North to South, South to North

We successfully transversed the Untied States from South to North after we left the trailer park in Southern New Mexico, and exited the United States via North Dakota. We mostly just drove straight without many stops, but we do have a few pieces of advice for intrepid travellers who might follow in our footsteps:

 a) Just because someplace is the busiest restaurant in a small town, doesn't mean that the food will be particularly good. We couldn't resist stopping in "Truth or Consequences", New Mexico for lunch (otherwise known as "T or C" on roadsigns where they need to conserve space). We pulled up to the busiest Mexican restaurant in town, got one of the last tables....and had a meal that I certainly wouldn't recommend travelling to New Mexico to enjoy. We'd had a similar experience in a Route 66 diner on our way down to Mexico too.

 b) New Mexio would certainly be an interesting place to spend some time. It has the single longest list of places we *didn't* visit that I might have liked to. The Trinity site at the White Sands Missile Range (admittedly only open 2 days a year), the Very Large Array (radio telescope), Los Alamos. Even Roswell!

 c) Petroglyphs are better viewed on a dry day. It was raining the morning we visited the Petroglyph National Monument near Albuquerque, and these petroglyphs were made by rock percussion....flaking off the front surface of the rock. Not so visible when the rock is wet. But on the bright side, it meant that the bunnies and a roadrunner weren't frightened away by previous visitors before our arrival, and viewing the petroglyphs became kind of a treasure hunt.

 d) Those vaguely remembered pictures and drawings from my childhood of Pueblo Indians in cliff dwellings? Those are the Puye cliff dwellings North of Santa Fe. It's actually an archeological site, under the stewardship of the local Indian band. Well worth a visit!

 e) Denver has a high tech park, apparently occupied by modest tech companies. We exited the highway there looking for lunch. But none of the office buildings were emblazoned with company names. Mostly shared buildings with smaller companies? Modesty? Secrecy? Strict sign by-laws?

 f) If you've just spent several hours driving by fields of cows, beef is a good menu choice. This worked in Chihuahua City, Mexico and it worked in Lexington Nebraska.

 g) Despite the proliferation of chain restaurants along the interstates, the classic truck stop restaurant is still hanging in there. Ricks in Lexington Nebraska could be out of a book, including waitresses who are more interested in visiting with friends among the customers instead of random strangers, and perhaps the best prime rib I've ever eaten...perfectly medium rare, tender as anything, tasty, and only $9 when purchased as part of a Prime Rib sandwich (like a steak sandwich, but with prime rib. Num!)

 h) Lincoln Nebraska is pleasantly surprising. It has a gentrified old warehouse district with little shops and trendy restaurants (like Brix and Stones, my new favorite punning restaurant name), and a skookum museum of quilting.

 i) "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska"a song by a group called Free Hot Lunch is innaccurate. There are hills (at least rolling ones), trees, and many curves in the road between Omaha and Lexington. If they think that's a boring straight piece of road, they should try heading north to the Dakotas.

 j) Actually the Dakotas aren't so boring to drive through either. It's where we first encountered consistent snow cover, and it generally reminded me of home. Lots of copses of trees, farmyards, birds, and big sky to watch as you drive along.  Not to mention that at sunset, you can see the shadow of the wheels of your car!

New Mexico, border thoughts

I'd never given much thought to New Mexico.  But as it turns out, there's a lot of there there.

After crossing the border into the US, we spent 4 days in a rented RV on the New Mexico/ Arizona border on the fringe of the Chiricahua Mountains.  I saw my first cardinals (male and female) in the flesh, did a hike to find some pictographs,  saw some interesting rock formations, saw the Milky Way, and enjoyed 4 days without travelling a whit.

It's a pretty corner of the world, and one I wouldn't mind visiting again.

But....I was always very conscious that we were close to the US border here.

