Week #18: Oaxaca de Juarez, San Jose del Pacifico y Mazunte

I've wrapped up my three weeks of intensive Spanish classes in Oaxaca and have significantly improved my Spanish. But I really want to continue to learn now that I'm not in Spanish class every day so I'm trying to do other things to continue to learn such as reading, listening to the radio and practicing my Spanish with the locals. Today I've started with only speaking Spanish in the morning which Ginny REALLY loves! She repeats in English what I've said to see if she understands what I've said - so far we've had no major misunderstandings. See photo below of my Spanish class and a few other shots from our last week in Oaxaca.

Ginny took a four-day natural dyes workshop last week in Oaxaca in which she learned the process of preparing fibers, pigment extraction and dyeing with regional pigments, such as pericon (a wild marigold), brazil wood and cochineal (the female parasitic bugs that feed on nopal cactus leaves). They taught the class in both Spanish and English so she learned some Spanish as well! See photos below from Ginny's classes.

Ginny is not crazy about ruins, after having seen a million in Greece/Italy, so while she was in her dyeing class I took the bus after my Spanish class to visit the ruins of Monte Alban which are up in the hills looking out over Oaxaca. Monte Alban was one of the earliest cities of Mesoamerica and was an important Zapotec city for about one thousand years until it was abandoned around 500 - 750 BC. The scale is much larger than Mitla and is really impressive to walk around and to think that all these pyramids were built thousands of years ago without the help of modern construction techniques. See photos below of Monte Alban.   

On our last day in Oaxaca, we went for a rather unique and unexpected cultural experience: a live stream concert (from the Seoul Olympic Stadium) of a South Korean band in a Mexican movie theater. It was the first time that we've been to the movie theater since the pandemic began and even though the theater was packed, everyone had masks on so it felt fairly safe. It was quite the experience as most of the other attendees were seemingly female teenagers (though Ginny thinks they were more in their twenties) prone to screaming throughout the show. So Ginny and I skewed the average age considerably but we had fun nonetheless. And it was a nice respite from the sun-baked van.

We met a couple from Germany and the Netherlands on our last night in Oaxaca who are traveling in their camper van from the US all the way down to Chile. We had a great conversation with them and surprisingly they are some of the only folks that we've really connected with who are doing similar travels to us. To be fair, we haven't actually even seen many other van travelers - they're probably all in Baja. We traded lots of tips and tricks that we've learned from life on the road.       

After three weeks in Oaxaca, we left town on Sunday to head south towards the coast. We had heard that the road through the mountains was a beast with crazy twists and turns much of the way, to the point where people who don't get carsick get carsick. Armed with a box of Dramamine, we headed off. On our way out of Oaxaca we hit a barricade which prevented us from carrying along the road. I had heard in my Spanish class that these types of 'barricadas' were commonplace in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas and Veracruz. Sometimes they're done as part of a local protest, sometimes they're done by groups looking for money and sometimes you don't even know what the cause is. So we had to find an alternative route off the main road through a local village with very bad, dirt roads to get around the barricade. Thanks to Ginny's stellar navigational skills and some suggestions from a handful of locals, we made it through the barricada with flying colors and not too much added drive time!

We spent a night up in the mountains in San Jose del Pacifico which is a beautiful little village known for its fresh psychedelic mushrooms sitting 8,000 feet above sea level. It was nice and cool up there which was a nice break after the Oaxacan heat. Yesterday we completed the rest of the drive through the mountains and down to the Oaxacan coast where we're planning to spend the next couple weeks. Our first stop is in the small village of Mazunte. We're still getting our bearings here but it may be a little too young and hippy for us. The sunset viewing on the beach felt like a Grateful Dead concert or Burning Man festival. Ginny thinks it may have the highest tattoo per capita (foreigners) in the Americas. See photos below from our first night/morning in Mazunte.