The Travelling Buncebury's

covering 10 January - 18 January 2020 two photos from our hotel - so you can see what I mean about the landscape. probably not what immediately springs to mind when you imagine what Mexico is like From Oaxaca’s 4,800 feet we rose through the lusciously green forested hills to about 7,000 feet.   Nights are cool at this altitude and on both evenings we’re here someone appears and lights the wood fire in our room.   The landscape is green and has the appearance of a giant and extremely rumpled green blanket as far as the eye can see.   Close up, green, then paler green changing imperceptibly to blues of varying hues and finally the greys as the hills fade away in the far distance.   You can probably guess that I’m impressed.   Our room at the lodge is a detached wooden building with a roofed verandah facing onto a steep slope looking straight out at the green hills to the west.   A trip in the wrong place would lead to a tumble down a couple of hundred feet of undergro

covering 3 - 7 January 2020 between Mexico City and Oaxaca just before dawn from a very high ladder I realised in the first couple of days here that I was suffering from something that no human in history had ever suffered from more than about ninety years ago.   Jetlag.   Maybe birds on long migrations do but are probably tired enough after having to do the flying by themselves to not notice.   Travelling west across six timezones meant that to fit in with local time we were having to go to bed a lot earlier than our body clocks would believe and certainly for me this meant lots of long naps and wide awake time in the middle of the night.   I’m not after sympathy, after all jetlag is essentially self inflicted.   A couple of days after we arrived and during one of my wakeful spells we enjoyed an earthquake (5.8, not too big, no injuries).   Sleepers generally missed it. Oaxaca is a large sprawling place about 225 miles SW of Mexico City and the old centre is fai

covering 8 January - 10 January 2020 some countryside a little outside Oaxaca Oaxaca is a region of Mexico as well as a city and a region which according to the guide for our Botanical Garden tour has a claim (possibly a little partisan, I imagine) as the holder of many records for crops, types, varieties and so on.   However, I did know that path in the Botanical Garden with every stone drilled and pegged down. (boot toe for scale) until recently the original source plant for Maize/Sweet Corn was unknown but it seem that it has now been identified and (surprise !) was first grown with wild varieties being selected in Oaxaca.   Selecting wild strains of edible plants of course is the first step to cultivation, agriculture, towns, rulers, wars and buying everything off Amazon.   Speaking of agriculture, many restaurants here serve grasshoppers (it’s difficult but yes, I am going to avoid that joke) which must be farmed because like everywhere else it seems, insec