I shot this photo from the Royal Park resort on my recent travel blogger trip there. Cozumel has some very nice sunsets.
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I found myself making acquaintance again today with the Mexico City airport and availing myself of the opportunity to again consume tacos al pastor. I was through this airport on a trip this previous February. I could not help but notice at this tie the differences between the circumstances of the two trips. The Amateur Traveler show has enabled both trips but in a very different fashion. In February I took some of the proceeds from the show and spent them on a trip to Mexico (Mexico City and Oaxaca). This trip was being sponsored by Royal Holiday. They flew me down to Cozumel to show me the Park Royal resort in the hope that I would have a good time and write about it.
I enjoyed both my trip to Mexico City and Cozumel though to be sure two trips had little in common besides the passport stamp.
Crime
Mexico City can be an intimidating city with regard to safety and crime. The U.S. state department actually has language in their recommendations on Mexico City travel to avoid hailing a taxi on the street unless you want to die or some frightening words to that effect. On the plane into Cozumel I met an American who works as a security consultant who was flying down to close on a house. Before purchasing the house he has done a lot of research and said that Cozumel has almost no crime. Sandra, who works for Park Royal, told the story of a woman who was picking up a rental jeep. She was told it was a blue jeep, was on such and such a street downtown and the keys were in the car. As it turns out there were two blue jeeps on that street with the keys in them and she took the wrong one, but no one bothered to tell her until she checked in the wrong jeep. They assumed correctly that her mistake was accidental.
Infrastructure
Mexico City is a massive city that some predict will someday succumb to its own demand for resources and to its own pollution (underestimating the Mexico City inhabitants according to many). Cozumel also has limited resources as an isolated island. For this reason hotels when they were rebuilt, after the near total devastation caused by hurricane WIlma in 2005, were required to build:
Cultural Distance
While Mexico City can certainly be intimidating there is no doubt that it supports a vibrant culture. The distance between Mexico City and the US was heightened by avoiding the Zona Rosa district which has become somewhat of a tourist gheto.
Cozumel has an economy centered around tourism and thus often seems to have less distance between it and the United States which is one of its major customers. Cozumel seems to be a gateway to Mexico for those who are not ready to jump into Mexico with both feet. Cozumel is a place that will be very comfortable to Americans. It is a place where you do not need to speak Spanish and at times it seemed to me to be more like an extension of Florida rather than a foreign country. This will of course recommend it to some travelers and take it off the list for others.
Urban Jungle / Tropical Jungle
There is no mistaking from the moment that you fly over Mexico City the vastness of that city. Nor is there mistaking that you are on a tropical island as you fly in to Cozumel. The color of the water is strikingly beautiful in a way that I have only seen in the Caribbean. The landscape of the island seems only partly to be settled at all with much of the island still jungle. Almost all of the hotels are on the side of the island facing the other resort cities of the Mayan riviera. The far side of the island is more windswept, rugged and uninhabited. The Mayans believed that a woman should make a pilgrimage to Cozumel (to what we now know as San Gervasio) at least once as it was associated with fertility. I have no doubt that more than one honeymoon couple has found Cozumel to still have some claim on fertility.
So I find that I enjoyed both trips but in very different ways. Mexico City is a way to dive in deep into Mexico. It is challenging, exciting and bustling. Cozumel is welcoming, beautiful and relaxing. It is still Mexico, but not the one you have been seeing on the evening news. And speaking of the evening news, no so far as I have been able to learn there have not been cases of swine flu on Cozumel.
This is a transcript of an episode of the Amateur Traveler focusing on traveling to the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.
Chris: I’d like to welcome back to the show Zora O’Neill, who has come to talk to us about the Yucatan, in Mexico. Zora, welcome back to the show.
Zora: Thanks so much, happy to be here.
Chris: I say welcome back to the show because Zora talked to us before about New Mexico, and has just written, or just published, I guess is true – you probably wrote some time ago – ‘The Rough Guide to the Yucatan’.
Zora: Yes. There’s a time lapse in travel guide writing – this was actually the second edition of ‘The Rough Guide to the Yucatan’ that just came out, so, I’m co-author on it, actually, with John Fisher, and he and I worked on the first edition about three years ago, and had a chance to really spruce it up again this time around.
Chris: Now, as a travel writer, when you are doing something like this, are you writing a guide because you get the opportunity to, and then, therefore, you go and learn the location, or was this a location you were already in love with?
Zora: Well, it’s funny. It’s been so long, I’ve been working on the Yucatan – I’ve been visiting the Yucatan for travel guide work for about five years, so it’s sort of hard to remember when I wasn’t familiar with the place. My original assignment from ‘Rough Guides’ was to update the Yucatan chapter of their Mexico book, and, at that point, I didn’t really know all that much about the place. I’d fantasized about taking a big car trip around the Yucatan and I had some contacts there, and they said “That’s great! Go!”, So that first trip was really a crash course, but now I’ve been going down there at least once a year, sometimes two and three times a year, ever since then.
Chris: Now, with Mexico driving, combining the words ‘car trip’ and ‘crash course’ sounds a little scary to me.
