San Joaquin continued

The rest of our week in San Joaquin passed mostly uneventfully. Once the festival packed up and left, San Joaquin became a sleepy Mexican town nestled into the hills. One interesting thing was that every house with a yard seemed to be raising at least a couple of sheep, presumably to cook them in a pit at some point to make barbacoa. But it was kind of relaxing to walk around listening to quiet baa-ing and chatting with the sheep as they came to the fence and look at us curiously.

Yes, I tend to talk to animals. (Once while living in Baton Rouge, I even serenaded a herd of cows on a LSU farm. They all came up to the fence to listen to me, chewing their cud in silent appreciation of the little bit of art I brought to them that day. They were a good audience.)

We did take an afternoon to walk out to the caves that Camillo had mentioned (20 pesos entrance). They were nice but small and fairly poorly lit. If you can’t see in a set of caves, it’s just not much of an experience. Still, it was an okay 20 minutes or so of looking at an average collection of rock formations and enjoying the cool. The best part was the walk back, where we took a trail through a forest of fragrant cypress and other trees.

We did try to walk out to the waterfall as well, but at about 15km out of town each way it was more of a hike than we were up for. Still, another nice walk along a dirt road through the hills. The tourist office had a pamphlet that said after half an hour’s walk you would come to an overview where you could at least see the falls, but after an hour and a half we hadn’t found it and turned around.

The notable thing about the walk to the waterfall was that we saw several monarch butterflies fluttering around. Of course, Mexico is the wintertime habitat of the monarch, who literally cover the trees with their multitudes during that time. I’ve seen pictures of that since I was a kid on PBS documentaries and the like, and both Petra and I really wanted to head to that area and see it for ourselves. Unfortunately, the butterflies start to migrate north again at the beginning of April or a bit earlier, and we just didn’t make it south fast enough to catch them. So it was nice to run into a couple of stragglers as they fluttered on their way over the hills of San Joaquin. Definitely not the same spectacle, but at least a nice interlude.

San Joaquin Dancing Festival

Having finally recovered enough from our stomach bug to drag ourselves out of Guanajuato, Petra and I headed to the bus station to head to our next stop. Petra had read something about San Joaquin, which was supposed to have some pretty waterfalls and be a quiet, out of the way place. So we caught a bus for Leon, and transferred to Queretaro in order to transfer again up to San Joaquin. I'll take just a moment to note that the Queretaro bus station is gigantic, and the prices for food there are almost double what we've found anywhere else in Mexico -- 18 pesos for a bottle of Coke, 35 pesos for a small sandwich. We had to have something to eat at that point, but I was so insulted that we split a sandwich and sipped on the water we had brought with us.

We finally arrived in San Joaquin just after dark. We had heard about San Joaquin from Camillo, a German working in Mexico whom we had met while staying in Real de Catorce. He said it was a lovely little town with waterfalls and caves nearby, and Petra had picked it as our next destination after Guanajuato. As we were pulling our backpacks out of the bus, one of the other passengers told us there was a huge festival going on that weekend. When you're traveling, festivals are a double-edged sword: they can be interesting and a lot of fun, but they also tend to be crowded and often require booking ahead. So we grabbed our packs, got our bearings, and started looking for hotels straight away. Full. Next one full. The next one had some many cars spilling out of its small parking space I didn't even bother to ask.

We finally found a small shop that had a handwritten sign saying they had rooms. We asked about them, and was told they were 250 pesos a night. Petra did a bit of bargaining, and we got it down to 200 pesos a night, or we could have the entire week for 900 pesos. (Once the festival was over, we expected to be pretty much the only tourists left in town.)

So this is one of Petra's and my ongoing issues at the moment. Of course our financial resources are finite, and although we're really enjoying Mexico it is more expensive than we would like. We know things will be cheaper further south in Guatemala. So we keep telling each other we need to pick up the pace, see the things we want to see in Mexico quickly before our resources run out and then head down to where our money will last longer. But then we run into situations like this: with the festival, we were going to need at least three nights to stay in San Joaquin (the night we arrived, the next night where we'd enjoy the festival, and then in theory one more night where we could run around and see everything else we wanted to) which would run us 600 pesos. But after that, we could get the next four nights for 75 pesos each (plus food and other incidentals, of course) which is cheaper than we would expect to find anywhere else. So one quick pow wow later we decided to take the full week.

