My Nomad Diary, Week 11: Finding my base of operations
Moments from the week:
Finding *the* place
Touching down in country #30
My favourite places this week:
Another week on the road… next week is 3 months, I can’t quite believe it? A much slower week this week, still in Mérida and loving every minute of it.
It’s Monday and I’m having a day of deep-focussed work, exploring a couple of avenues for some short-term contracts: I’ve found a platform called Arc that is like a recruitment platform for freelance developers and they’ve just branched out to marketing professionals, so I’ll see how that goes.
I’m still absolutely loving Merida and I’m being joined later today by my friend from Oaxaca, it’ll be a nice change to explore a city with somebody else.
Later in the night we headed to dinner at a museum-cum-restaurant called MUGY in central Merida.
Fast-forward to Tuesday and I’m headed to an Airbnb. What I tend to do is, spend my first week in a hostel in a new city and if I like it, I’ll then settle down in an Airbnb for a bit, and if I don’t, then it’s onwards to the next city. I may have mentioned in last week’s diary entry already, but I absolutely adore Merida and this is definitely a long-term option for me. Not much going on today really, a bit of work, moving and errands.
Big day today, it’s Wednesday and I’m headed to Chichén Itzá and after researching the transfer options, I’ve decided to hire a car. After about 2.5h of driving we arrived to my third modern wonder of the world and…
It sucks.
Honestly I think Chichén Itzá is one of the most overrated tourist attractions I have ever seen.
It’s not actually that big, it’s insanely over-crowded and it’s FULL of street sellers, all selling absolute shite. My senses were incredible overwhelmed and I couldn’t have left sooner.
Yucatán is full of other Mayan ruins with less people and less shite.
As we cut our trip to Chichén Itzá short, we headed to Izamal and Sisal. Izamal is a quaint colonial town, where all of the buildings are yellow and Sisal is a sleepy little town on Mérida’s coast.
A great day out all-in-all but damn I’m exhausted; 6 or 7 hours of driving in the end, maybe more.
Thursday and back to work, starting the day with my usual daily Spanish lesson; we’re focussing on irregular reflexive verbs at the moment and they’re finally starting to sink in. Afterwards I had a call with a prospect and caught up on editing my latest batch of photos, you can see all of them over on the Postcards part of my blog.
Fast-forward to the evening and I fancied something boujee for dinner and went to a rooftop restaurant called Delina. Two drinks and two mains for £90… might as well be back in the UK 😵
I tell you what though… this is the place. Mérida is one of the nicest cities I’ve seen in LATAM and I’m going to miss it – I’m pretty certain this will be my “base of operations” for next year.
Friday’s a relatively quiet day, I’m leaving Mexico tomorrow, so I need to pack up and bid farewell. Another standard day in the bank; Spanish lesson, bit of work and some writing. Squeezed in a walking tour of the city to check off any final bits I might have missed and called it a day.
It’s Saturday and time to wave goodbye to Mexico… I hate travel days, I just feel like the entire day is spent waiting to travel and I’m riddled with anxiety for most of it. I bought some currency for Guatemala, had lunch, packed my bags, had a lesson and then headed to the airport. Naturally, my flight was delayed 3 times and I didn’t arrive to my accommodation until 1am 🎉 On the plus side, my driver picked me up from the airport to bring me to Antigua and we talked the whole way (about 1 hour) completely in Spanish, it was a really cool moment!
Sunday… nowt much to report, ventured around the city Guatemala for most of the day. I’m in a sleepy hostel and just trying to get my steps in… becaaaaaaauuuuuuuse… I’m climbing an active volcano next week 😱
