Chiapas Getabout 2: Chamula Excursion and a Church with Strange, Shamanistic Ways

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Regional History, Travel
Town of San Juan Chamula

Slated down on the tour itinerary for Day 2 at San Cristóbal was an afternoon side trip to Chamula, a regional cabecera (headtown) famous for a most unusual and unorthodox Christian church. Chamula’s location is just over 10 km from the township where we were staying, but given the state of the link road and other contingencies it ended up taking us the best part of an hour’s driving to reach the town.

First-hand encounter with the ‘Conflicto de Chiapas’
The ‘contingencies’ included having to deal with unofficial roadblocks on the highway. Chiapas State is base to the Zapatistas (officially Zapatista Army of National Liberation – EZLN), a small, left-wing political/ militia group resisting the authority of the central government in Mexico*. As we approached the outskirts of Chamula our mini-bus came to a fairly abrupt halt with half-a-dozen or more vehicles banked up in front of us. A group of Zapatistas or their rural trade union affiliates had blocked access into the town, draping banners across the road stating the protesters’ current, specific beef with the unsympathetic government (Hector had earlier warned us of the prospect of this and there had been recent reports in the media of buses being hijacked by the Zapatistas!).

The bus idled for several minutes as we gradually inched our way up to the blockade. The roadblock party looked a bit fierce and daunting to us, like they really meant business, even Hector seemed a bit tense. For several minutes the driver and Hector exchanged words with each other and with the protesters, while we in the back tried to figure out what was going on. As the conversation proceeded, the workers’ sternness dissipated and relations gradually became more cordial…it all ended harmoniously with smiles all round after our driver deposited an indeterminate amount of pesos in the workers’ “contribution fund bucket”. The protesters obviously satisfied themselves that we had exhibited sufficient simpatía (empathy) with their cause as we were permitted to continue through the roadblock without further delay!

=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image.jpg”> Mercado Chamula[/capti
Having made our way safely to the township, we make our way to the zócalo, passing streets lined with souvenir and food stalls. The main square itself was chock-a-block with the usual array of items to entice souvenir hunters. I thought that the way the fruit sellers stacked oranges and other citrus fruits in rows to form a pyramid effect was pretty nifty. We passed through an open gate separating the zócalo from an enclosed forecourt…this forecourt led us to what is the main event in Chamula, Iglesias de San Juan (Church of St John).

http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-1.jpg”> San Juan Basilica[/caption
San Juan Chamula church: a very loose association with Catholic traditions
We stood round in the courtyard taking photos of San Juan Bautista, by no means a structure monumental in scale but attractive with it’s white facade and green, blue and golden-orange trim. Before we went inside Hector reiterated his earlier message about the required etiquette. Photographs of the interior were a definite no-no! The population of Chumula, being overwhelmingly indigenous (95% Tzotzil Maya people) are devoutly conservative and apparently not even keen on being photographed themselves, let alone their sacred place of worship. Crossing over the church’s threshold and glancing down the nave towards the altar, I could see we were in a very unusual church. There was no pews, at different points local parishioners sat on the floor intoning mantras over lighted candles in shallow bowls. These candles were lit all over the church floorspace, thousands of them. I can see that the rituals being performed were not likely to be recognisably Catholic ones, some of the worshippers were accompanied by shamans and curanderos (indigenous medicine men)✦. Also everywhere on the ground were green branches and leaves of the pine needle tree. My instant impression on seeing such strange interior church decor was to ponder on just how much of a total fire trap this place was!

Stepping my way carefully past the carpet of pine needles and the rows of candles I observed that the icons on display represented a blend between the pre-Conquest Mayan customs and the orthodox traditions of Spanish Catholicism (images of Mayan gods and Catholic saints adorned the walls side-by-side). We noticed that among the reverent icons on display, the eponymous San Juan (St John the Baptist) of course took pride of place in the church. Another curious feature of the interior near the altar was a series of long, draped sheets affixed to the walls and roof forming an inverted V shape.

