What we did in Oaxaca – our city of celebration

Let’s pop back to Mexico shall we? As I type the rain’s hammering down outside and it feels as if spring has crept back into its shell. Today I want to take you to Oaxaca which you may remember was the reason that we chose to go to Mexico when we had to pivot away from Cuba rather quickly. It was the place that the well travelled midlife women I met in Thailand voted as their all-time favourite and so I had to find out why.

We flew from Mexico City and it only took an hour, it would have been a lot longer by road because of the mountainous terrain. This was the day of our silver wedding anniversary and it felt very, very special. I’ve found that as I get older I don’t feel the resonance of special days as much as I used to. Birthdays and even Christmas Day just don’t hold the tingle that they did but I woke up on the morning of our anniversary feeling full of treasure. It was exultant and I was grateful that we were doing ordinary things because the simple glow around them felt noticeable, more so than if we’d planned a series of special events.

So here we were, setting off, we felt like venturers and actually our lack of prior research which is so unusual for me was making it all feel more thrilling.

We’d booked a very simple Airbnb for five nights which we’d chosen specifically for its central location.

There was a functioning bathtub on the patio outside – I confess we didn’t use it but it was a novel touch! This was a great place to stay and about half the price of the nearby hotels so I’m giving it 5 stars.

Although it was only an hour away, Oaxaca instantly felt different to Mexico City. The first thing we noticed was the clean air. Mexico City sits in a basin with mountains around it and you can see the smog hanging over it as you fly in. It isn’t a reason not to go there – you don’t actually notice it until you move somewhere else but it is something you sense as you breathe more freely again. Oaxaca is also much warmer than Mexico City because it isn’t at the same altitude. The days were a pleasant 25°C and the evenings a bit cooler – about 16°C, you needed a wrap or a jacket.

I was happy to leave my serious city capsule behind with its tonal navy theme and open the kaleidoscopic one that I’d filled with colour for Oaxaca. Because Oaxaca is famous for being the city of colour, I luxuriated in it as soon as I stepped out of our door.

We wandered for a while, slowly making our way towards the meeting point for a ‘first day in Oaxaca‘ walking tour that I’d booked with a truly lovely local chap called Gilberto. It was exactly what we needed to orientate ourselves. He took us past all of the key buildings and markets as well as a few places that were off the beaten track, giving us a potted context to each one. It was a great way of working out what we wanted to explore in more detail. He also roused us with Oaxaca’s history, giving us a first glimpse into its culture and what it’s really like to grow up and live there.

A note about Airbnb experiences

We’ve done a lot of Airbnb experiences now and we’ve learned how to spot which are worth booking. Look for the ones that are clearly run by individuals – you can tell by reading the reviews and checking that a single name is repeated consistently rather than a number of different guides. The individuals are highly invested in what they do and they’re passionate about where they live. They really want to tell you about it and show you the real place rather than a sanitised, official version of it. If you find yourself on a tour with a rep from a bigger company they’re just doing it for the tips – they’ll tick off the obvious tourist spots and get it over with as soon as they can.

There’s so much that I could tell you about the magnificent colonial buildings in Oaxaca. I’ve had to edit this post heavily because it was far too long so you’ll have to imagine most of them with their imposing 16th century architecture. This church, the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, is so big that it was once referred to as the eighth wonder of the world… imagine the scale… and it’s covered with gold inside. It was hard to capture in a photo but the whole place shimmers, it’s like walking into a Fabergé egg.

Gilberto explained that the Oaxacans are proud of its beauty but also conflicted by the fact that it manifests so much opulence when it resides in Mexico’s poorest state. He took us to see the graffiti on different walls that surround it – challenging the Catholic Church’s riches and also the way that it has treated the region’s women over the centuries. These are the cultural insights that come through on tours led by passionate locals; they’d be swiftly bypassed on a classic, tourist board approved excursion.

It was enlightening to get the 'anti-tourist' version of the city's story from him before we delved into it. So, for example, most tourists are seduced into buying the beautiful hand made alebrijes (spirit animals – I'll show them to you in a minute) but he explained that they're actually a tourist construct. They don't come from traditional Mexican folkore, they were invented by the artist Pedro Linares Lopez  in the 1930s. And yet when you go into the alebrije shops in Mexico they pull out ancient looking almanacs to help you identify your spirit animal based on your date of birth. They are very enticing souvenirs though; the artisan ones are made in the villages around Oaxaca. Tradition forbids the use of loupes or magnifying glasses and so the most intricate ones can only be made by people with very young eyes and training starts at around the age of eleven.

