Juanito’s Travel 50-yr backpacker post, Post #40 – Oaxaca, a bit out of order from the 50 yr backpacker story, where’s the cheese, mezcal and wasting your life playing Civilization VI.
Oaxaca, México.
I pledged to write at least one sentence of this blog post today.
And I did.
That’s not in Oaxaca. That’s in Australia.
I’ve been playing Sid Meier’s Civilization VI most of the day. It seems like a waste of time.
I guess it is a waste of time. But now, on another day because I’ve been leaving this draft mature like a fine wine, I’m finally finishing blog post #40 for the 50 year backpacker blog. It may be 40, could be another number, depending on how you count. I’m really just finishing this today because I want to play more Civilization and I feel like I’d consider myself addicted to that game if I played it without writing something new and creative. And also because I spent almost all of last Sunday playing the game. Like in Regurgitator’s song Black Bugs which includes the lines:
stared at the tv too long now and i’m not the same
i’ve got to remind myself that it’s just a game
Regurgitator’s new album Invader is great, I call it their Epic album as that is a song on the album and I did think the album was called that. I got it at their gig at the Miami Marketta on the Gold Coast in Queensland last week. On vinyl. Of course, I’m 50+ years now.
It would have been a dream of mine as a kid playing some game most of the day. We didn’t have very good games back then. I did play River Raid on the commodore 64 all day once, it didn’t have an end so, just like in Regurgitator’s song Black Bugs in the end I had to let them planes and missiles which lined the river ‘shoot me so that i [could] die’.
When I was very young, much younger than today, I’d go down to Mark Bathurst’s house at the end of the street. I didn’t really like him, but he had an Atari with the Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back Game where you fly your little T-47 airspeeder to attack walkers. A little square would show up which you had to hit to destroy them before they did something. And then just more of the walkers would come. It was endless, like the Walking Dead. The dead just keep coming. Most of the time I just watched him play because it was his Atari, and you get what you’re given. We were so poor I didn’t even ask for an Atari. Though I could afford one now, and I might keep my eye out for one so I can waste more time.
Civilization VI is a bit more complex than anything you’d get on Atari. But I still feel shitty when I’ve spent too much time playing it and I delete it from my Steam library from time to time before trying it out again. My life. How short to be dedicating so much time to such things. I know.
I’ll go for a walk on the beach this afternoon. This morning I planted some dragfruit cactus pieces along the back fence to grow dragfruit for a smoothie. I have bananas ripening up and some papaya plants growing so, apart from some yoghurt and almond milk I’ll be able to have my own smoothie from the garden one day. Look out when the black sapote (chocolate pudding fruit) and avocados get some fruit because then it’s going to be party time!
I also vacuumed. On the day in question. I did listen to Regurgitator’s Unit and Tu Plang albums on vinyl. I’ve put it on again, listening to I Sucked a lot of Cock to Get where I am. I haven’t sucked anyone’s. I prefer tacos. They are delicious in all their forms.
My wife’s cousin died a few days ago in Guadalajara. I guess he did things like wasting time playing games.
I didn’t know him very well, but we’d met a few times. We were watching a Dodgers baseball game last October. I don’t know much Spanish so we didn’t talk much. He made a few comments on the game and I nodded. I enjoyed his company as I drank tequila.
The AI tells me I should write more about Mexico. It also gave me a thought for the day ‘take one small action to achieving a goal that doesn’t even feel like you’re doing something’. Or words to that affect (or effect?? Spell checker is saying effect, but now I have to leave it in as I’ve questioned myself and this bit won’t make sense if I correct the ‘affect’, which I know now is incorrect).
That was my one sentence. Just write one sentence and you’re on your way. It doesn’t feel like much.
So, Oaxaca. Thank you AI overlords for telling me what I should write. Soon I can just tell you to write this stuff. Just not sure how you’re going to weave in Oaxaca, Regurgitator and everything else in one travel blog. Dunno, maybe you’ll be able to do random shit like that one day. But you’ll spell everything correctly anf won’t mix up affect and effect because you always know the difference. You won’t get that why us humans can include typos like anf instead of and either because you don’t have fingers and so, on a standard English keyboard you won’t get that the f and the d are next to each other so easily mixed up.
If you don’t know how to pronounce Oaxaca it’s a bit like wah-hah-ka or wuh-haa-kuh.