//www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-7.jpg”> El Iglesias

[/caption]Iglesias de San Juan, although a startling departure from ecclesiastical orthodoxy, is not unique among churches in the Americas (I recall seeing one or two composite religion churches in Peru), the synthesis of Catholic and indigenous religions, the bending of Catholic traditions to accommodate native belief systems in the Chamula cathedral was as starkly defined as any I could imagine.

A little bit of street art and a lot of identical Chiapas native bird bags
After several minutes of shuffling up and down the nave, I made my exit, as did the others progressively. Outside, we had been allocated about 45 minutes of free time to leisurely explore the square. The markets had been going full-tilt to then but were just about to taper off for the day. Time enough for some rapid gift-buying (six tiendas in a row all selling the same woven carry bags with the identical Mexican Redhead Parrot design!).

.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-4.jpg”> Peluqueria Estetica + accessories!

After the[/caption]After the presents were taken care of, I had time to veer off the zócalo and explore a nearby side street…what caught my attention in particular in this street were two shop fronts, about 40 metres apart from each other. Both these tiendas were men’s hairdressers coincidently (peluquerias)! Painted on the walls were cute, comical depictions of young Mexicanos dudes with haircuts which were sort of fashionable – though the hair styles looked like they were modelled more on Elvis and 60s rockers than on anything 21st century contemporary! The other hard-to-forget (and less delightful) memory from my free-time roaming was a pitiful sight – a mother and toddler standing in the market, holding captive a pathetically forlorn looking turkey, it’s torso enveloped in a garbage bag and feet tethered with a piece of rope. More sobering Third World realities.

By the time we left Chamula (late afternoon) it was starting to get cooler – a pointer to the town’s highland location (altitude 7,200 feet!) We arrived back at Casa Margarita with time to relax before dinner. I took in the splendid hacienda-like ambience of the hotel’s outdoor central courtyard before venturing out to do some restaurant hunting and catch some of the town’s night-time sights I hadn’t yet discovered – like this modern SC administrative building.

PostScript: Los Mexicanos – making a virtue of symbolic protest, an end in itself?
The episode with the roadblock staged by the pueblos ordinario of Chiapas reinforced for me a peculiarity of the Mexican character I had noticed elsewhere on my travels in this land – rhetoric and ideology aside, the Zapatistas (and the impoverished and aggrieved agrarian workers who support them) know in their heart of hearts that they, with all the will in the world, are NOT going to overthrow the iniquitous national government (as they envisage it to be). But, and this seems to be intrinsically ingrained in the mindset of the Mexican peasantry after centuries of being on the receiving end of high-handed authoritarianism, the people collectively will always make as much noise and commotion as they possibly can to protest any perceived injustice perpetrated by the state…just for the symbolic right to do it, and irrespective of how futile their actions might be in trying to prompt real and profound change in society. It is as if the mere act of protesting itself is a wholly gratifying, as well as a cathartic, experience for the Mexican masses.

I would hasten to add that this trait is by no means peculiar to Mexicans, I have personally observed similar purely symbolic protests in places like Lima in Peru, but I wonder if it might a particularly Hispanic and Latin American characteristic?

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* poor, primarily indigenous, Mexican farmers are the backbone of the Zapatista movement, with the roots of the disharmony traceable back to the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s and the failure from that point on of the historic party of power in Mexico, PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), to deliver on promised land reforms
✦ there was none of the really weird (to foreign Western eyes anyway) goings-on while we were visiting, but I learned later that the church was famously notorious for rituals aimed at ridding families of “malicious spirits”. This often involves the slaughtering of chickens over the candles and the consumption of Coca-Cola and a local ‘moonshine’ known as pox

Chiapas Getabout I: Cruising the Canyon – Crocs, Spider Monkeys and Floating Detritus

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Natural Environment, Regional History, Travel
C de Guadeloupe entertainers

San Cristóbal de las Casas is a lively town full of consumer and tourist options like the famous, so-called “Yellow Cathedral”❈ in the zócalo (town square). At night San Cristóbal’s tempo picks up with evening diners and drinkers frequenting the numerous restaurants and bars on the streets that criss-cross the zócalo. Also providing spontaneous public entertainment on those same streets were various three and four-piece bands of buskers. This was especially the case in our hotel’s street, Calle Real de Guadalupe, one of the town’s most lively pedestrian thoroughfares.