Zora: No, not at all, it’s actually really funny. I still remember when I left for my first trip. I had booked six weeks and I was going alone. I was a little bit scared, and, once I was down there, I really had to laugh. You hear so many, sort of, horror stories about Mexico, and driving especially, and terrible conditions of the roads, and bandits and policemen who try and give you tickets for nothing, and I encountered absolutely none of that, and, actually, the roads in the Yucatan are all stellar, there are no bandits as far as I have ever encountered, or even heard of, and the policemen are exceedingly polite, and it’s actually been great. And no crashes, so none at all.
Chris: Well, a while back, and this has been a little while since they’ve changed, I understood that, especially in Mexico City area, that people, when driving at night, found that they could see better if they left their lights off. They could see the lights of the other guy. Of course, that doesn’t translate very well to large groups of people! I haven’t seen that recently, so I think they’ve…
Monte Alban, just out side of Oaxaca Mexico, was built by the Zapotec people around 500 B.C. At the time it was one of the largest cities in Mesoamerica. The Zapotecs apparently leveled a mountain top to put this city on top of it. What remains of Monte Alban is the temples and ceremonial structures. The private homes continued down the sides of the mountain and have not been uncovered. Structures like Monte Alban also cover many of the nearby hills and probably only 10% of the cities scale is currently apparent, but why the Zapotec were know as the “Cloud People” by their neighbors is pretty apparent. The Zapotec were peaceful traders and with the men gown for years at a time it is believed that the society was matriarchal. Eventually the city grew two large and the nearby valleys were over farmed. The Zapotecs remained in the area and much of the population of the area speaks Zapotech at home.
This is a transcript of an episode of the Amateur Traveler focusing on traveling to Oaxaca, Mexico.
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Today the Amateur Traveler goes to Southern Mexico to the land of chocolate and mole to Oaxaca.
Chris: I’d like to welcome to the show, Sarah Menkedick, who ‘s coming to us from Oaxaca, Mexico. Although you’re originally from Ohio, I understand. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Chris: And Oaxaca happens to be a place that I am actually looking at going right now, so I was very excited to have Sarah come on and talk to us about this destination. Sarah, for those people who aren’t currently planning a trip to Oaxaca, why should they?
Sarah: Why should they go? Well, I was thinking about this and I thought really what Oaxaca has to offer. I mean it’s got the big tourist attractions and what not, but I think it’s the little things that are what draw people to Oaxaca. The coffee and the cafes and the empanadas and the local food and I think really the best thing about Oaxaca is just the ability to walk around and have amazing weather and awesome food and drink and just sort of get out of the whole rhythm of your daily life at home for a while.
Chris: Ok. Now I’m someone whose oddly enough been to Mexico 13 times and yet never really been to Mexico. I’ve just been over the border into Tijuana on some volunteer work.
Sarah: Ok.
Chris: What’s going to surprise me when I come to Oaxaca?
Sarah: Well, I think especially if you’ve been going to Tijuana, I think what’ll surprise you is that it’s so clean, at least in the city center. That’s what surprised me because I had been to Mexico City before. Mexico City, I like it, but it’s just total chaos. So Oaxaca is actually very clean, and orderly and the downtown is very sort of poetic and romantic. So, the only other places I have been in Mexico are Mexico City and in traveling around the state of Oaxaca. But that was the one thing that took me by surprise when I got off the bus here was I thought, wow, actually seemed very sort of laid back and ordered.
Chris: Now a lot of people probably in the US, for instance, who have heard of Oaxaca, and every time I say it I pause to try to make sure I say it right because we should mention how this is spelled for people who are going to try and look this up.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s tricky. It’s Wahaca. Like W-A-H. Wahaca.
Chris: But it’s spelled O-A-X-A-C-A.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. It actually comes from a tree. It’s a oaxacy tree. It’s like if you come here, you’ll see a ton of them and they’re these trees that have these bean pods on them and they’re call oaxacy. So Oaxaca, the name Oaxaca, comes from that.
Chris: Oh. Ok. I did not know that. And, as I started to say, a lot of people who have heard of it from the US unfortunately heard about it from some of the negative press that it got what is a year and a half ago with the teacher’s strike.
Sarah: Yeah.
Chris: First of all we should say that you talked about it being clean and orderly. So really, at least for now, those troubles are behind it.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, it’s a pretty shocking difference because I was here for all of 2006 and into 2007. And then I moved to Beijing for a teaching position over there in China and when I left I mean there were still charred buses on the streets and there was still the remnants of chaos. And during that time in 2006, there was really almost no tourism and there were barricades everywhere. The city was occupied by the Federal police. And then I came back from Beijing, when was it, in summer of last year 2008 and it was a completely different city. I mean still they say tourism is about 70% right now so not at what it was. But yeah very, I mean, if you hadn’t heard that in the news or you hadn’t been there during that year, then you really wouldn’t even know. So it’s slowly growing back, which is why it’s kind of a good time to come now because it’s not too crowded, it’s not too full of tourists and it’s just sort of starting to take off again.
Chris: And especially for people coming down from the United States, there are some amazingly cheap airfares, which is why I’m looking at heading down this time. Less than $300 from San Francisco, for instance.
Copyright 2009 by Chris Christensen
