|
[transcribed journal notes — slightly corrected & expanded & hand-coded — likely full of typos & errors & ommisions & wavering tenses & odd vague references & snide personal opinions & asides of no interest to anyone but the author — written as a stream-of-consciousness travelogue, hence the curious style — this is not a blog, so you don't have to read it upside-down]
DIA SETENTA SIETE:
Miercoles 4 May 2005 - San Ciriaco
en route throughout a mixed Wednesday.
MORNING, CHIAPAS: Our last fine Pakal desayuno, then out across the Chiapas mountains past patches of snow left by the recent storms and down through kilometers of decayed limestone layers. In Tuxtla Guiterrez the southern peripheral highway is blocked with logs; we engage in informal detours with no signs, wandering, following hopeful traffic randomly.
Tuxtla sits on layers of fractured lava. Just beyond (westward) we wind through layers of crumbly sandstone, then down steep grades in hills of unconsolidated mud-sand alluvium, across burnt valleys, and into coastal hills looking much like California: the green of serpentine, eroded basalt, torturously mixed gunk.
Across the Istmus boundary and then into Oaxaca's lush fields and orchards, but it's hot hot hot. Radio reception was fair around SCLC and Tuxtla (Guatemalan stations maybe?) but it thins out rapidly in Oaxaca.
At the speed bump in a slow day in a small village on the hot hot Istmus. We see a scene; we imagine the conversation that led up to it:
Girl #1: Gosh Lupe, nothing's happening here. Whatcha wanna do?
Girl #2: Hey Ana, I know! Let's go down the the tope and break bottles!
Girl #1: Great idea! You get the umbrellas, I'll bring the wheelchair.
See SPANISH LESSONS: Translations
|
|
|
MIDDAY, TEHUANTEPEC: We roll past Juchitan de Zaragoza, the town that's supposed to be what the world would look like if grandmothers ruled. This is our putative destination for today, about 200 miles, but it's too hot to stop. (Maybe we should have found an air-conditioned room here and headed up to Ciudad Oaxaca after a forced rest.)
We continue past industrial-traditional Tehuantepec (we see just one woman in trad Zapotec garb) and the long strip-mall road to the refinery port of Salina Cruz. We climb its rolling hills and snake along the winding coastal road, so much like a hot day around Gilroy-Watsonville-Salinas California, through a string of one-pig hamlets. And I just got tireder and tireder and sicker and sicker.
LATE AFTERNOON, HUATULCO: We finally reach the engineered resorts of Bahias de Huatulco (** two Michelin stars -- HA!) exhausted from driving eight searing hours and crawled into a broken downtown hotel in Crucecita just as I started heaving. This is just about the worst I've ever felt, sober. So I lay prone or supine or something for hours, too weak to move.
TRANSLATIONS:
Yo soy ni borracho ni drogasado ni embarazado, solo enfermo. (I'm neither drunk nor drugged nor pregnant, only sick.) Gracias por las cacahuetes, cerdo! (Thanks for the peanuts, swine!)
NIGHT, IMMOBILIZED: Hotel Busanvi is on a main drag with trucks and buses and disco trams thundering below our broken window - the locked grill denies access to the balcony, had we wished a fuller immersion to the soundscape. Across the street, a music-all-night club with a good Latino cover band, doing salsa and Santana etc. but followed by not-so-great bar bands.
How to live the Good Life in Crucecita, Oaxaca: boogie all night, sleep all day in air-conditioning. Immerse in liquids as needed or desired. Don't look up.
SONGS:
Time And Time Again
Don't Look Into The Sun
The Montezuma Trot
|
REMEMBER:
* The blonde Mayan woman hawking her wares on the street in Antigua. Ah, she's an albino.
* The Guatemalan truck with pictures on the back of JesusChristo and His evil twin.
* 11AM is feeding time in SCLC. That's when most of the Mayan women whip out a tit and adjust the baby accordingly.