If you don’t know how to pronounce México in Spanish it’s a bit like meh-hee-koh.
As chronicled in my previous post, my first days in Oaxaca, México were spent in bed with food poisoning from airline food.
But before we get too into Oaxaca I’d like to reflect on what an awesome life I’ve had.
Getting to go to Oaxaca is definitely pretty amazing. There’s other things that are just as awesome in my life. My wife and my two kids.
I’ve married a Mexican who I got to go to Oaxaca with. Amazing. I met her online in Guadalajara, around the Day of the Dead. I still haven’t been in Mexico on the actual Day of the Dead. I’ve been close, a few days before, a few weeks before, and few weeks later. But never on the actual day. You can get Day of the Dead bread – pan de muertos – in the weeks leading up to the Day of the Dead. Not as bad as the sales of hot cross buns here in Australia which start on 26 December – or no later than 1 January – in the lead up to Easter. I always feel like Easter has come and gone when I see the Easter eggs on the shelves because the hot cross buns have been there for so long.
And my kids are great. I won’t say more than I love them to bits. And I love my wife to bits.
So, my awesome life, often wasted playing Civilization VI, has also been spent doing much more interesting things, like travelling with my wife around Mexico, to Coyoacán in Mexico City, plus Xochimilco (also Mex City), Mérida, La Paz (Baja California), Guanajuato, Querétaro, Morelia, San Cristobal de las Casas, Puerto Vallarta, Palenque, Pátzcuaro, Calakmul, Cancún and even Mazatlán in Sinaloa, where I had aguachile, this limey, chilli, coriander dish mostly served with prawns (camerones). I had prawn aguachile for lunch today (be mindful that as I’ve spent weeks writing this that could be any day now), leftover from last night’s dinner. After, I had a Balter’s XPA beer.
Is that a better use of my precious life? Travelling I mean. I think if I had a PH scale like they use for soil testing I’d say Aguachile and beer is more on the acid scale than alkaline, which doesn’t really help as it really depends on what you’re trying to grow as to whether more alkaline or acid soil is better. Me I just chuck trees in and cross my fingers. If things grow the PH is right. Lime juice is definitely too acidic to grow anything directly in. That’s just an assumption I’ve never tried.
In my cupboard – my wardrobe cupboard – I have seven polo shirts from Uniqlo. Oh, I’m back to how awesome my life is and I’m using the fact I can afford 7 different shirts from Uniqlo as an example. That is one for every day of the week! This morning I went out for breaky with my wife and bought an açaí bowl and had a triple shot flat white in a mug (it was a little strong actually, I think 2 shots is enough, you can get too much of a good thing, like playing Civilization VI most of the day).
Last Friday I bought a half and half pizza with chilli prawn on one side and a meat lover style on the other from a fancy pizza place in Palm Beach, El Torro’s. When in Mazatlán I eat aguachile. In Coyoacán I have tamales in a bun for breaky bought from some dudes on the street, and tacos al pastor for dinner, or lunch – both those meals are often blurred in Mexico.
In Oaxaca I’ve developed a fondness for mezcal with chapuline (grasshopper) or gusano (agave worm) salt.
Whenever I visit Guadalajara I love popping into centro for some birria tacos and then head to La Fuente Cantina for a caballito – a tall shot glass that they fill to the brim, plus a few drops more, not like those child-sized shot glasses you get outside of Mexico – de Cascahuín tequila – Cascahuín is great, I’ll get back into that once I’ve finished my mezcal.
And you know what, I even own a blue tooth record player which I’m currently playing Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday record on. Well I have Regurgitator’s Tu Plang playing right at this very moment, that previous sentence was from another day. I might change my awesome album, come to think of it, feel like Fat Boy Slim.
When I first started working at the State Bank of Victoria (SBV) back at the start of the 1990s most of what I knew about Mexico came from Herbie Goes Bananas when the VW Beetle main character pops down to Mexico to fight some bulls and stuff. I also knew they made tequila and tacos. Now Mexico is part of my DNA – I think literally as when I read or watch things about archeology they can tell where people spent time depending on certain traces in their bones. That might not be DNA, but how are you going to tell? Ask AI?
