The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Oaxaca

If you had four days in Oaxaca City, what would you do?

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I think it might seem like I go on vacation a lot, but I promise, I’m working up to my ears. In fact, I’m so busy that I feel like I have exactly two minutes to plan my and Crayton’s next trip — back to Oaxaca, but this time to the city. We’ll be there Dec. 18-22. Then it’s back to DF for Christmas and New Year’s.

I was stressing about planning the trip — where are we going to stay? It’s only two weeks away, for goddsakes — then yesterday, while I was on the elliptical at the gym, it hit me that I could ask you all for recommendations!

So where should I go? Should we rent a car and drive there, or fly? At this point I’m starting from zero. Only thing I know is that I’d love to stay somewhere with a kitchen, and that I want to sample as many moles and tlayudas as possible. Visiting a fábrica de mescal would be great, too.

Can you help?

A long, lazy weekend in Huatulco, Oaxaca

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Good friends from Seattle came to visit us last week. Since it’s cold where they live, we took off for a long weekend in Huatulco.

To say we all needed this trip is an understatement. The Seattleites only get sun three months a year; I’d been dealing with Eat Mexico up to my ears (business is great) while simultaneously nursing a flu-ridden husband with Gatorade and soup and medicine. Crayton needed it because he was the sick one.

None of us had ever been to Oaxaca before. I’d kind of longed to visit one of Oaxaca’s small, bohemian beach towns (Mazunte perhaps) and wondered whether Huatulco, a planned tourist development boosted by the Mexican government, would just be another copy of Ixtapa. But it wasn’t. Huatulco was small and hilly and quiet, with resorts and hotels sprinkled around the area’s nine bays. The one bay we saw, Tangolunda, still felt fairly private. There were vendors, but not too many. Only sound was the breeze rustling the palapa fronds.

We rented a beach house on Tangolunda Bay, probably the most developed portion of Huatulco. A Dreams resort lay just down the road from our place, plus a Barceló resort and a golf course. The rental had three bedrooms and came with the use of a VW bug, so we could drive to pick up groceries or to dinner. (This also fulfilled a fantasy I didn’t know I had, to zip around in a bug in a Mexican beach town.)

Huatulco seemed great. But with only three full days of vacation, we didn’t have a whole lot of reasons to leave the beach house. This was the view from our bedroom:

We also had a pool in the living room.

We did explore a little bit. One afternoon we traveled to the Camino Real Zaashila to have drinks under the palapas and take in the sea breeze. We drove into Las Crucecitas, Huatulco’s charming downtown area, and had crispy-thin tlayudas piled with Oaxacan cheese at Sabor de Oaxaca. We slurped on paletas for dessert and walked through the square. We ate American-style hamburgers and Tex-Mex at the Tipsy Blowfish in Tangolunda, which is owned by a Texan. The salsa tasted eerily Tex-Mex and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then it hit me: canned tomatoes.

We also grilled outdoors one night, setting up dinner on a table that overlooked the water and the stars.

Strangely, now that we’re back, I’m exhausted. Time to hit the gym and recover some energy. And maybe make a dent in some of those mimosas and chocolate chip cookies I had for breakfast.