San Cristobal

Alright, finally trying to catch up on the blog. We’ve taken the last month or so /very slowly/, both to let my shoulder heal and also because of a certain amount of sheer laziness (at least on my part).


From Mazunte, we headed to the lovely little town of San Cristobal in the Chiapas highlands. We arrived about a week or so after my little accident in the ocean. My shoulder was still screwy, so one of the first things we did was head over to a doctor to have it looked at. After several doctor visits over the next week or so, I got an X-ray and discovered that I had dislocated my clavicle at the shoulder. I was given a sling (fun to wear with 90 degree heat and infinite humidity!), some muscle relaxants, and told not to move it for three or four weeks. So now after all is said and done –- it doesn’t hurt anymore but is still tender on occasion; I seem to have full range of movement but have been careful not to stress it with too much weight, and so am not sure (and am a bit nervous to try) whether I could do push-ups or yoga; and my clavicle moves up and down a bit underneath the skin depending on how I use it, which is unfortunate but not unexpected. There seems to be a relatively simple surgery where they can sew the clavicle back into place with a bit of cat gut, and I might think about that at some point especially since I should be able to get a pretty decent deal on such a surgery here in Guatemala or elsewhere in Central America. But at the moment I can sling my backpack around, I’m favour the injured shoulder a bit to limit any discomfort, and it gives me an excuse not to do any push-ups or yoga (did I mention a certain amount of prevalent laziness?). So maybe I’ll look into the surgery at some point, but I’m just seeing how things go and whether this might just be “one of those things” that I’ll deal with indefinitely.


For anyone else who winds up with a non-fracture shoulder injury (dislocated collarbones seem to be a somewhat common problem for skiers, especially) –- I’ve been told that the shoulder should be immediately immobilized using a sling and strap around the chest, for several weeks or as your doctor directs. For a dislocated shoulder, a doctor should be able to pop it back into place; for a dislocated clavicle, the surrounding muscles should be strong enough to pull it back into place as long as you don’t keep jostling it around and continuously stress the injured site. The first week I was injured I did not do this, and actually thought it might be a good idea to try and exercise my shoulder a bit each day –- I can’t remember my exact rationale at the time, but for some reason that seemed like a good idea to me. Upon additional information it turned out to be the exact wrong thing to do, and so please don’t make the same mistake if you somehow manage to catapult yourself into a solid, immovable object.


Anyhow, when we first got to San Cristobal, we stayed with an acquaintance of Petra’s from back when she lived in an artist squat in Paris. (Have I mentioned recently how totally cool Petra is?) Cisco is a photographer and artist, and who runs the Sol y Luna Bed and Breakfast out of his home (US $50-70, tv, wifi, external bathroom, and breakfast included if you actually pay to stay there). As you can see, there would have been no way we could have afforded to stay there on our own, so thanks Cisco for providing us with such a treat! The rooms and rest of the house were gorgeous, and although a bit damp there was a tiny workable fireplace that dried everything out and warmed it nicely. We met the other guest staying there, Lara, a mid-wife from northern California who was just fabulously interesting and fun, and whom we ran around with for the next week or so. It was really interesting to chat with her about being a mid-wife, and she had some interesting figures: if most low-risk pregnancies were handled by mid-wives instead of at hospitals, it would save roughly $85 billion in health care costs and dramatically increase your chances of having a natural child-birth instead of delivering via Caesarian. I don’t have a cite for those figures (although if anyone out there is interested, let me know in comments and I should be able to get them for you), but I found it all provocative and interesting.


We only stayed at Cisco’s a few days though, before he had bookings and needed the room. We moved down the street to a small hotel down the road, El Meson just down from Cisco’s on Calle Tonala. It had bare basic concrete rooms with shared bathrooms, but was /only 40 pesos/! That’s Wadley prices, tying for the cheapest accommodations we found in Mexico! And San Cristobal was /way/ prettier and more interesting than Wadley! Anyhow, I think one of the reasons it was so cheap is that it was a reported bordello, not that we ever noticed anything seedy or were disturbed at all by strange sounds or the like. And it wouldn’t have been the first time we’ve stayed in a bordello, although it totally wasn’t as nice as the gorgeous bordello we stayed at in Laos.