At the beginning of the tour Gilberto had asked if anyone was in Oaxaca for a special celebration and so we told him that it was our silver wedding anniversary that very day. After everybody else left he insisted on taking us to this particular spot so that he could take a photo for us to keep – it’s a lovely memory to have.

You see the other nice thing about a tour with an individual is that if you get on they’ll often stay with you after the tour’s ended and tell you more over a drink or two. At the end of our evening we felt as if we had a real insight into the true Oaxaca.

We’d left the next day free so that we could go back to some of the places we’d seen on the orientation tour. It was lovely just wandering through the city at our own pace, with all of the context from the night before in our heads. We made the most of the visual spectacle that unfolds as you drift through the streets in Oaxaca, it throbs with creativity…

Dress – this year’s version – more colours here; sandals – this year’s version

… on every corner!

I was keen to pop into the shop which is run by the most famous alebrije artists, Jacobo and Maria Angeles. Sure enough the ancient almanac came out and so here I was jotting down notes as I requested the spirit animals for us and the boys. And as he described the personalities that surrounded each one of us, they were quite uncannily accurate. I was hoping mine would be something like a puma crossed with a python but it was a deer crossed with a frog!

If you go to Oaxaca you’ll see alebrijes everywhere the Taller Jacobo and Maria Angeles is the place where you’ll find the truly beautiful ones that have been made in local villages rather than shipped in from China. They’re exquisite and it’s worth a visit.

After a while we found a shady courtyard and stopped for a lazy lunch because there was something we’d been waiting to do for a very long time. You see years ago during a clearout I found an old diary that I’d kept sporadically from my Sixth Form days. It contained lots of detail from the time when Mal and I were first together so rather than reading through it then, I deliberately put it away to read on the (then) unimaginably distant date of our silver wedding anniversary. So before we left we photocopied the relevant section without looking and here I am, reading it out over lunch.

Of course there were all of the happy, fun events that we remember but what jumped out was the pain and conflict from that time. We’d both come out of the ashes of other relationships and we’ve since forgotten how harrowing it was stepping from one life into another. It was surprising to see that our brains have overwritten so many difficult memories as our life together has moved on. For both of us it was a poignant reminder of the struggle we persisted with to secure the happiness that we have today. I’m so glad we saved those pages for our silver wedding because it added an extra layer of tenderness to our celebration.

Dress – this year’s version – more colours here; sandals – this year’s version

So after a pretty intense return to the past it made sense to move to another bar and dedicate the rest of the afternoon to the future. As good students we test out every exercise that we do on the Midlifechic Retreat ourselves and one of them is a very visual mapping of future hopes and dreams. We’d each spent quite a while working alone on our plans and now it was time to share what had come up. (And it’s just made me smile to see that there I’d been with my handwritten pages from the past – and here we were sharing our futures on an iPad. It just sums up the life trajectory of GenX doesn’t it?!).

When you focus you uncover surprises

There were surprises for each of us in the stuff that came out, in fact while I was doing it I uncovered dreams that I didn’t know I had. They’re now really important to me and it just shows how activating parts of your brain that you don’t apply to your usual processing methods can unearth new dimensions. We also found sides to each other that we didn’t know

One thing I discovered about Mal has now helped me to understand him… and my boys… and a lot of men better – and that’s the need for life-enhancing adrenaline-sparking activities. Perhaps it’s something primordial that goes back to the days of being hunters. It seems so obvious now but while he was working on his board Mal had realised that the times when he’s felt less fulfilled in life have been when he’s had no adrenaline-triggering outlet.

So for example when the boys were tiny and we were renovating our house there was no time for karate or rugby and he put them on hold for a year or two. As soon as they were back in his life he felt better. Eventually rugby had to end but karate is a lifelong sport and the sparring side of it when they fight hard and fast gives him the twice weekly dose of adrenaline that he needs. As we plan the next stage of our lives it feels really valuable that we’ve stumbled across this. It’s been an eye-opening insight for me into what helps him to feel as though he’s living his life to the full.

It’s also given me some insight into why some of our male friends have veered towards risky behaviour. Mal was talking about one who’s done something unfortunate recently and he pointed out that it was probably because he doesn’t have an adrenaline outlet. I’m just telling you this in case it helps you too – because it’s made a huge difference to how I see things. I understand now why my boys have always wanted to climb to the top of trees/jump off cliffs into the sea/do half marathons without training – it all makes so much more sense. And instead of cursing karate every Friday night I’m now going to bless it as Mal walks out of the door!

