A year ago I was in Dublin, wholly alone in a dismal, cramped, bleak, cold apartment. I swore to myself I wasn’t putting myself through that again. And if there’s a clear sign of exactly how over the pandemic I am, it’s this: I went to Mexico. I started planning and booking this trip mid-November, pre-Omicron — had I known what the world would be like in a month I likely would have altered my plans — but the counterargument is I could have changed my mind at any point. I didn’t.

I’ve consumed a truly awful degree of dire predictions around COVID-19 in the past few months, about how useless previous rounds of vaccinations are for preventing Omicron, about spiking hospital rates, about the potential risks of long haul effects even if you’re asymptomatic. Without a doubt, the safest route was to go back into lockdown and hope Omicron burns itself out completely by mid-February. Less extreme steps might be reestablishing social bubbles, or maybe giving up on restaurants and movie theaters.

But I don’t have a social bubble to reestablish, and cutting out restaurants and movie theaters is effectively going back into lockdown for me. I spent a year of my life sticking to close to the most conservative, safest line of advice I could find, in full compliance of every government regulation and recommendation. And I still got pilloried by friends for my choices, and I watched as crowds of idiots flaunted the regulations and protested in the streets for their right to go clubbing and refused to get vaccinated.¹

I’m twice-vaxxed and boosted. I’m wearing a KN-95 mask religiously indoors and avoiding crowds. I’m someplace sunny and warm and I’m spending a lot of time outdoors.² I’m not done with the pandemic and neither is the world. But I’m prepared to triangulate my way through it.

I knew I needed to be in Buenos Aires at the end of February.³ I was going to be in the United States at the start of January. I really didn’t want to fly yet another round-trip transatlantic flight and with winter looming the obvious choice was to hang out in Mexico and South America.

Around this time I also a had a random conversation with a friend in Russia. They’d been forced to return to Russia at the start of the pandemic when their visa for the EU ran out, and were feeling depressed and trapped between the continuing pandemic, the winter, and the inability to return to the EU.⁴ Russians don’t have nearly the same visa issues with Central and South America,⁵ and I’m already paying for hotels so I invited them along and was only mildly surprised when they accepted.

So early January I found myself flying to Cancún and meeting a friend I hadn’t seen in two years at the airport. I’ve traveled a little bit with other people in the past three years — never more than a week — and this is the first really long period of time I’ve spent in the company of another person while on the move.⁶

It’s been awkward, as most feeling out a new relationship is, even a platonic one. I don’t mean that in a bad way. To my relief we’re still getting along, three weeks in and just short of the halfway point. But there’s still all that negotiation that has to happen between sudden roommates — who takes which bed and whether to sleep with the windows open or closed and what kind of food we’re getting for dinner.⁷

The consolation, of course, is getting to see how someone else sees the world. I’m entering my fourth year of professional nomadism; it’s harder to surprise me and easier for me to overlook things than it used to be. Having a travel companion resets many of those biases, or at least replaces them with different and more illuminating ones. There’s more than one way of understanding the world, after all.

Here’s an example: because of how I travel, I am severely allergic to souvenirs, and with only room for a handful of shirts and a couple pairs of jeans I don’t buy clothing either. No luggage space means no shopping trips, and no shopping trips means I usually skip local markets — and even when I do wander through them, I’m never really sizing up the goods or negotiating with the merchants. My friend, who is going back to someplace with closets relatively shortly, doesn’t have the same limitations,⁸ and treats haggling as an invigorating contact sport. So I’ve discovered a lot about the local textile industry I’d never have explored otherwise.

I’m looking forward, at least a little bit, to getting back to traveling alone when I can decide when to get up and when to go to sleep and what to see around town. There’s a deep luxury in that. But I know I’ll be looking forward to teaming up with someone again after a couple weeks of that, and having someone to talk about what we’re seeing and eating and exploring, to be able to see someone try tostones or mole for the first time,⁹ to go through the same experiences I went through once but never can again. Simply put, travel is a gift, and most gifts are best shared with others.