Zócalo: “Euro Bungy”

At around nightfall the entire zócalo itself became market centro as street traders carefully arranged their goods on blankets on the ground (the prices, the merchandise on sale and the sellers all had a homogeneity about them!). In one corner of the zócalo near the cathedral, small children attached to ropes were being rapidly and worryingly flung high up into the air by a large mechanised contraption that had the meaningless words “Euro Bungy” emblazoned on its side.

The highlight of our first full day in San Cristóbal was a trip to a massive Mexican “grand canyon” north of Chiapa del Corzo. The canyon, known as Cañón del Sumidero, was observable by taking a speedboat ride down the Grijalva River which flows through the canyon. When we got to the river-side pier about mid-morning it was a hub of activity. We were assisted in donning life jackets and directed along one of several short wharves which (oddly) have boats permanently attached to them. From here we crossed onto our assigned speedboat itself and set off downstream.

Early on, we passed under a bridge before heading towards the canyon…the course of the river comprised long, straight stretches punctuated by several bends of up to 90 degrees in angle. The boat’s pilot would gun the vessel down the river at full throttle for a few hundred metres, then cut the engine at different spots to allow us a photo op and to take in particular features of the canyon. Occasionally he offered commentary – in Spanish only! While he nattered on we contented ourselves with taking in the scenery…and there was plenty of that to see – misty waterfalls and verdant vegetation growing off the cliff-faces which at certain parts of the canyon extended up vertical walls over 1,000 metres high! One moss-covered botanical species on the cliffs we saw was the gorgeous Arbol de Navidad (Christmas Tree).

Mossy vegetation & Navidad on the canyon walls
Arboreal simians in the canopy

The evident wildlife was abundant – birds of various kinds including herons, egrets, some kinds of cormorants and vultures. I was intrigued by the distinctive flying pattern of one group of white birds which had formed itself into a squadron of 10 to 15 flyers. They were flying very low and in the same direction and parallel with our speeding boat, almost skimming the water as they went. In the water itself were more exotic creatures, notably a number of crocodiles who spent most of their time sunning themselves on the river bank. We were also fortunate to spot high up in the forest canopy a couple of spider monkeys (not quite enough for a troop)✦.

The canyon was an awe-inspiring sight, and when the boat paused to take in the surrounds, a serene and irenic atmosphere could be felt. Unfortunately there was one spoiler, a real downside to the idyllic setting as a result of the over-exploitation of this tourist hotspot¤. The incursion of mass tourism onto what were once pristine waters brought with it an influx of garbage and other disposable refuse which was summarily cast off into the river by unthinking and uncaring litterbugs. Inevitable yes, but it was the sheer quantity that came as a shocking sight for us…in many parts (including the habitat of the crocs) it had concentrated into grossly unsightly, rubbish-strewn pockets of water.

At one little rocky outcrop on the side of the canyon, the pilot steered our boat slowly into a small craggy alcove which up above eye-level was a tiny cave containing a local Catholic shrine of some kind. Our Hispanic-speaking pilot, I’m fairly confident would have mentioned the significant of it or the particular saint in question at the time (at least I think that was what he was saying). But of course the boat trip deal didn’t come with an efficient translator, so that morsel of information remained, like most things associated with religion, a mystery to us Anglophones.

The boat went as far at it could up the Rio Grijalva – the end point was when the river came to a dam wall at the northern end where there’s a hydroelectric power station. From this turnaround point, in contrast to the leisurely pace of the outward leg, the boat powered back to the jetty on the return leg without halting. The whole trip took us somewhere between two and two-and-half hours to complete, I guesstimated the distance covered was about 13 kilometres.

Back at the pier on dry land, the speedboat traffic was now busier than in the morning (it was now about one or two o’clock in the afternoon). Lots of people were fastening their orange life jackets and jumping into the waiting boats…someone should alert the crocs of the imminent arrival of yet another dump of unwanted human cast-offs.

