From the mountains to Mexico City
Trip Start
Oct 16, 2011
1
10
43
Trip End
Ongoing
Mexico City, Central Mexico and Gulf Coast, Mexico
Thursday, December 8, 2011
San Cristobal is a beautiful small city located high in the mountains, out of everywhere we visited in Mexico both Liv and I liked San Cristobal the most. It is a clean well laid out city with heaps of cafes, bars & restaurants for both the locals and tourists to indulge themselves in the local cuisines. There is also a large indigenous Mayan population living in the city and the surrounding hills so it was nice to meet some of them and be able to appreciate their way of life.
No sooner had we arrived at our hostel, we found ourselves in the back of the hostel managers car on a mission to find firewood for their open fireplace which was the only form of heating in the hostel. We found some firewood (if thats what you would call it, it seemed more like small kindling to me but apparently thats all they have there) at one of the local shops. After a bit of haggling about the price we bought and loaded up 400 pieces of wood and headed back home to unload it all. Located at 2,200 metres above sea level the nights were really cold in San Cristobal sometimes dropping to 0 degrees so it was fantastic to be able to sit around the fire at night. As a reward for our help the American couple who were managing the hostel took everyone out to their favourite taco restaurant which had amazing Mexican food.
The next day Liv and I decided to go on a short hike up one of the dormant volcanoes 15 minutes out of town. The hike was only a couple of km's long but it was straight up into the cloud forest then back down. Within the first 5 minutes it became evident that either both of us are super unfit or we were feeling the effects of the altitude we are not used to. It seemed to be much harder than it should have been. Hopefully it was just the altitude because in less than a month we will be tackling our largest hike to date, the 'W' Torres Del Paine hike in Patagonia which will no doubt be a test for both of us.
After sadly saying goodbye to the lovely people of San Cristobal we moved onto Oaxaca, a much larger version of San Cristobal. It is a great city located in the centre of three large valleys with many small towns within an easy day trip from the city. We decided to do our first organised tour of the trip that took us to a number of small indigenous towns, petrified waterfalls, the widest tree in the world, a mescal (local tequila) distillery and of course some Mayan ruins. We quickly made friends with a German couple who were also on the tour and we spent the day mucking about and having a great time. Swimming in the pools next to the petrified waterfalls was the highlight for me, it was an unbelievably beautiful setting and the water was clean and crazily cold having just bubbled its way up from deep underground. Luckily it was a nice sunny day so it didn't take long to warm back up.
Our last destination was huge, noisy and busy Mexico City. We spent four days here checking out all the tourist attractions and local markets. On the second night while we were sitting eating dinner in the hostel an earthquake hit Mexico City, measuring 6.6 on the richter scale and at a shallow depth it was an amazing thing to experience. The entire room started moving and shaking. It lasted a good 30 seconds and I felt like I was on a boat rolling about in a large swell, it was the strangest feeling. I would hate to be in an earthquake any bigger than that.
It luckily didn't do any major damage in Mexico City but unfortunately 2 people lost their lives elsewhere.
We had originally planned to spend a week travelling up the Pacific coast of Mexico that everyone raves about but having talked to a bunch of people who had either been there or knew people that had, it became clear that it wasn't the safest destination at the current time. In San Cristobal we met a Swiss couple who had just come from there and while on the coast had their hotel room broken into while they were sleeping and robbed by three people holding machetes. They weren't hurt but it scared the shit out of them and they lost all of their possessions.
So we decided to give it a miss and instead head to the Uruguayan coast instead. So that's where we are off to next.
Comments
Really nice blog, my friends....greatings from Akumal!!! The bloddy Germans: Alex and Michaela.