We didn’t do a lot in San Cristobal. I enjoyed hitting some of the cafes in town to watch a few of the World Cup games, and we poked around a lot of the boutique and trinket shops to pass the time. We spent a day with Lara at the orchid and nature preserve that Cisco runs, Orquideas Moxviquil, which was beautiful and interesting, and totally worth the trip. And we hung out at the newly opened Hostal de la Iguana, founded by two couch surfing couples and looks like a great place to stay (I think the dorms were 70 pesos and private rooms around 100-120, but while Iguana would have been a prettier and more chatty place to stay we were totally enthused with our ultra-cheap pseudo-bordello). They had a nice barbeque every Saturday you could drop in on, and the guests there were particularly nice in setting up one-handed fussball (table soccer) games so I could play.

Near-term plans

Quick shoulder update: it was much better after about 3 days, but then started healing more slowly, although it continues to improve. About a week after the accident, I’ve got about full range of motion back (if sometimes slowly and tenderly) and the sense of weakness I had in my arm is fading. Nice big yellow-brown bruise over the entire front of my right shoulder, though! I think it is definitely on the mend, but I’m going to have it checked by a doctor when we get to our next larger city in a day or so. Any reiki people out there, feel free to send some universal light this way!

The rains have finally come, and so the hole in the roof that acts as my alarm clock has proved an impediment, along with the other two or three sizeable holes in the roof of our room in Mazunte. They offered to swap us to another room the first night it rained, but I wasn’t eager to be schlepping our packs down all the stairs in the rain with my shoulder. So Petra and I noted where the wet areas were and moved the bed and our things into the opposite corner, covering our packs with our raincoats just in case. So far this has worked for keeping us dry, and can really provide a lovely atmosphere with the waves crashing, thunder and lightning in the distance and a gentle mist pouring through our roof.

In other news, Petra and I have been talking and are planning on wrapping up the Mexican adventure over the next couple of weeks. There are still definitely two more places we want to see, both here in the Chiapas region: San Cristobal, where a friend of Petra’s back from the days when she was squatting with artists in Paris, and Palenque which has ruins and comes highly recommended by everyone we’ve ever talked to who’s been there. After that, though, we think it is about time to dust off the passports and head on. That does mean we’re going to miss the Yucatan, which is unfortunate. But funds are starting to get a bit tight and we need to head somewhere to make them last longer.

From Mexico, you have two overland travel-on options. One is Belize, which is English speaking and I’ve heard is more expensive but otherwise know very little about. The other one is Guatemala, which has been our planned destination all along. It is supposed to be cheaper than Mexico and again comes highly recommended, but which just got hit by a tropical storm, has a volcano erupting near the capital, and apparently even has giant sinkholes. So we’re not sure what the full situation is there and will have to do some research over the next week. If anyone happens to see any news on what things are like in Guatemala while you’re online, do us a favor and post a comment with the link or send us an e-mail.

Life and love in Mazunte

We traveled out of Puerto Escondido with another guest from our guest house there, Sheila, down the coast a couple of hours to Mazunte. Sheila had found this great little hostel right on the beach and insisted we had to stay there with her. It doesn’t have a name yet (UPDATE: it's called Hostal Colibri) and was just reopened a few weeks ago, but the place where we’re staying (50 pesos per person per night, plus 5 pesos kitchen usage/p/n) is pretty nice. Some of the rooms are ultra-ultra-basic and musty, but the new owner Steve is working on it and it had a to offset that there is a deck that looks out over the water and steps that lead down to the sand. Oh, and a fairly nice book swap that I am enjoying. Absolutely nothing else to do in town, but really… what else more do you need? Sheila unfortunately had to head out of town the next day (hope all is well!), which was unfortunate but meant we could move up to her old room (sorry). It’s up a ladder through a trap door at the top of the hostel where you can see the waves out the window and listen to them all night. It even has a convenient hole in the roof where the morning sun shines /right/ in my face at an unknown (we lost our alarm clock in Poza Rica and still haven’t found a decent replacement) but relatively acceptable time to get up in the morning. They’re planning to fix that soon since if it rains, then a hole in the roof sucks...but as long as it doesn’t rain, I kind of like it.

