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After a two-night stay at the San Angel the tour group said goodbye to Puebla straight after breakfast. My chico correspondent Jose Carlos wasn’t around to farewell us but when our taxis arrived I made sure that I had packed his new residential details as Jose the Antony Beevor fan, much preferable to being a Justin Bieber fan, 😉 was moving to an outer part of Puebla city in January.

The taxis dropped us at the inter-city coach terminal and we soon got going on our long trek to Oaxaca (some 340-odd kilometres) which, with several stops for sightseeing, lunch, toilet breaks, etc, took us more than five hours to complete. Fortunately the coach was well equipped with air-con and comfortable reclining seats – which made the off-highway part of the journey more tolerable.

Oaxaca – Hidelgo

Oaxaca (pronounced “wá-HAH-ká”) gives its name to both the city and the state in this southern province of Mexico. The city itself which we got to about four in the afternoon is quite sizeable. As we reached our hotel (Casa Arnel), the wall of a cafe directly opposite caught my notice, it was attractively decorated with brightly painted murals depicting the characteristic Mexican motif of skeletons dancing with death. Our hotel rooms overlooked a delightful exterior courtyard comprising a dense, lush greenery brim full of native Mexican plants and shrubs.

‘Michael Jackson’ in attendance at Alameda Carnival

Casa Arnel was handily located in Jalatlaco on Hidalgo, close to the town centre with its plentiful choices of very reasonably priced comida options✱. Before dining though, we did a spot of sightseeing of Oaxaca nightlife…there was the standard Mexican Zócalo of course overlooking the city’s principal cathedral. From here we walked back to a large park called Alameda de León. By day Alameda is a busy market where you can buy, among other things, the colourful native blankets and shawls from descendants of the area’s indigenous peoples (Zapotec and Mixtec ‘Indians’)…at night it transformed into a Luna Park style carnival with rides and shooting galleries taking over the park.

By now it was cena-time, so accompanied by Eric, a softly-spoken southern American academic in the group, I had dinner at one particular budget-priced caterería/cantina in the street our hotel was in. We returned to the same joint the next morning for breakfast and then attempted to complete the trifecta by coming back for lunch three hours later, but ran foul of the famous Mexican institution of siesta!. Entering the now familiar cafe at around 12:30 I noticed that, though open, it was unusually dim and dark inside, in fact bereft of any sign of activity. When we eventfully attracted the attention of staff in the kitchen we were ushered to a seat. We attempted to order from the menu but nothing we asked for seemed to be available! Unimpressed by the scant morsels offered up by a callow, underage youth of a waiter, we pushed back our chairs and took our business and appetite somewhere else.

We headed back to the Zócalo to find a place with a decent lunch selection…reflecting on what had transpired at the cafe, it was clear to me that we had turned up during the afternoon siesta, the locals obviously knew that, that’s why it was empty (unlike the last two times we were there!). But because we were there, they obviously didn’t want to turn away the tourist dollar, so their scheme was to cobble together anything, maybe leftovers (who knows what!) and fob us off with that. Another valuable lesson learnt: don’t enter a Mexican eatery during siesta time! I stored it up alongside strictly avoiding any salad in prepared meals at Mexican restaurants!

Árbor of Sánta María

The tree of trees!
The first scheduled day trip from Oaxaca took us to the small town of El Tule to see its amazing natural wonder, a tree which is at least 1,500-years-old and possibly as much as 2,000-years-old. El Árbor del Tule, located inside a gated churchyard, dwarfs the two churches on either side of it! The Montezuma Cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) has the tag of being “the stoutest tree in the world”, boasting a world-record girth of 11.62m in diameter! Stats aside, it’s massive appearance is what leaves you amazed…a spectacularly gnarled trunk and branches which twists and turns in every conceivable direction – it’s simply the widest of gnarled bark living entities imaginable! (take note of the fence sign in front of the tree which is oddly incongruous).

The church & the topiaries of Sánta María

When you’ve finished marvelling at the El Tule tree, it’s worth taking the circuit walk around the enclosed gardens which contain many quirky sculptural features, of mainly cute animals (some made of metal but most of the creative creature sculptures are topiaries).

Not much else to see in Sánta Mária del Tule, from here its about a 20 minute drive back to the Oaxaca town centre.

PostScript: a cultural gulf across the Pacific?
After rejecting the “siesta lunch” American Eric and I finally settled on a place we agreed looked suitable in the crowded Zócalo. With ever an eye on a bargain comida we picked the three-course almuerzo especial (dirt cheap!). The service seemed pretty prompt, we received and consumed courses one and two swiftly, then we waited…and waited, 25 minutes, no third course (the dessert). We resolved after a few more minutes of no show and disinterest from the waitress, to query its inordinate delay with her as she was scurrying to and fro from table to table. I was about to put the direct question to her (with a typically Australian lack of “beating around the bush”…”Where is our dessert?!?”) when Eric in his ultra-polite southern gentlemanly way suggested a more culturally sensitive approach was the way to go. He beckoned her over and in Spanish politely asked her a (to my mind) wholly understated question: “Is everything okay?”. To which the short, stout waitress merely intoned “Si!” and immediately scurried off in the direction of another table! When she finally darted back our way again, with firm encouragement from me Eric rephrased the question, managing this time to include the sentence dónde es nuestra postres? (or something approximating that in Spanish) and hey presto two minutes later the said desserts made a welcome appearance at our table (underwhelmingly cod-ordinary postres they turned out to be I must say!) The amusing exchange reinforced for me the other wide cultural gulf, the one separating two very different sets of English-speakers on either side of the Pacific!

El Zócalo

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✱ catering for desayuno, almuerzo y cena (breakfast lunch and dinner). A peculiar trait of Oaxama, as of everywhere in this country, is that the locals largely eat the same maize-based food irrespective of whether its their morning meal, their noon or night one!

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