Oaxaca

We left the luxury of watching football on a huge screen in a stunning plaza and managed to catch the England v USA game in a bus station halfway between Mexico City and Oaxaca, actually stopping purposely to watch it! Things you do! Really should have known better and not bothered. We made the rest of journey after the game turning up in Oaxaca at around 10pm and everything looking very closed. We hit the streets looking for something to eat and stumbled across hundreds of tents pitched up in the streets surrounding the main plaza and in the main plaza itself. It all seemed a little wierd and we almost got out our tent to camp with them but then realised that the people were camping out on the streets of the city as part of a protest. Oaxaca is an old colonial city and a mish-mash of cobbled streets, interesting markets selling everything from death dolls to pig fat, and churches (not getting bored by churches but each town we visit does have very pretty, very exquisitely decorated churches – and it is starting to become just another church now!). We took a bike ride out to the ruins of Monte Alban, about 6km outside of town and straight up a dirty big hill!! Before freewheeling back to town and out the other side to see the biggest tree in the world… now that’s some claim and to be honest as we pedalled down a motorway, having taken a wrong turn, I was expecting that being the biggest tree in the world it would be quite apparent!! Well, I was wrong! The Eiffel Tower in size it aint. Anyway, so having been bone shaken a couple of times as lorries and buses whizzed past us we finally found a farmer in his field and asked where the hell this town and massive tree was, to which he pointed across the motorway and over another field to a little town. The town of El Tule, is a pretty little town but doesn’t really have much going for it other than this tree – which as the claim states, is a big tree but big in girth not height. It is over 1,200 years old, has a trunk measuring around 14 metres in diameter and is actually quite cool, for a tree, shame you couldn’t go climbing on it though. Joyed by the big tree and wondering what the guide book might say to visit next, the biggest sheep or the hugest apple, we pedalled back to town in mega quick time before the heavens opened and gave us our afternoon soaking!