Back in those SBV days, when I was just 17, I only owned 2 long sleeved (sleeves are mangas in Spanish by the way) shirts and 2 ties (corbatas) which I rotated one day on one day off before washing them on the weekends and starting the whole rotation again. I earnt less than the dole, so I was poor and wasn’t travelling to Mexico or eating aguachile or having flat whites at fancy cafes or even non-fancy cafes. And how the hell would I know what an açaí bowl was or mezcal the ‘spirit distilled from over 30 types of agave (primarily in Oaxaca), distinguished by a smoky flavor derived from roasting agave hearts (“piñas”) in underground pits’ (putting that in inverted commas means I’ve referenced the AI that produced that description, I’m hoping this doesn’t break the internet by feeding in AI descriptions that the AI may then go and refer to when producing AI descriptions).
So, that life reflection is just to say. I’m fucking lucky. Sure, I can’t afford a deposit on a house in Australia at this very moment, and at age 53 that stresses me the hell out, but I have a loving wife, two great kids, 7 polo shorts and a brand new Cypress Hill record, so life is pretty good.
Back to Oaxaca.
Despite my tummy troubles, I did manage to go outside our hotel on our first night in Oaxaca and had some sopa de tortilla. My wife had the Oaxacan speciality dish tlayuda, a large, thin, crispy Oaxacan corn (mostly blue corn from what I’ve eaten) tortilla, often topped with cheese and stuff. Mexicans love cheese. I had never imagined Mexicans love cheese so much prior to coming to Mexico. They didn’t mention that in Herbie Goes Bananas I think. I haven’t seen it for ages so they may have.
But after travelling to Mexico for over a decade (since 2013) – as time progress that reference to over a decade will have to be a point in time thing (BCE – before current era), as perhaps I’m 63 and happily living in a house that’s a third paid off with my superannuation (future self, let me know how you go with that!) – visiting Mexico, meeting my wife, marrying my wife, visiting my wife’s family, taking my kids and my wife’s stepkids to visit my wife’s family in Guadalajara and a few other places, I’ve learnt cheese is a big thing there (that’s a pretty long sentence if it is indeed a sentence!).
They typically have very cheesy pizzas in Mexico – though I did find one somewhere I can’t remember that had more of a modest Italian level of cheese on top.
Cheese is also mentioned in Civilization VI even if it is perhaps not mentioned in Herbie Goes Bananas.
I ordered a chicken parmigiana (a classic Australian pub dish) in Ajijic, near Guadalajara and the cheese weight outweighed the crumbed chicken and I ended up scraping off a huge chunk leaving an ugly mess at the side of my plate.
While we’re on cheese, the Oaxacanas, oaxaqueños in Mexican Spanish, make the most divine cheese which in other Mexican states is often called Oaxacan cheese (queso de Oaxaca or queso oaxaqueño) but in Oaxaca is called quesillo.
After being sick for the first two days, not being able to venture far from the toilet (which, again, was from food poisoning on American Airlines caught from dodgy scrambled eggs on the plane from Australia to the USA as I started pooping in that bad poop way before I left LAX, on the way to Oaxaca) and ended up in hospital on a saline drip early one morning, then having to have antibiotics for a few days, I went to a tiendita de quesillo (Oaxacan cheese shop) with my wife as she wanted to get some quesillo to take back to Guadalajara.
In the tiendita de queso the guy asked me, ‘do you want to try some mezcal?’.
It was 10 am, and I had finished my course of antibiotics, so I was like ‘sure!!’.
And while the guys prepared the cheese – which is quite the process when they stretch the curd out and roll it in a ball and trap in all that delicious flavour – I sampled some of that ‘spirit distilled from over 30 types of agave (primarily in Oaxaca), distinguished by a smoky flavor derived from roasting agave hearts (“piñas”) in underground pits’. This is again sourced from AI – sorry to screw you up AI by using information that you produced that you may come and reproduce again – again – but I like playing with fire.
It’s like when I was at Marymount Catholic school and I kept writing ‘666’ on a piece of paper in religious class, and then I got freaked out because I thought if I wrote ‘666’ 666 times then maybe the devil would appear, and Marymount, being Marymount, did have a kids book in the library with a picture of the devil who looked pretty evil and had like a wolf’s head, or goat’s legs or something. So anyway I didn’t want to risk writing 666 exactly 666 times so I just kept writing 666 figuring at one stage I’d have written it at least 667 times or more, so I’d be in the clear.
