Monday, February 2, 2015 METRO 37 Travel | Culture | Adventure SCHOOL’SOUT Balloon, trampoline or stargaze your way through half-term e Y id Escape Page 40 » ou gu r urban

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MEXICO CITY HOTELS

Mexico City’s most design- centric digs come courtesy of boutique hotel group Habita. I stayed in its eponymous flagship hotel in Polanco. Check-in involves shots of head-spinning mescal, there’s a cool rooftop with movies projected on the skyscrapers opposite while the minimalist glass-heavy rooms would excite designer Kevin McCloud.

FOOD

Mexico City isn’t just about incredible street food. Thanks to putting innovative spins on Mexican cuisine, its chefs are also winning praise. At Rosetta, housed in an ex-art gallery, we feasted upon sublime Italo-Mexican cuisine such as cuchama worm with nasturtium flower while watching Mexican diners choose from the tequila trolley. GO MEXICO GREEN MEXICO CITY Thought Mexico City was a crime-ridden, air-polluted hellhole?

Think again. It’s cleaned up its act, says Christian Koch If you need proof of Mexico City’s increasing green credentials, you only need to RIDAY afternoon and buckets of (fermented cactus- around Mexico City and it’s When you do spot non-Hispanic visit Paseo de la Reforma on psychedelic pulqueria () sap), mouths agape. Have I committed immediately apparent. Selfie-sticks, people, they’re invariably clambering Sundays. Closed to traffic, the Las Duelistas is hosting a a major gringo gaffe? Evidently not, Kiwi backpackers and tourists into people carriers at the Four city’s main artery is awash demob-happy crowd. But as because within seconds our passage shoving long-focus lenses into locals’ Seasons. These folk (and the majority with joggers, skateboarders F and stray dogs, all running you enter the western-style to the bar is thwarted by arriba- faces are all noticeably thin on the of British tourists who visit Mexico saloon doors, the boisterous cackle toasting backslapping revellers. ground. For an electrifying without leaving Cancún) are missing cheek by jowl alongside each and ear-perforating salsa quietens. You see, tourists just don’t visit megalopolis of 21 million people with other. It’s partially thanks to the government’s three-year Customers look up from plastic places like Las Duelistas. Walk more than 150 museums, it’s weird. Intoxicating city: Page 38 » regeneration plan. 38 METRO Monday, February 2, 2015

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» Continued from Page 37 Symbolic: Strumming away: out on an intoxicating city that should be gabbled about in the same The Angel Of breath as New York or Paris but you can hardly blame them – for years tourists had been warned off visiting due to violent crime, taxi hijackings and smog so bad birds dropped dead mid-flight. However, Mexico City has cleaned up over the past decade. The murder rate’s lower than Cape Town, Miami or New York, with notorious drug cartel wars confined to the country’s north. The smog has cleared. consistency, many will find this Hummingbirds flap in trees. People 2,000-year-old Aztec drink vile. zip around on EcoBicis, a shared However, flavoured with pine nut, bicycle scheme. Daniel Craig will tamarind or celery, it’s smoothie- decamp here later this year to film like delicious and it’s not long new Bond flick Spectre, while the before we’re gawping at Las Mexican Grand Prix is an F1 fixture Duelistas’ hallucinogenic walls for the first time in 23 years. in a boozy fug. And so it is that I find myself on Our final experience is a four- a Journeys Beyond The Surface hour nocturnal stroll. Darting walking tour (customers tailor their down narrow Centro Histórico own adventures by emailing in streets, each block offers an adventure, such as being engulfed by smoke as snakeskin-loincloth- and-feathered-headdress Aztec dancers perform ceremonies, or Walk an intoxicating city listening to silver-studded mariachi bands strumming away in Plaza advance) to experience this city in its hotel, I’m besieged by a succession of way, I’m accosted by Day Of The Garibaldi. A ten-minute bus ride later, visceral, sombreros-and-all majesty. Psychedelic: bizarre cameos. Dead imagery at every turn: scythe- we arrive in a different world. ‘In Mexico, surrealism runs through Tourists don’t As we traipse through the Centro wielding skeletons graffiti here, rows Zona Rosa, or the ‘Pink Zone’, is the streets,’ said literary giant and usually get to Histórico we weave between sidewalk of skull piñatas there. home to glitzy shopping malls, long-term resident Gabriel García visit bars like knife-sharpeners, four men hauling a Eventually we reach Calle Regina, fluorescent gay bars and ska clubs. As Márquez. Indeed it does. From the the lively broken fridge, a female clown and a a corridor of hip mezcalerías (serving GETTING we tramp through Condesa’s art deco moment blue-haired Mojdeh, Las Duelistas chap pirouetting ballet by traffic mescal – tequila’s smokier cousin) THERE home-lined esplanades, a stately, Journeys’ founder, meets me at my (below) lights. Our nostrils are and peeling pastel buildings sophisticated city reveals itself. It’s a assailed by kerosene, speckled with street murals. Journeys Beyond bit like Paris but without the dog poo. roasting meat, brick rubble, Taking the baton on from The Surface tours Our guide suggests walking through coriander and sweat. muralist (and ’s are available from a nearby park – something we’d be Every so often, Mojdeh ex-husband, no less) Diego £99 for four hours reticent to do at 9.30pm on Sunday drags me aside to enter a Rivera, they’re every and customers can night at home. Suddenly, something church celebrating the Instagrammer’s wet dream. tailor their own brushes against my leg. A coyote? A itineraries, such Virgin of Guadalupe At Las Duelistas, we as street art, food bandido trying to steal my iPhone? (‘bigger than Jesus’, sample pulque. Made or anthropology. No, it’s a designer dog followed by a apparently) or stops from maguey cactus, it’s travelmexicocity. Pooper Scooper-wielding owner. to eat at the kind unlikely to be drunk com.mx The Four Seasons-istas would have of corner-side outside of Mexico (it British Airways been aghast. But tomorrow, they’ll be taqueria you’d ‘Bigger than Jesus’: can’t be bottled and flies daily to shunted towards gift shops and we’ll normally avoid The Virgin of needs to be drunk Mexico City from be the ones with an authentic lest it gives you while fermenting). Heathrow, from understanding of how everyday Guadalupe; above, Montezuma’s Thanks to its £700 return. Mexico City residents lead their lives. Revenge. Along the Aztec death masks wallpaper-paste Quite clearly, we win.