* We didn't go to Salvador because the air wasn't any clearer there. Why go to see mountains when you can't see?
|
DIA SETENTA OCHO:
Jueves, Cinco de Mayo 2005 - San Eulogio
Crucecita, Oaxaca - hot Thursday morning
EARLY: I'm still as weak as a polio puppy. It's all I can do to scratch out a few notes. Maureen tends me like Florence Nightengale. I'll omit the messy details of my condition. We blame the Chedraui peanuts for the infection. I'm dosed with Cipro (anti-bacterial), Pepto-Bismal (gut liner), saltines (nutrition?) and GatorAde (electrolyte replenishment).
Let's go to a beach, string up a net hammock between palm trees, have a hose nearby, let me just lie there -- at appropriate moments, hose me off. Much less trouble.
And for quick and easy weight loss, try the (patented) Dysentary Diet, guaranteed to melt away those excess kilograms -- and it's free! Except for medications and air-conditioned quarters, of course.
NOONISH: More doses, and a move to a hotel without broken windows, with air conditioning that actually works, and I'm feeling much better. I'm even able to sit up (briefly) and key in these notes. Some yoghurt and crackers and VOILA! a new Ric. Almost. Still very weak.
AFTERNOON: I'm looking thru stored email. After my recent comments on Mayan languages and different spoken Spanish, a Constant Reader (hi Jacque!) sends the following:
"My sister has her Masters in linguistics from UT-Arlington (had at least one class at Wycliffe Bible Translators in Dallas, TX). She's telling me how different the Spanish in Costa Rica is from the Spanish in Mexico and what we hear in the US and that these all differ from the Spanish spoken in Spain. And they say English is the hardest language. :-) Her next undertaking after Costa Rica is working with Chinese in Panama and it is a different dialect than the Mandarin they spent four years learning back in the 80s. LOL . . .
"We have been enjoying your travel logs. Too bad you had to quit so early. We thought this was going to go on until late summer."
To the latter, I say: Even with the latest setback, our budget isn't totally shot. Yet. We have a fair idea of the costs per day of travel; if we can intersperse those travel days with days of laying about in cheap places, the adventure COULD continue for a month or more. Maybe.
As for language -- somewhere along the line I read that within 20 (or 40) years, 90% of the people on the planet will think they speak English, and 90% of those won't be able to understand one another. As if Maine Cajuns, Brooklynites, and Brownsville Texans could be mutually intelligible, just in the USA, eh?
EVENING: We crawl downstairs for food, an open-air eatery on the hot busy zocalo filled with NOISY birds. La Crucecita is a hopping resort town, with all the usual means of separating tourists from money. And this Hualtuco area is a long ways from anywhere, by car or bus or plane, so all those arriving have SOME money from which to be separated.
Nearby are stands filled with Oaxacan pottery -- no Lenca (Honduras) pots here, we sure missed out on those, last chance was Pana. Oh well. Maybe next time. But this black Oaxaca stuff -- yeah, we'll get a few more of those. The classics are by Doña Rosa and her family, burnished and carved, no good for holding anything but they sure look good.
|
|
DIA SETENTA NEUVE:
Viernes, 6 May 2005 - Santa Judith
Crucecita, Oaxaca - sometime Friday
MORNING: I'm feeling somewhat better, still weak. TV weather report on CNNE shows it's much cooler in the highlands. We'll hang around another day in this town I've barely seen, then head up the coast to Puerto Angel and uphill to Ciudad Oaxaca tomorrow, Santa Marina doing the driving. Don't trust me with anything more than an ice cream scoop, if that.
Our lovely comfortable Hotel Marla Mixteca is a reasonable in-town place (ie, no parking) but the shower water never quite gets hot. We won't steal the customized ashtray.
Maureen just returned from the tienda, says a Panama cruise ship and three tour busses just arrived and the town is filled with fat round pink hot British tourists wandering around dazed, but probably with deep enough pockets to keep the place running. The Brits say this is the hottest place they've been, worse than the Canal Zone. Ay yi yi.