Throughly trashed crocodile [photo courtesy E Greschman]

The Zócalo and points south
There was time, once back at San Cristóbal DLC, for another wander before dinner through the shop-strewn streets of the city centre. I began my exploration from the Zócalo…San Cristóbal’s main square is not the biggest you’d ever see in Mexico but it contains a lot of pleasant greenery and a good supply of bench seats to put your feet and watch the locals. My attention though was drawn towards one particular toy being hawked in the square, a cute, colourful, thin lizard-like creature given to bouncing around the pavement in a series of sharp jerky motions (a sure winner with the ankle-biter brigade!).

Specialist agricultural produce-growers market

Leaving the Zócalo I headed south past Portal and followed one street to where it terminated near Domínguez Street in a tall earth-hued old church. In front of it I found a more specialised kind of market that the usual touristy ones in the Centro. It was housed in a large marquee with a banner labelled Red de Productóres Chiapanecos. On sale inside the market was all manner of agricultural produce from the surrounding Chiapas region (exotic fruit jams and vegetables mainly but also decorations, clothing items, utensils and so on).

Not sure about the fare at this restaurant but the doorman was a bit of a head-turner!

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❈ the cathedral is actually part golden-yellow and part reddish-orange in colour
✦ Ocelots are known to inhabit the adjoining forest although we didn’t manage to spot a cat of any size or description during the cruise
¤ I calculated that at one point there was at least 11 other tourist boats on our stretch of the river alone – and just the one solitary municipio vessel making a seemingly futile effort to dredge up the mess

Mexican Road Trip: An 11 Hour Epic on the Overnight Bus to San Cristóbal de las Casas

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Regional History, Travel

When it came time to say despedida to Oaxaca, I did so one hour earlier than the rest of my Intrepid group. The reason? There had been a stuff-up with the bus transport bookings – someone had reserved one too few seats on the San Cristóbal coach trip – Hector (our guide) had nervously approached me on our final night at Oaxaca Casa Arnel, asking for a huge favour as he put it, would I please, please, volunteer to travel “Napoleon Solo” (a lame example of faux Cockney rhyming slang probably only fathomable to aficionados of 1960s television spy dramas) on the bus leaving at 8pm, rather than the scheduled one for the tour departing at Nine? The dilemma was clearly causing the affable ‘ector much angst. Standing there on my doorstep he seemed visibly distressed… he explained he had earlier asked two of the young punks in the group but they had “alpha-boy bonded” with each other and refused outright to be separated even for one night (how touching!) Hector’s gratitude overflowed when I answered his request in the affirmative! In fact I had no hesitation in agreeing to take the early coach. I was as happy to leave at eight, it was only one hour difference when all is said and done.

Oaxaca: this wasn’t the overnight bus to Chiapas but given how long the trip took, it might well have been!

My only one concern (prior to departure) was that now I was riding on my ‘patma’ I would need to have all my wits about me. Several days before the overnight trip to San Cristóbal de las Casas Hector had reminded us of the warnings issued by Intrepid which featured in the tour itinerary – they stressed that there were inherent dangers posed by overnight bus journey between Mexican cities…to quote directly from the Intrepid travellers’ guide about the handiwork of petty thieves who sneak on board long-distance, inter-city night buses at stop points along the way: “These opportunistic individuals are not only an annoyance, they are also unfortunately extremely talented. They wait for passengers to be asleep to skilfully search through carry-on luggage in search of cameras, money and credit cards”.

So, with this reiterated warning resounding in my ears, I freely admit I was feeling a bit apprehensive about what might befall me without any travelling companions to watch my back. Hector walked me down to the coach terminus in Oaxaca and issued me with directions on what to do on arrival at the tour’s next destination. After a short wait we were called to board the Chiapas bus, upon finding my allocated seat at the back of the autobus I discovered a pleasant and unexpected surprise…Hector had cautioned that the bus would be ‘chock-a-block’ full all the way, but au contraire I found that I had the luxury of an empty seat next to me! With the baggage quickly loaded in the under seats’ stowaway (and my all-important bag number slip secured in my top pocket), it was not long before we were away. It was now about 20:00 hours and fully dark. The extra room to stretch out was good fortune indeed on what was promising to be a very long, boring and testing solo overnight ride. After ferreting out my airline eye mask from my hand luggage, I made sure that I had affixed my bag securely to my person for the whole journey.

