food and an icy cerveca. Maybe we'll just grab a plate of taco's and sit under a tree by the lake.
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