Anyway here I was talking about my hopes and dreams (which have zero requirement for adrenaline in the mix!)… and if you’d like to go through this illuminating process yourself and see what comes up for you, don’t forget that we’re doing one last retreat in October, there are a few spaces left here.

This day spent looking back at the past and then projecting ourselves into the future felt like the zenith of our silver wedding celebrations. It went on until we discovered that the square in Oaxaca turns into an impromptu dance floor most nights. There were a mix of bands coming and going, playing different types of music and of course we were over the moon when the salsa began. Even more so when we realised that the average Mexican is no better at it than us so we could dance without a care. Dancing in the warm moonlight was a perfect end to the day. Here’s a little clip of one of the slower numbers when the older locals stood up to take a turn.

The next day was dedicated to something I wanted to do. I slightly hesitate to tell you about it because as some of you know I was documenting our trip on Instagram Stories and by this point the trolls were having a field day. In Mexico City they’d told me I was a disappointment because this was supposed to be a dream holiday and all I was doing was going to museums and galleries. So you can imagine the reaction when we headed out of Oaxaca to a little Mexican town because I wanted to see a tree!

To be fair it wasn’t really Mal’s idea of a great day out either but it wasn’t just any tree, it’s the fattest tree in the world, it takes over 40 adults holding hands to span its trunk. And it may not mean something to everyone but to me it does, especially as it’s between 1,400 and 1,600 years old.

I’m adding this video for any of you who ‘get it.’ You see there was an immense sense of peace that came from standing by this ancient tree. It felt as though the wisdom of the ages was there, almost as if it was saying, “I’ve seen it all and yet still I stand. All will be well.”

The trolling didn’t hurt me, if you can’t see the beauty in this then something’s missing. The local children come here for school trips and they look for the animal shapes in the old gnarls like this one… what can you see?

The tree guards the village church – which actually was a little macabre. There were lots of plastic baby dolls dressed to represent various saints (Mal nicknamed it the church of Chucky) and a full size Jesus and Mary in separate coffins at the front, covered in gory fake blood. Even so it felt good to be in a church that was authentically local and not full of tourists taking photos (as we were doing… I hear the irony!).

But look at what happened as we were walking out towards the gate. It felt like such an honour to see this glorious Mexican bride and her beau on their special day – watch to the end because the abuelitas are just so fabulous.

To the people who called me a geek and a nerd during our trip, I wear your badge with pride. The thing is that you can enjoy chatting about clothes and make-up and have other interests too – but on social media it seems that there has to be a divide. That’s why I prefer blogging and talking to you, the multi-dimensional women here.

Back in Oaxaca we had one last bit of ‘work’ to do – and that was sharing our answers to the questions in our Midlifechic Retreat workbooks. After the blue sky thinking of the day before it was helpful to drill down into the practical side of the future – the hows, whens and how much-es.

Before I move on I just want to mention the sandals I'm wearing in these photos because they are a find for midlife feet. They're designed by a podiatrist and they help to support the chain in your body from neck to spine to foot so you can walk for miles in them without them looking like you're wearing Hotter shoes or other fugly sandals. I wish they weren't so expensive but I reckon they're a lifetime purchase – they're not going to wear out. And the best thing is that they also design really elegant heels – the sort you would happily wear all day as mother of the bride and then dance all night in.

These are the sandals I'm wearing…

Supportive sandal

and this is how the soles are designed to support the foot…

… and this is just one of the many pairs of low heels that I keep lingering over because they'd take you anywhere and they'd work both with formal dresses and casually with jeans.

Suede low heels

Ok I’d better speed up a bit – I told you Mexico would take a book to write up!

We went back to the Airbnb to change quickly and headed out for the evening. We were running late but we hadn’t had time to eat so we popped into a backstreet restaurant we were passing (Tlayudas El Negro) and I’m going to say this was the best food we had in our whole time in Mexico. You can see me tucking into a tostada here – a crisp tortilla topped with spicy pork, cheese salad and guacamole – it was so good that I’m still thinking about it. And that’s another thing about Oaxaca there are lots of fancy restaurants, many on rooftops with Michelin stars but don’t judge by appearances. All of the best food we had was in unremarkable places and from street food stalls. You don’t need to spend much at all in Mexico to eat like a king.