So we moved up into the attic, and I went out to play in the waves. The beach here is very different: after you go out very far, it gets very rocky – a little smaller than fist-sized, it seemed. And they swirl every time a wave comes along, which generally gave the effect of being in a washing machine with a bunch of boxing midgets. But I looked around a bit, and found a part of the beach that stays sandy farther out.

The other thing about the rocks is that they mean it’s relatively deep here, and so the waves break closer to shore. I had noticed this before, but learned it first hand when I got caught up in a nice big wave I thought I could use to propel me back into shore until I realized it was going to break almost on the sand. My shoulder got jammed into the ground -- really hard -- and my back snapped over top in an uncomfortable way. Then I had to awkwardly lurch, on all-4s-minus-1 and with a stiff back, out of the froth before the next wave knocked me around some more.

It was the most acute pain I’ve ever experienced in my life -- I honestly thought I had broken a bone in my shoulder somewhere, and my arm was all-but immobile. And I assumed I had thrown my back out along with it. But I wasn’t concussed and seemed to still be relatively mobile, so held my shoulder and made my way back up to the room. I called up to Petraand she started coming down the steps, and I told her I had hurt myself really bad. And Petra sat down on the steps and said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

And that’s how I knew that Petra /really/ loved me.

I know how much she loves me from other times, too; over the years we’ve both shared experiences where we’ve shown how much we care for one another. But it just showed me the real depth of her feelings again that being able to move Petra, who is normally the most here’s-the-plan-now-move person you could ever hope for in a clutch, to the point of illness just because I had hurt myself.

Then she got back up and we hobbled down to talk to Steve, who looked at my shoulder and said he didn’t think it was broken and things should be okay. But Petra still felt really ill all the next day, which I’m /really/ sorry about. I love her, too, and definitely don’t want her to go through that again and so will try to think things out more fully from now on.

So we kept an eye on it the first night and applied an ice-aspirin-tiger balm strategy. Of course, our room is at the top of a ladder but the bathroom is at the bottom, and swinging on and off the ladder was a bit tricky. My back was also stiff and sore, so movement in general was out for a day, and Petra was wonderful in looking after me. But we stayed pretty much completely inside our room for a couple of days.

So now I feel like we’ve become the old crazy couple in the attic, the ones that make the creepy moaning sounds but whom no one ever sees --  except for sometimes, late at night, in front of the book swap.  But the shoulder has healed way faster than I thought it would; it still hurts, but a couple days later and I’ve pretty much got full mobility back and at this rate in a few more all will be back to normal.

I don’t mind staying.

Odds and ends

 -- A camouflage painted VW van with half a dozen surf boards strapped to the top just pulled into our cabanas. I think the expression “Surf the Revolution” is incredibly cool.

-- The automated announcement service at the Matehuala bus station sounded shockingly like a Spanish-speaking version of the insane computer in Portal. I kept imagining what it must have been saying: “The 11:45 bus to San Luis Potosi is now departing from gate 8. There will be cake aboard the bus. And we will not try to murder you at all. Instead we’ll simply try to drive you insane by making you watch a horrible D&D movie, dubbed into Spanish. For three hours.”

-- Horchata Tang -> surprisingly satisfying substitute for the real thing. Allen, take note in case you see it in some specialty section. Just don’t make it full strength.

-- Btw, I’ll mention again: getting a 20 liter water jug saves you a bunch of money over buying a bunch of pre-cooled 1.5 liter bottles. Petra says I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. We can get a 20 liter jug for between 13 and 25 pesos plus bottle deposit, whereas a 1.5 liter water bottle costs usually 11 pesos each. If you buy a packet of Tang in one of about 20 flavors (about 4 pesos average per pack) you can easily flavor 6-8 liters. Now for the effort of carrying around a 45lb (20 kilo) jug a bit you can save lots of money over buying small bottles of water or soda. If you’re traveling mid- to long-term, take heed.

