Puebla and Oaxaca

We’ve spent the last week and a half exploring two Mexican cities: Puebla and Oaxaca. We’ve been doing well, and we’ve had no more stomach bugs, so we’ve been able to experience quite a bit.

Puebla was our first stop after Mexico City. The main reason we visited Puebla was to try it’s famous dish – Mole Poblano. Mole Poblano is a traditional sauce made of well over 20 ingredients, with the most dominant flavors being chile peppers, chocolate, nuts, and delicious spices like cinnamon. For our first dinner in the city of Puebla we visited a small traditional restaurant that specialized in Mole Poblano. We were not disappointed. The sauce was excellent. It had so many layers of flavors that you just wanted to hold that flavor on your tongue for as long as possible. The sauce was spooned over chicken and rice and was a perfect way to start our voyage into southern Mexico.

The Mole Poblano aside , we also really enjoyed the vibe of the city. Like many other Mexican cities, it is built around a beautiful vibrant center square called a zocalo. The zocalo in Puebla was really exciting. There were crowds of people hanging out having fun, giant trees and water fountains, vendors selling trinkets and treats, and it was surrounded by outdoor cafes where you could sit and enjoy a cervesa or a nice hot chocolate flavored with Mexican chocolate and spices. We spend a lot of time here walking around and taking it easy. We also walked to the local market and had a fantastic sandwich with roasted spicy pork and avocados. We really enjoyed the vibe of the city, but we decided to move on to Oaxaca.

Oaxaca (pronounced as “Wha-Haw-Kah”) is a place that had been recommended to us by many Mexicans and other travellers, as being a great town to visit. We enjoyed it as well, and decided to rent an apartment here for a week. Joh found a great little rental that was cheap – and yet still nice and in a great location. We spent our days in Oaxaca hanging out at the local cafes, touring the markets, eating delicious meals, and sitting around in the zocalo. There’s no one thing here that was really remarkable or noteworthy, it is just one of those places that is nice and is great to visit.

The cafes all had free wi-fi so we were able to do a lot of travel research and get a lot of plans in place for our future travels. We have plans to spend the next month or two touring the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, and probably a little of Guatemala and maybe even Belize. If we’ve got some time left over after that, we’re considering maybe checking out Cuba, northern/western Mexico, or possibly even a US road-trip back home. That should bring us up to nearly the end of August. We’re planning on coming home then for three and a half weeks to be around for the wedding (and of course to see all our family and friends again – we really are starting to miss you all very much!), and then we plan on leaving for the second half of our trip which now has a definite starting point. Joh worked her magic, and was able to find a super-cheap one-way flight to Hong-Kong with a 2-day stopover in San Francisco leaving September 20th, so it’s been booked. We are now starting to really get excited about our upcoming Asia adventures. So many possibilities there…

We’ve left Oaxaca now, and are currently visiting the city of San Cristobal de las Casas, which is on the way towards the Yucatan. We plan on being here for a few days and then moving on north towards the city of Merida, or east into Guatemala - we haven't decided yet which route to take.

By the way, Mexico isn’t that far from all of you back home. If any of you want an exciting vacation, come and visit us! We’re going to be within a few hours of Cancun for the next few weeks, so keep your eye out for cheap flights and come on out and join us! We could even meet you at the airport, and get you set up with a place to stay if you want. I’ll keep a nice cold Corona in the fridge waiting for you!

Puebla

Oaxaca

Mexico City

We arrived in Mexico City late on June 7^th and booked into a really nice hostel in the center of the city near the main square (Zocalo).  We were really excited to be in Mexico City.  With over 22 million people it is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, and the 5^th largest city in the entire world.  It also has one of the most vibrant cultures.  And….of course the food is legendary.  But more on that later.

I can’t continue without of course mentioning that yes, we’ve heard the all the horror stories regarding the crime in the city, and yes we added a bit of precaution to our explorations.  But after travelling through other big cities we’ve come to realize that most of these horror stories are greatly exaggerated.  By default, people are not out to hurt you or to rob you – regardless of what city they live in.   Most people are very welcoming to visitors and are genuinely interested in you and are thankful that you’ve come to visit them.  They are all very proud of their city.  Of course, if you walk around flashing money and other valuables you will be tempting people, but I really think that temptation would not be any worse in a city like Mexico City, or Rio or any other city with a bad reputation than it would be in the downtown of any city back home.  When crime does happen, for some reason the media picks up on it and makes it sound like the city is the most dangerous place in the world.  The reality is that there are millions of visitors who enjoy trips to these places and only a very select few are victims of crime.  And usually they are the ones stumbling down the street at 3am waving their wallets and iPads around attracting all kinds of attention.   But enough about that.

