The heart of Mexico
Dear Reader,
We just wanted to say, sorry. Our intention is not to assail you with images of tropical beaches and gourmet food. Or to cherry-pick our stories to conjure the impression that it’s all great all the time and we’re floating from one hammock to the next on clouds of fish tacos. Let’s face it, the subtext of a travel blog might as well be: why my life is better than yours.
Overland travel on a budget isn’t the easiest way to go about it (though, arguably, the most fun). Showers and bathrooms are not a given. The sheets only get washed about once a month. Sometimes I wish I could turn the van upside down to shake the sand out of the corners and crevices. We’ve had a couple of sticky, suffocating nights we could have done without — some so bad we had to take turns hopping in the driver’s seat and blasting the AC for fifteen minutes of fleeting reprieve. There have been waaay too many speed bumps in Mexico and a few disappointing locales — Mazatlán for one (a dingy high-rise beachfront) where the best we could do was sleep off our disappointment in a Walmart parking lot. The monarch migration was only just starting to trickle in when we went to the Biosphere Mariposa Monarcha. We hiked two hours to 3,240 meters to view a distant cluster for about 15 minutes before it started to rain, then hail, and our guide began herding us back down the mountain. Oh, and the next day we awoke to discover DJT would be the next US president. That was a morale gut-punch, felt even more sharply now after an our overwhelmingly positive experience of Mexico and Mexicans. It hasn’t all been pretty, promise.
And sometimes no matter how good a place is, we’re not in the right frame of mind to experience it. I was a bit museum-saturated by the time we visited Templo Mayor in Mexico City, one of the most unique, comprehensive and remarkable museums — or places — I’ve ever been to (I was hungry, ok?). And there was a pretty large and irritating tour group trailing us at Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Casa Azul, which was getting to me (I was hungry, ok?).
So bear in mind that I am, very self-consciously, trying not to sugar coat this post. But, as I sit in Lo Cosmos hostel in Zipolite, Oaxaca, recalling the nearly two weeks we spent inland, in Oaxaca City (the sound of the ocean mixed with the squeak of the fan and the occasional whine of a mosquito), it can’t help but all blur into a montage of the good. (Ok, my legs are covered in bites, as is my right index finger for some reason).
Before even arriving in Oaxaca we sensed it was a place full of spirit, rich in culture and tradition. A Mexican heartland if you will. Many Mexicans praised it as one of their favorite states. And many of the crafts we’d liked along the way — as far north as Baja, even — often hailed from Oaxaca. There was a Oaxacan market in Mexico City where I tasted hot chocolate with crushed cocoa nibs that was cinnamony and spicy, a little bitter and excellent — a taste of things to come.
We arrived in Oaxaca at night, descending from the hills into a very antiquated city grid with several one-way streets with unusually ugly traffic lights — conspicuous afterthoughts to an otherwise picturesque city centre. The city was bigger than we expected. This, of course, immediately put off mi compañero. Then the dog barking throughout the night next to our hostel and the amount traffic zooming by in the wee hours (only to screech to a halt at the corner), made a less than perfect first impression.
Our mission in Oaxaca was to find a Spanish course and finally discipline our haphazard efforts at learning it. We settled on a week-long course though Becari. Tim would start from the beginning and I would build upon my few years of high school Spanish, over a decade ago. Before classes began we had a few days to explore the surrounds of the nearby Valles Centrales, home to the ingenious Zapotecs, famous for their architectural and agricultural contributions to pre-Hispanic civilizations and well known for their weaving.
We had heard about a strange sight that defied imagination, Hierve El Agua, meaning, “the water boils”. We drove east, ascending the a narrow, unpaved road until we reached it in the afternoon. We had been duly advised by our groovy, free-spirited new friend from the hostel in Oaxaca, Richard Fartsalot (we didn't ask), to be sure to hike to the bottom. So our first views of this bizarre phenomenon were from beneath, looking up at the white and gold-tinged plunging rocks, fixed in the now like petrified waterfalls. Similar to the way stalactites are formed in caves, fresh water springs spit out calcium carbonate-dense water, which trickles over the cliffs and, over time, deposits its excess sediments to create the vertical finger-like falls.
From here we drove through Teotitlán del Valle, where beautiful Zapotec-designed rugs are created and families pass their weaving tradition through their generations. Even seeing it for ourselves, it’s still hard to grasp that in the days of industrialized and mechanized everything, people are sheering sheep, combing wool, spinning the wool, dying it and weaving rugs with such intricate designs it can take months to create a single one. It is, quite frankly, utterly humbling.
The city of Oaxaca itself is one colorful marketplace after the next, stippled with quaint and stylish restaurants and art that range from edgy and experimental print shops to well-established galleries. It was the most conspicuously expat-visited location we’d been, capitalizing on its cultural hegemony with dozens of Spanish schools and Mexican cooking classes. In and amongst the authentic Oaxacan restaurants and mezcal tasting bars there are French bakeries, German eateries and wood fired pizza joints. It is (to misappropriate the phrase) a movable feast.
Our routine of morning classes, lunch, then exploration in the afternoons left us thoroughly satisfied and fairly exhausted. The Catedral Santo Domingo was one of the most impressive afternoon excursions. Located in the centre of town, we’d walked past it several times, noting the geometric rows of aloes in the courtyard and the dramatic shadows they struck. But there have been hundreds of cathedrals along the way and eventually one gets inured to another building of gilded carvings and icon-laden altars. This was different. Not just a cathedral, it is a impeccably preserved double-story monastery, now housing the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca. Inside are extensive stone and brick corridors, enormous fountained patios and an incredible collection of art and artifacts from the region. Linographs of Leopoldo Méndez, an outspoken artist of the Mexican revolution and contemporary of Kahlo and Rivera, modern sculptures, pottery from several centuries and, most impressively, relics from Tomb Seven of the Zapotec ruins at nearby Monte Albán. Like the Louvre, what makes it remarkable isn’t just what is stored within the building, but the building itself.
It would be utterly remiss not to mention Monte Albán. This alone warrants a trip to Mexico. Ruins here sit high — 400 meters above the Valles Centrales — with views of the distant mountain ranges. The structures date back to 500 BC and represent a city in itself, built for the reigning priestly class. The hilltop is flattened with mountainous tiered buildings ordered around the Gran Plaza — temples, residential quarters and tombs of the elite. The Zapotecs built a very accurate sundial and a court for an ancient, high-stakes ball game (the loser was sacrificed). Some buildings suggest the origins of an organized government. We wandered the grounds with our newfound friends, Valarie and Muz, a couple we met the day before while touring the print workshops of Oaxaca. Dwarfed by time and human prowess, it was difficult to know what to say to one another besides the obvious. Eventually, Tim blurted out what I had also been wondering: “Where are the doors to these buildings?” Valarie, having seen pre-Colombian ruins before, responded, “Oh, these are just the foundations,” framing things even more dramatically. As incredible as it was, what we were looking at was but a shadow of what once was there.
Our discursive experience of Oaxaca City and surrounds took about two weeks — a week longer than planned. We spent more of the budget here on accommodation and souvenirs (ahem, five floor rugs) and there were some hampered night’s sleep, curtesy of the dog next door (though ear plugs were a welcomed acquisition). But this is one place I’ll return to in my mind, again and again — the point where vacation and real-life just about intersected for us, in the most extraordinary of ways.
I’ll never forget the woman balancing on the elevated feet of an enormous loom, leaning over while threading in another color to her rug pattern, describing what it takes to be a weaver: “This is my life’s work,” she said, “it takes my hands, my feet, my heart and my whole mind.”