I hated telling people I was traveling to Cancún, and I hated Cancún. Cancún is divided into the “Hotel Zone” — a seemingly endless strip of horrifically expensive high-end hotels which have locked down all the oceanfront property — and the central city, a reasonably nice mix of midlevel restaurants and hotels catering to people who … I don’t really know who the city center caters to, actually. I guess a mix of locals and tourists who wanted to be able to afford the hotel zone and imagined this was close enough?

What Cancún does have is cheap flights¹⁰ and easy access to the Yucatán. I had been through it the last time I was in Mexico because it was close to Valladolid and Tulum; this time I was happy to catch a bus to Mérida after two nights.¹¹ My friend and I did run out to tour the small Mayan museum and archeological site, and accidentally scammed two free margaritas from an all-inclusive resort¹² before spending sunset at the only public beach in the hotel zone, but were thoroughly ready to leave after a single day.

But we just headed inland to Mérida, a short bus ride into the Yucatán jungle. And Mérida was wondrous. It’s still touristy — I don’t think you can be that close to Cancún without being a little touristy — but it still bears its history proudly.¹³ The historic district is surprisingly large and well preserved, and it’s a delight to wander around the city after dark past the cafés and through the many parks.

We weren’t staying long; it’s a good jumping off point for Mayan ruins but I’d already toured a number of them and didn’t feel the need to revisit them. My friend and I did make time to visit the Mayan museum in town, and it’s well worth the journey out of the city center. Unlike most museums, it started resolutely in the present day, foregrounding the over seven million Mayan peoples currently alive and living in and around the Yucatán Peninsula.

Tracing that history into the past, back through the Caste War and the Spanish Conquest, forces you to remember this isn’t ancient history; the Mayan civilization was very much alive when the Spanish turned up, even if it wasn’t as extensive as it had been at its height.¹⁴ The language is still in use and the cultural traditions are still being passed on. The Mayan Empire didn’t disappear any more than the Roman Empire did. It just dissolved and flowed into the present.

Lest you think I’m resolutely opposed to overpriced tourist areas, after Mérida I flew with my friend to Los Cabos for a week. I’d never been and wanted to see Baja California, I was looking for a place I could just relax for a while, and I was curious if the tourist scene on the West Coast played out like it did on the East Coast. Also, there are whales.

We did go whale watching, hopping on a Zodiac and spending two hours zipping around the Sea of Cortez, watching humpback whales surface about an arm’s length from the boat. I had worried about not being able to find any, but during the time we were on the water we must have seen at least thirty of them. They’re just kind of hanging out — like a lot of creatures they gorge themselves before migrating and then don’t eat while they’re on the move — and they’re somewhere between wary and comfortable with the crowds of tourists that gather to watch them. We were lucky at the end, when one got a little curious and sidled up right next to us to get a look at our boat before swimming directly under our boat. You can see them just under the water, half hidden in the emerald green of the ocean,¹⁵ the markings along their fins and tails glowing under the waves.

As for the rest of it, it’s fine. Cabo San Lucas is the part you’re probably thinking of with Sammy Hagar’s tequila bar and a frightening array of dance clubs and strip clubs and taquerias. There’s the usual strip of megaresorts down the coast which mercifully haven’t completely cut off the public beach¹⁶ and some nice restaurants mixed in with the rest. But it’s really not my scene, as I suspected.

After a few days there we headed down the coast to San José del Cabo, which was much more to our liking. It’s just as touristy, in it’s own way, but it’s a more genteel touristy and a more relaxed vibe. You still have access to all the tours you want to go on¹⁷ but it’s catering to people who prefer to go to bed before midnight. I’m not quite there,¹⁸ but even if I am going to be up that late I’d prefer not to have every place in town blasting hair metal at full volume while I’m wandering the streets. All in all I still think Los Cabos is eminently skippable, but if you’re looking for a place to spend some time relaxing on the coast you could do worse than San José del Cabo.

