Gringo Tour 08/09 - Part 27

We had to get up-and-at-em fairly early as we had a 10:30am bus from Pubela to Oaxaca today. We got dressed, packed and headed out to the main square where Ant had some evil idea to have Mc Donalds for breakfast. Mc Donalds appeared to be setting up when we went past – so instead – I had an evil plan for “Hot Cakes” at the Cow restaurant where we had the chilli-con-carne hot dogs the first night here. Although we were the only customers, and there was about 5 employees for each of us – they seemed to take an eternity to take our orders (traditional Mexican service). The menu was en espanol – and there was a half page section on Hot Cakes in the menu. I thought I was going to be ordering something crazy like hot cakes and bacon – but instead – we ended up getting hotcakes with cream and maple syrup… which hit the spot somewhat but was a bit Mc Donalds-esque.

We grabbed our bags from Hotel Noisy, checked out (the front woman sort of spoke about 2 words of engrish) and grabbed a taxi to the Autobus Terminal. We were a bit spoilt by our last bus from Mexico City to Publea (was “Ultimate” class or something) – but this time we had only on “First Class”. The leg room was a little tighter – Ant did the whole “red-hair-banging on the seat in front when a woman reclined her seat” – but that didn’t seem to make much difference as she had it fully reclined the whole 3 hour trip.

The bus ride was very scenic to Oaxaca… so much so that people who had their curtains pulled down for some bits – had to pull them up so they could see the spectacular view. Everything was a little bit like the Grand Canyon, but without Americans. The area was quite arid, there were plenty of eagles (unlike the Culca Canyon) and I had a good time looking at the views. ADO continued in its tradition of playing bad American movies (en espanol). They played the Denzel Washington/Jerry Bucahemier (class act with a K) film Déjà-vu – but I was getting a distinct feeling of Déjà-vu of watching this the first time and falling asleep through it.

We arrived at Oaxaca (pronounced Wah-Haw-ker) after lunch at the ADO “First Class” terminal – which was so new that the LP didn’t know where it was on the map. Feeling a bit bewildered and not knowing how much a taxi ride would cost – we hopped on a local taxi to take us to the Hotel Gala which was right next to the main piazza in town. I have a bit of a rep of getting Ant to do all of the hotel bookings and flight arrangements… Ant was stressing out about the Oaxaca hotel booking – so I did it and had booked the Hotel Gala (a 3 star) which had somewhat mixed reviews on Trip Advisor – good ones if you had a room facing the street – and bad ones if you had an internal room (which were apparently noisier than the street rooms due to the guest noise).

After paying the taxi driver double the value of the taxi ride (I need to practice my Spanish numbers) – we had to lug our bags a block (down the pedestrian only road) to the hotel. The lobby was fairly impressive (in a 70s sort of way) and amazingly – the hotel reception dude spoke pretty good English. Thankfully – we had one of the better rooms (facing onto the street). According to LP – the rooms facing the street were more spacious – although – you really question whether the LP authors had stayed in the hotels they write about – let alone even visit them.

What was a bit more apparent about Oaxaca was the number of gringo tourists in it. Pubela (and for that matter – Mexico City) seemed fairly devoid of tourists. Although Mexico City had a high number of tourists in museums or art galleries – you didn’t really spot them outside – and Pubela only seemed to have a handful of foreign tourists. But Oaxaca felt like a 10 fold increase in the number of foreign tourists (which was a bit of a pain in the arse). The piazza was almost like a double piazza – with two squares situated opposite one another. There were the requisite touristy restaurants adorning the sides of the piazza – and the world’s tackiest nativity scene – complete with a tourist path – where you could get a bird’s eye view of the nativity action – almost 10 days after the fact. Give it up people – pull down those xmas Christmas decorations on Xmas-eve – Guilin Sheraton style (those Chinese really understand xmas decorations and the punctuality of pulling them down).

We found a little “fast food” taco place which was about 3 blocks away from our hotel. It was fairly cheap – under 50 pesos for a meal deal including 5 tacos and a soda-pop. It was good, cheap and did its job effectively.

After lunch – we wandered down to one of the town’s biggest drawcards – the Oaxaca cathedral. No one does over-the-top excess than the Catholics – and this Cathedral was fairly O-T-P in terms of its excesses – just about the whole cathedral was decked out in gold. It was pretty amazing and we could tick off another item off the “Don’t Know” front cover of Mexico – some golden statue thingy in the cathedral. The outside of the cathedral was also pretty impressive – it was a big sandstone Spanish-mission style cathedral with a beautifully presented garden (sort of in a dry Mexican arid way). The garden also seemed to be some sort of Oaxaca gringo-Mecca – as they seemed to be a lot of back-packers and flash-packers hanging about.

After the cathedral – we made our way through a “Gringo” market – with all products (eg: tacky souvenirs) appeared marketed towards non-Mexicans. We then did a bit of an “off-the-beaten-track” stroll through the non-touristy bits of Oaxaca. Everything was old (and probably UNSECO sponsored) and colourful – with a lot of houses painted in bold, different colours. One thing noticeable was a complete lack of convenience stores (unlike Pubela and Mexico City) which made buying coke a little difficult. Also – a lot of stores in Oaxaca seemed to subscribe to the “Latin America” school of business – where there were about 10 refrigerator stores in the same spot. We did manage to track down a super-mercado about 3 blocks away from our hotel where we could get our usual supply of diet coke (aka “Coca Light” in Mexico) and bottled water.

It was starting to get dark – and we decided to chill for a bit back at the hotel (with free wireless internet and Mexican “Lucha libre” wrestling on TV – which sort of felt like WWE but a lot more athletic with added gimp masks). After the Mexican wrestling – there was WWE but en espanol with a mexican host and a fairly strong emphasis on “Mysterio” the Mexican wrestler in the American WWE.

After a chill out and about 50 facebook updates – we headed out to a nearby street market - which was chock-full of people (mostly locals). Of course – there was the usual mish-mash of bad developing country clothing (think worse than “K-Mart”), illegal pirated DVDs, porn and MP3 CDs, toys (which were probably banned last Christmas by the NSW Office of Fair Trading) and various crap. Speaking of crap – I was becoming a little obsessed with tracking down all of the bad movies from my Razzie book of Best Bad Movies. According to the book – one of the best is “Exorcist 2: The Heretic” – which I managed to track down and purchase for about 15 pesos (or $1.50AUD). Ant bought a couple and I bought another few (including what was 4 Chucky movies on the same disc – which sounded highly dubious).

Also highly dubious was the food cleanliness of a street hot-dog seller. Despite the apparent lack of cleanliness and hygine (and refrigeration for the meat) – Ant and I had a hot dog Mexican style – which was pretty good (bit on the spicy side with some jalapeños garnishes). We will have to wait and see if we would lose 7 kilos in 4 weeks after eating them…

I was keen to check out the quality of the movies on Ant’s laptop – and we raced back to the hotel – where the Chucky Movie disc appeared to play bad Salsa music accompanied by pictures of dolphins and beaches and cliffs and stuff… que?!! Anyway – we headed to bed – where I started to watch Exorcist 2 – which seemed pretty amazingly bad. The first scene had some woman from the Middle East who was possessed where she screams in a normal non-demonic voice “Why me??? I only help feed the poor!!” before she catches on fire and dies a horrible death – only for the movie to cut immediately to Linda Blair tap-dancing (who might have lasted two-seconds longer on “Mexico’s Got Talent” than the tone-deaf piano accordion girl. Strangeness indeed. Also – I’m not sure what was more demonic – the Middle Eastern possessed woman exploding or Linda Blair tapdancing.