Emese's Mexico Top Ten
10) Where the streets have few names. Every city and pueblocito has a street called Juarez. Other Mexican favs: Hidalgo, Independencia, Constitución, Lazaro Cardenas, Alvaro Obregon. When that doesn't cover every block, there are dates and saints.
9) Loudspeakers. And I mean loud. In town plazas, in storefronts, strapped to the top of cars, there are voices, advertisements, and music blaring within earshot at every hour in every city and pueblo.
8) Pemex. The government owned gas stations and the only option in Mexico. "Lleno con Magna por favor!" Basically, fillerup! We repeated this sentence so many times, we dream it.
7) Change? No! Never! No one has change. This is a rule, not an exception. Hotels, stores, taxi drivers, newsstands - no one keeps change.
6) Topes! You could call them speed bumps, but they're more like speed hills. If you're not driving one of México's excellent toll roads (cuotas) you will ride the bumps. Vibradores are a variation - imagine a series of ruts that vibrate so hard, they could shake loose change from a Mexican newsstand vendor. Often unofficially constructed by local communities to slow traffic down through their pueblos and attract attention to various items for sale, presented at your car window.
5) Stray dogs. I wanted to adopt every one I saw, but there wasn't enough room in El Cuervo, according to Doug. Besides, there was another to adore around every corner.
4) Tradition. Especially the religous practices of the indegionous people of Chamula, Chiapas. Nothing to compare it to. Amazing!
3) Cities. The best, hands-down: Guanajuato (tunnels and colors), Mexico City (big-city feel, alive!), San Cristóbal de las Casas (beautiful, inside and out).
2) Landscapes. And beachscapes and mountainscapes, oh my! Driving through the heart of them is a great way to see them, and Mexico has no end of beauty. Favorites: Baja cacti forests, La Paz beaches, the tranquil Sea of Cortez, San Blas wetlands, Guadalajara's Blue Agave fields, the Chiapas highlands, Palenque's jungle and blue waters.
1) Food. We never ate so well - inlcluding the worms, larvae, and crickets in Mexico City. After living on Mexican food for 6 weeks, I still have cravings for it. Favorites: Baja fish tacos, pollo con mole, enchiladas con salsa verde, tamales, huevos rancheros, or estrellados, and salsa picante and jalapeños with every meal. And drinks! Liquados (fruit smoothies), aguas (just fruit, water, and sugar), and margaritas (though an American invention, the Mexican bartenders are craftsmen). I swear the tiny glass bottles of Coca-Cola taste different, and they're the only ones I like. Cafe Oaxaqueño (with cinnamon sticks). Deee-licioso!
Viva México!
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Aint Nothing Like the Real Thing
Oh, the load, the arduous, torturous burden, dragging a stale blog through Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Ecuador - including five Galápagos islands - for nearly two months. Imagine the persistent, painful ribbing I get from my travel partner and this blog's contributing photographer.
Having left you in Mexico City, and on tenterhooks, no doubt, I'm bringing this baby home. Well, let's shoot for the Guatemalan border. Hold on and imagine El Cuervo's pedal to the metal, from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido to San Cristóbal de las Casas to Palenque and to our first non-US border crossing and a new addition to our Spanish vocabulary: trámites. Translation: bureaucracy, red tape. And I mean mind-numbing, purposeless, Byzantine red tape requiring Christlike patience and an unshakable belief in the fundamental good of man in lip-biting spite of it all. But when you want to connect Mexican and Guatemalan paths in a '93 Pathfinder, you've got to do the slow dance of the trámites. Not to pick on Guatemala. The intellectual property (ironic reference) of trámites is freely traded throughout Latin America and, I know, many other places on earth, including American DMVs and Hungarian everything. Later crossings required up to five hours and bribery. More on that later.
We didn't have to cross a border into Oaxaca, our first southern Mexico stop. Had we arrived a year prior, we would have found barricades. In May 2006 a highly charged, volatile, and deadly clash erupted here between the state police and Oaxaca city groups promoting increased wages and labor rights and protesting the reputed corruption of the then-governor. On our first morning in the city in the city's beautiful and constantly bustling Zócalo, or main plaza, we witnessed a march and rally of the local teachers union marking the clash's first anniversary. The whole city pulsed through this colonial heart - what an introduction! The life of the Zócalo as we saw it is symphonic, with a sweet rhythm and a sense of possibility, a place where you can look up and see Saturn's rings.
