Sam and I were dreaming of a life where we could travel the world slowly and continuously. For the past decade we have been maxing out our annual leave and traveling nearly every month, but of course we always had to return back to London. Slowly we have been working our way towards a new lifestyle.
I left full-time employment in November 2023 and started working freelance for a consultancy. Not long after, Sam picked up a new job at a very cool new hospitality group which was opening lots of sites in quick succession. However, in December 2024, after opening three of the sites, Sam got permission to move to a remote role.
This meant that come Christmas 2024 we could travel abroad without necessarily having a deadline to return. It was a bit scary, to be honest, packing up the apartment and our bags knowing that we wouldn’t be home until mid February at earliest. This would be our longest trip together.
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Where to stay in Oaxaca
We stayed in a Booking.com apartment in the Centro neighbourhood. This listing no longer seems to be published on Booking.com.
The apartment was big and the location was excellent. On the flipside, it was furnished very much like a vacation rental rather than a home that you could settle in and be comfortable for longer stretches of time. We couldn’t both really hang out on the sofa for instance. There wasn’t a television or a fully fitted kitchen. We essentially had two hot plates and a kettle. It’s difficult to complain though given we paid £26 per night for the space.
We treated ourselves for an end of trip upgrade complete with rooftop pool and breakfast at Suites de la Parra. It was such a treat to get some sun on their rooftop loungers for our final couple of days. The location was right next to the Mercado and in the heart of the city. The price including a really nice breakfast served on the roof came to less than £70 per night. Mind you, this was after a really strong Quidco Cashback deal which resulted in close to 30% cashback.
Oaxaca lifestyle
Oaxaca lies at a high altitude amid some gorgeous rolling mountains. As a result, it gets quite cold at night and takes a while for the sun to heat it up during the day. I had brilliantly left all of my long pants behind and so just had my summer clothes for most of the trip.
It would be relatively chilly in the morning but by 1pm it would be scorching hot, then by 6pm it would start to get chilly again. This meant we tended to go home in the early evening for a change of clothes.
We planned to spend our month in Oaxaca working during the week and enjoying ourselves at the weekend. Our bodies probably couldn’t stand it if we brought our former vacation habits into our new traveling lifestyle. I was waking up early, when it was still dark, to take calls in UK time. We fell into a decent routine where we would work from home in the morning, fit in some exercise afterwards, and then return home to have lunch. We had the same delicious meal on repeat – rotisserie chicken prepared from a local rotisserie with a side salad of chopped avocado and tomato.
Oaxaca food and drink scene
It was a painful thing to commit to eating so often at home, because the food in Oaxaca was so amazing and so inexpensive. This was an overall highlight of the trip. The food and drink scene in Oaxaca was unreal. We honestly had some of the best meals we’ve ever eaten in our life, many of which coincided with some of the best value meals we’ve ever eaten in our life. Perhaps even more fascinating was the variety and uniqueness of the traditional Mexican drinks we found in Oaxaca.
Oaxaca city is quite dense and so most of the bars we went to with outdoor seating were on rooftops. We really enjoyed this. That being said, none of the truly local bars had outdoor areas. This was very much a tourist bar type of thing. A couple of our favourites included Viajero, which is a hostel with a beautiful rooftop, and located just a few minutes from our apartment. And yes, it did serve Corona Megas.
My personal favourite spot was a little bar set up a flight of stairs called Casa Porfirio. This became a regular spot for us. It had these nice little tables set on a balcony overlooking the street below. It got sun until early evening and it was a great place to grab an outdoor beer.
Things to do in Oaxaca
Anyway, after our wholesome midweek lunches we would go check out things in town. Sometime visiting galleries or museums such as the free-to-enter Manuel Álvarez Bravo Photographic Centre or the Textile Museum of Oaxaca.
Sometimes we’d just go for a walk to a cool neighbourhood such as the colourful Jalatlaco neighborhood, which is covered in street art.
Or the artisan and gallery-filled streets of historic Xochimilco.
One of these wholesome afternoons, we went for a tour of the Oaxaca Botanical Gardens. This is a first-come-first-served guided tour that fills up very quickly. The first time we tried to go it was a Saturday maybe at 11am or 12pm. Even though we got there a few minutes early the tour was already completely full. We went back on Monday or Tuesday around 5pm and it was a little bit less competitive, but still eventually sold out.
What we did not realise was our tour was completely guided in Spanish. I’m not sure if they do English tours at times but that would’ve been more illuminating for us if we could have done that.
Oaxaca’s markets
We also enjoyed visiting the various markets of Oaxaca during the week.
Mostly our intention was fruit and veg shopping for our lunches, but each market had it’s own surprises and specialities. Within each market there would be food and drink vendors, fresh juices and traditional Mexican ice creams called ‘nieves’.