ADVENTURES IN TRAVEL: Is this an Adventure? Are we enduring Adventures In Travel? We have a favorite catch-phrase, Adventures In (Whatever). Here is its origin:
Some decades ago we drove the high wild Great Basin plains of south-central Oregon, a hundred or so miles east of the Cascades and Crater Lake. Across the wide shallow valley of the Sprague or Williamson rivers, fifty miles wide and long, rimmed with far blue mountains, topped with fat blue sky and thin white clouds. In the center of all this empty rangeland, a Y-intersection of two-lane roads. And just off the Y, the shattered total wreck of a U-Haul trailer, only the rear panel being somewhat intact, showing the painted logo and a slogan: ADVENTURES IN MOVING.
For many years now, this has remained emblematic for us. Adventure equals Disaster. One may experience such Adventures in many realms of life: Adventures in Love, in Work, in whatever. Remember, "May you live in exciting times" is a Chinese curse. Excitement and adventure mean uncertainty and risk. Such is life. Bring it on!
DIA OCHENTA:
Sabado, 7 May 2005 - Santa Flavia
enroute to Oaxaca - all day Saturday
MORNING, COASTAL: Mexican tourists are as sloppy as USAnians out for a hot day at a cheezy beach town. Pretty people. ugly people, folks badly stuffed into ill-fitting clothes, same as at home.
We see a tittle more of Greater Huatulco -- the swanky(??) resorts towards the coast, more tawdry inland. Struggle northward on the unappealing carretara, a narrow twisty coast road that's not on the coast; no views, just winding through fried dirt and dunes piled along broken volcanic drifts. Scattered burnt villages, bare burnt trees, tenacious burnt cacti. Low, hot, dry here -- dank, foetid mangrove swamps along the shoreline? Ewww...
We're stuck behind another ancient Coca-Cola truck. It's a better neighborhood here than above Palenque, no bullet holes. I'm too weak to dodge insurgents today. It's good that Maureen's driving. The CHECK ENGINE light is on again, so everything's normal.
MORNING, UPHILL: We're heading inland towards Ciudad Oaxaca, ascending slowly, sinuously, the country lusher but no cooler yet. A girl walks along the road with a small parrot on her finger. Palms, vines, iris, orchids, bromeliads, nuts, bananas. Go past SELVA DE TIGRE, Tiger Jungle. What dreadful symmetry?
Cocos Frios (Cold Coconut) stands surrounded by hydrangea, hibiscus, bouganvillea, sleepy dogs and big running iguanas, tan doves, rockslides. The road higher now, temperature dropping into the high 80s. Adjusting for latitude and borders, this is rather like driving across the coastal hills in Sonoma County. Maureen says she feels at home.
But not quite. Townsfolk loading their new Ford sedan with windfall mangos near a BIG bamboo stand; jungle Indian kids watching the bypassers; a couple guys standing at a bridge with a full drum kit.
NOONISH, UPHILL: Further up, the temperature down to the high 70s, same lush vegetation, knife-edge ridges, precarious villages strung out on thin edges. Then through pine forests, over the top and into the next valley, inching the 300 klicks up to Oaxaca at 40 kph on Highway 175.
Clouds! Not just the omnipresent haze of recent weeks! The sky has definition again!
Further up, the temperature in the high 50s, a few raindrops, definite piney woods interspersed with tall agaves and tree daturas. No more bananas. High cool mountain resorts with prices to match. This is REALLY beautiful country.
AFTERNOON, INLAND: Then over the top and down the dry side, in the rainshadow. Sere hills, adobe forts, clumps of pancake cactus and cereus and something like organ-pipes, sparse bunch grass. And later, mesquites and yuccas and burrobush. It's like driving west from Solvang to Bakersfield, then suddenly sliding into the high pass from Tucson through Sonoyita to Tombstone and Bisbee.
Oaxaca's plateau is higher, the cloud cover a relief. The city and its burbs spread hazardously. We threaded busy Ocotlan, known for natural clay pots, and stopped in San Bartolo Coyotepec, famous for black clay pots. Other burbs specialize in red, green, puce, polka-dotted etc pots. They're stacked everywhere, handcrafts made in machine-batch lots.