The occasional edginess between travel partners may not call for barricades, but the edge can be softened with the occasional "personal day." You may have this option at work; we tried it in Oaxaca. Maybe it was the air of protest. After breakfast on the Zócalo we set off in separate directions with separate itineraries, and after 40 minutes of wandering we rounded the same corner and nearly collided. But we continued on, Emese to cultural edification at one of the city's impressive museums, Doug to more wandering, photo taking, and back to the Zócalo for beers at a café and a dictionary-aided trudge through Jack London's Call of the Wild in Spanish. Full disclosure: the personal day was Emese's idea.
Post-personal day we happily reunited for a visit to the home of Sergio Nivón and Corrine Machoud and their unique and intensely structured triathlon training program for young Oaxaqueños. On a usual weekday after school and before homework, this group of six or seven teenagers will swim 5,000 meters, run 10 kilometers, and spin on the bike for an hour. On the weekend, much more. At Coach Corrine's invitation, I joined the swim workout and chased these tireless kids for a couple hours up and down the pool. Killed me. These atletas are laser-focused and are as committed and hard working as world champions, which one of two of them could be before we know it. (One of the athletes is already winning races on the international junior triathlon circuit.) Sergio and Corrine are inspiring leaders, great people, and standard bearers of commitment.
A couple days later I was nearly recovered from my chlorinated thrashing, and we hit the road for the coast at Puerto Escondido, a drive of eight hairpinned, green-faced hours descending through the Sierra Madre del Sur to sea level. Puerto Escondido is home of Playa Zicatela, known in the surfing world as the "Mexican Pipeline," a bone-crushingly powerful beach break that takes the force of ocean swells, focuses it into a curved bay, and releases it onto about a meter and a half of water and a cauldron of coarse sand and rip currents. Here I took a salt-water thrashing over the next few days and convalesced in the clifftop casita that Emese had found and rented on-line. For nearly a week we enjoyed this temporary home that leaned into warm Pacific breezes above a paradise-blue cove. Here in Puerto El Cuervo convalesced too, having blown its starter and an air conditioning system pipe (brutal in this region's 90 degree heat).
A day's drive south took us to the next port of rest, Puerto Arista, for one night and then inland again to San Cristóbal de las Casas, capital of Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas and named for one of the most humanitarian of Spanish colonists, Bartolomé de las Casas. De Las Casas was the city's first resident archbishop and chronicler and advocate of the indigenous people at a time of great brutality against them. The archbishop lives on in this palpably spiritual, spirited, and just city, and the culture of Mayan descendants is present on its streets and in the surrounding villages and countryside. This mountain valley city is punctuated by rounded, spiky green cultivated peaks to all sides, and it is moody. The air is cool, and a constant blue-gray haze hangs here, unbudging - the result of hundreds of intentional fires set throughout the agricultural countryside to clear the way for new plantings. This is a place of purpose. Day to day life moves determinedly, the streets and markets buzz, and people here are engaged and engaging.
We got the latest on the Zapatista indigenous rights movement in Chiapas from a local anthropology student over three or four bottles of wine at a great hole called La Viña, and the next morning (nursing hangovers at Café Museo Café and sipping good, locally grown coffee) we were interviewed by a Dutch group making a film about the crop's Fair Trade movement, a worldwide effort to ensure good working conditions, fair prices, and sustainable cultivation.
Mysterious, beautiful, historical, gastronomical, and justice minded - we loved this place.
On a cloudy morning we chased down Alex and Raul on the main San Cristóbal plaza for their guided, “culturally responsible excursion” to San Juan Chamula, a 20-minute ride outside of San Cristóbal. Chamula and many other communities in the region practice a remarkable cross between preserved Mayan tradition and adopted Spanish/western culture in agriculture, trade, (self) governance, and religion.
Imagine a Catholic cathedral built in Spanish colonial style, within which there are no pews, just a constant press of human movement and ceremony atop a vast layer of pine needles, with chanting town leaders, burning incense, and hundreds of flickering red, white, green, and yellow candles, each with its significance. If you can get past the fire hazard, you’ll notice distinctly dressed curaderas (very loosely, "witch doctors") rubbing live (not for long) chickens over the appendages and torsos of ailing community members, and pouring Coca-Cola from two-liter bottles in curative rituals. Images of Catholic saints remain in the church and the saints (San Juan especially) are important, but the Catholic priest was kicked out of the church and the community years ago, and returns only every fourth Sunday to perform baptisms.
Visitors to the mountain valley town are greeted with evidence of an uneasy balance between the tourist dollar (welcome) and the overbearing impacts of western culture on a distinct and adamantly protected local culture (unwelcome). A large billboard at the town’s entrance greets visitors with a warning not to take photographs of town elders (easily identifiable in white tunics, sandals, and hats with colorful ribbons) nor of any rituals. The most visible western influence is perhaps Coca-Cola, not only prevalent at church, but everywhere in town – in stacks here and there and in the hand of every third man, woman, and child. We learned that tooth decay is a major local ailment, one the curadera is apparently not curader-ing.