The markets would be broken up into different districts of products. There were areas just for fruit, or bread, or mole, or even pets! And it turns out Sundays are big days for barbecue in Oaxaca. A tradition I was delighted for us to discover at the beginning rather than end of our trip.
Shopping in Oaxaca
This next recommendation is going to come as a surprise to anyone who knows me. I do not like clothes shopping. I am very picky, and usually if I do like something, it looks bad on me. As a result I wind up returning most things that I order online and shopping in person is a chore. But in Oaxaca, there were so many incredible independent designers and boutique shops. I would run or walk past somewhere, and earmark it to go back later. I wound up buying more clothes in Oaxaca with incredible designs and quality of fabric (Oaxaca is very famous for tapestry and textiles, too) than I would have bought living a year in London. Which isn’t very much, but still, more than a year’s worth!
Monte Alban Ruins
On our weekends we ventured a bit further out of town to check out the sights. One of the first places we visited, which is not far from the city, was Monte Alban Ruins. This was the capital of the Zapotec empire, and inhabited by various groups over 1500 years. Abandoned over a thousand years ago the site is remarkably well preserved.
Online you will find many options to visit as part of a package tour, but this is completely unnecessary. We simply bought bus tickets (which were more like a shared van transfer tickets) to and from Monte Alban.
Once you get there, you can pay for your own entry and it’s not very much, maybe 200 pesos each. If you do want a guided tour there are several English speaking tour guides waiting by the ticket gates to sell you their services. We decided not to take a guided tour and showed ourselves around, reading the signs as we went. It was really a sight to behold.
We visited early in the morning before it got busy and also before it got too hot. This is so close to Oaxaca and so easy to visit – truly a must do. We were very glad that we didn’t try to cram this into a full day tour as we spent a good couple of hours looking at everything, and because it was so easy to get to.
Hierve el Agua
One Sunday we booked a day with Conmigo Tours. We often find organised tours a bit slow for our pace and we can cram a lot more in. Conmigo allowed us to curate the tour, and they provided a competitively priced tour guide / driver. For our first stop we got ourselves and our driver some breakfast at Itanoni. This restaurant specialises in heritage corn and is in the Reforma neighbourhood. It was a bit out of reach for us on a normal day, but somewhere we really wanted to visit, therefore perfect to check out while we had a driver.
Next we drove out of town to Hierve el Agua, a set of mineral springs set atop a stunning mountain scene. The name literally translates into ‘the water boils’.
The minerals have created a stunning waterfall-like rock formation below.
We got there early enough to enjoy the scene without many people around, maybe 9am. Towards the end of our stay it did get a lot busier.
You can swim in the hot springs, and quite a few people opted to do so. We didn’t as we had other stops on the day and didn’t want to be wet for the rest of our adventures!
Tlacolula Market
The second stop on our tour took us to Tlacolula, home to one of the – if not the most – famous markets in the region of Oaxaca.
The market on Sundays sprawls out through the city for what seemed like forever. It contains EVERYTHING.
One entire section of the hall is full of freshly made bread, for which the city is famous for producing. Another of the sections was made up entirely of barbecue grills.
Another section was laid with gigantic pots sitting precariously over even more gigantic flames. These pots were full of molten hot goat barbacoa (our lunch). I was genuinely scared to walk down the hall of this section. If one of these pots fell at least 20 people would be scarred for life with third degree burns. Great food though!
Mezcal in Oaxaca
After our lunch stop at Tlacolula Market, we went to mezcal distillery Don Agave. We were taken around the grounds and shown different species of agave plants, and told how they are roasted to give mezcal its ‘characteristic’ smoky flavour.
I say ‘characteristic’ in quotes because while many of the mezcals that make their way over to the UK (and I imagine the rest of the western world) are smoky, they are not all necessarily like this. There’s a huge range of different types of mezcal which can be made with many different types of agave and many different production methods. The range of flavours are vast and complex.
Our tour guide also worked in production so we received a good understanding of how things are done and how mezcal differs from tequila. We then sat down for a tasting of ambient mezcals. Actually, all mezcals in Oaxaca were served ambient and were to be sipped rather than shotted. Glad we had full stomachs..! Unlike tequila, which is served with a side of salt and limes, mezcal in Oaxaca is commonly served with a side of ground spicy gusano salt (the worms/larvae found in the agave plants). We worked our way through their entire range of mezcals. I was so grateful that our driver had a cooler full of ice cold water and soft drinks in the truck for us.
We also did a great mezcal tasting at a bar back in town. In Situ has an epic range of mezcals on offer and exceedingly knowledgeable staff to explain them all to you.
Our month in Oaxaca
Even though we spent close to a whole month in Oaxaca, we both felt like we could have stayed another month and continued to explore the incredible city. We loved the culture and the people. The food and drink was second to none. We were so glad that this was our first destination to truly “slow travel.” We are already planning our second trip back, include a stop off at the famous beach, Puerto Escondido, and at least another full month!