The plan after Los Cabos was to take the Copper Canyon railroad, and had I managed to book the right dates it would have been easy — catch the ferry from La Paz across the Sea of Cortez to Los Mochis, board the train the next morning, and end up in Chihuahua after a couple days along the canyon on what’s supposed to be one of the most stunning railroad rides in the world. But it turns out between the publication of the guidebook I was using and the current day the government completely changed the schedules and my plans got all screwed up.¹⁹

The train used to run every day; now it only runs every other day. So you can no longer stop overnight — minimum of two nights required — and the train no longer even goes the whole way to Chihuahua.²⁰ So we ended up flying to Chihuahua with the intent of catching a cab for the three-hour drive to Creel. And then our taxi driver stood us up, and the ones at the airport were ridiculously expensive and insisted on traveling the next morning, citing safety concerns.²¹ So we had to book a room in Chihuahua and catch a bus early the next morning instead. It was an ordeal.²²

But what you get for your trouble is fourteen hours on a train through some of the most indescribably beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly similar to the Grand Canyon, although it’s absolutely smothered in trees while the Grand Canyon has far more bluffs and bare stone. But the train winds it way from the 2,300 meter elevation of Creel²³ down to sea level at Los Mochis, across 39 bridges and through 86 tunnels, and it feels like every time you look up you’re faced with another impossible vista which will disappear behind trees by the time you get your camera out to photograph it.

After all that bouncing around my friend and I really needed a little downtime, so we went to Mexico City to hunker down for a week and relax. I had been before, in 2019, but only for a couple days. And I did my best to make up for it this time around.

I wasn’t overly impressed with Mexico City the first time I visited. It was nice, and I knew I needed more time to really see the city, but I only spent a couple days exploring and one of them was during a national holiday.²⁴ This time I had nearly a week, and I finally got a chance to actually see the city. And it was amazing.

It helps that I was traveling with someone who absolutely fell in love with the city.²⁵ But this time around I got to see Frida Kahlo’s house and the cathedral off the Zócalo and the National Museum of Anthropology.²⁶ I ate at fancy restaurants²⁷ and hole-in-the-walls on the street²⁸ and bistros and coffee shops and cocktail bars and everything in between.

We had an AirBnB in Condensa, and it provided a nice break from the hotels and B&Bs we were staying in to that point. We could actually buy produce and cook a few meals here and there.²⁹ If you’re traveling for a long while, I highly recommend taking breaks to act a little more domestic here and there. It helps to ground you, and it’s really the only way to even being to wrap your head around a city of more than about 300,000 people.

Mexico City is the first place I been in a long time where I felt I could live for at least a couple months. Maybe because of balmy, sunshiny days in the dead of winter, maybe because it’s the first large city I’ve been to since Seoul in which I wasn’t constantly worrying about the Coronavirus.³⁰ But the combination of the Art Deco mansions, the rich and proud history, the eclectic and open-minded food scene, and the warmth and generosity of the people made it really stand out. Everybody should go at least once. Plan to spend a week.

We finished our trip through Mexico with a few days in Oaxaca — in the capital, specifically — and in a lot of ways it feels like the best half of Cancún and Cabo. It’s the same charming town, with historical churches and local markets and a mix of restaurants of various levels of sophistication.³¹ There’s a lot of Zapotec and Mixtec ruins around and small villages to visit and a lively nightlife downtown.³² But it doesn’t have the tourist crowds or prefab resorts or drunken revelers.³³

So it’s been a chill, cozy final days in Mexico. Oaxaca is known for its local crafts and its textiles, and for its mezcal³⁴ and local delicacies.³⁵ And most recently — and dearest to my heart — for political street art. There’s at least a dozen art collectives in the city tagging up the buildings Banksy-style and running classes on screen printing and turning out angry manifestos.

I’m saying there’s a vibrancy to the place that’s real and exciting. It’s still plenty touristy, but if feels a little more incidental, the way the massive number of tourists warp without changing the fundamental nature of New York City. It was a great way to round off a long stay in Mexico; small enough to feel manageable but large enough to spend three days without getting bored. I was ready to leave when we did, but open to coming back if the opportunity arose. That’s pretty great.

