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)

Mexico's canyon del sumidero

It honestly felt like I was in Jurassic park with the 1000m high rock walls surrounding us, the pelicans and other species of birds flying over and the crocodiles basking in the sun. Although as far as I know, as opposed to Jurassic park, humans are not at risk as every year there is a major international open water competition where swimmers from all over the world swim through the canyon and there have never been incidents of the crocodiles attacking the swimmers. This beautiful canyon is only 1h30 or so from San Cristobal de Las Casas it's definitely worth a visit. Impressive figure: apprently every year they need to clean about 3000 tons of waste that accumulate in the canon due to its location downstream from many big cities.

 

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Pakal the Mayan King

We arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas and were introduced to a famous Mayan king through a rather interesting play that may have caused us to giggle more than once. It was told in a local indigenous language with very few subtitles, which made the story quite challenging to follow.

Pakal, the king, lived till he was 80 and was very tall, he is an emblematic figure of Palenque, an archeological site close by. The play showed some of their rituals, such as piercing their genitals or thigh with a needle. The blood that came out was burnt and the smoke represented their offering to the gods. It felt a bit like a smoky room with people on drugs hallucinating. There are carvings in Palenque that explain this ritual.

We also got to see the famous ball game, they used light projections to show the trajectory of the ball. It would have been more exciting to see it with a real rubber ball but I believe it's quite complicated to play, especially on a small stage play.

 

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The Mexican national car

Before I move on to the next state we visited: Chiapas. I thought I would talk about what seems to be Mexico's national car: The Beetle! It's everywhere, I hadn't noticed at first but once Emma pointed it out I didn't stop seeing them. Volkswagen had some big factories in Puebla and produced the Beetle until early 2000's. Apparently the last beetle in the world was produced in Puebla in 2003.

 

 

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Puzzle Pyramids - built without any mortar

This was an important Zapoteca place of worship. A distinguishing feature of these pyramids is that they were built without any mortar. Pieces of the pyramid were stacked and fitted together in such a way that no type of cement was needed - this is the such archeological site in Mexico I believe. The small pieces of stones were fitted together to form these pretty patterns (the cement seen in the pictures was added as part of the restoration process, but you can clearly see most stones have no cement between them).

Oldest and biggest tree (in the world?)

The tule tree in Oaxaca is quite impressive. I had my doubts about going to visit it, but I'm glad I saw this colossal tree that is over 2000 years old and has a trunk diameter of 15 m! When I asked what the entry fee of 10 pesos was for, they said it was to contribute towards the 14 kilos of water they need to feed it each day! Here's a tree-selfie, some of the people on the left can give you an idea of the size of the tree.

I would expect such a huge tree to be in the jungle, but less than 10 meters away, its neighbour is none other than this pretty church (the leaves on the top left corner of the picture belong to the tule tree).

Monte Alban - oldest city in mesoamerica

A zapoteca city built in 500 BC and very little is known about how they lived at that time. Our guide kept emphasising that all things that had been told about the place were all speculations - he more or less said that our guess was as good as his.

The ball game is a curious ritual/sport that was played by many civilisations - although it's not clear how similar the game played in this early zapoteca court is to the mayan or aztec game. The overall rules are that a rubber ball was hit mostly using hips and in some cases the players were sacrificed to the gods at the end. Some say it was the winner that was sacrificed, as they wanted to send the most powerful one to the gods. Here you can see one of these courts. 

Oaxaca and it's teachers

Malu Lajous (consultant, civil servant and micro financer) tells us about the situation of the teacher's protest in Oaxaca against some (as many people said, much needed) government reforms. It has been going on for months, when we visited they had been camping in the zocalo for a while. On the second day of the new academic year (19th of August) they closed down the school opposite Malu's house, so the parents started protesting. It was interesting to see these local politics - it felt a bit like being back home in France ;).

 

Picture of the parents protesting outside the school - I didn't want to get too close, seems like journalism photography isn't my forte.

Emma on the comfy 5h ADO bus from Puebla to Oaxaca.

Part of Malu's beautiful garden, instead of a cement wall she has a wall of cactus separating the garage from the garden.

 

 

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My first Zumba class

Despite the many opportunities I got in Oxford, I never managed to go to a single Zumba class. So as we were walking in Puebla's Zocalo (City centre) at 9am, a couple of hours before our bus to Oaxaca, we saw an open air Zumba class that I couldn't resist joining. It was my first and hopefully not last class.

 

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Murals in Chapultepec

Murals are everywhere in Mexico. They are big, beautiful, vibrant, colourful and depict important historical events or legends. We found some in each municipal palace in the villages of Puebla which reminded me of the ones we saw in the Chapultepec castle. They depict Mexico's complicated history and many battles.

Ceiling mural of the niños héroes story (painted by Gabriel Flores completed in 1970). The legend says that the teenage boy soldiers preferred to jump off the cliff than surrender to the Americans during the battle in 1847. The soldier is wrapped in the Mexican flag and the outline of the Mexican eagle is depicted above him.

Mural of the victory of Francisco Madera over Porfirio Diaz, the castle of Chapultepec is in the back drop (painted by Juan O'Gorman in 1969)

Obviously the Diego Riviera murals are missing here, I hope to upload some of them later.

 

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Cholula - 7 pyramids and a church

Another one of the magical towns in Puebla. 7 pyramids built on top of each other by different Mexican civilisations. The theory is they didn't destroy the previous temple because they were afraid the gods would get angry. From the church you get a beautiful view of the town and the volcano Popo.

 

 

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