We landed in Mexico City in the afternoon, which, after a long overnight flight, is quite possibly the best time to arrive in a new country.

I have a theory that afternoon arrivals are one of the small luxuries of travel. They give you enough time to get your bearings without immediately having to deal with the exhaustion of a night flight followed by a full day of pretending you know what you are doing.

You arrive, collect your bags, make your way to your accommodation, dump everything you have been carrying around for the past 24 hours, take a shower and feel vaguely human again. Then, if you have any energy left, you can wander outside, have an early-ish dinner and crawl into bed at a sensible hour.

Morning arrivals, on the other hand, are something every seasoned traveller quietly dreads.

There is nothing quite like stumbling out of an airport at 7am after no sleep, knowing your room won’t be ready until mid-afternoon, and spending the next eight hours wandering around in a jet-lagged fog pretending you are enjoying yourself. Your body thinks it is the middle of the night, your brain has gone on strike and somehow you are expected to make intelligent decisions about food, transport and accommodation.

Whenever possible, morning arrivals are best avoided.

Mexico City was simply a stopover for us this time. We only had a couple of nights, enough to organise our thoughts, get our feet firmly back on Mexican soil and deal with the worst of the dreaded jet lag before heading south to Oaxaca.

We stayed in Condesa, one of Mexico City’s more attractive neighbourhoods. Tree-lined streets, old art deco buildings, leafy parks and a seemingly endless supply of cafés, restaurants and bars made it an easy place to settle into. It had the kind of atmosphere that encourages wandering without any particular destination in mind—which, after a long journey, was exactly what we needed.

I would love to say we spent our precious time in Mexico City exploring museums, visiting famous landmarks and immersing ourselves in the city’s incredible history.

We didn’t.

Instead, we spent our one full day doing something that, after years of travelling, we have become rather good at—absolutely nothing.

Well, not nothing exactly.

We sat in cafés in the morning drinking good coffee and watching the city wake up. We found somewhere for lunch and lingered longer than necessary. In the evening we wandered to a nearby bar, enjoyed a drink or two and watched the Mexican world move around us.

There is something wonderfully underrated about simply sitting in a place and observing. The rush to see everything often means you miss the small details—the conversations around you, the rhythms of daily life, the way people interact with their city. Sometimes a café table tells you more about a place than a checklist of attractions ever could.

And, after a long flight, a couple of days of good food, coffee and wine was probably exactly what we needed.

A few days later, feeling more human and considerably less confused by the time difference, we packed our backpacks and headed back to the bus station.

Our next destination was Oaxaca.

The bus slowly wound its way out of Mexico City and began the long climb into the mountains. The landscape changed almost immediately. The sprawling city gave way to rugged hills, valleys and mountains dotted with towering cacti standing defiantly against the dry landscape.

The road climbed higher and higher, twisting through the mountains. Far below, tiny villages appeared in the valleys, with houses clustered along rivers that wound their way through the landscape. From the window, it was a glimpse into another Mexico—one far removed from the enormous capital city we had just left.

Eventually the road began its descent, the mountains opening into a broad valley, and Oaxaca appeared ahead.