Nine days in Mexico City and Oaxaca: the two-city trip that actually works

What to take away

• Casa Azul sells out weeks ahead. It is the first thing to book on the whole trip.
• Fly CDMX to Oaxaca. The overnight bus is fine and costs you a day either side.
• Teotihuacan at opening, before the heat and the coaches. It is a two-hour trip out.
• Oaxaca runs on market days. Tlacolula on Sunday is worth building the week around.
• The altitude is real for 48 hours. Do not land and go straight out drinking mezcal.

Book Casa Azul before you book the flights

The Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan is small, ticketed by timed slot, and consistently sold out weeks in advance. It is the one thing on this itinerary where being organised and being disappointed are two different plans, and it is the reason we tell people to buy that ticket before the flights are even confirmed.

The Museo Nacional de Antropologia is the opposite: enormous, cheap, and rarely full. It is also the best museum in Latin America and it takes three hours minimum. Give it a morning and accept you will not see half of it.

The third bookable thing is dinner. Mexico City has restaurants that book out two months ahead and hundreds that do not, and the ones that do not are frequently better. We booked twice and walked in seven times.

• Casa Azul: timed entry, book four to six weeks ahead, closed Mondays.
• Antropologia: around 95 pesos, three hours minimum, closed Mondays.
• Teotihuacan: open from early, coaches from mid morning, closed nothing.
• Most museums in the city close on Monday. Plan Monday as a street day.

Where to stay, and the altitude nobody warns you about

Roma Norte and Condesa are the two neighbourhoods worth staying in for a first trip: leafy, walkable, full of restaurants, and central enough that the Centro Historico is fifteen minutes by taxi. Juarez is cheaper and equally convenient. The Centro itself is spectacular by day and quiet in a way that is less fun at night.

Mexico City sits at 2,240 metres. That is high enough that the first night matters. Two of our group flew in, went straight out, drank at altitude on no sleep, and lost the following morning to something that felt like a hangover but arrived without the usual quantity of drinking.

The fix is boring and effective: water, a flat first evening, and putting the Centro walk rather than the pyramids on day one. Nobody has ever regretted an easy first day in Mexico City, because the food on any given street is good enough to make a slow evening feel like a plan.

The CDMX days that are worth protecting

Teotihuacan is an hour and a half out by bus from Terminal Norte and needs an early start. The site opens early and the difference between arriving at opening and arriving at eleven is the difference between a vast quiet plain and a heat-hazed queue. You cannot climb the two main pyramids any more, which changes less than people expect: the scale is the point, and the Avenue of the Dead delivers it.

Coyoacan and Xochimilco fit into one day if you accept that it is a long one. Coyoacan is a colonial village absorbed by the city, with the market, the Frida house and a plaza that is the most pleasant place to sit in the metropolis. Xochimilco is the canal system with the painted trajineras, best in the afternoon, and much better with a group than alone.

And then there is lucha libre at Arena Mexico on a Friday, which is the single most fun three hours available in the city. Get seats a few rows back rather than ringside, buy the mask, and do not sit down.

Oaxaca runs on market days

Oaxaca is a small colonial city with the best food in Mexico and a set of villages around it that each have a market day. Tlacolula on Sunday is the big one, a Zapotec market that has run in the same place for centuries and sells everything from mole paste to livestock. Etla is Wednesday. Ocotlan is Friday.

Which market you catch depends on when you arrive, so plan the Oaxaca leg around them rather than around Monte Alban, which is open every day. This is the inverse of how most itineraries are built and it produces a much better week.

In the city itself: the 20 de Noviembre market for the smoky meat hall, the Mercado Benito Juarez next door for everything else, Santo Domingo church and the ethnobotanical garden, and mezcalerias in the evening where a flight of four costs less than a cocktail at home. Monte Alban is a half day, best in the morning, and the view from the ridge explains the whole valley.

Nine days of small payments in two currencies of habit

Mexico is cheap for what you get and it is not uniformly cheap. Street tacos at 20 to 30 pesos each. A very good lunch in Roma Norte for 250 to 400. A mezcal flight for 200. Museum entry under 100. And then a tasting menu that costs more than the four days in Oaxaca.

Cash still matters at markets, in taxis outside the app, at Teotihuacan, and for tips, which are expected at around 10 to 15 percent and are frequently the only thing the person serving you earns. Cards work everywhere else.

For five people this produced the familiar problem: one person buys the group tickets, another puts the flat on their card, and everybody buys tacos for everybody at some point. We logged the big items and photographed the two restaurant receipts. Total, excluding international flights, was around 780 euros a head for nine days including the domestic flight and both apartments.

Questions travellers ask

Before you book

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