Guanajuatoization

Mucho tiempo has pasted since I last posted an accounting of my southern adventures, but much of it has been worth recounting, so bare with me kind readers.

We spent two nights camping on different spots of the beautiful Rio Santa Maria. The river itself is almost a bright blue, possibly from heavy calcium deposits in the water. The first night we camped in a national park under a highway bridge, and there were still a few cows roaming around when we pulled into our site. We got there with just enough time to jump into the river before the sun went behind the mountains. In the morning we witnessed a miracle. A little shop was open just down the road that sold coffee.

After a hike up the river valley and a swim, we drove a few hours to a spot on the river Justin where had been during his first winter in Mexico nine years ago. The valley on the way down was straight out of Apocalypse Now, minus the war. Tall palm trees, cane fields as far as one could see with mountains on all sides, it was stunning. A number of locals had told us it was just a dirt road down to the river, and one not in particularly good shape, but turned out to be newly paved, which made the ride all that more enjoyable.

When we got to the campsite, however, we figured out why the road was newly paved. There was a construction site on the bank of the river, no structures yet, but bulldozers and piles of rock ten feet high all around. Someone was about to create a major tourist destination. To the right of the construction there was a still a large grass field with horses grazing and a few Mexican families enjoying the afternoon by the river. We set up our campsite and started to collect wood for a fire. Justin met a young local man named Delfino who offered to boat us up river to the Tamul waterfall for a very reasonable price. We made plans for him to meet us at the campsite at eleven am the next morning.

In the morning the campsite was blanketed in a fog, with mist rising off the river, which was now much warmer than the air. I could have been convinced I woke up in Ireland, rolling green hills with horses grazing, and it was all a ten minute drive from what looked like South East Asia. Microclimates present a challenge the foundations of my atheism. Justin, Dan and I ran into Delfino early in the morning and he recommended a place just up the road that sold coffee, another miracle. Our intention was to just get our morning fix and take it back to camp, waiting for the others to awake before breaking fast, but men are weak. We buckled under the temptation of huevos mexicanos—green chilies, tomatoes, onions: the colors of the Mexican flag. We watched the Mexican equivalent of The View under a circular thatched roof with open sides. Add to all these wonders the fact that the establishment had a toilet with a seat, and I might has well of died and been in heaven.

We figured that Delfino would have a motor boat, but he grabbed an oar for each of us from the back of his mini-van. We set out on a fifteen minute walk through the cane fields to where he and his partner Celestino docked their boat. Tamul is a major tourist destination, so there were many boats, all painted vibrant two color schemes. We even passed one team of guides retouching the paint on their vessel.

We paddled up stream for about half an hour through gorgeous canyons and surrealist rock formations. We docked on a big rock in the middle of the river about three hundred feet from the Tamul waterfall, one of the largest in Mexico. As we were rowing back we passed a few boats of Mexican tourists heading up to the falls, one boat ferrying the young couple we had seen doing the adult at the previous waterfall we visited (see the previous blog entry). We gave them a big smile and waved.

About halfway back down the river we stopped at a spring-water cave and all went swimming. Delfino said it was at least a hundred feet deep, and it seemed about thirty feet high at some points with giant stalactites hanging down. It was Samantha and Kyle's last day in Mexico, and there couldn't have been a better way to spend it.

That night we rented a hotel room on the north side of Cuidad Valles so that Sam and Kyle would be on the road to the border in the morning. The owner, or owner's husband—it was hard to tell, looked like an aging heavyset Mexican Sammy Davis Jr. with a terrible jet black toupee. He wore an unnecessarily heavy black leather jacket and carried around photo copied magazine articles that purportedly proved he had been one of the first people to discover the Grand Canyon, and that he personally knew Bill Clinton. He was very eager to explain this to anyone passing by, whether or not they understood a word of Spanish.

Cuidad Valles is the doppelganger for the part of Tel Aviv that reminds one of Queens, NY. According to the shy and awkward teenager who worked at the internet cafe where the internet didn't work, the city has no town square, though this may have been lost in translation. We ate terrible tortas at a fast food joint where I accidentally ordered “papas gordo”, or “fat fries” when I meant to say “grande” or “large”.

After saying our goodbyes to Sam, Kyle, and the Workhorse Van the next morning, the remaining four of us—Dan, Justin, Zeb and myself—walked across the street to the gorditas stand where all the cops in Valles hang out. We debated our route for a long time and decided to take the road less traveled, or at least the road less traveled by Justin and Zeb, since neither Dan nor I have traveled any roads in Mexico. We decided to head west and south to Guanajuato, then down through Michoacan, onto Acapulco, and finally over to the Oaxacan beaches following the southern coast. It seemed like a fine plan, but first we had to get through San Luis Potosi and the populated desert of northern central Mexico.

So far, we had mainly been in Hausteca, which is not a state but a cultural and geographic region, analogous to “New England,” “the Pacific Northwest,” or “Mid-Atlantic” in the states. Huasteca is lush and vibrant, completely divorced from what comes to the average yank's mind when they think of Mexico. The area around San Luis Potosi, however, is exactly the poverty, desolation, arid landscape and general fucked-up-ness that is the gringo's stereotype of Mexico. Dry, shrubby desert surrounded us in all directions. The building material changed from Hausteca's defiantly charming concrete cinder blocks to light red brick with heavy caulking in designs that somehow simply looked sad and tired against the barren landscape. Of the buildings we passed, most were only one story, half were abandoned, and half of the remaining ones were in an indefinite state of incompletion. We never made it to the center of San Luis Potosi, which perhaps does have some charming historical buildings, but the outskirts were stock industrial city, much like the strips of Queens, NY that are all chopshops and food stands plopped down in the middle of the desert.

