Local Oaxaca and Maintenance Day

Today was a "maintenance" day -- making some decision about the rest of our trip, including travel arrangements. I write this post mostly so remind myself and any other travelers that might happen upon this blog -- use a travel agent. Yes, in the Internet Age it's nice to be your own travel agent, but sometimes things aren't available on the web (yes, it's true). We wasted a bit of time trying to track down flights from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido, and to come up with a plan to visit Chiappas (the neighboring state to Oaxaca), and basically we couldn't do it with the normal arsenal of tools I regularly use to plan travel.

So while considering an eco-tour to the Sierra Madre Mountains, we came across Chimalli Travel Agency (M Bravo #108) and the very patient (and English-speaking) Francisco Perez Morales. He got us direct flights to Puerto Escondido for about $100 pp each way from the tiny AeroTuscan, which has no online booking and flies 7 and 11 passenger planes to the beach about once a day. He also got us a flight from Tuxla (Chiappas), but dealt with Mexicana for the re-routing. Grade: A, highly recommended.

We ended the day with dinner at La Biznaga, which we had high hopes for. Very artistic interior, and the menu is beautiful, a work of art by itself. But it's 100% smoking, and after moving tables once, we still ended up with someone smoking within a few meters of us during the entire dinner. Service was terrible, I think once we moved tables we were labeled as problem customers and were ignored the rest of the evening. Very disappointing, since I had such high hopes and it had received good recommendations.