One of the main reasons we came to Mexico – and started in Mexico City in particular is because I had been reading a lot about Mexican food.  Those who know me, know that I’m really into food.  I really enjoy eating, cooking, and trying new flavors.  Mexico City, with its giant food markets and omnipresent street food vendors was the ideal place to come and experience one of the best food cultures in the world.

Walking down the streets of Mexico is a food-lovers dream.  When we arrived that first night we walked out in search of tacos.  Tacos are everywhere.  There are vendors selling them everywhere  and they have 100s of different fillings - mostly different types of pork and different salsas.  We came across one that had a list 15 items long of all the different parts of the animal.  Ribs, Stomach, Sausage, Tongue, Brain, Head, Breast, Cheek, Lips, Eyeballs, Throat, etc.  They had a giant pot with simmering animal parts.  You could order whatever part you wanted, and they’d bring it out of the pot, fry it on a hot skillet for a few minutes, chop it up and serve it to you in a freshly made corn tortilla.  Fantastic. Then you were presented with a number of different salsas and hot sauces and you could customize it and down it right there on the street.  I tried the head tacos, and Joh (a little freaked out I think) went for the ribs.  The head was really good.  Little bits of brain, cheek, snout, and tongue all fried up, and doused in salsa. Back at the hostel, I polished it all off with a Corona (of course) and came to the realization that yes – Mexico City was going to be awesome!

The next morning we went to visit the central market.  Markets are usually one of the first places we visit when we get to a new city.  You can learn a lot about a place’s culture by visiting the local market. The market in Mexico City is the largest I’ve ever seen.  Rows and rows of fresh fruits, vegetables, dried chiles, spices, herbs, and countless other food items.  We passed by vendors with massive displays of 20 different varieties of limes, and others with huge selections of chiles, tomatoes, onions, avocados, tomatillos, cactus paddles, banana leaves, or fresh tortillas. Each vendor had their display set up beautifully.  All the produce was extremely fresh and displayed in towers stacked up perfectly.  We’ve been in many markets over the past months and many of them smell pretty bad and are quite dirty, but this market in Mexico City was immaculate.  The only smell was of fresh produce, and everything was clean and tidy. It was a real treat to walk through this market.  I stopped at nearly every stand to fully take in the smells, tastes, sights, and textures.  Countless times, Joh ended up way ahead wondering where I was only to find me a few stalls back, holding a dried poblano chile in my hand, with a dreamy look in my eyes.  I got countless photos of these stands, so please feel free to ignore most of them in the following photo album.  The market also had a number of food stalls where you could buy a little cooked food.  We tried tacos with cactus paddles (nopales), green onions, roasted pork, salsas, and zucchini blossoms.  They were all extremely delicious. They also had fresh fruit salads, smoothies, and juices and they were a real treat as well. I could talk about this market all day long, but to save you all the tedium of that I’ll end here and just say that yes – our time in Mexico will be filled with delicious food and we will likely be a few pounds heavier by the time we’re done.  That’s fine by me.  I think we’re both getting a bit too skinny anyways.

On one of days we went to take a tour of the Teotihuacan Pyramids.  It is a huge archaeological site near Mexico City that is the remains of a city from approximately 2000 years ago.  The main features of the city are the pyramids.  They are quite big, and really interesting.  You can climb to the top of them to get a great view of the surrounding city.  It was a really great tour.  The only downside was the after effects of the buffet restaurant beside the site.

After days of street food and market food, it was a restaurant that finally gave us the bug.  We were expecting the infamous Mexican stomach problems from the food right from the first day, but we were fine up until the supposedly “safe” tourist restaurant next to Teotihuacan.  The bug put us down for a few days.  We couldn’t go more than 10 minutes away from the hostel’s toilets without feeling a little worried.  We ended up spending a lot of time sitting around in or near the hostel taking it easy reading books and doing travel research.  After a few days or rest and some meds it’s all pretty much fine now and we’re off eating whatever we want again.  We’ll just stay away from the buffet restaurants.

