Oaxaca was incredible and one of my favorite places I´ve been this trip. I stayed an extra two days there (one on purpose, one on accident), and couldn´t have been happier. It´s a lovely, sunny little city with people selling jewelry and crafts all along the main pedestrian ways, and it has a beautiful main plaza. There were frequent free outdoor music performances, and there was an abundance of delicious food everywhere I went. The wonderful hostel I was staying in didn´t hurt either. I didn´t have much luck with the markets in the nearby towns (supposedly this is a must-do for a trip to Oaxaca), and there was the day I failed at going hiking, but there was also a day trip to an incredible petrified waterfall. Hiking around the petrified waterfall would´ve been neat enough on its own, but to top it off you could swim in a spring-fed pool at the top of the cliff surrounded by views of beautiful mountains. A definite highlight. My "last" night in town I treated myself to dinner at a nice restaurant and it was such a beautiful place that I wasn´t ready to leave yet by the time I had finished my food (a downside to eating alone is that you eat more quickly without conversation to break things up). Oaxaca is known for its mezcal, so I told my waiter I´d never had mezcal and I wanted to try it but didn´t know how to choose one. Out came the bottles and the glasses and a few samples were poured before I picked one and was brought a plate of oranges and a chile-maguey-salt mixture to go with it. Still wasn´t ready to leave, so a chocolate lava cake helped prolong the evening a bit more.
After a failed attempt to leave Oaxaca, thinking my bus left 2 hours later than it really did, I made it over to San Cristobal de las Casas the next day. San Cristobal is a very walkable, decent-sized town up in the mountains, and it has two twin hills with churches on top that made for a nice little climb. Highlights included a mellow evening out with some hostelmates for hot chocolate and live music, discovering pistachio ice cream, going to an amber museum, and riding in the back of a pickup truck to go see a cave. Walking through a long, windy, and very dimly-lit cave entirely by yourself is a pretty neat experience. Another highlight was the adorable little boys who worked at my hostel and giggled every time they talked to me. I was pretty excited about the pictionary date we had planned, but they ended up having to actually do work while they were at work -- a shame.
From San Cristobal de las Casas I headed off to Chiapa de Corzo, about an hour away. I spent the afternoon on a boat ride through the cañon del sumidero. Absolutely beautiful. It was 2hrs roundtrip in a little motorboat, passing between craggy canyon walls and scenery that made me think of the opening scene in Jurassic Park when they´re flying around the island.
The reason I added a night in San Cristobal instead of just doing a daytrip to the canyon is because of the fiesta de enero -- the January festival. It´s a 20-something day festival that includes parades of chuntas (young men dressed in traditional women´s outfits) and parachicos (impersonating Spanish conquistadors) and ends with a canoe battle and fireworks. I was able to stay there on the first night of the festival, which was the night of the chuntas. Definitely an experience. Some of the costumes were really incredible, I saw a 60+ year-old woman chugging tequila in the street, and I was swept off the sidewalk when the parade became too large to contain in the tiny street it was passing through. I only made it until 10pm since I was coming down with a cold and felt pretty crummy, but it was great to be out there for the few hours that I was.
Bright and early the next morning I was off to Palenque! I stepped off the bus late that afternoon, walked 3 blocks to my hostel, and suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a tropical jungle. A very neat change of scenery from mountain towns with cold nights. I signed up for a tour the next day so I could get in everything I wanted to do, had some dinner and crashed. The next morning I got picked up and taken down the road to the Palenque ruins. We got there around 9am and it was already hot and humid, which made standing on the top of large pyramids and other structures that much more refreshing. I spent maybe 2 hours wandering through the site and then headed over to the museum. But of course, Monday strikes again! So I joined the other kids from my hostel at the cafeteria for an hour before our 12:15 pickup time. Gripe #1 about tours -- the timing is never quite right. From the ruins we drove to Misol-Ha, a beautiful waterfall. Unfortunately we only had 40 minutes there since we´d gotten a late start from Palenque, so it was just enough time to explore the cave behind the waterfall and take a quick swim, but it was still great. And then we spent the extra 20 minutes waiting in the car for one person to show up...gripe #2 about tours. From there we continued on to Agua Azul, a long series of cascades with bright blue water (took maybe 10 miunutes to walk the length, not including time for pictures/gawking). We grabbed lunch and then went to explore, finishing up with a swim and some jicama/cucumber covered in chile and lime juice. We got back to the hostel and regrouped for dinner, ending up at a great seafood restaurant just down the street. It was a hilarious dinner, with two native Spanish speakers (also fluent in English) and two Australian guys who had been in Mexico for a week and didn´t know much more than "cerveza." We had big plans to watch a movie in the hostel cozy TV lounge after dinner, but we ended up with about 15 minutes of Ren and Stimpy in Spanish before we fell asleep in our chairs. All-in-all a great day, and the people I was able to meet more than made up for the other gripes about being on a tour.