-- In Poza Rica, the oil-field city we couchsurfed in for a week, there was a café that served café petrolero – oilman’s coffee. And it was seriously dark, although Petra (the resident coffee expert) declared it not very strong. But the place had free refills and was open 24 hours. Still would blow the socks off, say, your average cup of coffee in Ohio.

-- In Puerto Escondido, we have iguanas. About six to ten of them would sun themselves in the morning on the edge of a wall under the kitchen, and one or two could usually be found roaming around during the afternoon. Also, multiple smaller lizards to be found in the toilet bowls. Friends from law school might remember why I find that a highly stressful situation.

-- A few weeks after we arrived in Mexico, I was interested to see that Mexico City (which is also what we in the US would call a state) legalized gay marriage. I don’t understand all the ins-and-outs of Mexican politics, but my first blush reaction is that when a country as traditionally Catholic starts to legalize gay marriage, even if only in parts of the country, that is a real sign of the times.

-- One of the other long-term residents of our cabanas asked to use our computer to check her internet, then offered us some bracelets in thanks (she and her boyfriend make jewelry to sell on the beaches). I asked Petra to pick out mine, and she chose one of knotted waxed thread in purple, black and ochre. Not my first choice, but I kind of liked it. Then I noticed it matched the floppy hat I got in Bangkok, a hat that Petra also picked out for me. I take it my fashion consultant has a preferred color-scheme in mind for me.

A week at the beach (Puerto Escondido)

We got to Puerto Escondido by Minivan (150 pesos each) with Rich and Ian, a couple of English guys we met at the hostel in Oaxaca. It took us seven hours on that curvy road up and down the hills to get the 250km (150 miles). First we stayed in the Tower Bridge Hostel, which the boys had reserved beforehand for themselves. Really nice and lovely rooms but a bit too pricey for us (200 pesos). [Simeon says: Yeah, but for 200 pesos you got a full suite! Bedroom, bath and comfy front sitting room with a fridge filled with pay-as-you-go Coronas. And it had a television that didn’t work. Genius! You felt like you were getting a tv with the room, but you never felt the urge to watch it (since it didn’t work) and so you got to feel all superior about how you wouldn’t waste your time watching tv at the beach. The hostel also had one of the loveliest pools I’ve ever seen. Just for wading and with a little walking bridge over part of it, the pool somehow seemed to always be the perfect temperature. The owner is a gregarious Englishman who was a lot of fun in small doses and you got good free wifi and a shared kitchen area, but it’s like a half hour hot sunny walk to the beach. Still, I admit that I insisted splurging on an extra night or two here wallowing in the relative luxury.]

So we changed after a couple of days to the Cabanas Edda near a different beach, for 100 pesos a night plus a 15 pesos charge for wifi (shared bath, shared kitchen area and about five minutes to the beach). We got to know everybody that lived there fairly quickly and had a lot of fun chatting and sharing; there are enough visitors who have all stayed long enough that they’ve all gotten to know each other and a little temporary community has formed. Karen and Emilie (we couchsurfed with them on Carolina’s and Juan’s couch in Poza Rica) joined us there (hi the two of you, just thinking about you!) enjoying the beach at the end of their holidays. Actually Emilie was supposed to be already back in France, but the airline company she was supposed to fly with went on strike. And it is not even a French strike (which I just presumed with that history and Emilie going back to Paris) – it was British Airways! So she needed to postpone her flights back, if I remember correctly.

We have a little hut to ourselves and a hammock right in front of it. It reminds me a little of Laos. We are shaded by palm trees which have big bug shells on them. Just the remaining shell after growing and shedding the too small case. Still, it looks like the bugs are always on the march across everything. The owners also take a lot of care of their little patch of grass. All this watering, every day – it seems like a lot of effort for the few little shoots of grass it produces but it cools down this place a lot.

Simeon went and rented a beginners surfboard to start the learning process in the waves. He got quite a bit tumbled around and unfortunately the wrist strap got loose all the time; every time a wave came in the board shot away from him and he had to start searching and chasing it back to the beach. After a little while, he got rid of the board and started enjoying the water the old fashioned no-tools-way. The waves here can be really big; according to Sim: “The biggest waves I’ve ever seen, and the first ones I’ve actually see that are taller than I am.” And playing in them can be quite a bit of a job.