After a week or so in Mexico City we got a ride to the city of Puebla which is a couple hours south-east of Mexico City.  We’re here for a day or two and then we move on to Oaxaca.  We’ll likely be staying in Oaxaca for a week or two.  We’ll write about our time here in Puebla in the next blog post.  Hopefully sometime in the next day or two.  Stay tuned.

Mexico City

Teotihuacan Pyramids

Pictures from Mancora and Quito

Enjoy:)

Blog Mancora Peru

Blog Quito, Ecuador

Mancora and Quito

Our month in Mancora, Peru at our rented beach house was great. We had a very relaxing time and our travel ambitions were definitely rejuvenated. We spent a lot of time just hanging out, reading books and working on different projects. It was great to take a break from constant travelling, but after a month of sitting still we were quite ready to move on and continue our journey.

We spent a lot of time in Mancora planning for the next couple of months. When we arrived we had no plans whatsoever. We were debating on Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, all of Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. In the end, after a lot of research we’ve settled on Mexico. We realize that it’s quite a jump from Peru to Mexico, but we figure that we can explore Mexico and go further south into Central America if we so desire. From all our research, the information we read regarding Mexico excited us the most, so that’s where we’re headed. To get there however, we would need to get to a city with major airport first, so we decided on first visiting Quito, Ecuador for a few days. On June 3rd we took an overnight bus across the border into Ecuador, and arrived in Quito the next morning.

We immediately loved Quito. Quito is a city with definite contrasts. There’s a modern metropolis feel to a lot of the city and there are historical districts with interesting colonial buildings. The food in Quito was also fantastic, and we spent a lot of our time sampling the food from small vendors all over the city. Empanadas, humitas, quimbolitos, gelatos, shwarmas, coffee, chocolate, tropical fruit, and freshly squeezed/blended juices were available everywhere and we tried them all. The city is perfect for just wandering around. There were large beautiful parks, interesting markets, and great streets for walking around people watching and checking out the sights.

On Monday, we took the bus out of the city a short ways to visit the equator. The equator runs just north of the city, and there are a number of tourist attractions there. There is the main tourist site called “Mitad del Mundo” which has a giant monument along the line. This site was created years ago and it is a great tourist spot for taking photos of you standing on the supposed equator line. Unfortunately around 20 or 30 years ago, when someone first brought a GPS to the location, they discovered that the actual equator is around 250 meters away from the monument and line at Mitad del Mundo. After checking out Mitad del Mundo, and getting the required tourist photos, we walked down the road, where there is now a museum which show the real location of the equator determined via GPS. The museum was pretty neat. They had scientific demonstrations of the Corialis Effect. They showed water draining directly down out of a sink instead of swirling out. You can also balance an egg on the head of a nail. It was all very interesting.

So after a busy and enjoyable weekend in Quito, we’re now (Tuesday morning) off to the airport for our flight to Mexico. We’ll be arriving in Mexico City this evening and we plan on staying there for a week or so before moving on to visit other areas around Mexico.

Joh will post some photos of Mancora and Quito as soon as possible.  I'm typing this at the airport in Bogata, Colombia while we wait for our connecting flight.  There's not enough time here to upload all the photos.  Once we're in Mexico City and we get connected we'll put the photos up here.  Hopefully sometime in the next day or two.

Chilling out in Mancora

So we’ve been in Mancora, Peru for a week or two now. We arrived here last week Monday after a series of small flight from Cusco, to Lima, to Piura, and finally to Tumbes. From Tumbes we found a van heading for the small coastal town of Mancora (an hour and a half away) and got a ride. When we arrived here it was immediately evident that this place was a great place to stay and relax for a while. Great beaches, lots of seafood restaurants everywhere, surf shops/schools, and plenty of cheap hostels.

We came to Mancora with the intention of taking a break from travelling. We had just finished a tour to Machu Picchu, a tour through the Amazon, and visiting a lot of cities in a row without any significant break in between. It was time to relax for a while and recharge the batteries. After travelling for over 4 months now, we become a little immune to seeing all kinds of new and interesting things, so we can definitely say that we need to get the travel bug up and excited again. When everything starts looking the same and you get feelings of indifference to things that are supposed to inspire and amaze you, you know it’s time to stop for a while.