Our first attempt to camp for the night was in an abandoned national park site just south of the city. It sure did look perfect on the map. We drove through a small town across from a highway and a thermo-electrical plant. The whole scene appeared to be out of a contemporary movie about the war in Iraq, if the studios thought the audience was gullible enough to believe small towns in Iraq were built out of light red brick. But the town sure did look like it had just been bombed. There was hardly one completed building amongst the lot, though we did pass an internet cafe on one corner. Many Mexicans appear to be content getting halfway through a building project, erecting two and three quarters of the walls, then sitting back, and sighing to themselves “eh, that's enough.” Everything from dad adding a second story to the family home to four story apartment buildings obviously built by a developer seem to follow this pattern. Creation and destruction achieve the same aesthetic.

When the government decides to close a national park in Mexico this must entail the removal of all signs, roads, and any evidence what so ever that the place ever existed. The sun was already setting behind the mountains when we decided to abandon our search for the park and just head down the way hoping to find a dirt road to camp on. We eventually found such a road, though by now it was dark, so we weren't quite sure how clean or unoccupied our campsite was. It was on a little creek next to some farm land. While Zeb and I were setting up our tent under some trees, we heard what we thought was a shotgun firing. I can't say I was the most relaxed I've ever been. It turned out to just be fireworks that someone thought were important to set off to celebrate Tuesday night. Once we had set everything up, a horse drawn cart with two or three farm hands passed us on it's way to the main road. They didn't stop or say anything to us. We awoke the next morning to discover that the place was covered in trash and that there was a little house just across the creek through some trees. A few more donkey pulled carts and one pick-up truck drove right passed us, however, and no one seemed to mind our camping there.

Guanajuato was our next destination and we all liked it so much that we ended up spending two days in the town. It is one of the most beautiful small cities I have ever seen. Built in a steep canyon in the 16^th century, it resembles the medieval cities of Europe but with the extreme landscape and vibrant colors of the buildings, it surpasses many of them with it's splendor. I also drank the first decent espresso I've had in all of Mexico. It is definitely a college/tourist town, which does make some of its vibrancy feel artificial, but still, there are enough people who live there milling around and going about their daily business that the place would feel vibrant non-the-less.

One thing I noticed that U.S. planners could glean from such a city was how incredibly small many of the store fronts were. Many shops were no more than ten feet deep and maybe ten or twenty feet wide. It might be a way to keep chain stores out of cities, and a way to integrate the food cart movement into the street scape. The small business food carts that are springing up all around Portland and Austin (probably other cities, and in Portland at least the city government is actively encouraging it) are a great recent U.S. city revitalization plan, and they certainly have their charms, but they can't compare to having shops of the same size (and same rent) built into the city facade. I'd love to do a study on Guanajuato, or any city really, that compared store size, rent, profit, distance from the employees homes and number of employees.

My friend Tommy Rouse once explained the chasm between people who like living in cities versus people who don't as the difference between people who like being around crazy people and people who don't want to engage with crazy people. While I think he meant it as a humorous slight against the fear associated with suburban flight, the truth is most often spoken in jest. People watching is certainly one of my main reasons for loving city life, and the more eccentric the people, the more entertaining it is to watch them. And I don't mean this in a condescending way. I strongly believe Ronald Reagan should go down in history as one of our worst presidents for cutting funding for programs assisting people with mental handicaps and creating the immoral homeless problem that the U.S. has. But I also think there is a difference between laughing at someone and appreciating their eccentricities. I've lived in some great cities for appreciating crazy people—Minneapolis, New York, Baltimore—but I have to admit, I saw a man in Guanajuato Mexico whom I believe has all the others beat. He was walking down the busiest tourist street with a toilet on his head. This man deserves all the government assistance available to help him get through this hard, hard life, but he also deserves an award for making me and most of the people on that street smile.

We found a great campsite just outside of town on the edge of a rock quarry that was also grazing land for cattle and sheep. When one shepherd passed by with his flock he waved and smiled, and gestured charades of us sleeping there for the night. It seemed like the perfect campsite. In the morning, however, we noticed two little dogs hanged together by a rope on a tree on our way out. I'm hoping there is some custom I don't know about that can explain this, but regardless it was a bit disturbing.

The next night we camped south of Guanajuato on some dirt farm road, and the next morning headed to Morelia, the capital of the state of Michoacan. Morelia is an old colonial city, famous for its ice cream, and I did have the best soft served ice cream of my life there, cappuccino flavored. Even though the town was old and incredibly beautiful, after being on the winding streets Guanajuato, Morelia's grid felt oppressive. We also were unfortunately right in the downtown district which was seventy five percent shoe stores. One thing of note about Morelia was it's bus system. They used small white vans and painted them with colored stripes to represent which line the drove. I've always thought that buses should copy the “colored line” system that most subways employ, and I've always thought that smaller buses that came more frequently made more sense. Morelia seems to prove that these are good ideas and that they can work.

Of the four of us, I seem to be the only fan of big cities, so rather than find the cool and hip part of town we hightailed it out of there. We ended up in Patzcuaro, a city founded in the 14^th century by the indigenous ruler Tzintzuntzan as a lake resort town for the nobility. In Patzcuaro all the buildings are painted white, with a three foot high burnt sienna stripe around the base and terra cotta roofs. The only signs for the stores are painted on the buildings above the door in a black elaborate font, with the first letter of the words painted in red. And, at least in one cafe, they pull espresso shots that rival Portland's. I've even seen a few women in their mid-twenties/early-thirties that appear to be single in this town, a rarity so far on this trip, though they all seem to be vacationing with their mothers. We found an extremely reasonable hotel for less than eight dollars each, which means I was able to enjoy another gourmet espresso cortado for breakfast today.