The City That Paints Itself

• Calle Macedonio Alcalá
• 08:40
• 19°C, clear

Off the night bus and straight into a street the colour of sweets, papel picado sagging between the roofs. A man walked the whole length of it ahead of me and never once looked up at the flags. I decided that was the most Oaxacan thing I would see all week. I was wrong daily.

• Barrio de Jalatlaco
• 10:15
• 24°C, sun

A red vocho parked in front of a mural as if hired to match it. Two men leaned against the wall talking, neither of them owning the car, I checked. In Chennai the scooter would have been gone before I raised the camera; here nothing moved for ten minutes and I got to choose my frame like a person with all the time in the world.

the car was still there three days later

• Calle Miguel Hidalgo
• 11:30
• 25°C, bright

A stationery shop window papered edge to edge with lotería cards: the mermaid, the drunk, the moon. The owner saw me shooting through the glass, came out, and started pointing at cards and telling me which relatives they were. El Valiente was his brother-in-law, apparently, and not in a good way.

• Monte Albán
• 08:20
• 17°C, high cloud

The first colectivo up the hill gets you forty minutes of a two-thousand-year-old plaza with nobody in it but the grasshoppers. The Zapotecs flattened a mountaintop for this. I stood in the middle of the great plaza and understood, briefly, what a street photographer does with no street: panics, then looks at the light.

• Hierve el Agua
• 12:45
• 26°C, sun, wind

A petrified waterfall and a mineral pool that stops exactly where the valley drops away. The water is colder than anyone admits. A boy from Tlacolula asked me to take his picture at the edge, checked it, and made me do it again because his collar was wrong — my people, everywhere.

two hours of hairpins in a truck bed to get here. worth eleven.