Monday, July 27, 2009

El Dia Fuera Del Tiempo

For those following the Mayan calendar, this past Saturday was the day outside of time, a day situated between the last day of the year and the first of the new year, counted but without a name. No one, of course, really follows the calendar anymore, but the day was cause for a host of celebrations across the world, primarily of the hippie and indigenous sorts. We decided we wanted to spend the day somewhere stunning and also somewhere with a group of people, as you are supposed to spend the whole day relaxing, partying, and sharing things with others. So we drove south to Teotihuacan, the great pyramids northeast of Mexico City. Seeing the pyramid of the sun appear, miles and miles away, as we approached the flatness nearing DF, was one of the first things that actually produced some kind of internal thrill for me. It’s enormous. It’s beautiful. It’s 2000 years old. (Outside the pyramids you can buy “the food that made the Aztecs great”, which appears, by the look of the posters, to have been Corona.)


We camped out and went into the grounds at dawn. We were the first people into the park, the first people up the side of the pyramid of the sun, and we sat alone at the very top to watch the sunrise. It was amazing, really. There was no one in the whole park, and we could gaze down the avenue of the dead to the temple of the moon, or across the flatness to where the lights of Mexico begin to make a halo in the sky.


After five hours of climbing over and into and onto every rock in the place, we headed back to our campground to participate in a Mayan ceremony that was to span the next 30 hours or so. There was an ancient and fragile Mayan woman, a variety of old medicine ladies, and an assortment of 50 or so hippies and eccentrics of all ages from all over the country present. We made an alter with offerings of seeds and fruit and flowers and danced around it chanting. We waited around a lot. We sat in a small half cave and watched drummers sing and play over a slideshow of photos that looked like national geographic best of animals loving the earth and one another, a series of lectures on Mayan astrology, a set of dances by 17 year old girls belly dancing to Mexican music (oh, Latin America), and then climbed down through a huge and ancient cave complex to another alter, where we sat all night dancing in the dust and chanting and lighting fires and learning new words. The next morning we made a ritual fire and a Temezcal, which is a kind of spiritual sauna. I think it definitely tops my list of weirdest things I have ever done. We concluded the weirdness of this day by driving straight into Mexico City and getting spectacularly lost. We made it to Carlos’s brother’s house, however, and set out to explore starting tomorrow.

On a less weird note, I wanted to add, largely to make my mother and all the other family friends I have alarmed feel better, that we have been doing more normal travel things lately. We drive around and look at very old pretty churches. We hike in actual national parks with trails. We camp in camp grounds, we swim in rivers, we eat lunch. We pick up people here and there, we meet travelers at every stop, we acquire friends. It’s been pleasant. I’m getting used to it.

Un beso

m

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

5 Marvelous Treats

1. We camped in the middle of a river at the base of a waterfall. It was like swiss family robinson, only low fi. All pools of water and trees and tents. I backpaddled under a waterfall.

2. Carlos stopped learning new songs to play on the guitar four years ago. This being the case, his only cover songs are mid ninties pop rock hits. My heart was filled with joy when he broke out in song to: "I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend". Oh yes.

3. On our way paddling up river to see the Tamul waterfall, we stopped at a ceanote, and I back paddled under a stalagmite. Stalagtite? It was glorious!!! I felt very Planet Earth like. There was even a small bat.

4. Xilitla. Surrealist ruins in the middle of the jungle. I climbed stairways into nothing and swam in a waterfall next to cement towers that twist and open.


5. Nopal cactus is delicious, and probably the most literal of the aformentioned treats.

Friday, July 17, 2009

El Cielo

The jungle is the loudest place I have ever been.



Other surprises: It turns out that Carlos intends for this to be a pretty hardcore camping/hiking/outdoor kind of trip. Also he eats very little for the amount of climbing, swimming, and sweating we do. It's amazing how much your body can, in fact, do without collapsing. In fact, there have been some times recently in which I actually wished that it would just collapse, that I would pass out, hit my head on a rock, and have to be helicoptered out to a hospital somewhere far away. Just sayin. But it's been a pretty decent trade off between things that make me wish I could be hospitalized and things that make me happy. I think.

Early this week Carlos and I headed south from Monterrey towards El Cielo, a bioreserve where three ecologies meet (desert, forest, jungle) high in the mountains. Of course we left the city five hours late and ended up arriving in the dark, opting to crash with some family friends, who were, of course, not at home, and so we camped in their front yard. It was humid, over 90 degrees, and the birds around their house sound like they are in space. Or under water. Screaming under water.

In the morning Carlos told me the hike would be "un poco pesado", so we left some of our heavier things in the courtyard so as to lighten our backpacks. Honestly I had no intention of ever using the backpack I brought to hike and camp at all. It was just to take things on buses and planes. So hiking up the side of a mountain, straight up, for six hours in the midday heat carrying 30 pounds or so on my back was not in my plans either. There were spiny plants and spiders and mosquitoes. Actually, we got lost (of course) and ended up hiking even further than necessary. At one point my ankles and legs simply could not do it any longer. They only shook and bent to the sudes. But there was nothing to be done. Finally a campesino out cutting and collecting leaves found us and took us to the nearest town with him, and we ended up camping in his backyard, as we literally couldn't take one more step.


