Hasta luego Mexico

The one month Pathfinder trip has come to an end. It was sad to leave, as I was doing my second round of goodbye hugs Martin said that I was saying goodbye in the Mexican way:

The English leave without saying goodbye

The Mexicans say goodbye without leaving

I certainly hope that it is not goodbye for good and I will come back soon. Mexico does have an antecedent of luring Balliolites into never leaving, as with Martin and Tim.

The trip has been amazing. Thanks to everyone who made this trip possible especially Martin, but also Tim, the 2 Malu's, Isabel and Balliol of course. Thanks for following my first ever blog, I hope you enjoyed it :). Feel free to write comments, posts or questions.

 

 

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The delicious cactus

Cactus are everywhere in Mexico, many public spaces have them: the two main varieties seen are nopal and pulque. And I must say I'm in love with Nopal. The leaves are delicious fried in tortillas and the red fruit (prickly pear) is extremely sweet and juicy.

 

 

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15th of September

Shame we're just missing it, but the whole of Mexico was getting itself ready for the 15th of September independence celebration. Viva Mexico banner in the Zocalo!

At every street corner small mexican themed trolleys can be found.

Punting in Mexico city

South of Mexico city, Xochimilco seems to have a similar tradition to Oxford punts. Cassandra told us that together with a big group of friends, they often hire these 'trajineras' after school or university with drinks and some nibbles. The boats are more colourful and bigger than our Oxford punts but the concept is similar and the boat is driven with the same long wooden stick. Mariachi bands also rent a trajinera to sing to neighbouring boats, just like in the restaurants! I think there's an idea for the acapella bands in Oxford: take a punt in summer on the isis and get tourists or students to pay them to sing a couple of songs for them on the river! The river was quiet so the 'punter' let us show off our Oxford punting skills.

Sea, surf and turtles

Just before heading back to Mexico city, Malu Lajous kindly invited us to her beach house in Puerto Escondido. Yes Mexico has other beach areas apart from Cancun ;). This is a beautifully well kept small fishing town on the west coast. The main beach, Zicatela, is very famous amongst surfers from all over the world, a big international competition takes place every year in November.

Turtles come and lay their eggs on the beach every year in August/September. They come out of the water at night and can lay up to 130 eggs in a single hole. If the eggs survive their many predators, 45 days later the eggs hatch and the small turtles still face similar predators in the sea. In the last decades there have been very big incentives to protect these turtles (http://fmcn.org/mares-y-costas/). We were lucky to see how this is done upfront. Two men walk up and down the beach 4-5 times per night and wait patiently to see if any turtles come to lay their eggs. If they see one, they then move the eggs to the protected area pictured here. Palm leaves cover each batch of eggs as this year it hasn't rained much and the sand can get very hot. Unfortunately some of the eggs, got cooked by the heat of the sand. The efforts to protect these amazing creatures have been successful, with many more turtles surviving. Once the baby turtle has been set free, it comes back to the same beach 10 years later to lay its own eggs. There are different species of turtles but some of them can way up to 1/2 a ton! Despite turtles having a very hard shell for most of their lives, I was surprised to see that their egg shell is actually very thin (almost transparent), soft and the exact same shape and size as a ping pong ball. 

Chiapa's archeological sites

The famous archeological site in Chiapas is Palenque, with its main feature being the Palace where the tower is. There is also Pakal's famous tomb that he designed himself with the tree of life inscription on a slab of stone weighing almost 7 tons. He designed his own tomb and made sure it reflected the power he had.

Another mayan city we visited was Yachilan, a rival of Palenque - which we had to get to by boat (previously one had to take a small plane to get to it). The other side of the bank is Guatemala and the river is shared by Mexico and Guatemala.

An architectural feature of this city is the high stone structure that rests above the temples - you can see part of the structure in this picture.

Bonampak was under the rule of Yachilan and is now known for the colour paintings that have been amazingly preserved over the last 1500 years. They are beautiful and seeing them gave me a glimpse of how colourful and beautiful all the walls must have been at that time. There are three mural paintings: the first one depicts a celebration of the birth of a heir (with a Lion King style pose of the baby being held to the public), the second one shows a war scene and the third one represents a celebration of offerings to the gods. Unfortunately it seems I didn't take any pictures of these paintings, but I do have a picture from the top of the temple - you can see how green it is!

Finally the last vestige of Mayan culture we saw in Chiapas was the Lacanja temple in the Lacandon jungle. It was quite surreal to be walking in very dense jungle and suddenly come across a little hill with this temple on it. As opposed to other sites, our Lacandon guide told us it has not been touched or restored since it was found.

Chiapas-cades

Chiapas is a very green state with beautiful rivers and cascades all over the region:

- Lagos de Montebello (one of the 59 lakes in the park - just as we got onto one of those wooden rafts to go to the island it started to pour down with heavy tropical rainy season rain and didn't stop till we got back to shore)



- Cascadas el Chiflon (more than 100 m tall, where we zip lined our way down from the cascade!)

- Cascada Misol Ha (40 m high, you could walk behind it and go into a 30 m deep dark cave)

- Agua Azul (a beautiful set of small cascades, I got a great cascade back massage there)


- Lacandon jungle cascade (with beautiful caves behind and some adrenaline pumping jumping spots)