We spent 4 beautiful days traveling to the major tourist sites in and outside of Oaxaca City. Our first day, our host at our AirBNB said we must go to the Sunday market and we could hire an affordable driver / guide to take us there, as well as to the ancient Zapotec turned Spanish site Mitla and wherever else we wanted to go. Bleary eyes from an overnight bus we chose to take her advice and spent 10 hours exploring — it was a whirlwind of a sensory experience!
We were lucky to have Antonio (+52 951 210 35 33, $250 pesos/hour), a kind and gentle soul, who drove us and explained everything. We spoke Spanish w him all day, although he also spoke English and had spent 6 months in Teotitlán del Valle learning Zapotec. We talked about so many things!!! And learned so much! There’s something super special about having a guide…without him, we wouldn’t have had the experiences we did. Truly grateful. So here’s what we did and saw with some pics!
At the Tlacolula Sunday Market we ate delicious tasajo (salted beef) from the stall #1 “Diego” at El Mercado de la Merced. Here is Angeles cutting our meat before grilling it for us 3 feet away to eat on tlayudas (large handmade tortillas), onions, beans and avocado, all fresh from the market.
Domingo de Ramos (Palm Sunday) in Tlacolula
Copal wood
We explored the Mitla archeological site and ate Nieves (ice cream) made from tuna (cactus fruit).
We went to Mezcaleria Don Agave where we got to taste amazing silvestre (wild) agave mezcal like Coyote and Jabalí and eat delicious enmolada with cecina and estofada with beef tongue and chapulines (grasshoppers) sautéed with Chile’s and mezcal. We left with an Espadín mezcal, which is more affordable because it is the kind of agave that you can cultivate in farms, and it takes fewer years to reach maturity. Some of the wild agaves take 10-25 years to reach maturity and be harvested, and some grow up in the mountains or among the rocks, and you can literally taste the earth they grow in in the mezcal. I’ve never tasted anything like what we had at Don Agave, and we got to see the plants themselves as well as the artisanal earthen stone roasting, horse or donkey mashing with a huge round stone & distillation process.
We finished our Sunday visiting the home of a Zapotec family of artisans in Teotitlán de Valle, who gave us a heart-opening and mind-blowing presentation of their ancestral tapete making process. Juan Carlos (son of Juan Gonzalez) warmly invited us in the family home, which is also a gallery and where they weave and make their art. He offered us mezcal and delicately elaborated on each step of the gorgeous process taught to him by his grandmother and father (written about in our last blog post).
Then we arrived back home to our cute AirBNB (Frida Khalor BNB by the first class bus station, just $24/night), took hot showers and fell into bed for a great 9-hour sleep.