Actually it was in this bus, an ADO autobus, that we trekked from Oax to San Cristo

I settled back for the long haul on Highway 185D…the bus, an ADO (one of Mexico’s most popular autobus fleets) did live up to the advanced publicity, it was comfortable, well-fitted out, air con, on-board toilet, TV screens, if not quite being the cutting edge latest in luxury road travel (I’d still rank the Inka Express trip on the Ruta del Sol from Cusco to Puno (Southern Peru) as número uno). Starting off from the Oaxaca terminal, I had entertained the thought of trying to get some shut-eye✲ on the trip but the strategically placed and glaringly distracting television screens put paid to that notion. Resigning myself to the reality, I glanced fitfully for several minutes at the screen which was showing, appropriately enough, a Spanish-language movie.

Cantinflas in his most famous role as Passepartout

On the road with Cantinflas
When I eventually twigged to the fact that it was a biopic of Cantinflas, I overcame my hitherto disinterest and started to watch the film. It was hardly a great movie but I did learn a lot about Cantinflas that I was unaware of…firstly I had forgotten that he was in fact Mexican and not Spanish (which explains why it was featuring on this inter-city Mexican road trip). Ninety-five percent of the world’s audience-goers who have ever actually heard of Cantinflas would associate him with his role as Passepartout in the universally well-known Hollywood movie Around the World in Eighty Days. But what the biopic brought home to me was just how important and instrumental – and versatile – a figure he was to Mexican cinema and to the country’s entertainment industry generally…I was aware of Cantinflas the beloved actor and comedian, but what the movie revealed was the other strings Cantinflas had to his bow, he was also a writer, producer and singer, certainly credentials to be celebrated as (one of) Mexico’s foremost entertainment “Renaissance Men”.

According to Hector the trip to San Cristóbal from Oaxaca was about nine to nine-and-half hours (covering a distance of 600 km). At about 12:30 in the morning the coach pulled over in complete darkness near some all-night street stalls. Nothing was said by the driver (no passenger announcement) but he got off, lit a fag and was soon joined by a couple of the Mexican passengers (I was the sole non-Mexican or if you like the token gringo on the coach!). After about 15 minutes everyone re-boarded and we set off again. I was puzzled at the reason for our stop but thought to myself that at least this was roughly half-way to San Cristóbal, so we had some sort of milestone on the long trek into the night!

Unscheduled stop on Highway 185D
Most of the next part of the trip to Santo Domingo Tehuantepec was uneventful, too dark to see anything outside and sleepless, I passed the time by groping round in the dark of the interior trying to find items in my bag and continually re-positioning my back on the seat support so as to ease any pressure on my dodgy L2. There was the one event/non-event on this leg of the drive…we stopped at some kind of official bus check-point or way-station, the engine was turned off and the interior remained in total darkness – again there was no on-board announcement. Although this went on for a while I wasn’t perturbed, I assumed that they were just doing a mandatory spot check of the vehicle or such, and in a short time we’d be back on the road. But the delay went on and on, still no word from the driver, still in darkness. Occasionally, the silence was punctuated by a loud, whirring noise on one side of the bus. After about an (unexplained) hour of sitting around, the bus engine was suddenly switched on and we resumed the trip. I found out later that they were changing one or some of the tyres…updating of passengers is obviously not part of customer service on ADO buses, we were figuratively – as well as literally – kept in the dark all the time!

By now we were at the lowest longitudinal point in Mexico that we were to get, the Pacific Ocean could be viewed to our right perhaps just a couple of hundred metres away…that is if it weren’t for the fact that it was still pitch-dark and the middle of the night! We swapped highways and were now free-wheeling down 190D, deep into the heartland of Chiapis, Mexico’s southern-most state.