It was a little creepy. We saw Border Patrol trucks patrolling every day that we were in the region, often more than once.  The few casual conversations we had with the developer of the "Astronomy Villages" in the region touched on "Mexicans" and illegal immigration within a few minutes.  There were signs along the highway in the Chiricahuas warning you that there were illegal immigrants in the area.  And on our way out of Las Cruces on our way there, and again when we headed North from Las Cruces after our visit, we had to pass through a checkpoint where the only question was "Are you a citizen?".  And somehow, "No we're Canadians" wasn't enough to prompt any interest in us, or even a request to see our ID.  Racial profiling anyone? Which is particularly ironic given that this part of the world was Mexican until the mid-19th Century and that there are plenty of American citizens that are ethnically "Mexican" in the region as a result.

Going overboard...4 posts!

We finally had a free day today and I'm afraid I went a little overboard.  This is my fourth post of the day.   Just a heads up that you should scroll back a bit if you're interested in following my blog.

Back in the US, back in the US, back in the US of A.....

Well, we hit the border yesterday without incident, and passed through without any drama or even an inspection.  It was even completely obvious where to go to turn in our Mexican Tourist Cards and Temporary Car Importation Certificate (both of which are necessary to drive in Mexico).  This was quite the contrast with our entry into Mexico, which involved two separate searches for the correct offices.

Also, I don't know about you, but I naturally assume that although things will be fine in the end, crossing borders will be a hassle.  I was fully prepared for there to be a long line-up, and then to have US customs to ask us lots of questions, pull us aside and inspect the food items that we were bringing across, and perhaps even search our car on general principles.  Not, you understand, because we had anything to hide.  We'd even regretfully dumped the chipil seeds we'd bought in the Villa Etla market so that we could grow this uniquely Oaxacan herb ourselves at home.   (We realized after purchasing them that seeds are a prohibited plant material.  And although it was hard to imagine what harm those seeds could do in Vancouver given that any bug adapted to Oaxacan near-desert conditions would struggle to survive a single wet, cold, and rainy Vancouver winter,  what do I know?  IANAPB or entomologist.  (IANAPB = I Am Not a Plant Biologist, of course)).

But as it turns out, everything went very smoothly.  We'd planned to spend the night at Las Cruces, New Mexico, only about 45 minutes past the border.  We got there about 2pm, even after stopping in El Paso for lunch.

La Cruces is one of the many formerly Mexican towns that pre-dates the American annexation of this part  of the world.  We spent the remainder of the afternoon in the historic La Mesilla town centre eating ice cream, visiting shops, and, ironically, learning more about the carpets that we bought in Teotitlan del Valle (near Oaxaca).  The woman who runs one of the shops in La Mesilla imports large quantities of Zapotec carpets and is quite knowledgeable about them.  Unfortunately, she put the idea into my head that at least one of the carpets that we bought is an investment piece, and that we might want to consider framing what I'd imagined would be a mat for our back door....I will try to resist.  Aren't beautiful useful objects meant to be used?

Tea or Chocolate?

Those of you who read my (lame) explanation of my blog name may be wondering what the status of my caffeine addiction is.

As expected, finding tea in Mexico was almost impossible.  Most restaurants that serve tea at all serve herbal teas of some kind, and seem puzzled when you request "tea negro" (black tea).    If they have it, it's generally cinamon tea. Which isn't bad from time to time, but is not exactly my idea of a "get me up in the morning" beverage.

Fortunately, I brought a supply of tea with me from Canada, which lasted through my month with a house and the ability to heat water in Oaxaca.  Once we gave up the house.....I tried drinking chocolate, I suffered through coffees of various kinds....and concluded that I didn't really have a serious addiction.  At least, I managed to survive without caffeinated beverages on days when I couldn't face chocolate or coffee, without even a caffeine headache to show for it.

If I were a better person, I would resolve to free myself and avoid getting addicted again.  But instead I stocked up on tea when we went grocery shopping for our 4 days staying in an RV in the New Mexico dessert.