Palenque, the Mayan ruins in the eastern Chiapas foothills, gave us a great view into pre-Coca-Cola Mayan culture, and we capped off our six weeks in Mexico here. 20th Century archaeologists cut the great Mayan ruins out of the jungle that had buried them into the hillsides, and they are amazing. Like San Cristóbal, there is something magical here. Take a look at the pics and imagine the constant, eerie low roar of howler monkeys beyond the stone temples in the distant jungle.
In an ironic twist, the jungle surrounding the ruins had been cleared long ago for cattle grazing land. When Palenque's preservation began this land was returned to jungle, and today you will find the funky hippy-Eden, called El Panchán, just a few kilometers from the ruins. We stayed at Margarita and Ed's Cabañas and were woken at 3 a.m. by the loudest cracking dry thunder storm either of us has experienced, oh so safely buffered by a thin palm-thatched roof. Emese believes that Ahau-Kin, the Mayan jaguar god of the underworld had returned, growling with enough force to knock a water bottle off our nightstand.
In the morning spider monkeys greeted us audibly and visibly in the tree canopy above our cabaña. We headed up the road to the aquamarine waterfalls of Agua Azul. Here we spent a hot, leisurely, perfect day, feeling the cool water's constant roar and movement and swimming away the cares of the road and the underworld.
Mexico is it!®
Having left you in Mexico City, and on tenterhooks, no doubt, I'm bringing this baby home. Well, let's shoot for the Guatemalan border. Hold on and imagine El Cuervo's pedal to the metal, from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido to San Cristóbal de las Casas to Palenque and to our first non-US border crossing and a new addition to our Spanish vocabulary: trámites. Translation: bureaucracy, red tape. And I mean mind-numbing, purposeless, Byzantine red tape requiring Christlike patience and an unshakable belief in the fundamental good of man in lip-biting spite of it all. But when you want to connect Mexican and Guatemalan paths in a '93 Pathfinder, you've got to do the slow dance of the trámites. Not to pick on Guatemala. The intellectual property (ironic reference) of trámites is freely traded throughout Latin America and, I know, many other places on earth, including American DMVs and Hungarian everything. Later crossings required up to five hours and bribery. More on that later.
We didn't have to cross a border into Oaxaca, our first southern Mexico stop. Had we arrived a year prior, we would have found barricades. In May 2006 a highly charged, volatile, and deadly clash erupted here between the state police and Oaxaca city groups promoting increased wages and labor rights and protesting the reputed corruption of the then-governor. On our first morning in the city in the city's beautiful and constantly bustling Zócalo, or main plaza, we witnessed a march and rally of the local teachers union marking the clash's first anniversary. The whole city pulsed through this colonial heart - what an introduction! The life of the Zócalo as we saw it is symphonic, with a sweet rhythm and a sense of possibility, a place where you can look up and see Saturn's rings.
The occasional edginess between travel partners may not call for barricades, but the edge can be softened with the occasional "personal day." You may have this option at work; we tried it in Oaxaca. Maybe it was the air of protest. After breakfast on the Zócalo we set off in separate directions with separate itineraries, and after 40 minutes of wandering we rounded the same corner and nearly collided. But we continued on, Emese to cultural edification at one of the city's impressive museums, Doug to more wandering, photo taking, and back to the Zócalo for beers at a café and a dictionary-aided trudge through Jack London's Call of the Wild in Spanish. Full disclosure: the personal day was Emese's idea.
Post-personal day we happily reunited for a visit to the home of Sergio Nivón and Corrine Machoud and their unique and intensely structured triathlon training program for young Oaxaqueños. On a usual weekday after school and before homework, this group of six or seven teenagers will swim 5,000 meters, run 10 kilometers, and spin on the bike for an hour. On the weekend, much more. At Coach Corrine's invitation, I joined the swim workout and chased these tireless kids for a couple hours up and down the pool. Killed me. These atletas are laser-focused and are as committed and hard working as world champions, which one of two of them could be before we know it. (One of the athletes is already winning races on the international junior triathlon circuit.) Sergio and Corrine are inspiring leaders, great people, and standard bearers of commitment.
A couple days later I was nearly recovered from my chlorinated thrashing, and we hit the road for the coast at Puerto Escondido, a drive of eight hairpinned, green-faced hours descending through the Sierra Madre del Sur to sea level. Puerto Escondido is home of Playa Zicatela, known in the surfing world as the "Mexican Pipeline," a bone-crushingly powerful beach break that takes the force of ocean swells, focuses it into a curved bay, and releases it onto about a meter and a half of water and a cauldron of coarse sand and rip currents. Here I took a salt-water thrashing over the next few days and convalesced in the clifftop casita that Emese had found and rented on-line. For nearly a week we enjoyed this temporary home that leaned into warm Pacific breezes above a paradise-blue cove. Here in Puerto El Cuervo convalesced too, having blown its starter and an air conditioning system pipe (brutal in this region's 90 degree heat).