We decided that we would rent a private home here for a month. When we last stopped for a month to live somewhere (in Sucre, Bolivia) we really enjoyed the time we spent there and we got to really know the place and settle down a bit. Living in hostel after hostel can get really tiring after a while. It feels great to set some roots somewhere, unpack your bags, and just live for a while privately. It feels great to have our own private kitchen, bathroom, and living area.

It look us around 24 hours to find our place. We spent the first night in Mancora at a hostel, and spent that evening and the following morning wondering around looking for places and asking locals for advice. We ended up finding a place on the Internet that looked ideal and was within our price range so after a quick visit we handed over the rent money and moved in right away.

The place is around 15 minutes away (via MotoTaxi) from the town of Mancora in a quiet area known as Las Pocitas. The manager here is also a MotoTaxi driver, so he shuttles us back and forth to town every few days for groceries. Our house sits halfway up the side of a hill right across the road from the beach. It has a really great patio with a fantastic view of the Pacific Ocean. We have front row seats to a beautiful sunset each evening. The house is plenty big enough. It’s basically a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and a few spare beds. However, we spend pretty much all our time out on the patio. It’s comfortable, shaded, and we have great scenery all day long.

Our Home

The Patio

Sunset view from the patio

Being away from the town keeps us isolated here (the closest store is too far to walk to) but we don’t mind it. It keeps us focused on relaxing and working on some projects. Rather than focus on travelling tourist activities, we’ve resolved to spend this month working on ourselves. We spend an hour or two each day working out – jogging, stretching, yoga, strength training, etc. We cook really nutritious meals with all the delicious local vegetables, fruits, fish, and chicken available at the local market. We have vowed off all artificial ingredients, sugar, coffee, and filler foods like rice, bread, and potatoes for the month – except for Saturdays when we go to town for dinner at a restaurant. We’ve also each picked a couple subjects to research and educate ourselves. We’ve each read a ton of books here already, and we’re filling up notebooks with study notes. Aside from all that we make a conscious effort to relax as well. Every day we sit back and take it easy to watch the sunset and go for leisurely walks.

One of the other intentions of coming here was to learn how to surf. The Internet and guidebooks said there were waves here year-round, unfortunately there has been next to nothing here, so I think we’ll have to save that for another time later in the trip. I’m sure with Central America coming up soon we’ll find some good surf soon.

We (well mostly Joh) have also been focused on determining our travel itinerary for the next few months. We’re starting to realize that after we leave Mancora we’ll have less than three months until we need to be back home. We know we’ll probably go north to Ecuador next, but after that we are lost. We’re not sure if we’ll be going to Colombia or Venezuela. We may skip them and go straight to Central America. We’ve been researching all the countries in Central America, trying to determine where we want to go. It’s really difficult to do. We know we don’t want to travel fast and try see everything, as we know that not really our style. So we have to try pick a small number of places out of the vast amount of possibilities. How do you choose between Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Belize, and Guatemala? And what about the giant country of Mexico?... or the Caribbean Islands? We know we can’t go to them all, so how do you pick out the best? We are having a really tough time figuring it out. Any advice from you blog readers would be great. Have you heard of or been to any highly recommended places in this area of the world? Let us know. Where would you go?

We’ve also been entertaining the idea of purchasing a car after Mexico, and driving home through the US for the last few weeks. It’s just an idea at this point, but an interesting possibility. We could probably get a decent deal on a vehicle in the states, and then either sell it in Canada when we’re back, or maybe keep it for when we return next year. I’m sure there are a bunch of legal/tax/customs/licensing/insurance issues with this, so we’d have to do some extra research. If any of our blog readers out there have experience with purchasing cars in US, we could use your advice. Send us an email - if you don’t mind.

So we’ll be here in Mancora until at least June 2, and after that we’ll be off travelling around again. There probably won’t be too many exciting blog posts in the next few weeks, so please forgive us, and we’ll try get some good stories in June to make up for it.

By the way, our internet access here in Mancora is pretty decent, so if any of you have some free time over the next few days/weeks, we’d love to arrange some Skype chats. Let us know when you’re available and we’ll give you a call. We’re free to chat at pretty much any time. After four months it’s really starting to feel like we’ve been away for a long time. It would be great to reconnect with family and friends back home.