So we’re now on a flight from Oaxaca to Bogatá. Our flight to Mexico City was scheduled to land at 8:05 and our flight to Bogatá started boarding at 8:30, leaving a massive 25 minutes to change planes. A slightly early landing and a shockingly straightforward transfer to connecting flights at Terminal 2 meant we arrived at the gate 20 minutes before they started boarding the first group. This still feels like witchcraft to me.

We’re passing through Colombia on the way to parts further south. Our first few stops require proof of vaccination; the later ones start to require PCR tests and that’s where we’ll run afoul of transit requirements, if it’s going to happen. I’m convinced I’ve caught COVID already and it’s just lurking to be picked up on a real test — same as I was convinced back in December, and then back in July, and then back in October, and a dozen other times — but the evidence so far is that it’s all been psychosomatic. I’ll find out if that holds true in a week.

Until then, I’m living though a strange lacuna in the pandemic for me. It’s been great exploring Central and South America so far, it’s bee great exploring places I’ve never been with a friend, and I’m excited to see what the next few months will bring.

Next: Bogatá (BOG) to Cusco (CUZ)
Prev: Atlanta (ATL) to Cancún (CUN)

Footnotes

¹ As of this writing, only 63% of the US population is fully vaccinated and only 23% have received a booster.

² With, tragically, the sunburn to show for it.

³ I am still booked on a cruise with my father, and I’ve been mildly surprised it’s still apparently on. I did get a recent update rescheduling the last few stops — it no longer stops in Brazil, owing to fluctuating COVID restrictions — but other than that it’s go. It’s the same company — Viking Cruise Lines — that ran the one in Iceland, and I was comfortable enough with that one to trust their safety protocols. I trust them more than most governments, anyway, by this point — at least I can sue the cruise line if things go badly.

With a month left before departure, I’m half expecting it to get cancelled anyway.

⁴ Obviously, getting a visa for a country in the EU is always a bit of a struggle for a Russian citizen, but the particularly nasty hitch in COVID times is that the EU doesn’t recognize Russia’s Sputnik vaccine, so you’re considered unvaccinated if that’s all you have. Russia, for its part, refuses to allow the importation of non-Sputnik vaccines even for private clinics. There was apparently a significant tourist trade where Russians would fly to Croatia, getting the single dose J&J vaccine, an EU vaccine passport, and a cheap weekend on the coast in one fell swoop. But that loophole is reportedly closed.

⁵ Russia donated a significant number of Sputnik vaccines to South American countries.

⁶ I suppose I’ve been on family vacations, but most of us spend our childhood in close proximity to our parents and siblings. Traveling with them is only a novelty because of the travel. And we rarely had a choice in the matter anyway.

⁷ The answer is usually Mexican, if not Yucatánian or Oaxacan — despite how meat-heavy the cuisine is in general I’ve found just about everything to be excellent — but with a month it’s usually good to mix it up every so often with a bistro or a pizzeria.

To my horror, my friend dislikes spicy food, which is a dagger through my heart through much of Mexico. But I’ll survive.

⁸ Though they’re traveling out of carry-on baggage same as I am, they deliberately underpacked to provide some space

⁹ The mole, especially, was a huge hit.

¹⁰ Especially from Europe

¹¹ I figured we were getting in late afternoon on Monday, so we’d spend Tuesday kind of adjusting to the time change and leave Wednesday morning.

¹² We were hoping to find a cocktail bar on the beach to spend the sunset, but the only one within walking distance turned out to be in an all-inclusive resort and the doorman explained they didn’t allow non-residents in. I proceeded to the front desk and asked if they knew where we could find a drink, they assumed we were checking in and summoned a waiter who quickly returned with two margaritas in plastic glasses, by which point I had figured out what had happened but wasn’t going to pass on a free margarita.

¹³ Founded by conquistadors on the site of a Mayan city, long resistant to accepting rule from Mexico City (as opposed to directly from Spain), reputedly the city with the most millionaires in the early 20^th century owing to the henequén industry, still a cultural powerhouse to the present day

¹⁴ Chichen Itza lost its cultural importance only about 400 years before Columbus landed. About as much time has passed since the landing and the present day. It was history, but not ancient history.