More fun with ADO
At the ADO station at Tuxtla Gutiérrez (at least I think that was where we were!) more passengers got off 🙂 unfortunately a greater number of new one ones got on 🙁 … much worse, I had to surrender my adjoining (spare) seat to one of the new passengers, a Mexican guy with the build of a Sumo wrestler¤ (built like a proverbial “brick house” as they say in the Antipodes). The guy consumed so much horizontal space that his swollen, “Michelin Man” sized left arm spilled haphazardly over onto my side of the arm rest, forcing me to bend my right arm at a 45 degree angle and keep it in that fixed, uncomfortable position for the rest of the journey!

Chiapas & the road to SC

Chiapa del Corzo: salida frustrado!
Chiapa del Corzo looked like a very major bus station, many of the bus passengers got off and several got on. This was where I got confused! I knew from the itinerary that we were going to the state of Chiapas, but perhaps distracted by my aching right arm I somehow thought this was my destination point (momentarily forgetting I was going to San Cristóbal, the following stop). With some very considerable effort on my part and virtually no assistance from the slumbering immovable object next to me, I half-squeezed, half-climbed over Mr Sumo, and made for the door.

When I tried to retrieve my luggage though, the guy in charge of distributing the baggage, to my surprise, refused to hand over my case despite my waving the correct luggage receipt in his face. My entreaties fell on deaf ears as he dismissively waved me away. With my frustration rising, I tried to appeal to the nearest bus station officials but no one seemed to understand (there might as well have been a “No Inglés spoken here” sign) or made any attempt to resolve my issue. Finally, one of the uniformed staff motioned to me to return to my bus, which I reluctantly did. Not relishing the prospect of getting back into my allocated seat by vaulting over Mr Sumo, I sat down in one of the empty seats, hoping it wasn’t the seat of any of the still boarding passengers. But no sooner did I do this when Murphy’s Law raised its head – a Mexican couple immediately turned up to claim the seats and I was forced to retreat further back in the bus. Fortunately the new seat I perched myself on didn’t have a claimant and we duly set off for San Cristobal.

Whilst I was at Chiapa del Corzo I surmised that San Cristóbal de las Casas was quite close, but as things transpired it was still a good 40 minutes or so on the bus. As we drew closer to the destination, crossing bridges and rivers, I had to concede that I owed a measure of gratitude to the ADO employees back at Corzo who, though abrupt in tone, stopped me from trying to exit at the wrong bus station.

Casa Margarita’s courtyard

Once we had reached the San Cristóbal bus station I felt a sense of relief, even though I still had to negotiate my short taxi trip to our hotel and the chance that some local taxi con man might try to play the universal game of “lets rip off the naive tourist”. I gave the first driver on the rank the hotel card and the 50 Pecos note Hector had given me for the fare and everything (for a change) went seamlessly. In just a few minutes we were at Hotel Casa Margarita. I waited a few minutes in the hotel’s charming hacienda style courtyard…the staff on duty (two callow boys both looking about 15-16), who clearly weren’t expecting me, differed round a bit, offering me self-serve coffee in the foyer. I was determined to get my room key and in my exhausted state simply crash ASAP! Only when I reminded them, and a more adult-looking staff member who had popped up, that I had been given the assurance that when I arrived I would be able to get straight to my room, they relinquished their prevarications and showed me to the room.

Footnote:
It was 7am when I got out onto the street in San Cristóbal, 2,200 metres above sea-level, it was quite chilly. The advertised nine-and-half hour bus journey had taken eleven hours all up – thanks to the tyre problems and other, unspecified random tardiness. But I consoled myself that at least I had avoided the fate of less fortunate past passengers on this overnight trek who had apparently been fleeced of their personal belongings.

﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋﹌﹋
✲ I say “shut-eye” rather than sleep because sleep, that rare commodity was out of the question. Every journey I have ever taken on a mobile transporter of any description (air, rail, road, even water) I have found myself constitutionally incapable of sleeping, no matter how tired or sleep-deprived I am!
¤ if he wasn’t a Mexican Sumo wrestler (unlikely), then perhaps he was one of those Lucha Libre wrestlers I had seen in CDMX. A ex-one though because he looked like I imagined retired luchadores look like when they stop training and their previously tautly contained centre of gravity spreads all points east and west!