A day's drive south took us to the next port of rest, Puerto Arista, for one night and then inland again to San Cristóbal de las Casas, capital of Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas and named for one of the most humanitarian of Spanish colonists, Bartolomé de las Casas. De Las Casas was the city's first resident archbishop and chronicler and advocate of the indigenous people at a time of great brutality against them. The archbishop lives on in this palpably spiritual, spirited, and just city, and the culture of Mayan descendants is present on its streets and in the surrounding villages and countryside. This mountain valley city is punctuated by rounded, spiky green cultivated peaks to all sides, and it is moody. The air is cool, and a constant blue-gray haze hangs here, unbudging - the result of hundreds of intentional fires set throughout the agricultural countryside to clear the way for new plantings. This is a place of purpose. Day to day life moves determinedly, the streets and markets buzz, and people here are engaged and engaging.
We got the latest on the Zapatista indigenous rights movement in Chiapas from a local anthropology student over three or four bottles of wine at a great hole called La Viña, and the next morning (nursing hangovers at Café Museo Café and sipping good, locally grown coffee) we were interviewed by a Dutch group making a film about the crop's Fair Trade movement, a worldwide effort to ensure good working conditions, fair prices, and sustainable cultivation.
Mysterious, beautiful, historical, gastronomical, and justice minded - we loved this place.
On a cloudy morning we chased down Alex and Raul on the main San Cristóbal plaza for their guided, “culturally responsible excursion” to San Juan Chamula, a 20-minute ride outside of San Cristóbal. Chamula and many other communities in the region practice a remarkable cross between preserved Mayan tradition and adopted Spanish/western culture in agriculture, trade, (self) governance, and religion.
Imagine a Catholic cathedral built in Spanish colonial style, within which there are no pews, just a constant press of human movement and ceremony atop a vast layer of pine needles, with chanting town leaders, burning incense, and hundreds of flickering red, white, green, and yellow candles, each with its significance. If you can get past the fire hazard, you’ll notice distinctly dressed curaderas (very loosely, "witch doctors") rubbing live (not for long) chickens over the appendages and torsos of ailing community members, and pouring Coca-Cola from two-liter bottles in curative rituals. Images of Catholic saints remain in the church and the saints (San Juan especially) are important, but the Catholic priest was kicked out of the church and the community years ago, and returns only every fourth Sunday to perform baptisms.
Visitors to the mountain valley town are greeted with evidence of an uneasy balance between the tourist dollar (welcome) and the overbearing impacts of western culture on a distinct and adamantly protected local culture (unwelcome). A large billboard at the town’s entrance greets visitors with a warning not to take photographs of town elders (easily identifiable in white tunics, sandals, and hats with colorful ribbons) nor of any rituals. The most visible western influence is perhaps Coca-Cola, not only prevalent at church, but everywhere in town – in stacks here and there and in the hand of every third man, woman, and child. We learned that tooth decay is a major local ailment, one the curadera is apparently not curader-ing.
Palenque, the Mayan ruins in the eastern Chiapas foothills, gave us a great view into pre-Coca-Cola Mayan culture, and we capped off our six weeks in Mexico here. 20th Century archaeologists cut the great Mayan ruins out of the jungle that had buried them into the hillsides, and they are amazing. Like San Cristóbal, there is something magical here. Take a look at the pics and imagine the constant, eerie low roar of howler monkeys beyond the stone temples in the distant jungle.
In an ironic twist, the jungle surrounding the ruins had been cleared long ago for cattle grazing land. When Palenque's preservation began this land was returned to jungle, and today you will find the funky hippy-Eden, called El Panchán, just a few kilometers from the ruins. We stayed at Margarita and Ed's Cabañas and were woken at 3 a.m. by the loudest cracking dry thunder storm either of us has experienced, oh so safely buffered by a thin palm-thatched roof. Emese believes that Ahau-Kin, the Mayan jaguar god of the underworld had returned, growling with enough force to knock a water bottle off our nightstand.
In the morning spider monkeys greeted us audibly and visibly in the tree canopy above our cabaña. We headed up the road to the aquamarine waterfalls of Agua Azul. Here we spent a hot, leisurely, perfect day, feeling the cool water's constant roar and movement and swimming away the cares of the road and the underworld.
Mexico is it!®
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