It turned out for the best though. El Cielo is a strange place to visit, mainly because it is a tourist location but so isolated and old that nothing really caters to tourists. There is nowhere to go, per say, except to the only three towns in the mountainous jungle, and then off hiking to various viewpoints (which we often couldn't find, despite scaling, on various days, sheer cliffs covered in rocks that appeared to be good homes for large spiders which I fortunately did not encounter, in our attempts) and various rivers (which were brilliantly cold and made for swimming and getting blood, mosquitoes, and bugs off of you). You can't get around except by taking the insane kind of walks that Carlos and I did our first day, paying a ton of money to a guide if one can be found, or hitching rides. As we do everything for free, you can imagine our attempts to movew around. On the plus side, the campesino who we stayed with was lovely, and his whole family hung out with us every night, made us coffee and tortillas, played ball with us. It was super charming.




Sometimes I feel like I must just be totally crazy to do this. People always tell you that you can do things you never imagined you could, and I always thought, well, I like to nap and chain smoke when left to my own devices, that will never happen to me. But here goes. I think though, that some craziness is in fact present. But then everywhere I look it's beautiful. Stunningly so. In El Cielo there are jaguars. There are also herds of butterflies that scatter like flocks of pigeons when you walk into them. There are tiny houses and children and donkeys in the sunset. I have seen every sunset that has passed our earth since I have been here. On the way down from El Cielo, which was an extreme trip even in a car, we stopped at a huge river and swam in the currents. You know, I haven't met a single Mexican who doesn't want to live here. Why would you ever leave, except for the obvious economics? I could spend a year here and not find everything. In fact I may have to come back if I want to see even a single city.


This week we explore the Sierra Potosi, lots of waterfalls and caves and jungle, and end up in Xilita eventually, which was in National Geographic's "Hidden Mexico" edition, if you're curious. Hopefully we will be in D.F. by the first week of August, where I will surely be able to download photos. With love


m

ps- I finally got a job confirmation! I begin interning for the Foundation for Sustainable Development in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the end of September. Come visit next March-August, please

La Huasteca


Twenty minutes outside of Monterrey this sierra begins, and it stretches all the way to the South of Veracruz. In the northern areas it's pure desert and inhabited only by Huichol indians and hippies from Colorado. Seriously. We drove in one night with a Carlos's usual crew, arrived in the dark among a bunch of massive rocks, like those I imagine on mars, in order to lay around in the back of the pickup, listen to poprock, and look at stars. After a while this crazy music began, and we encountered a group (possibly Huichol, impossible to tell in the pitch blackness) playing guitars and pipes and drums and using those things you spin over your head to make sci fi noises. So we sat and played percussion on our knees until they wandered away. Things like this seem to happen to Carlos constantly. As hard as I tried to have some spiritual, natural, transcendent experience, mostly I think I just sat. After the musicians left, a hippie from Colorado crawled out of a rock to talk to us. He has been living in La Huasteca for over a year, except for a bit after he fell 100 feet off a cliff face and was deported after being hospitalized. He lives off rabbits. I feel very far from home.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Mexicans in Mexico

Monterrey is a huge, fairly ugly city that sprawls around an extremely beautiful part of Northern Mexico. There are mountains everywhere, and since it´s been over 100 degrees most days, they are prettiest at sunset. Then they disappear, and at night you only see the valleys glittering while you drive across town, which takes hours. It looks something like this, only lots more so:


I spent this week following Carlos around, running errands, helping him finish his CD, looking around the city center, and going to a lot of house parties. At first I couldn´t understand half of what his friends said to me, but I am learning their slang fast, and realizing that they aren´t saying anything at all, really, except: cool awesome yeah really wow. It´s still weird waking up here and trying to figure out what language I´m thinking in and where I am. Today I went with all the women in Carlos´s family to a huge baby shower which had a baby made out of cake.

Before I came here I told Carlos I wanted to visit every place he had ever sent me a picture of. So two days ago he decided to take me and a couple of his friends to Cuatro Cienagos, a place way out in the desert 3 or 4 hours from Monterrey where there are these huge shallow lakes in the middle of the mountains. It looks beautiful in the photos I saw, but I wouldn´t know what it really looks like, because the boys managed to get spectacularly lost on the highway (don´t worry mom, we´ll bring a map when we actually leave) and we ended up hours and hours from Cuatro Cienagos, in the south of the state of Nuevo Leon. The road was lovely though, and appeared outside my window like this:


So we opted to go to El Real de Catorce instead, as we were already rather close. The Real is an ancient city, which has both an indigenous and colonial history, and which is hidden in the middle of nowhere in the mountains of the desert. To get in you have to drive through this INSANE tunnel that lasts for more than 15 minutes, and which is all bare rock and dirt and like nothing I have ever seen. The city is tiny and old and all hills, rock, and dust. It looks something like this:


Actually, we camped about 30 feet from that last photo, amidst more of the old ruins. The city itself is much more condensed and colonial, but we were on the edge of the desert. We camped out for the night, and of course, being hippies, my companions sat by the fire and played guitar and drums and sang all night long. Every American hippie´s fantasy, I´m sure. Here is a picture of my lovely Mexican companions, left to right: Pato, Bella, Christina, and Carlos. I was also rockin the bandana + hat but escaped unphotographed.


So that´s this week! I head south Monday, toward Xilitla. I have yet to learn anything about health or revolutions, but I also haven´t totally freaked out or gotten really sick yet, and I am having a spectacular time exploring and being a guest in this town. Entonces, adelente! Un beso, compañeros.