Today's 200 miles were long and hard. We're beat to shit. The only hotel in San Bart was nasty and expensive. We came into Oaxaca City, played bump-em cars with the inexorable flood of traffic, and finally found a room north of the zocalo -- not cheap. With the prices we've encountered recently, we'll be chased out of the country within two weeks.
Our first impression of Oaxaca is of an utterly charmless minor metropolis, about as appealing as Bakersfield but with less smog and expressways. Perhaps the secret lures are subtle, but I doubt we'll hang around long enough to be ensnared, now anyway.
|
ACHTUNG!
The contents of Ric's daypack will soon be listed here. I know that y'all can hardly wait.
|
DIA OCHENTA UNO:
Domingo, 8 May 2005 - Asuncion del Señor
slow drive across Oaxaca state - Sunday
MORNING, EN CUIDAD: Oaxaca's Posada del Virrey is comfy and quiet enough, but with no dark curtains to block the all-night lights, and it's priced for suckers. In its restaurant, food is barely adequate and the staff is blah. Never again.
There's lots of great graffiti here for me to photograph but I'm too tired and, even after last night's downpour, it's smoggy this morning. We thought of finding cheaper digs elsewhere in town but no, we're outa here. No more black pots or painted carvings, not today.
MIDDAY, EN CAMPO: We head north into higher sparser terrain. First, a wide agricultural valley; then the cuota (toll highway) takes us into the serried barrancas of canyon country. For a while we think we're on US 101 in the dry interior of northern Mendocino County. Then a series of grassy dunes and mixed alluvium and dried mud. Above the barrancas, stands of pine and oaks and other broadleafs. In the dunes, sparse scrub. All around, scattered small habitations. Lots of guys along the roadside selling toy trucks.
Then onto the old high road to Mexico City, Highway 190, along the Mixtec Trail. A string of huge old Dominican templos rating Michelin (*) stars. Rocky rolling oak woodlands with cactus clumps and towering agaves and bright concrete villages. Halfway along the Mixtec Trail,. at Teposcolula, we stop at the cinderblock Hotel Juvi for rest. It's cheap and spare and pretty quiet and pretty clean and we need it.
Other than still being sick, today was the kind of day I'd hoped for on this trip. Drive about 100 miles; see minor attractions and lovely country; stop in a low-key quiet friendly little town with a minor attraction; lay around; etc. Doing this stuff in a hurry really sucks.
EVENING, EN PUEBLO: Our route to Cuernavaca will take us past a few more old templos y ex-conventos. When done, I believe I will have had my fill of baroque Dominican fortresses, period. Innoculation, that's what it is. [Slander of Latin American baroque Catholic architecture deleted.] I think of the stunning 'little' cathedral in Amalfi, Italy, the 100 steps leading uphill from the tiny town plaza to its amazing black-and-gold-striped facade, and I compare that with a minor temple in Chiapas where steps ascend steeply for at least 150 meters. A climb for the truly penitent and/or masochistic, that.
It'd be nice to see temples from some other dominant heresy for a change. Buddhist and Hindu temples, some grand mosques, yeah. But I don't know when we'll get to Kashmir and Nepal etc, And it'd be nice to see some country that doesn't remind us of California. Will Peru be really different? We can only hope.
PS: We indended to go online here as well as call our moms for Mothers Day but 1) all the internet parlors and long-distance booths were closed for Sunday siesta, then 2) when they reopened the satellite went out and the town lost all communications: phone, Net, TV, everything but carrier pigeons. Hi Moms!
|
AMENDED ITINERARY:
Oaxaca, Cuernavaca, Taxco, Toluca, Morelia, Queretaro, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Aguas Calientes, Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua, Parral, Paqime, Bisbee. Something like that. The current fantasy.
|
DIA OCHENTA DOS:
Lunes, 9 May 2005 - San Pacomio
Acatlan, Puebla - Monday night
Oaxaca state's three Mixtec region Dominican templos, at Yanhuitlan and Teposcolula and Coixtlahuaca, are all bulky wonders of imperial domination, built nearly on a Mayan scale. Scary.