The next morning I caught an 8am bus and headed off to Campeche. I shared a taxi from the bus station with an older couple and sat in the back with the woman who was 75 and writing a book about following your dreams. She and her husband have spent the last 5 years traveling, mostly housesitting internationally, and had just come from a month living in Mérida. She was so incredibly excited to discover that I was traveling by myself, and even happier to hear that I´d met lots of young, female, solo travelers during my trip. It was only a 5 minute taxi ride, but it was really fun and I hope I´m having adventures like that when I´m 75. I wasn´t wild about Campeche itself, although a crappy hostel and bad weather probably played a part, so I only spent that afternoon and the next morning there. Got to see a small but really well done museum on Mayan architecture and walk along the old fortress walls that were built to defend the city from pirate attacks.
And then it was off to Mérida, with an extra day to add to one of the last 4 places I´d be visiting. My first day in Mérida was thoroughly interesting and involved 2 lengthy conversations with random strangers on the street. The first one offering me advice about the city and things to see/do and the second one, a linguistics professor, talking to me about tourism and a study he and a bunch of other researchers had done of tourists and their conceptions of Mexico. This second conversation lasted for about 1.5 hours and took place mostly in the rain. The strangest part was that it ended with him learning about the first guy I had talked with and warning me that he was the sort of guy who made cameras disappear. But he was evasive enough about how he knew the guy and asked me multiple times not to tell him he´d said anything that the only conclusion I could come to is that they´re friends/acquaintances of some sort but the fact that I´d spent the last hour and a half talking to this guy about tourism, indigenous cultures, etc. got me off the hook. It was bizarre.
The next day I went out to see some archaeological ruins at Uxmal, which had beautiful, intricately-carved facades. It was a pretty small site so I only spent a few hours out there and had the afternoon to explore Mérida. The day after I took a daytrip out to Cuzamá to visit a set of 3 cenotes (an underground cave with a pool of water). After taking the collectivo to Cuzamá´s main plaza you hop on a "tricitaxi," basically a motorscooter with a cart in front, which takes you another 20 minutes down the road. From there, you get into a little cart that´s pulled along railroad tracks by a horse and go another 20 minutes to each cenote. The first cenote was long enough I couldn´t see the back of it and it had lots of fish swimming around. Incidentally, fish bites tickle (go figure). A neat, slightly eerie experience being down there all by myself. The second cenote only had one small access hole with a long ladder, so it was pretty dark inside. One tree had sent roots down maybe 20 feet to try to reach the water, and the water was so still and clear it was hard to tell where it started and the air ended. Again, very creepy but neat to be there alone. The 3rd cenote was absolutely beautiful. A large opening in the roof let in plenty of light and the water was bright turquoise. Wonderful swimming. A guy from my hostel and his parents showed up, and it was nice chatting with them while we lazed about in the water.
The rest of Friday was less pleasant than the morning. I got hit pretty hard with turistas and ended up throwing up multiple times on the bus ride home before they could pull over. Luckily the driver didn´t leave me on the side of the highway, despite the fact that I for some reason, in a vomit-induced haze, told him to go on without me. So the extra day I got by leaving Campeche was spent sick in Mérida, but so it goes. Thanks to antibiotics after a day I made it out of bed, managed to eat something, and even dared to pack up and take the bus to Valladolid today. So now here I am, more adventures (and less being sick) to follow.
How´s that for a whirlwind 3 weeks? Hopefully someday you´ll forgive me if I never come back.
I miss you! I can't wait to hear more when you're back :)
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