We took our chance to download the long awaited last season of “Lost” – and watched it in a marathon. We also went to the movies at the Cinema theater -- if you would call a small backroom with a big screen showing .avi files off a computer a theater -- but at least we had the chance to finally see “Alice in Wonderland” in English. For me it would have been much better to see it with subtitles because of the slurpy language. I do that on occasion, I believe that particularly this movie I would have enjoyed more if only I could understand what was said but unfortunately the characters had thick accents. The tickets were 50 pesos, but 2-for-1 before three in the afternoon. Emilie and Karen had told us that popcorn and a beer would have been included – would have been a good deal for 25 pesos each. But it turned out to be a misunderstanding; what a shame.

Mezcal Factory

The harvested maguey plants (an agave plant native to Mexico). Oaxaca is the main place in Mexico that produces Mezcal.

The place where the plants are getting crushed (a donkey would be pulling the wheel).

The mashed plants are left to sit in water to ferment.

Distilling the Mezcal.

The product gets collected, tasting like true Mexican moonshine.

The Mezcal ages in wooden barrels.

The worm gets added or not? There are many different flavors (anise, passion fruit, marijuana). And we had a lot of fun afterwards with the goodies we bought there.

A day driving in the mountains

Our neighbors in the hostel, Alex and Maureen, had rented a car in Cancun and driven west to Oaxaca and were about to head back to catch their flight back to the US. I had told them about this mineral spring and waterfall I had heard of that was supposed to be interesting nearby. We even had a pamphlet with a little picture of it, which looked like a kind of frozen waterfall. The guide book said that it was a non-thermal spring that made wading pools and weird mineral formations that look like “a frozen waterfall,” so everyone seems to agree. Alex and Maureen graciously offered to drive us out with them to see it and we jumped at the chance after a quick lunch of giant squash blossom quesodillas. Yum!

It’s about half an hour or so to the town of Mitla where you turn off for Hierve el Agua (“The Boiling Water”), 13 km away. Of course, those 13 km are along a dirt road winding it’s way through the mountains with no guard rails, where passing a car going the opposite direction can be a Very Exciting Event and take over an hour to traverse. (Hi, Uncle Joe! Thinking of you and panic bars and remembering the reason we call it the panic bar!) Alex was an absolute pro at the driving though, and I was seriously impressed a couple of times. Of course we were in the back seat and just got to look at the great views back towards Oaxaca, as the arid desert vegetation gave way to different climate and landscape at the top of the mountains.

Eventually we came to a village whose economy seemed completely dcependent upon this tourist attraction and mezcal production, and bumbled along the dirt roads there for a bit longer before reaching the entrance gate (20 pesos/person). From the parking lot, you had to walk a couple hundred meters down a trail to the actual springs.

Not really what I was expecting. There were a couple of points where the springs bubbled up and the water did seem fizzy, bit for the most part it was just a trickle of water. This then ran down the slope depositing minerals over the years, making a sort of series of gutters and at some points forming into pools. 

The “wading pools” were filled with greenish water often covered with brown scum though, so not much wading was done.

Eventually the water overtops the pools, and I guess the “waterfall” is the little dribble as it pours over the cliff. The “frozen waterfalls” is visible a short distance away, and seems to be another spring on the next cliff over whose mineral deposits collected differently.

Interesting and all kind of cool, but it was a all a bit too starkly zen for me after visions of Xilitla.

The road back was full of little home distilleries that produce mezcal. As someone from the US, I would have thought all Mexicans would drink tequila. Jose Cuervo is the national drink, right? So far every Mexican we’ve met has been a mescal drinker, bringing out the tequila only once the party is really going and it doesn’t matter anymore. Anyhow, since we had drank up Alex and Maureen’s stash the night before we decided to stop at one and try some of the free samples. It was really interesting: the entire process was laid out in one little room. You could buy a regular size bottle for I think 200 pesos, but we decided on four small flavored ones (50/bottle, 4 for 150, about 10-12 shots per bottle).

