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.