The festival was the 41st Annual Huapango de Huasteca, apparently the third largest dancing festival in Mexico. The men all wear white suits and sombreros (at the risk of being culturally insensitive, basically a Speedy Gonzales outfit) and the women white blouses, coloured skirts and colored  ribbons braided into their hair. We mostly watched the junior dancers who performed at the free stage outside, as the main adult competition was held indoors and cost 100 pesos per person entry. Still, a couple of the kids were great and seemed to be having a blast on stage, and we usually picked out our favorite duo out of each group. Special note should also be made of the band: I think it was the same band playing all day, and they did indeed play /all day/ as wave after wave of dancers took the stage. The guitarists must have calluses of steel on their strumming fingers!

And of course there was the food. After a week of stomach troubles in Guanajuato, the festival was just what we needed. Row after row of stalls with tasty goodies, some we had already tried and some new dishes, all provided in small inexpensive servings to munch on, rest and digest for a bit, and then move on to the next snack. I ate a good deal of gorditas de nata -- slightly sweet disks of dough fried on a griddle until golden on both sides. Tasty, not too filling and not too heavy, exactly what my stomach needed. We also had what Petra and I have decided were the best tacos we've had in Mexico so far, from a lovely woman who always had a huge smile and whose stall had a veritable vat of guacamole you could help yourself from. It was amazing, I swear there must have been two gallons of guacamole in a large stone bowl!

Good eats, and a good weekend.

Mummies

We mostly just wandered around Guanajuato during our time there. There was so much street performing, and so many plazas with neat little shops and cafes, that it kept us perfectly entertained. The one big attraction we had to check out was the Museo de las Momias (50 pesos per entry), which has a collection of mummies from the area. It was very interesting, starting off with a strange movie showcasing Mexican funeral practices followed by an equally strange collection of...I guess I'd call it death art in the next room. Lots of skulls with works for eyebrows and centipedes crawling out of the jaws...kind of gruesome, although I thought a couple of pieces were moving.

 

The mummies are not what you'd probably expect. They are desicated corpses, something apparently caused by the soil conditions in the area. But none of them are particularly old; I don't think any of them were over 200 years and one died in 1977 and was exhumed in 1982, which shows how fast the mummification process can happen. But the museum is a fascinating meditation on death. There was a stabbing victim, where you could see the knife wound in his chest and the discoloration from the blood staining the skin there; the skin from his cheeks had crumbled away, leaving a Joker like grin that seemed very odd for someone who had been stabbed. There was a drowning victim (the one that died in 1977) with a slight bluish color compared to the other mummies. And there was a mummy with her arms wrapped around her head, whom they believe had been buried alive.

 

There were also an entire room of "little angels", babies who had died for whatever reason. One was in a little dress and hat with her tiny hands carefully interlaced in prayer. I found it surprising how well preserved she was.

Almost all the men had beards, and almost all the beards were still intact. As was a lot of the clothing still. A lot of the mummies just seemed like corpses to me, and a lot were not in particularly good condition. But there was a minority that I found very compelling, in a gruesome way.

Guanajuato

So, not much else happened in Matehuala. The second night we were there, Petra announced she was going to play a little Nethack. She then sat in front of the computer for about 30 hours straight before sleeping for about five and then playing all the next day. It was a good game but her healer finally died, and she consoled herself by playing Civilization IV the entirety of that night. So I got a lot of reading done and walked around the Easter-time fiesta a bit (lot of stalls and it seemed like a parade or some entertainment was always about to start, but I never actually saw anything happen), and watched Petra play on the computer all weekend. It would have been boring if the 16-year-old "stupid junior" still within me didn't think it made Petra about the coolest, sexiest woman on earth.

We decided to stay Monday in Matehuala, since stores finally opened back up (a lot started to close on Holy Thursday) and we could finally get some overdue laundry cleaned. Tuesday we decided to go to Guanajuato. Petra and I had met a bike messenger in San Francisco at a bar while we were there in November and he had mentioned it as a neat place to go, and we've heard good things about it on the way down. So we took a bus to San Luis Potosi, changed for Leon, and then changed for the last hour to Guanajuato.