Oaxaca

The overnight bus ride from Cuautla to Oaxaca was sure uncomfortable, but I must have slept well enough because I sure don’t remember much of it. But at 6:30 in the morning sharp we pulled into the Oaxaca bus station and were rousted out, pulling our bags out from underneath the bus before blearily wandering out into the morning sunshine.

Petra had written down a couple of possible hotels, and we grabbed a taxi to take us to the Santa Isabel Hostel (doubles 190/night, shared bath and kitchen area, cheap breakfasts). The room was simple, but didn’t have a plug. In fact, we only found one working outlet in the entire hostel and it was in the laundry area. Shows what a different mindset we are in from when we were traveling in Laos, where we tried to go places that didn’t have electricity. Anyhow, we found a couple of other hotels nearby all a few blocks from the zocalo for 150, but wound up not staying long enough to bother switching rooms.

I had heard about a mineral spring and waterfall nearby that was supposed to be neat. I noticed another couple who had a guide book so went over to ask if I could look at it for a moment. I told them I was looking up information about a waterfall, which they hadn’t heard about and were interested in too. Petra came over and we exchanged introductions with Alex and Maureen, both from Vale, Colorado, who were just wrapping up a vacation in Mexico. A bottle of mescal was produced, along with a packet of salt, chili, and ground up worm for flavoring. A couple of English guys named Rich and Ian checked into the hostel and came over to swap information, and stayed for a couple of beers. We were blocking the walkways and so moved to the hostel’s bar, where we were joined by other guests from Germany and Quebec, and an American Peace Corps volunteer just getting back from the Honduran jungle who had a whole Dennis Hopper vibe about him.

So, we fell in with a fun group at the beginning and had fun hanging out with the other guests at the hostel. And it was nice because Alex and Maureen had rented a car and invited us out to see the spring the next afternoon. Then the next day we basically applied the Dirk Gently Driving Method (pick someone who looks like they know where they’re going and follow them) on Rich and Ian the next day, following them down to Puerto Escondido.

Hard days on the road (UPDATE: With Photo)

After we left Mexico City, it seemed like we had a hard week. We had kind of a rushed visit in the capital, and just seemed to have lots of annoying problems the next few days.

We first headed to Tepotzlan, which I had read in the Lonely Planet is “one weekend trip...that rarely disappoints”. That’s what I get for listening to Lonely Planet. They weren’t wrong exactly, but it kind of glossed over a lot of the travel difficulties and it didn’t mention at all that there is effectively no real budget accommodations in the town. So after a day switching buses we arrive and ask around for a cheap hotel, and are being told the cheapest thing in town is 400 pesos and most hotels in the 700-900 pesos range. We’ve never paid more than 250 a night, and so these really weren’t options. Then we tried to get a bus out to the next city over, but all the next buses were full and the ticket salesman didn’t seem overly keen on helping us out. So we wound up chatting with a taxi driver who said he knew a place that was 250 a night and so we went with him, but it turned out the price was 300 and we declined. So another chat with the taxi driver that all we wanted was barato (cheap) and it was really okay if it had a shared bathroom and no tv, and he took us to a no-name hacienda where we found a room for 200 pesos which we exhaustedly took. We would have stayed another night, but the next day (a Saturday) he wanted 250 so we packed our bags and left.

The town was really pretty, I have to admit. Some neat little boutique shops, a nice market, and beautiful craggly mountains in the background. Apparently the main tourist attraction is a picturesque pyramid on top of a cliff, but we didn’t make it up to see it. We did stop at one of the many lovely restraints and treated ourselves to a queso fundidio, a kind of Mexican fondue made with queso Chihuahua – something I hadn’t known existed. (Later, we found a block of queso Chihuahua and at least I found that one to be pretty bland as a table cheese. But it made wonderfully stringy fondue!) We really enjoyed the atmosphere there and knew that it would be at its best and brightest on the weekend, but it was just too expensive.

