It’s been another busy week where I fall behind on writing – Mexico City has been a laaaat.

Hello you. I am in Mexico City now. Hoooooooooooo! But first: we must wrap up Oaxaca.

Almost every traveller I’ve met on this journey has told me they loved Oaxaca. The first person to tell me this was a French girl, way back in Holbox. Nobody really told me why the city was so cool; every time it was mentioned people merely smiled and told me to go there.

I’m writing this hungover as all hell, so forgive me if I’m not very… good… at words.

So, quick recap: I met some cool English people in San Jose and we ate magic mushrooms together and got weird.

I left Mazunte happily, not because it’s an ugly place – it’s achingly beautiful – but because it’s fucking sweltering, and I was burning through two t-shirts a day just to not be constantly soaked in sweat. Next stop: San Jose.

I stayed in Escondido until my three-week jaded weird stage had passed. My time was spent chatting to people by the hostel pool – people who were also there for a week or so, so the stream of new faces slowed right down and made way for deeper friendships. I cooked, I watched sunsets, I lay on my bed and did nothing for hours at a time: nice. It took about five days before I felt back to full energy – once again ready to get out there and find a new adventure.

The remainder of San Cristobal was calm: I went out one night for a dance, and the rest of the time I just chilled in the hostel and chatted to a lot of people and spent one particularly lazy and enjoyable day watching the new Lord of the Rings series on a big screen in the hostel. My energy from the first few weeks of my trip was leaving me – it always does around three weeks in.

After the insane waterfall day in Palenque, I had a last supper with Luuk, Bas and Nienke, and then it was time to head on. Luuk and Bas were heading south from Palenque, taking a bus the next morning to Guatemala where they planned to visit an active volcano – you hike up an adjacent mountain, from where you can watch it erupt every thirty minutes. I added it to my to-do list.

Next stop was Palenque. I took a night bus there with Olatz and Nienke, and we arrived at 8am and wandered through the little mountain city. It’s hillier and more haphazard than flat Merida, with the latter’s colourful cobbled lanes replaced with topsy-turvy highstreets crammed with pharmacies and hat stalls. At the end of each street, when each one inevitably dipped away or curved around, green broccoli mountains line the horizon. I noticed very few backpackers or tourists in the city, which is simultaneously pleasing and a little intimidating when you can’t speak the language and are aggressively blonde.