I could make up an excuse like "it will be useful to have the tea to warm up and stay awake for the astronomy".  But instead, I'll level with my readers......it's because I like tea.  When we discovered a hip "tea parlour" across the street from our hotel in Mexico City, I found myself craving tea as soon as I noticed the shop.  (Before that, I was fine.)  And thoughts of blogging and drinking tea occupied my mind when Harv proposed the stay in the RV park.

Oh well.  I suspect there are one or two worse things in the world than a tea addiction.  :-)

Photographing every artifact in the Mexico City Museum of Anthropology

Sorry it's been so long since I blogged.....I was discouraged by writing almost an entire blog post a few days ago, saving it (so I thought), and then finding that it was gone when I returned to blogger to post it. Vagaries of slow connections and slow website responses. Frustrating.

Anyway, as per the title of this post, if you take a look at our photos for this trip, most of them are fairly static, or formal.  Things like pictures of pretty buildings or every artifact in the Mexico Museum of Anthropology.  (Okay, Harv hasn't posted every photo we took there.....and we didn't even take pictures of everything in the museum.  Although you'd be forgiven for doubting that statement if you were forced to sit through the "slide show" version of all of the photos from our trip.  The Museum of Anthropology would occupy approximately hours 12 through 20 :-).

Unfortunately, our Canon Digital Elf (the snap camera) died about 2 weeks into our trip.   All of our photos since then have been taken with the SLR, which is great, but is too heavy to carry everywhere we go. It also seems like too much trouble to haul out for a quick shot in a street or market or while we're driving.  Which means that we don't have photos of a lot of fun things that we've encountered.  Like the innumerable cars parked in the "No Estationmento" (No Parking) zones, or the drift of plastic bags captured in one particular segment of roadside cactus, or the vast vacant and beautifully paved highway in the middle of nowhere in particular with the 60 km/hour limit.

Oh well.  Too late to go back in time and buy a new one back then.  And we probably have enough pictures of our trip for all practical purposes.

10 pesos (part 2)

The intent of my original "10 pesos" post was to visually show the vast range of things that cost 10 pesos (~75 cents). The problem with this idea is that we keep eating the edible things before I can take a picture of them or I don't have the camera handy to capture things that we don't purchase.

 So here's a (partical) list of today's Mexico City "10 peso" items:

•  a piping hot tamale purchased from a street vendor, big enough for breakfast. 
•  offered for sale by hawkers on the Metro:
  • toothbrush with mini toothpaste (guaranteed to completely prevent tooth decay!)
  • a roll of surgical tape
  • a CD of the Beatles greatest hits, complete with live audio preview (one supects Sir Paul doesn't get any royalties from this one)
  • a CD of "beautiful" classical music
  • small bag of squash seeds
  • book of jokes (complete with samples shouted out in the Metro car)

There were several other items offered for sale for 10 pesos over the course of our trip out to Xochimilco, but I'm afraid that those are the only ones I remember....

Visiting Teotihuacan

We last visited Teotihuacan, the major ruins outside of Mexico City, just over 16 years ago on our last long trip to Latin America, back in 1995.

I'd forgotten just how overwhelmingly huge the site is. The main site stretches along a grand avenue that is a couple of kilometers long. The "Pyramid of the Sun" is second in size only to the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. And the part that's restored (along the main avenue) is only one slice through the most impressive ruins that are contained within the fenced off region of the archeological zone. If you wander behind these restored facades, you'll find all sorts of unrestored pyramids and grand plazas, each of which would be a major site if it occured anywhere else. And wait, that's not all! The ancient city of Teotihuacan stretched far beyond the official archeological site. There are restored palaces scattered through the modern village of San Juan Teotihuacan, and innummerable more modest ancient houses have been obliterated by the current village. (On the way to one of the palaces we passed a house with a huge pile of rocks in the corner of their yard....doubtless they'd gathered up these annoying remanants of their ancestors to make their yard a little less bumpy).