We were heading towards another independently run Airbnb walk. This time it was it was Nighttime Urban Legends with Javi who introduced himself as an example of original Mexican man because he’s a pure descendent of the Zapotecs with no Spanish blood in his line. He took us around the dark back streets of Oaxaca telling us all of the stories of things that had happened there. It was fascinating but even more so were the insights he gave us into Zapotec culture.

Hernán Cortés came to Oaxaca in the 1500s in his search for El Dorado. He soon realised that there was no gold there and seeing that the mountainous terrain was going to be hard to conquer, he moved on quite quickly. Of course he left enough troops behind for them to create the colonialist centre that you see today. He also instigated the building of churches on the top of the Zapotec places of worship. This meant that the Zaptoecs had to enter the new edifices to leave tributes at their holy places such as their ancient water stone. And once they got them inside, the Christians gave them a choice of converting their faith… or facing the fatal alternative.

Javi showed us another beautiful church that people stand and admire… but then gave us the sinister side of its history that the tourist board keeps hidden. In the 20th century archaeologists noticed that the walls that surrounded it were hollow. It was thought that perhaps gold was hidden there and so the state gave permission for them to be dismantled. Inside they found hundreds and hundreds of skeletons of newborn babies and women. They finally worked out that they were the bodies of Christian nuns who had come over as colonial missionaries and been raped by the Catholic priests. When the babies were born or if a nun tried to escape before giving birth they were buried alive in the walls.

It makes you think doesn’t it? If we’d gone on an ordinary tour all we’d have done is admire the beautiful building. This is why I like to get behind the official history. Here’s a picture of Javi in front of the church that I’m talking about – leaning on the hollow wall.

He told us the story of his own father who is now the same age as us. As a seven year-old child he was kidnapped from a Zapotec market in the foothills of the Oaxacan mountains and taken to Mexico City where he was kept as a slave, working for a family of colonial descendants until he finally, in his teens, managed to escape. Unable to remember how to get back to his Zapotec village he made his way to Oaxaca and wandered the streets, asking around until one of his uncles heard about this street urchin and came to rescue him. Isn’t it incredible that this has happened in our time?

We learned so much more about Oaxaca and the Zapotecs as well as the dark side of colonialism from Javi…

And he took us to eat at Netflix’s favourite Mexican street food stall

… run by a group of fabulous midlife women.

The storytelling continued as we tucked in and he explained about the true alebrijes – the Zapotec spirit animals. Again they’re based on your date of birth but they’re centuries old. And I was delighted to discover that I’m a peacock… much better than a frog-deer!

So I’d had my day with the Tule tree, now it was Mal’s turn and we travelled high into the hills to meet an ancestral mezcal maestro. This was ‘the soul behind the spirit‘, another Airbnb experience, just for the two of us and it was run by yet another brilliant Oaxacan, Diego. The great thing about this tour is that he chooses a different maestro each time so you really are going into the heart of a working farm, not to a sanitised visitor experience.

As you know, Mal loves the process behind any kind of manufacture and so we were happy to listen in detail to the entire journey of Mezcal – from agave to bottle. I’m not going to go into lots of detail here but let’s start with the most important thing – the difference between Mezcal and Tequila.

Any spirit that comes from an agave plant is a type of Mezcal. Tequila is simply a region that produces its own version – so it’s a bit like Côtes du Rhone is to French wine as a whole. During WW2 there was a shortage of spirits like whisky and gin in the US and so they turned to Tequila instead – and that’s why it became so much better known than Mezcal. And Tequila is now produced on such an industrial scale that the regulation surrounding quality has been scaled down. You now very often buy a spirit that has very little agave in it but a lot of pure white alcohol – hence us being taught to quality check it on the back of our hand in the last Mexico post.

Mezcal is much more highly regulated and at the very top level is ancestral Mezcal which is produced completely by hand and that’s what we’d come here to see. Maestros are trained by their families from childhood and it takes years before they’re trusted with their own label. So let me whizz you through it. You can see Mal’s delight here as he was handed a machete. When an agave is seen to have matured (often after about 15 years), the leaves are chopped away until the heart is revealed.

The chopping and harvesting of hearts is done in one day and they’re then brought back fresh to the farm where they’re buried like this. Underneath this mound of soil a fire is burning and they’re being roasted. That’s where the smoky flavour of Mezcal comes from although really good Mezcals only have a very faint hint of smoke.