We both fell in love with the city as soon as we got here. Built on the slopes of a couple of hills, sometimes the brightly colored buildings seem literally stacked on top of each other, but walking around is not the minor adventure into mountain climbing that Real de Catorce was. It's a university town with a lot of tourists, so there is a nice mix of people and lots going on. The city itself reminded both Petra and I of Italy, with little roads twisting up between the buildings and lots of cafes and boutique shops. There are also performers everywhere: musicians in costumes playing period instruments, magicians on the street, or just some college student with his guitar sitting in front of the cafe. And the views are spectacular.

The first night we stayed at Hostel La Casa del Tio, a proper hostel with an attached sushi restaurant (which we never got around to trying, but the limited selection of rolls were 45-70 pesos). It has dorms for 100 pesos a person, but Petra managed to get us a private room (with shared bath) there for the same price as two dorm beds. It has a laundry machine (which makes the extra day we spent in Matehuala kind of a waste, but after the dust of Wadley our clothes /really/ needed washed), a small stove for cooking, and a rooftop terrace with great views of the city; the only thing we didn't like was that breakfast was included, but all it was was a piece of pre-made toast, store jam, and bad coffee. Still, 200 pesos is more than we wanted to spend and we spent Wednesday pricing all the hostels and hotels we could find. We really liked another nearby hostel, Estacion Esperanza, which had great decor, homemade bread and preserves for breakfast, and was right next door to one of the neatest cafes in the city. Unfortunately the dorms were also 100/person/night.

In a slightly different part of town a bit nearer to the university we found Hotel Parador del la Gadarza Diego Rivera for 150 pesos a night. It also had a great shower and our first television since Ciudad Victoria, which we took intermittent use of.
As you walk around Guanajuato, you'll see pictures and statues of Don Quixote everywhere. The town bills itself as the Cervantes Capital of the Americas, for reasons that I never quite figured out. I've never read Don Quixote, but I'm a fan of the musical "Man of La Mancha" and so know at least the first half of the story from the book. There was even a museum of Quixote art that has free entry on Sundays; I had planned to check it out, but came down with the stomach thing on a Saturday and never quite got around to doing much after that. Still, the public art was great, especially a pair of statues of Don Quixote and Sancho by the Teatro Cervantes.
We had a big night out one evening, catching a Mexican ska band in one bar before heading over to catch another band somewhere else. On the way home, we met a bunch of performers from the Renaissance Festival that was in town -- four sword fighters and their resident gypsy. We had seen advertisements for the festival and had planned to check it out, and had a lot of fun chatting. The next evening we ran into them again, as the Renaissance performers paraded through town. So we marched along with our friends most of the route, dodging out of the way as they fought with some other performers; Mexican swordfighters use real metal swords and axes instead of foam "boffo" swords, so we definitely wanted to stay clear. It was interesting, though, how they would communicate back and forth about what they were going to do and where they were going to attack; it didn't look like any of it was stage managed before hand, but rather they were good at improvising an entire battle while not actually hitting each other in the process.
The parade also had a piper babe! It occurred to me that I don't think I had ever seen a woman playing the bagpipes before, a fact that seems odd in retrospect. There were also dancing horses -- I can't remember the exact term for the sort of riding, but the horses would kind of clop and pose in rhythm to the music, which made for an odd spectacle. And then there was the fire breather, who must have used a couple of liters of oil as he all but singed the eyebrows off the nearby spectators.
The next day we did go to the festival itself, but it looked to be a very small affair mostly comprised of Corona tents set up in a baseball field, and cost 50 pesos to enter. After the parade we figured we had gotten a taste of pretty much all the entertainment, and we just got the feeling we wouldn't be missing that much not going to the festival itself.
We wound up staying a lot longer than expected in Guanajuato since after about a week we both came down with either food poisoning or some sort of stomach bug, which put us out of commission for nearly another week. Every evening we would swear we were leaving the next day, but in the morning we'd still feel queasy and just stay in bed.