With that in mind, that will be the last time I describe mezcal as ‘a spirit distilled from over 30 types of agave (primarily in Oaxaca), distinguished by a smoky flavor derived from roasting agave hearts (“piñas”) in underground pits’.
I tried many of those 30 different types of mezcal at the cheese shop between 10 am and 10.30 am before landing on a bottle of an Ensemble blend called Invócame made from Sierra Negra, Cupreata, and Arroqueño agaves and another bottle of mandarin-flavoured Espadín agave mezcal.
The Invócame made from Sierra Negra, Cupreata, and Arroqueño agave is very amazing and I barely have a half bottle left now with some little nighttime cabillitos. So good, that I have been neglecting my poor Cascahuín blanco and Añejo tequilas.
For a quick comparison, the Sierra Negra, Cupreata, and Arroqueño agave mezcal has ‘a smoky flavor derived from roasting agave hearts (“piñas”) in underground pits’ whereas the Cascahuín blanco (made from just one type of blue agave, as all tequila is) feels a bit like firey (which the internet tells me is meant to be spelt fiery which makes no sense because why would you put the ‘e’ in fire before the ‘r’ when you describe something as ‘fiery’) burny flavour and is nice with a bit of lime, and the Añejo tequila is a bit smoother and much less ‘fiery’ – see looks weird, I think those internet people may have gotten that one wrong. Or maybe those dictionary people were enjoying Cypress Hill’s Hits from the Bong when they came up with that nonsensical spelling. Fucking ‘A to the K’.
So Oaxaca. First two days, bit of a blur. On day three, once the tummy had settled down, I was up to breakfast at the hotel starting with a cafe americano, and some fruit, by the next day I was getting into a tamale in a bread roll. Then we headed out to the markets and I, still weak, sat down on a bench in front of a rug shop while my wife looked around. I started chatting to the rug shop owner and he explained how cochineal was made form bugs or snails or something, and how other dyes were made from different rocks and things, and how the family made the rugs, and in the end, by the time my wife had rejoined me on my bench, I was asking her which rug she wanted, and we had a new, very beautiful, handmade rug, which is now sitting under my feet as I listen to Fat Boy Slim ‘fucking in heaven’ on my bluetooth record player.
We then headed to a traditional Oaxacan massage/ ceremonial place and engaged in a traditional Oaxacan ceremony, with conch shells, and then onto a steam house experience with rosemary and other herbs, followed by some decent massages.
On day four we did the usual Oaxacan day-trip, heading to Monte Albán, stopping off for some Oaxacan cuisine and some artisanal wood-working place where they made lots of alebrijes (an assorted of mythical Mexican creatures – though the tour guy said these weren’t actually alebrijes and more a local tradition), an abandoned church and monastery, and an an artisanal pottery place that specialised in black pottery. We now have ‘alebrijes’, black pottery, and a vase and a necklace from Monte Albán. Plus the rug and the bottles of mezcal – my wife got a bottle of Cómplice – an espadin, maguey cuishe agave blend.
We also went to a Michelin star restaurant – where I left a review saying their ‘tacos’ were in my mind tlayudas, which they didn’t seem to appreciate – and visited the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca and just generally walked around enjoying Oaxaca.
All the usual tourist things to mention in a travel blog. Inlcuding drinking great coffee.
And on day five we had the cheese and mezcal. Which I’ve already mentioned.
And that, good people, is all about the cheese. I feel like now my day hasn’t been wasted and I wish I was eating some more of that melted quesillo with jalapeños – yes one of the cheese we bought had jalapeños in it – in a tortilla as we did once we returned from Oaxaca to Guadalajara.
Is that a waste of life, eating Oaxacan cheese with jalapeños? More than playing Civilization VI? It doesn’t seem as much of a waste, though the cheese is of a similar addictive nature.
Just being in the moment, even reflecting on the past feels ok. I’m not sure you need any PH kit to work out what’s a ‘waste’ and what’s not. Just find what gives you peace and do more of that, and do much less of what feels like a waste. But don’t judge yourself. If your peace is a piece of Oaxacan cheese and a little Mezcal at 10am, then that’s your peace.
I’d also recommend vipassana meditation courses.
So that’s today’s blog post. I just ate some hummus that said ‘use before December 2025’ and it’s now March 2026, so let’s see how that goes with my tummy.
We’re off to Eurovision in Vienna in a few weeks, might end up writing about that in case you’re interested.