Oaxaca 3: Teotitlán Textile-making’s Canine Sideshow and a Mezcal Happy Hour

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Archaeology, Regional History, Travel

One of the trade-offs you face on an overseas tour with budgetary and time constraints conspiring against you, is deciding which optional ‘highlights’ you take up and which you pass on…in an un-ideal world there’s just never enough time to do all of them, as enticingly exotic as they probably all sound! As our Intrepid (‘Basic Explorer’) tour was trying to cover a large chunk of central and southern Mexico within a short time span, just over two weeks tops, we, like all tourists, were constantly making these choices at every new town or region we came to.

In order to see the limestone pools of Hierve El Agua and the Mitlá remnants, we had to forgo a trip to Monte Albán. I didn’t think much of this at the time, but after doing a bit of retrospective research I came to the conclusion that it would have been nice to see this high point of Zapotec civilisation whilst in the general vicinity✳. Still, “mustn’t grumble” as the English are wont to say, in hindsight looking at the tour as a whole we chalked up plenty of visits to historic stepped pyramid sites to get a real representative insight into this most Mexican phenomena, and of course the downside of journeying off to Monte Albán would have meant missing out on Mexico’s Travertines…it was in the end, to put a philosophical take on it, a case of swings and roundabouts.

Textiles tienda

Returning to Oaxaca late in the day after the long trek on bumpy roads to Mitlá, we had two more stops to make. The first was to a family ‘backyard’ textiles business where we were shown a demonstration of how the Mexican garments, shawls and other colourful items of apparel (all the stuff you see in countless market stalls all over the country) were manufactured. The machinery used in the family business was decidedly not state-of-the-art, rather it looked very Third World tech and, when demonstrated quite tricky to master, requiring a lot of time, patience and persistence. Worth it though if the calibre of the finished products on display in the ‘showroom’ were anything to go by, especially the dazzling, woven wall rugs. The price tags seemed a bit over-the-top explaining why no one in the group, though quick to show interest, were in a rush to buy (thankfully there was no pressure forthcoming from the owner on us to buy💢). I’m sure the serious, potential buyers in the showroom wrote themselves mental notes to do a comparative (and you can bet advantageous) price checks on the wall rugs once they hit the city markets!

Textiles sideshow: Chihuahua a-go-go!
It’d be true to say that I found the textiles plant visit less than captivating…then again, to put it in context, it was more interesting to me than a perfume factory I once visited in Switzerland, but that is saying precious little!). However the visit was saved from descending into a tedious, total time-waste “better spent doing something else” by the antics of the family’s pet dog. I discovered the dog, a characteristically Mexican black-and-white Chihuahua, out the back in the casa’s courtyard. The minuscule, over-excitable canine kept frantically trying to mount the legs of one of the older American ladies in our party. Just as I was about to try to capture its hilarious behaviour on video, the family’s two human ankle-biters (two little <5 year-old girls) turned up and armed with a thin tree branch suddenly starting chasing the harassed Chihuahua from one side of the outdoor courtyard to the other…what with the pursued Chihuahua (or should that be Chi-wow-wah?) hareing around crazily it proved very hard indeed to catch it on the video…all that could be made out on the film was a small, black flash with a very low centre of gravity streaking around the courtyard like an Exocet missile! Riotously funny though!

The agave piña – a long, long road to fruition
With the approach of nightfall looming we turned off the Oaxaca highway into a mezcal distillery in the town of San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya¤. To state what will soon become bleedingly obvious this proved to be the most popular stop of the day! The distillery was set up for tastings just like a regional winery. Before we got to sample the eagerly anticipated local drink though, the distillery honcho walked us through the manufacturing process which is a very, very protracted and complicated one…first the root, the piña, is extracted from the agave after the plant had been grown for about eight years! We were shown a big, eight foot deep earth pit where in the next stage of the process the workers bake the piñas under smoking logs and rocks before removing them to be fermented for a further 5-15 days. After this the fermented by-product gets bunged into a clay brick still to be distilled using heated firewood. When it reaches its purest form (which is called blanco), the aging process in oak then begins…Phew!!! Incredibly time- and labour-intensive process eh?