Maureen necessarily drove slowly across the northwestern Oaxaca landscape -- a variety of high-desert scenes, some quite dramatic and eroded. Then over a temperate crest and down into Puebla state, hotter but at least not humid.
We've taken moderately pricey refuge in Acatlan, at the Plaza Candida Hotel, and supped similarly at their across-the-road eatery. The waiter mistook our incredulity at the prices for an inability to read Spanish, and brought us English menus. That didn't help much. Then the following questions arose:
Q: When is catsup a food?
A: When you're traveling on a budget, or composing federal school lunch programs for GOP administrations.
Q: Can you name Ronald Reagan's favorite vegetable?
A: James Brady.
But I digress. Our evangelist landlady is very nice. Tomorrow's route leads DOWNHILL towards Cuernavaca. If it's as hot there as it is here (100°f) then we will divert directly uphill to Taxco, a long drive.
LATE NIGHT: Tight voices singing modal acapella gospel (??) songs drift in the window, not unpleasantly. In a dream, our hostess tells a nosy Austrian investigator that they're Jehovah's Witnesses. Do JW's sing? I'm not sure. Then, in early morning, many explosions outside our window. Getting started early, beating the heat, eh?
SONGS:
Shapes of Things
(It's a) UFO
She's in the Mountains
Nothing is What it Seems
|
NEEDFUL STUFF:
STUFF TO TAKE INTO HOTEL ROOMS BECUSE IT'S MAYBE NOT SUPPLIED: plastic cups, drinking water, toilet paper (er, sanitary tissues), comfortable pillows, ear plugs, eye shades, immersion heater (for SOME hot water), a plunger
STUFF TO TAKE ON THE NEXT CAR TRIP: plug-in cooler, plug-in droplight, AC invertor
STUFF WE COULD MAYBE HAVE LEFT BEHIND: well, nothing -- even what we haven't used yet still seems like its pretty good to have, just in case
|
DIA OCHENTA TRES:
Martes, 10 May 2005 - San Damien de Molokai
Taxco, Guerrero - Tuesday, Dia de las Madres
Breakfast in Acatlan in an odd garage next to the hotel -- no bargains here, but OK, Then drive ever lower across Puebla, Morelos, Guerrero states. Hotter and hotter. This is my first day back at the wheel in nearly a week. Can I stand it?
Cuernavaca is big and noisy and stinky, its routes maddening, but we stumble across a WalMart and replenish. West from the city past a sting of funparks, beerparks, simmering amusement parks, all incredibly jammed (as is the secondary highway we're stuck on). Why all this on a Tuesday? Why, it's Mexican Mothers Day! All those flowers and candies for sale! One hundred glorious farenheit degrees of joy! Then we start the climb to Taxco and things cool a bit.
OUR TAXCO HISTORY: Maureen says she's dreamed for a long long time of visiting Taxco, and San Cristobal. Those were just place-names to me, before this trip. But a few months ago we met Logan and Autumn selling Taxco jewelry on the street in Bisbee. They said they were involved in a Taxco hotel, lived there, just came stateside regularly to deal silver and gems. They said we should visit, gave us business contact info but no address.
Taxco's history is all about silver. For hundreds of years it was the silver capitol of the world, until the mines ran out in the last century. Since then, rather than mining ores, locals have been crafting silver goods, and extracting money from visitors.
INTO TAXCO: We climb the old road to this incredible mini-metropolis of 100,000 built on vertical mountainsides. It's very Positano-like (without the water); likening it to Jerome on steroids is totally inadequate. We stopped at the visitor info center, looking for a hotel phone that matched Autumn and Logan's number. No luck. We decided to try a backup, Posada Lucy, recommended by the guidebook. So we tried to follow the maps. Ha ha ha.
We wandered totally lost around these impossibly steep narrow streets, hoping against hope for some landmark, as we dodged the inexorable traffic. Up into the crowded mercado -- oops, dead end. Up other nameless streets. Shifting into Low-4X was barely adequate, Almost all the many vehicles here in old town are VW bugs or vans; most of the rest are rear-engine VW Golfs, Jettas, etc. And then there are the motorbikes (shudder).
