Poza Rica and Papantla

So I had been wanting to go to Papantla, one of the centers of Mexican vanilla production. My family does a lot of baking and my sister or I can go through more vanilla extract in a year than most people do in a decade, and so I thought of it as a sort of culinary pilgrimage -- hopefully with lots of fresh tasty vanilla-infused treats scattered around the town.

We tried our second foray in couchsurfing. It's a great resource, but so far we had only used it once while staying in London (where it wound up saving us a BUTTLOAD of money, for several reasons). We did a search and there was one person offering a couch listed in Papantla, although it turned out they actually live about 20 minutes away in Poza Rica. This seemed close enough, and so we spent an incredibly long day transferring buses five times to travel from Xilitla to Poza Rica.

Poza Rica itself was pretty unattractive. It's a company town -- the Mexican oil company Pemex is absolutely everywhere. They own the hospital. They own the sports complex. They subsidize the English school and provide most of the clients. They even provide the city's public art -- from a mural of oil workers working hard throughout the day to a statue of oil workers lit up near the highway so you can see them working hard throughout the night. I can't remember any place I've been that has been so completely dominated by a single entity, and there was about as much character as you would expect from what amounted to a residential satellite office for the company.

But there we met Carolina and Juan and their other couchsurfer at the time, Saevar the Icelandic bandit. We were planning on staying for a couple of days, but the time blew by in a series of tequila and cerveza soaked parties, and the one happening the next night always sounded even better, so that it was hard for us to leave and we wound up staying a week and a half. It would be difficult to describe everything we wound up doing, so here are a few notable events:

-- We attended a birthday party at Juan's house for Abdiel, a friend of theirs, complete with Mexican DJ and lots of friendly locals.

-- Took a trip out to the beach in Tuxpan and played in the waves. Then stopped by the salsa festival happening there, and people danced until about 5am.

-- Spent an evening finishing a jigsaw puzzle of the world at the house of some English teachers from around the world (Hungary, Canada, England, Australia). It was actually really cool: each country was a piece but didn't interlock, so then you had to fill in the ocean, which made the borders that held the continents in place. A Venzualan guy named Felipe and I worked really well together to finish it. Then we visited and drank with everyone until the wee hours.

-- Went to the 20th anniversary celebration at a very small local theatre, where we saw a play about a crazy wife and a brilliantly dopey husband (the actor was great at seeming /really/ stupid). It was all in Spanish, of course, so we didn't know what was going on very much. A couple of times though the husband grabbed his wife by the hair and banged her head against a wall or the table, to chuckles from the crowd. I guess different cultures...

-- Spent a very quiet Cinco de Mayo, where all the little shops were open and there were no fiesas that we could find. Juan and Carolina seemed a bit perplexed that I thought there was going to be some sort of big party. I guess it serves me right for depending on Corona and Jose Cuervo to teach me about Mexican history.

-- Went and saw my first pyramids at El Tajin. (Petra has seen pyramids in Egypt already; she's so cool!) It was a nice site to walk around, but somehow I wasn’t blown away. We also got to see “flying” Mexicans; five men in traditional costumes climb a tall pole and sit on a spinning platform, and one plays a really pleasant flute while the other four drop off the platform suspended by ropes that slowly unwind as the platform spin, swinging them around and slowly lowering them down to the ground.

-- Took another trip to a different beach and stayed in a little camp there. The water and beach were much nicer here, with the water actually being blue if you gazed out into the distance (although as the waves broke they picked up sand and became the mucky brown color that I associate with the Gulf from trips to Grand Isle). I got totally sunburnt as did most everyone else, but fun was had by all.
-- We did make it to Papantla, but were very disappointed. The “city that perfumes the world” really didn’t smell very nice, and although there were a few shops that sold vanilla beans and extract (and, interestingly, jewelry made from folded vanilla beans that was certainly interesting but not very attractive), I didn’t find anything really different and I couldn’t find any shops large enough to have them ship it to the US. (Liquids in the mail are prohibido, and I assume mailing plant stuff internationally would be as well.) Also, absolutely no baked goods or other vanilla-flavored goodies. So it was hot and there was not much that captured our interest, and so instead of exploring the town further we decided to pack it in and catch the bus back to Poza Rica. Maybe there were great little shops somewhere else in town, and visiting a vanilla plantation would have been a more pleasant olfactory experience, but spending more time there just seemed like a chore.