¹⁵ The Sea of Cortez is apparently almost as salty as the Dead Sea, and the whales like it because it’s easy to float.

¹⁶ Although you should expect to get hassled by dozens of locals hawking all manner of cheap tourist crap the whole time you’re out there.

¹⁷ Cabo San Lucas is only 25 minutes down the road, about a $20 cab ride at worst

¹⁸ Although, since I’m still a bit jetlagged, I’m pretty close

¹⁹ I had even made an effort to double check the official schedules, but their website was down every time I tried to look it up, and all the blogs and discussion forums I found were prepandemic and thus just as out of date as my guidebooks.

²⁰ Strictly speaking this isn’t quite true. There’s a commuter train for locals which does run the whole way, but tourists are either strongly discouraged or aren’t permitted on it at all. Reports vary, and it seemed like an iffy thing to hang our plans on.

²¹ My traveling companion is convinced they just didn’t want to drive us that late at night.

²² Mercifully, I was able to cancel the “uncancellable” reservation for the night’s hotel in Creel, as well as the tour we had booked for the morning, so we mostly only lost the morning in Creel.

²³ Half again as high as Denver, which is only 1,600 meters. But then Mexico City is 2,300 meters as well. “The Mile High City” seems more and more ridiculous of a brag the longer I travel.

²⁴ I ate at the Four Seasons because it was one of the only restaurants open. It was quite nice, but not exactly steeped in local culture.

²⁵ I’ve spent a lot of time hearing various schemes to secure a long-term visa.

²⁶ Sadly, the main collection was closed owing to COVID, but they had an amazing temporary exhibition which was open and brought together different art and artifacts from the entirety of the history of the region, mixed together to reveal all sorts of correspondences. No, I’m not sure COVID knows the difference between the permanent and the temporary exhibits.

²⁷ I had booked a reservation at Quintonil and managed to botch it, booking it for lunch rather than dinner. They managed to find us seats at the kitchen bar — we got to watch the kitchen work while we ate — and it was fantastic.

One of the dessert courses my friend had was topped with caviar which, being Russian, amused them to no end.

²⁸ Although we rolled up at a highly-rated vegan street cart serving carnitas and al pastor and carne asada and chorizo tacos and tortas and burritos which looked and smelled amazing only to discover we didn’t have any pesos on us. It’s on my list for next time.

²⁹ My friend was overjoyed to be able to make smoothies every morning with all sorts of fresh fruit that’s not normally available in Russia.

³⁰ When I was traveling through Europe last summer I was constantly worried about getting tested in order to travel onward. When I was in the United States I was worried for my personal safety because it was clear the government and/or significant numbers of my fellow citizens didn’t. And in the UK Omicron happened as soon as I arrived.

For what it’s worth, Mexico has the best mask compliance I’ve seen since I left Korea. They’re all KN95 or similar, everybody wears them indoors, virtually everyone (who isn’t a tourist) wears them outdoors. And there’s plentiful hand sanitizer everywhere and temperature checks at the front of every building. I’m not claiming these measures are all helpful or effective. I suspect the masking indoors helps a lot, the masking outdoors helps a little, and rest is mostly security theater.

Mexico still has restrictions, but I’ve been feeling okay about it, with Omicron peaking or peaked and the people I’m surrounded by being cautious but not freaking out. And our travel has been intranational, so there’s no concerns about testing.

³¹ If cheap places with plastic tablecloths and someone frying up meats on a charcoal grill in the corner is your thing, you’ve got that, and if you’d be happier on some fancy terrace drinking mezcal cocktails under warm, starry skies, you’ve got that too.

³² Probably more lively pre-COVID. We stuck to the less crowded bars.

³³ It also, probably not coincidentally, lacks a beachfront. The sea’s two hours south by car.

³⁴ I drank a lot of mezcal cocktails there.

³⁵ Including a particular local pride in chipaulines — grasshoppers — which the locals will slip into just about everything if you’re not careful.