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.
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?
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◘.
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.
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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 😉