Weblog: Mexico Days 9 to 11: Oaxaca

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It was time for Ed and I to go our separate ways, since he had to be back to work the next day. We drove to a hostel with my stuff, since the hotel was expensive, and then he was off.

I'd been moving around a lot for over a week, so it was time for a break. I immediately took a liking to the hostel, and my first impression was correct. It was pleasant, if not the cleanest, but certainly not the dirtiest, and full of interesting people. Not at all the usual backpacker crowd (thank God). A whole group of Holland-related people: A middle-aged Dutch woman living in America and travelling through Central and South America, an English guy and his Dutch girlfriend who are living in Holland, and of course, myself. Also an interesting older Australian woman, a Puerto Rican living in Mexico City who was in Oaxaca to buy stuff to sell in New York, and a wheelchair-bound expat, a couple of girls from Isreal, and a smattering of young Germans. Most of these people were hear for a period of a month or more in order to learn Spanish at one of the many school in the city.

For three days I didn't do much. Oaxaca is a very livable colonial city with plenty of culture. The downtown is a bit bigger than San Cristobal and a bit more run down, but the outskirts sprawl over the surrounding hills. There seemed to be nightly festivals: colourful processions winding their way through the city streets setting, and fireworks in church plazas. I wandered around the city, visited museums and beautiful Baroque cathedrals, went to a Sunday mass, and spent a lot of time at the hostel reading and conversing. It's nice when you get a group of people together who don't know each other but have a seemingly endless amount of stuff to talk about. It's one of my favorite aspects of travelling.

One day I rented a bike to go in search of the nearby Swedish Oaxaca Multi-Cache. I ended up going quite a strange way and pushing my bike up a very steep hill along a trail that wound between houses on the outskirts of the city, and got some quizzical looks (maybe they thought I was an insane gringo who was going to bike back down the trail). The first cache location offered great views of the city, but it looks like the cache has gone missing, which is not surprising. Most of the caches in Mexico, aside from the ones near Mexico City, are placed by travellers and rarely looked for. Both the caches I searched out had been placed over a year ago and didn't have any logs, so I wasn't expecting that they would still exist. The other problem with traveller-placed caches is that they are often not in very interesting locations, since travellers don't know the area and will choose a convenient spot. My experience with these caches made me decide not to place the cache I had brought with me from Canada in Mexico.

Oaxaca has a small independent theatre, and my first evening in town I saw Bunuel's "Un Chien Andoulou". In fact, I saw an hour of rewinding and fastforwarding a tape on a projection screen, punctuated by periods of blue screen, followed by the very short feature, which was strange to say the least. I figured that since it was a silent film I would be able to understand what was going on, but I don't think there was actually anything to understand. The next evening I went to another Bunuel film, but it was very talky and being in Spanish without subtitles, I wasn't getting anything, so I left after twenty minutes.

Finally I decided to leave and, after finding as much information as possible and buying a map, bought a bus ticket to Cuajimoloyas. To be continued.