My Nomad Diary, Week 7: On The Road Again

Moments from the week:

Driving across the Puente Kalapa de Tepelmeme

The petrified waterfalls of Hierve el Agua

What I’m reading this week:

Finally back on this, such a fantastic read: The Vagabond’s Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel

Welcome to a new week dearest gentle reader.

I’m feeling pumped today… had a good night’s sleep, and I’m feeling productive and ready to do some good work. I’m just sitting at my favourite cafe, Relámpago, next to my apartment, for the last time, reading a book and getting myself ready for the day.
Work-wise: I’m actually going to restart my portfolio, I realised why I’ve hit a roadblock and it’s because I just don’t like the creative direction it’s gone in. I have a lot of blogs to write as well about life on the road but the former is what is going to pay the bills, so I need to prioritise.
The rest of the day is my usual, I have a Spanish lesson and then my teacher leaves me for two weeks to go off gallivanting in Japan, the country right at the top of my bucket list. I’ve signed up for Baselang which is a Spanish school in Medellin, but they offer unlimited online lessons for $99 a month, so I’m going to try that for a while. At the moment, I take an average of one hour of lessons a day and I need to really press ahead and get to a conversational level.
Anyway, moving on…. Guess what I’m doing this afternoon? Going to a churro making masterclass, I’m so excited 😂🐷
I really enjoyed the class, there were a group of 8 of us, I’ve found that solo travellers don’t often seem to do these organised experiences on the likes of Airbnb/Viator, which is surprising, but I met a lot of interesting couples as always and the experience of making churros was so good. Bonus points: I now have a bag full to get me through my six hour bus ride tomorrow. (editor’s note: I ate them all in bed that night)
After class I headed home, stocked up on snacks for the bus from the nearby 7-Eleven and got back to working on my portfolio.
I made some seriously good progress on it, the homepage is finished and I’ve almost finished the “service page” template and I’ve defined the content for the four services I’m going to offer. I should be able to have that finished in the next couple of days, then to create a “portfolio item” template and I’ll be on the home stretch.
Finishing up the day, I’m packing my bags and getting ready for a new city tomorrow with a 5.30am start. I’m feeling proper sad about leaving CDMX, so I’m strongly expecting an emotional day tomorrow. But, I shall be back!

Tuesday… an uneventful day today, for the diary at least, I’m up bright and early for a 7.30am bus that is going to take me to Oaxaca, a six-hour journey awaits me!
The bus costs about £25 or you can upgrade to the premium bus for about £40, and considering the length of time and that a flight with luggage is about £150, I went for the premium bus.
Only to be sat next to the most annoying fidgety child for the entire journey. It actually took eight hours. Kill me. Fellow dog parents that are reading this will understand… we are so nervous about our dogs being little terrorists, we ensure that they sit still and don’t say a word in public… why can’t people do this with their children!? “haha sorry they’re just a child”. Give me strength.
On the plus side, the views were absolutely incredible. I love nature so much and seeing mountains and valleys, something I’d never see in my island-home, gives me goosebumps and truly fascinates me and reminds me why I’m really doing this: I want to see mountains again, Gandalf.
I arrived into Oaxaca at about 15.30/16.00 and took a taxi to my hostel, which I successfully negotiated down from the gringo rate of $100 to $80 (saving 70p) and then only had change for $90 so actually saved 35p. Just call me Hah-mez going forward.
For the next week I’m staying at a great little hostel with amazing beds, a dedicated co-working area (where I’m typing my diary as we speak [*read?]) and, of course, a roof terrace with a bar – the latter is my accommodation non-negotiable for this trip 😂
After some life-admin, I headed up to the hostel terrace to go and make new friends, a part of this experiment in living I always dread, even though I’ve done it a million times before. So I did what I do best, bought two beers (for £1.19) and sat in the corner and waited for somebody to come and talk to me because I have as much chat as a single-celled amoeba. But that’s the beauty of hostels, people love coming and sitting with people that are sat by themselves and after about 15 minutes, I was sat with 9 people from 3 or 4 different countries, whilst a drag queen force fed us mezcal. Surreal.
I kept it relatively PG-13, it had been a long day and I was pumped to get some decent work done tomorrow.