Once roasted the hearts are placed into vats for fermentation and progress is judged by smell and by ear. This chap is part sleeping but also part listening to what’s going on inside the barrel. When the sound of bubbling is just right he will alert the maestro.

And then the long process of distillation begins…

… the maestro judges the alcohol level by taste and sight (and is apparently correct within about 3% accuracy). If it isn’t quite right it’s sent around again until he’s happy with the end result.

When we were there they were in a critical part of the production process and they’d been awake for three nights in a row so we decided to go for lunch to give them time for a nap. But first I needed the loo… and I just couldn’t stop laughing when I got back… so Mal went off to see what was so funny. Join us…

… this really was the authentic Mexico we’d been looking for.

I think you’d agree that they’re definitely not pimped up for tourists!

So, up in the village we had a lovely lunch. It was so good sitting down with farmers and labourers and tucking into what was on offer – which was a pork stew with red and black mole and rice.

When we got back to the mezcal farm the final stage of distillation was beginning, it was hot and ready for tasting.

This was a batch that they were trialling with marijuana which is why it’s green and you can tell by my face that I wasn’t keen on the flavour.

And so began the tasting of 15 aged Mezcals. And all of the welders who’d been working at the back of the farm came out to join us. It was a Friday and as part of their contract once they’d finished they were allowed to drink their fill. It was the only point where for a moment I felt we were a bit exposed to fate. We were up in the hills with no phone signal and a team of burly Mexican men but luckily they didn’t know that I understood Spanish so I listened to their conversation and worked out that although we were a source of great interest, they meant us no harm.

They came out with a huge gourd filled with more of the weed infused Mezcal. They passed it round and then handed it to Mal – he declined because it really wasn’t nice but that caused offence. Fortunately as soon as he took a sip we were back on track!

And then there began a strange kind of macho olympics – gringo versus Mexican welders but he held his own for team GB!

It was such a fabulous day and I could have written an entire post about it. Mal loved it so much that he asked Rolando, the maestro, if there was any chance of an apprenticeship. He replied that there absolutely was and so it’s seriously on our radar. We’re thinking we could live in Oaxaca for something like three months – he could drive up to the farm each day and I could get on with writing a book and brushing up my Spanish in the city. I just wish we could go tomorrow.

You’ll be relieved to know that we’ve made it to the last day in Oaxaca – I wish we’d planned to stay there for much longer. If you’re thinking of going I’d say a week is good just for pottering around the city. So, we were back in my world for the morning – we started with the city museum which is based in a beautiful old monastery. Like all of the Latin American museums/galleries we’ve been to so far, the artefacts are fascinating but they’re presented in the driest, dullest language. It seems there’s a curse of academia out there that likes to serve up a word salad.

Dress; sandals

When I’d had my fill of history we stopped off at a cafe and as it was Valentine’s Day I thought Mal deserved this biscuit.

We decided to go to the market for lunch because although we’d been through the smoke hall with Javi on the orientation night, there wasn’t time to stop and eat. And as this is getting a bit long I’m going to take you there with me on video.

It was all so hot, fresh and delicious

We wandered around the market for quite a while because it gave us a true insight into Mexican life. As it was carnaval that night the clothes stalls had their best wares on show and people were buying new outfits for the evening.

I have so many photos that I could put in but let’s move on to our final gastro experience of the day… grasshoppers and again, it’s better by video. I wasn’t expecting to have to eat them there and then!

They’re hugely popular in Oaxaca because they’re cheap, high in protein and they’re a farm pest so by eating them you’re helping to save the crops. Here’s the verdict…

And so, with bugs still stuck in my teeth we followed the beat of the drums to where Oaxaca’s Carnaval was just beginning. The sixteen different regions of Oaxaca come together to celebrate their individuality. It’s said to be a mix of Spanish and Zapotec culture because although the date is based around Lent, the celebration is of the indigenous tribes that make up this incredible, vibrant region that is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. This gives you an idea.

And just look at this sweet little face, taking her heritage into the future.

We ended the evening with dinner on a rooftop and a few mezcalitas too many… but it was a Valentine’s Day that we’ll never forget…

… and our last bar was appropriately named “Oaxaca Te Amo.” Because Oaxaca was so much more than we hoped for and we barely scratched the surface. I completely understand why my three very different globetrotting friends agreed on it being their number one world destination. Something tells me we’ll be back.

Disclosure: ‘What we did in Oaxaca – our city of celebration’ is not a sponsored post

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