Almost distraught, we creep through the maze -- and there's Logan! We hail him, and we turn out to be just below his hotel! Somehow we turn around and follow him around a corner, and we're IN! Into the rambling old Hotel Victoria, a sprawling masterpiece of decayed elegance. And the management cuts us a great deal! 1500 pesos for a week, that's under US$20 per day for a big room, sweeping views, private terrace, secure parking, and a free show on the road beneath us.
(If we can eat and drink for US$15 per day, our budget allows us to stay here indefinitely. INDEFINITELY! But maybe for only a week, depending on how well we can stand it here.)
THE STREETS: Ah, the cobbled streets! The LetsGoMexico guidebook says the roads are so narrow, pedestrians must jam against the high walls to allow traffic to pass, and this is precisely true. And cars must choreograph their two-way passage along the road that hairpins beneath our terrace. Yes, the show: cars and vans string out in both directions beyond the limits of vision, then some squeeze one way past the narrow hairpin leg, then some others squeeze the other way, and they hardly honk at all, just roar like trucks. Those backing are especially droll.
Very little paint is scraped off on the walls, even by newbies like us. Yet. And looking down at the lit hills, all the red tile roofs, the mediterranean courtyards and arched gateways -- this is SO Amalfi-esque! All that's missing are an ocean and Fiats.
THE HOTEL: This concrete confection wraps in a big rounded V over the hairpin, maybe 100 meters on each leg, and up the notch in the hill about 10 levels, but hugging the terrain most of the way. The jaggedly-spiraling stairways and courtyards and terraces are, yes, Escheresque, seeming to occupy more dimensions than can physically exist.
And the hotel needs a lot of work. Concrete decays. Red roof tiles crumble. After we checked in, a thunderous downpour, refreshingly cool, but we walked the archways dodging waterfalls. Still, the place is a wonder. I'll probably write more about it in future days. And I'll shoot many many pictures. From the far side, I should be able to see the cathedral.
So. Now it's dark, but for the night-bright hill-town and its towers. It's humid, the sky thick with moist haze, which in the morning will blow away. Beyond, come daylight, a line of blue mountains. Below, the taxis are diminishing, but they'll resume early. And tomorrow we go exploring.
Q&A SESSION:
There have been reader inquiries. Here are responses to some questions.
Q: Alligators washing up out of the sewers!?!?!? ¡Madre santa del dios! You are more brave than I. [JK]
A: They were very small sewers, very small alligators, and a very big rain. No problemo.
Q: Isn't it hot and humid there off the high plateaus? [SH]
A: Yes.
Q: When a room is so bare, do you use an inflated air mattress? [JK]
A: That's better than leaving the air mattress flat.
(Actually, the air mattresses are just backups, in case the ONLY room available somewhere has inadequate beds. Or if we might rent an unfurnished place for a few weeks, REAL cheap. That's why we brought folding table and chairs too. And now we have hammocks. We're ready.)
Q: I admit to having some concern about you as you went deeper, deeper into the dark. Whatever that means. [CR]
A: It means that dark skies are only good at night and during eclipses, and should be otherwise avoided. Dark beer is another matter.
Q: I agree with your statement that democracy is failing in this country. Where do we go from here? [JK]
A: New Zealand is seeking qualified English-speaking immigrants. Or try Guatemala, where most votes now seem to be actually counted; and whomever gets the most votes, actually wins.
Q: When do you expect to be back in the US? [SH]
A: Somewhere between two weeks and two months from now. If they let us across the border. Do they have to let military veterans back in?
Q: Perhaps, once you get back to Bisbee, you will find the time and desire to write an accounting of your trip in book form. I think it has all the makings of a fun book; perhaps even a book with a cult-like following. [JK]
A: Just what the world needs -- another cult. THE CULT OF RIC! Yeah, that sounds good.