Wadley

The road out of Real was great. You travel it by Willys, which looked to me like early ‘60s-era 4-wheel drive trucks. They then take you down the mountain by the rockiest, bumpiest road Petra and I have ever traveled together (although the road just out of Mengla, China, was a close second). Into the valley you could see ruins and a surprising number of waterfalls with caves behind them; I wish I had known they were there earlier and we definitely would have hiked out to them. It was a great hour long trip, spanning about 8 miles (15 km).


We finally arrived in Estacion de Catorce, and sat on the road for a couple of hours until the bus to Wadley came. We had heard about Wadley while reading up on Real de Catorce as a nearby town that was supposed to be cheap to stay in. We had been treating ourselves a bit in Real, and so decided to try and even out the coffers a bit.


In Wadley, we asked for Don Tomas, whose name we had seen on a couple of websites as the person to ask for rooms. He led us over the railroad tracks to a small complex: about six room around a dirt courtyard, plus a small kitchen with a hot plate. Each room had a bed and a light, but no plugs (so no computer). It was cheap, at only 40 pesos a night; we actually talked to several other travelers while we were there that said it is known for being the cheapest place to stay in Mexico.


One of the reasons people come to Wadley is to pick and take peyote. Almost all of the backpackers we met there had come “to walk in the desert,” and there were also a number of people from Mexico City who had come up for the holiday. Most of them headed out to a nearby ranch to camp out for a night and commune. But we didn’t have a tent and only one sleeping bag between us, and that sounded like it would just be cold.


But there was nothing else to do!!! It was absolutely the most boring place I have ever been! No plug, which meant our usual entertainment was gone. We have a couple of books, but they’re all pretty heavy reading and we weren’t up for much of them. We’ve been to other places that weren’t particularly exciting, and I spent some time trying to figure out what made Wadley more trying. What I came up with is that there was no food. There were little bodegas all around that had cokes and chips, but for actual food there was one little taco stand, whose tacos weren’t very good and which was only open in the evening. So during the day, there wasn’t even someplace to sit and have a cup of coffee and maybe meet a few people. Nor were the little stores very well stocked with non-snack food, so we couldn’t even cook much even though we had the luxury of a kitchen.


So we’d get up in the morning and walk in the desert. Then we’d come back and get a drink from one of the shops and sit on the corner to drink it. After that, it was time for high excitement as we decided to sit on the corner across the street for a change of view. Then a wander down the block to look at the fluffy white baby sheep. Check the watch, and…it’s like 11am, by which time it’s getting to hot and bright to walk in the desert anymore, and we had just seen the entire set of highlights for the town. Makes for a /long/ day, and after just a couple of days Petra and I were literally climbing the walls trying to figure out what to do.


And it was dusty. Our dirt courtyard was dusty; the roads were dusty; the desert was dusty; our room was dusty; and we were dusty after having sat in our courtyard, on the road, in the desert and in our room. We tried to unpack as little as possible and wear the same clothes in the hopes of not getting everything covered in dirt. I think we’re also going to pay up for an actual washing machine, as well, instead of washing our clothes by hand like I usually do.


Still, the desert was beautiful. This is the first North American desert Petra has seen (she’s been to the Sahara and to Australia), and she was having a hard time thinking of it as a desert because of how much vegetation there was: you’d look out, and it seemed just carpeted with low shrubs broken up by occasional bigger cacti or trees. At night you could see the stars really well, and there was the absolute brightest full moon I have ever seen: one night it seemed to light up an entire half of the sky with its glow. Pretty amazing.


We had decided to try and couchsurf (a great resource for any traveler) over to San Luis Potosi, which apparently has a big Easter celebration. We had seen a pamphlet in Real which had pictures of the Procession Silencio, where hundreds of people march by silently every year, wearing what I can only describe as purple Ku Klux Klan robes. I was chatting to another American when I first saw the pamphlet, and we both blinked and asked the receptionist about it; obviously the robes don’t have the same symbolism here, and the parade is part of the Easter celebrations. But things didn’t quite work out and we were afraid the hotels there would be full and/or expensive, so we have retreated back to Matehuala and are planning to stay here over the weekend.