I love ruins. I put it down to having grown up in Western Canada, where European settlement dates back to just before the dawn of the 20th Century. Now there are archeological sites that you can visit that preserve and explain ancient remains of aboriginal culture, but growing up, the visible human presence was less than 100 years old. And often much less. So the idea of a building that is hundreds of years old is exciting. And ruins that date to 100 AD or earlier? It's awe-inspiring.

We arrived at the site before 8am, as the sun was still rising, and as "los globos" arrived. Who knew it was "a thing" to take a hot air balloon ride over the ruins at dawn?

A local, very friendly dog greeted us at the entrance, and accompanied us up the Pyramid of the Sun. Or I suppose I should say, "accompanied Harv to the top of the pyramid". I have this problem with heights. Sometimes it's worse than others. And despite the fact that I have photographic evidence that I made it to the top of this pyramid when we last visited 16 years ago, I just couldn't do it today. I stalled at a platform about 2/3 of the way up, and sent Harv and the dog to the top without me.

This gave me lots of time to contemplate how I was going to manage to get down. And then watch a local guy who'd been riding around the site climb the main staircase while carrying his bike! It made me feel pretty stupid. And somehow magically made about 1/2 of my fear vanish, which gave me just enough courage to descend without a helicopter rescue. :-)

We spend the next 7.5 hours at the site, stopping only 1/2 an hour for lunch. We were both so excited by everything that we were seeing that I didn't notice that I was tired until we got back to our hotel. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to walk tomorrow..... In the meantime, you can see some of our photos here.

A peculiar kind of poverty

If you have nothing in your wallet but a 500 peso note (worth about $37 CDN), you are hosed.  Unless you are paying for a hotel room, or *maybe* buying a full tank of gas, you are unlikely to be able to spend it.   Very few places can change a bill that big.

The sensible thing would seem to be to avoid getting 500 peso notes.  Unfortunately, that's very difficult, because ATM machines very much want to give them to you.  For a 3000 peso withdrawal, you'll generally end up with a minimum of 4.  

So, spending 500s requires strategy.  Hm....this coffee shop caters to foreigners and has large volume.....maybe I can slip them a 500 mid-day.  Score!  (she says, noticing that in the process she's making a big dent in the change in the register).  Okay, I'm spending 240 for 2 kg of chocolate at this moliendo....I'll force them to take a 500.  They'll grimace, but you're making a big purchase, so Yah!  Broke another.

But the best solution is a bank.  You don't have to get farther in your sentence than "Can you change...? (Puede cambiar...) before the teller will reach for the cash drawer.  Dealing with 500s is a common problem.

Leaving Oaxaca

We've spent the last couple of days in Oaxaca nursing my cold, and have decided that our next stop is going to be the beach. We're headed out, probably to Zipotle, on Saturday or Sunday.

 It's going to be a little sad to leave Oaxaca. We've gotten comfortable here. We know where to get a decent cheap pan au chocolate, have favourite vendors at our favourite marketplace, know where and when to find internet downtown. We can find a pharmacy, hail a cab and know about what it should cost, can take buses most places, or find a parking place should we need one. I even know where to buy a mop. :-) But our thoughts are starting to turn homewards, so it's time to focus on the things we'd like to do before our time in Mexico is up. So, out to the coast for a week or so, and then we'll start slowly wending our way home.

Portion size

Admittedly we dashed across the US on our way here. We stopped for meals at whatever roadside restaurants were convenient and looked neither too expensive nor too disgusting. But the food turned out to be almost uniformly awful. Too salty, too processed. Even the US Dairy Queen seemed to have food that was less appetizing than its Canadian cousins.

But the thing that seems most interesting in retrospect is the portion size.