So we left the next day to head about 20 km away to Cuautla, from where we eventually planned to transfer for a bus to Oaxaca. But we weren’t in a hurry and decided to try staying the night there. We went looking for a hotel and ran into a guy we recognized from our bus who had a bum leg. We explained we were looking for someplace to stay, and he showed Petra a hotel off the main market behind a popcorn stall for I think 150 pesos a night. We check in and chat with our new friend Armando, who says he used to be a professional soccer player and was Mexico’s national team, until someone ran into his leg with their cleats and shattered his leg. We think he said he was now out scouting for new talent for the club team in Guadalajara. Anyhow, we had a really nice time hanging out with him, drinking mescal and going out to dinner, chatting about soccer and whatever else came up. It was one of those times when he didn’t speak a lot of English and we know very little Spanish, but everyone mostly understands each other and is having a good time. A lovely evening.

Until 6am the next morning when we’re awoken by a knock on our door and Armando pleading outside. The explanation was a little hazy, but after we went to bed he seems to have gone out and found a girl at a cantina to have a few drinks with, then fell over and lost his wallet. Now he had to get back to Guadalajara to get money, but needed to fly and wanted to borrow 2000 pesos. We just looked at him and told him sorry, there was just no way we could give him 2000 pesos at 6am even if we had wanted to. We mentioned having a friend send money Western Union or taking the bus, but for some reason nothing else would work. He sat for a while and told us what good friends we were, which was nice but we finally bundled him grumpily out of the room. We went back to sleep but when we got up we decided we’d had enough drama and decided to catch the bus to Oaxaca.

Which of course only left at 11:30 pm, a fact we learn once we’ve trekked our bags over to the bus station. But it wasn’t the right bus station, so we wandered around to half a dozen other “bus stations” (just little ticket offices that buses pull up next to scattered all over town) and find the right place to buy the ticket, but the bus leaves from a different station and there is absolutely no earlier bus. We’d kind of had it with hauling our luggage around town and so we sat with our backpacks in the bus station all day, watching bad American action movies dubbed into Spanish so what little plot there was remained completely elusive. It was a long, boring day with the bonus of a cramped night stuck in the very front seat of the bus to Oaxaca, the one with no leg room.

A short stay in Mexico City

From Poza Rica we managed to line up another couchsurfing opportunity for Mexico City. One of the largest cities on earth, it was not nearly as giant and soul-sucking as I would have feared. Actually, Mexico City seemed just pretty much like any other big city with a good Metro system; you could get around the city easily, and there was never an overwhelming crush of people.

We really didn’t see much, though. A trip mainly to see the big pyramids nearby, we only spent one day sightseeing around the Zocalo and National Cathedral. I thought the cathedral was great, with one of the most impressive pipe organs I’ve ever seen. There was an immense amount of art inside, but most of it was kept in small alcoves that were unlit when we visited, so you could just make out the barest details.

We stayed with Erick, a physics student, and stayed in apparently the university part of town. We didn’t notice too much of a student vibe though, except that prices for food and such in general were a few pesos lower than average which was a nice surprise. The most notable thing I found about the area is that in the morning when you look towards town, the view is in almost sepia tones. The smog was immense, and while I didn’t have any trouble breathing you could really see a giant brown cloud billowing up into the sky.

Although there was a lot more that we would have liked to see in the capital, we only stayed a few days. Erick and his two roommates were all gearing up towards finals and finishing their theses, and one roommate especially didn’t seem keen on us being there. So we did one day of sightseeing, and one day at the pyramids, then headed out.

Popular Mexican Music

One night over beers in Poza Rica, the subject turned to music. The locals made a list of current popular Mexican bands for we travelers to check out. I'll pass it on here in case anyone else would be interested in checking some of them out. The list comes unendorsed, as so far Petra and I haven't heard most of the bands or are even sure which genres they represent.

Natalia LaFourcade
Nortec Collective
Plastilina Mosh
Austin TV
Cafe Tacuba
Zoe
Maldita Vecindad
Kinky
Sussie 4

Btw, if anyone does give any of these bands a listen and likes them, do us a favor and let us know in comments. Make sure to leave your name too, so we know who's who.

