I love the Rick Steve's community since they travel the way I like to travel, staying in BednBrf and meeting the local people.
I am considering the hot air balloons rides outside of Mexico City in Teotihuacan and wondering if anyone ahs a recent experience and would share what company you booked with.
Also any tours that you would recommend in Oaxaca, from a cooking class to visiting the artisan villages.
Hi Catherine,
I can't speak to Mexico City, but I recently had a wonderful time in Oaxaca ( Walking in Oaxaca )
There's a number of excellent tours available. I recommend the following:
Margaux is an amazing tour guide and her tour of Oaxaca's wonderful street art was a highlight of my time in Oaxaca.
I highly recommend any tour with Erick and Edmundo (they also provide pickup service to and from the airport). The tour Erick gave my wife and I of the Sunday market in Tlacolula was worthy of a Rick Steves tour.
My wife and I are heading back to Oaxaca in March and we've booked both tour guides to show us Mitla, Mercado 20 de Novembre, San Martín Tilcajete (home of those wonderfully-colorful wood animal carvings) and San Bartolo Coyotepec (know for their black pottery)
One final tour that I was unfortunately too sick to take is Alvin Starkman's mezcal tour. If you love mezcal, this is your tour. He drives you into the countryside to meet local producers and sample their copious wares. Full warning: this is not for the light-hearted. This is not tourist mezcal. This is as real as it gets. Alvin really knows his stuff and is friends with pretty much everyone in Oaxaca, but the mezcals the indigenous people make is industrial strength. One of my friends said it best: "I can't feel my face anymore".
There is SO much to see in Oaxaca that you'll have an amazing time just wandering around.
Enjoy your trip!
-- Mike Beebe
In August 2023 I went to Mexico City and Oaxaca (and Puebla). I didn't do any tours or classes. I missed the hot air balloon ride but it sounds like a good experience. I took uber to the bus to Teotihuacan. There were available guides outside the entrance that would have cost under the equivalent of about $60 US dollars. Part of my brain might feel guilty for not getting a guide. I bought an English guidebook inside the site: There is a main ancient road through the Teotihuacan site with small but still impressive pyramid of the moon and a gift shop and bathroom on the opposite side of the road maybe a 1/8 mile from the pyramid, where I bought the book, although there were booth selling stuff outside the entrance. I don't remember if you can buy the book outside the entrance. Maybe I could have bought the guidebook online before my trip.
The reason I choose to take the bus from Oaxaca to Mitla and then a collective taxi to Hierve el Agua, instead of a guided tour with a tour guide and a 15-passenger van, is because I know that alcohol is poison and I will never consume a drop of it again, and going to a place where they make poison doesn't sound appealing to me, and all the guided tours stop at a mezcal manufacturing place for at least 45 minutes to and hour (in addition to workshops where they make pottery and rugs and maybe painted wood figurines. But I passed by a place in Oaxaca where they sold painted wood figurines; you probably could buy souvenirs without going far from Oaxaca). The buses and colectivos worked ok, although it took an eternity for the colectivo driver to be willing to leave because it took too long for other passengers to show up and the drivers were really trying to save me money; the total price is divided by the number of passengers or payers in the car or truck. I skipped the artisan villages and just focused on the ruins and Hierve el Agua park. On another day I paid for a ride to and from Monte Albán in a 15-passenger van, from a tour operator but it wasn't a guided tour, just the transportation.