Start of a satisfying tasting experience

Mainlining on free mezcal
This info on the craft of mezcal-making, interesting as it was, was only a preamble to the day’s main event, the mezcal tasting itself. As we lined the distillery’s bar and listened to the amicable and nuggety bartender-cum-sales guy explain the different types of mezcal whilst cracking jokes, everyone was getting in the mood to taste this most iconic of Mexican drinks. My earlier, tentative tasting of mezcal in Mexico City had left me uncomfortably imagining that this was how drain cleaner might taste. As had happened on that occasion we were again offered salt (or as a substitute paprika powder this time) which you add to a slice of lemon to ameliorate the unpalatable effects of the potent concoction. I managed to down, with a suitably grimaced facial expression, two sizeable snaps-size glasses of the undiluted, bitter-sour drink. This second exposure to this lethal 110-proof beverage clinched it for me – the best way of softening the harsh and abrasive taste of mezcal, I concluded, was not salt and lemon, but rather simply to abstain from drinking it at all!⌽

At this stage I was happy to call it quits on the tastings…that was until our jolly-joker of a host introduced us to something new, a range of Cremea de Maguey (Maguey was the traditional name given by the indigenous population prior to the Spanish invasion to the libation derived from the agave. Agave is still called maguey in some quarters). These mixed drinks were much more to my liking – the hard liquor’s bitter taste, softened and sweetened by the addition of cream flavoured with a host of natural ingredients, transformed it into a drink of “amber nectar”. I tried the avocado, the mango, the lime, the coconut, the pino, various assorted berries, chocolate (but passed on the coffee)…I lost count of how many different, velvety cream mezcals I sampled over the next half-hour, the sum of which of which never succeeded in getting me even close to a state of inebriation◘.

My errant pourer: So many mezcal creams & so little time!

The only concern was the young woman serving my drinks – in her haste to satisfy the frenzied, Bacchanalian demand of so many willing tasters, she kept pouring the portions of maguey way too quickly – with the result that the silky-tasting liquid often as not ended up on my hand and forearm rather than in the intended receptacle! Still, as I hadn’t forked out a single Peco for the innumerable shots of mezcal I had consumed, I could hardly complain, could I?

Observing the other convivial tasters at the bar I realised that I was not “Robinson Crusoe” in my preference for the more palatable mezcal cream mixers. Aside from a hard-core handful (mostly Yanks and Brits) who had clearly already made a happy acquaintance with the classic Mexican beverage and kept plying the pure form of tongue-numbing, straight mezcal down their throats, it was a real winner! Everyone else in the group was sampling every available variant of Cremea de Maguey on the bar at a fast rate of knots!

A short time later the tastings came to an end, prompting some in the group to cough up some hard cash to stock up on the product to ward off any possible effects of an attack of MDS✦. Very soon we were back on Highway 190 completing the short, 21 kilometre bus journey back to our Oaxaca hotel. With the intoxicating spirit of ‘mezcalmania’ fuelling a sense of collective bon homie, the “happy hour” mood continued on the bus with nonstop banter and badinage being exchanged on the way home.

Fortification for the bus trip back…

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✳ Monte Albán’s great tourist appeal lies in how the local Amerindians turned a 1,500 foot high hill into a series of pyramids, terraces, dams, canals and artificial mounds
💢 so refreshingly at arm’s length to the merciless “take-no-prisoners” approach of rug and carpet salesmen I had previously experienced in Egypt and Turkey
¤ Oaxaca (State) abounds with mezcal producers, it’s the pivotal hub of Mexico’s mezcal industry (although the plant itself is grown in many regions of the country)
⌽ its interesting that experts and devotees of mezcal tend to describe the drink in its pure form as having a smoky taste as its most distinctive characteristic…all I can say is to my less sophisticated palate what came through was the ‘burning’ sensation rather than the smoky one!
◘ the cream mezcals tasted a little like Bailey’s Irish Cream but more variable and infinitely nicer!
✦ Mezcal Deprivation Syndrome – quite common in these parts of Mexico they tell me, though fortunately not infectious 😉