Which brings us to Wednesday and my first proper day in Oaxaca, I woke up really early for a Spanish lesson which I took up on the rooftop, as it was 9am, nobody was up and about yet. Afterwards I went for a walk around the town and wow, this place is beautiful, I really like it. I have the feeling that long term I’d get irritated by how touristy it is… slow-walkers everywhere ☠️, but it is beautiful and I really like it. It’s a welcome respite from the chaos of CDMX, but I don’t think it’s somewhere I could realistically add to the list of “places to live” after this trip (unsurprising spoiler alert: I change my mind in a few days)… but we shall see! CDMX retains the top spot for now.
A few more life admin bits, collecting laundry, some cash and I’m trying out another new Spanish teacher for a few weeks whilst Yuri is on holiday (how dare she). My new teacher is from Argentina, arguably one of the most difficult accents to understand, perhaps second only to Chilean, so we shall see how this goes…
OK, it actually went pretty well, we had a grading test and she scored me as a level 5 (out of 10), I’ll take that! For clarity, they’re grading score is based on a conversational level, so, a 10/10 score would be a very competent B1 level, which is my goal, so it’s good to know I’m halfway there. I need to work on remembering genders, the future tense and work on my confidence, but I have a good level of vocabulary. I’d say that in the last week my Spanish has really started to get somewhere and I can really see some progress, new vocabulary is starting to stick in my head and I can often guess what words could be in Spanish as I’m recognising language patterns.
As the end of the day came, I went up to the hostel terrace for dinner but my social battery was completely dead and I called it early ready for Thursday.

I am feeling pumped this morning, pancakes for breakfast again this morning (it’s that or eggs, so I’m having pancakes every day), a quick Spanish lesson up on the roof again and I’m knuckling down on my portfolio. I made some great progress on my portfolio and I’m almost there, I’m trying not to get too annoyed at myself about my progress and I’m really going to focus on it next week with some downtime. Besides, the average client website takes me 6-8 weeks, so I’m fine. Finishing up the afternoon, I went on a street food tour; ate a torta, a taco, a memela and some nieve. Safe to say I was comatose after this.

Coming up to the weekend and it’s another packed day for Friday, a Spanish lesson in the morning followed by a walking tour and later on today I’m meeting some friends from Guernsey. Katie and I have been in the exact same places at the same time for the last month; Valencia, CDMX and now Oaxaca, so it only made sense to catch up for a drink. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, you can always bet your left arm there will be somebody from Guernsey or Jersey within ten miles at the same time as you.
I got first dibs on where we were going, so where did I search? World’s 50 Best Bars of course. I can’t go to a city without visiting somewhere on this list. We visited a bar called Selva and it certainly lived up to the hype.
After a few drinks we then found another bar just around the corner with a live jazz performance. I’ve never seen a jazz performance before and I inadvertently ticked something off my bucket list ✅ A fantastic way to complete the “working week”.

And it’s the weekend again, I’ve crammed in so much this week as I didn’t want a repeat of CDMX and not see everything that Oaxaca has to offer, but I’m now exhausted haha. I was up early today with a spicy little hangover and I took an excursion to see the ancient city of Monte Alban. I love visiting historic sites and this was a proper highlight for the week.
After the tour I headed back to my hostel for some downtime and then I went out with a new friend, we explored Jalatlaco together, this amazing barrio packed full of street art and little restaurants. We are both keen photographers and language learners, so we walked around photographing the neighbourhood but communicated using each other’s language. That’s the first time I’ve held an extended conversation with somebody in Spanish and, whilst it’s surprisingly exhausting after a few hours, it was an amazing experience and did wonders for my confidence.

Sunday is here and it’s a big one… I have a full day tour, but first… I have some life admin: laundry, book some more accommodation and go for breakfast.
I went to a lovely cafe called Sagrado Filemón, enjoyed some French toast and a local speciality coffee I discovered at a cooking class called café de olla which is made with coffee, cinnamon and piloncillo – sometimes they’ll add other ingredients such as cloves or anise, this one definitely has cloves in it. Top marks.
Step two is to find an apartment. I’ve found a good pattern now; go to a new city and stay in a hostel for a week, meet new people, go on group tours and then “get the f*ck outta Dodge” and move to an Airbnb afterwards for some deep work and proper living. I’m headed to a district in Oaxaca called “Reforma” which is the business district of Oaxaca and no doubt, more suited to long-term living. Oaxaca is starting to pip CDMX to the top spot for my long term option, I might start a leaderboard on my blog for where I want to live after all of this 😂

I headed out at about 10am on the tour bus to Hierve el Agua, which translates to boiling water. It’s a natural spring site, where the minerals in the water create a reaction that makes it look like the water is boiling. Disappointingly it is in fact very cold, compared to the outside temperature. It’s a beautiful site, and the petrified waterfalls are extremely cool. But the place is why I hate going to major tourist destinations, it was full of idiots trying to get Instagrammable shots, climbing over stuff they shouldn’t have been and generally just blocking the paths. Anyway… afterwards we headed to a mezcal factory and then to a traditional tourist market in a town called Tlacolula, the latter I feel we left it a little late to go to as it started to close shortly after we arrived but I had my first gordita, which translates to ‘little fatty’, that is a Mexican dish of fried masa dough stuffed with, well, whatever you want, I chose chorizo and Oaxaca cheese (similar to mozzarella).
And that was the end of the week. I’ve had a great first week in Oaxaca, seen a lot of sights and I am looking forward to another couple of weeks here, based from an Airbnb and I’m going to get some serious work done.