(We'll not be in Bisbee long, just to repack, then head up to the Sierras. I'll likely be working on pictures then, editing and printing. Sometime after mid-August we'll hop in the RV and go north to Puget Sound, Vancouver Island, Prince Rupert, whatever. Another [less strenuous] travel adventure to document, eh? If my agent [Maureen] finds a paying customer, I'll be persuaded to rewrite both of the Maya-land travel journals. Where's that advance?)
|
NOTED:
SEEN AT/FROM ROADSIDES ACROSS OAXACA-PUEBLA LANDSCAPES:
* Thin turkeys, some goats, many wild (??) burros, few borrochos
* Fewer military checkpoints, more shrines
* Giant organ-pipe cacti spotted up hillsides like housing developments
* Forests of very tall single-finger sahuaro cacti
* Little overgrown volcanos
* Really bad graphic on CAUTION: CATTLE signs -- that's a COW?!?!?
|
DIA OCHENTA CUATRO:
Miercoles, 11 May 2005 - Santa Estela
Taxco, Guerrero - Wednesday night.
Taxco's winding flat-cobbled streets are inlaid with contrasting rocky designs, some just a simple wide white stripe, others abstract or naturalistic. Some designs delineate some edges. Some drivers and walkers heed the markings, which probably impress aliens in hovering UFOs.
We're up late, have a tasty but pricey 'continental' breakfast on the hotel terrace, then into town for our first foray. Around some minor plazas, into the stupendous Santa Prisca church (on the UNESCO list of the world's 100 most endangered sites), through the cultural center (a silver baron's house), into a tiny fraction of the zillions of silver shops, etc. And then into the labyrinthine 3D mercado. Ay yi yi.
APARTMENT: In one shop off the zocalo we saw an ad for an apartment, just 3000 pesos for a month. Sure, we could do another month in Taxco, like SCLC (San Cristobal de las Casas) but more vertical. We find parking, just 640 pesos a month. Still on budget; together, they're about US$12 per day. (We can spend US$25 a day without cutting into the travel funds.)
We waited all afternoon, finally saw the place, it's spacious enough but not airy and it's up WAY too many steep stairs. Hauling our belongings in would wear us out. And we decided that five weeks in Taxco may be just a bit too much for us now, even with the rainy season starting.
A young guy at the hotel desk told us he's not from here, he's from Cuernavaca, and admitted that it's too hot there now. I asked about the best season for visiting, He said in the spring, after it starts raining: June, July, August, I have to readjust my thinking to make August a spring month.
STROLLING: After rejecting the apartment, we strolled out the main inside road to the town entrance and the paved peripheral road (which winds around a canyon edge, thronged with buses and trucks and noise). More of the zillions of platerias (silver shops) -- how can they all stay in business? To the San Bernadino ex-convento where the 1823 treaty ending colonial status was signed -- this is Mexico's equivalent of Independence Hall, and it's an elementary school. And like everyone else mid-afternoon, we ate ice cream.
The walk and the heat wore us out, so we took a cheap cab back to the hotel. Cheap cabs! Such a deal! About the best deals we've yet found in this pricey town. Well. there's supposed to be a great cheap hamburger pit also, but it's closed today. Maybe we'll have to eat in the mercado.
OK, we met today's budget. Back on our terrace, we dug into our road-food box and dined on kippers and crackers and coconut candy, washed down with orange water (30 pesos for 10 liters at WalMart). See, it's easy! But tomorrow we need to restock.
ATMOSPHERE: Yesterday's pre-sunset downpour was accompanied by great blasts of lightning, some very very close. Today's heat is broken by another deluge but the clouds are higher, the westward mountains are still visible, and no lightning yet. Woops, there's the first flash-bang. Taxco means "lord of the rains" and really puts that egotistical Irish dancer in his place.
SCLC was a colonial city set in a slightly bumpy valley. Taxco is a colonial city set on a virtual cliff face. The charms and difficulties are rather different. The cloven hoofprint of geography lies heavy around us, almost smoking, And when the rain clouds settle in, it's just an island in the murky sky.
|
|