The Vanilla Adventure (UPDATE: With Photos)

First of all: Carolina and Juan were great hosts. We had so much fun going out and around with their friends. Drinking coffee at all times of the day, especially at three in the morning, played a big part… They know so much about the area and if we hadn’t decided to travel just that bit faster, we would have stayed even longer. Apparently there is an immense amount of pyramids in the jungle in the area but the Mexican archeological society (I don’t remember the official name anymore) only funds El Tajin. Waterfalls, beaches with or without turtles, mountains, caves (that some people believe connect the pyramids with the sea); whatever bursts your bubble.

The oil workers are having a really bad time right now. Juan went every day to ask for work – all they say each day is “tomorrow”. And sometimes he had to show up at a meeting of a politician (unpaid of course), to make it look more popular and maybe influence his vote – elections are coming up soon. Just to point out again how dependant Poza Rica is on the oil industry: there even is a fiesta/holiday for the petroleum, which is one of the biggest of the year for the city.

Let’s go a bit more into the specifics of the vanilla adventure: When we crossed the border, we actually bought 6 liters of vanilla-extract to send to Simeon’s sister in the US. That was the easy part, finding the post office not so much (post doesn’t translate at all) just to be told that sending fluids across the border is nowadays a no-no. So we started to carry the vanilla around with us, because we wanted to give it to the right people: we finally found them in Real de Catorce and just as we were running around to pass on the bottles, we met an American who was very happy to buy the leftovers. We travel in strange ways sometimes: we didn’t choose Papantla at all because of the pyramids but because of the vanilla (we hoped to find some way to ship the vanilla across the border this time) and El Tajin was on the way. One might understand our disappointment a bit better now – but in the end we had the best time in Poza Rica. And always you end up with more interesting places to visit, but you can only do so much.

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.

Surreal in Xilitla

Leaving the bus in Xilitla, we were drenched in instant sweat - the kind where you can feel the drops rolling down your body. It brought to mind a humid New Orleans in August, and was a real switch after a month and a half in the desert. The greenery around town was incredibly lush, with jungle surrounding the town and the concrete crumbling from the moss and ferns covering the buildings. The hour running around finding a hotel was oppressive, but in the Mercado we found Casa Maria for 140 pesos a night (with tv, shower and intermittent wifi).

Xilitla apparently has about 8000 people, but after San Joaquin seemed a bustling metropolis. The central plaza is always busy and especially in the evenings, and food stalls crowd the streets.

There are two main things to see in Xilitla. One is the Cave of the Parrots (20 pesos, very hard to find), where hundreds of parakeets (not parrots, actually) gather to nest each sunset. We made the hike, but I think arrived too late; we never saw more than half a dozen or so flying arounjd at once, although you could definitely hear more. The cave itself is more of an amphitheater carved into the side of a cliff, and might have been fun to climb around in if it hadn't been getting dark.

The other, more notable thing to see is Las Pozas (50 pesos, totally worth it). Created by an eccentric English millionaire (which you find as you travel are apparently not as rare as one would think) with a passion for surrealist art, it is a series of paths and concrete structures hidden into the jungle. There is also a stream with two waterfalls that forms a series of pools you can splash around in. With stairways that lead up to nothing, paths that lead into concrete walls, and the jungle crawling over every surface, it's as if Lewis Carol had asked M.C. Escher to help design Wonderland.

 

Here is a wonderful YouTube clip we found with the announcer giving his wonderfully English perspective on Las Pozas.

We spent the first couple hours climbing around in the structures, which was entirely more terrifying than it should have been. In some sort of sick surrealist joke, almost all the stairways running up to five stories tall had holes made into them where you could have installed a hand railing, but then didn't install said railing. I'm not usually that afraid of heights, but walking out onto some of the small concrete paths between structures was seriously nerve-wracking.

After that, I really enjoyed playing in the pools while Petra mostly sat on the bank and worried about me as the waterfalls tossed me around.

But the water was wonderfully refreshing and there were lots more ruins to explore both around the stream and just away. Then we had a nice walk back to town through the encroaching landscape in the cool evening air.

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.