I should start by explaining my experience with the "comida corrida" here in Mexico. A comida corrida is a 2 or 3 course set menu lunch served in most restaurants between 1pm and about 4pm. Its generally an excellent deal, costing between 35 and 70 pesos. ($3 to $6). It usually starts with a bowl of vegetable or pasta soup, followed by the plate of the day -- a single small drumstick in mole sauce or a small portion of chicken stew, a half cup of rice, perhaps a dollop of iceberg lettuce salad. Its always accompanied by tortillas, and might come with either agua de fruta (basically a fresh fruit drink made with papaya, or pineapple) or a modest dessert (think jello;-), or sometimes both. The first few times I had one, I thought "this is lovely, but I didn't get quite enough to eat. I'm not hungry, but I bet I will be soon...". But in actual fact, it turned out I'd always had enough, and didn't actually need a second meal 2 hours later.

Contrast this with our last meal in the US, in El Paso, Tx. After several failed attempts to order something both appetizing and healthy at the modest "family" restaurants we'd been stopping at, I decided to give up and order the chicken- fried steak. It turned out to be an excellent choice, but it came with:

• biscuits and butter
• a large iceberg lettuce salad
• baked potato with both a large lump of butter and sour cream
• large portion of previously frozen broccoli
• a large, thin, breaded and deep-fried steak

It was all quite tasty. Except that we could easily shared the meal between us. (and if we had, we might have had room for a piece of pie, which looked excellent). Instead I stuffed myself and was still able to finish only 2/3 of the salad, 2/3 of the steak, 1/2 of the broccoli, 1/3 of the potato, and a bite or two of the biscuit.

I think I've found the secret to maintaining my pant size when I return to Canada. Portion size.

Ecoturism in Ixtlan

A number of rural mountain communities near Oaxaca have set up "ecoturistic" facilities over the past 15 years. They've built very nice cabins in the woods, and offer various outdoor activities, including hiking. You can't just go hiking on your own...all of the land is owned by someone, often communually by the local villagers, and you meed to go with a guide for even a simple walk in the woods. It generates employment, and gives villages an incentive to preserve their natural surroundings.

Unfortunately, not all of the communities really seem to "get" tourism. Or maybe it's just that they aim their tourism at a different audience than us.  We spent a couple of days in the eco-cabanas in Ixtlan de Juarez, about an hour and a half from Oaxaca City.  When we arrived on Sunday, the area was swarmed.  It was a lot like a provincial campground in Canada:  families having picnics, kids riding their bikes.  The site offers activities like zip-lining, a kids playground, and a couple of short walks in the woods (to a cave, and to a river).  Instead of campsites, there are rental cabins.  Actually very nice facilities with king sized beds, private bathrooms, and fireplaces.  No kitchens in the cabins, but there is a restaurant on site.

The staff in Ixtlan were all geared up to deal with the tail end of the Xmas time rush, and were busy all Sunday dealing with their swarm of visitors.  They didn't really have time for the stupid foreigners and their questions.  The young woman in the Ixtlan tourist office (about 6 km from the actual site) had no patience for our questions about *obvious* things (things obvious to someone who's spent her whole life in Ixtlan, of course), and no patience for our poor Spanish.  I don't think she was an actual teenager, but she hadn't lost the attitude.

Later, after visiting the next town, Capulalpam and their much equipped and more intelligently staffed tourist centre, we were able to arrange a guided hike into the cloud forest for Tuesday.  As hikes go, it wasn't much of one (just a road walk for a couple of hours).  But we learned from our guide that they don't get much foreign tourism in the area, and most tourists to Capulalpam come from other parts of Mexico.  I also got the impression that hiking as we do it in Canada is a bit of a foreign concept.  

We ended up leaving the area after only two days.  The unfriendliness of Ixtlan didn't help, but it was mostly because I came down with a bad cold.  Cool air makes me cough.  And being inside doesn't help much when buildings aren't heated and it's 8 C inside.  Even with the fireplace lit.  Which we could only do for about 2 hours a day, because they wouldn't give us more firewood than that.  :-)  So  we decided to head back to Oaxaca where it's warmer.