Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Incidents of travel (IV) From Mexico City we drove south to Cuernavaca, a town said to have been a popular getaway for Mexico City residents, at least for those with a little money. According to my Sanborn's log the high point in altitude on the road south was just under 10,000 feet. Somewhere along this road, if the weather was favorable, the twin volcanoes bearing the garish Nahuatl names of Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl would have been visible, but I have only a vague recollection of having seen one or both. Once in Cuernavaca we probably stayed in the Hotel Del Parque, which overlooked the main plaza. We ate dinner at an Italian restaurant on the same block, spaghetti being my idea of comfort food after a week of digestive distress. Just a couple of blocks away was the Cortés Palace, at one time the residence of Mexico's conqueror, Hernán Cortés. It is one of the few visible public monuments to the conquistador, who is almost universally reviled by the Mexicans. I don't remember whether he shared his time in Cuernavaca with his Aztec translator and mistress, Doña Marina, known to history as la Malinche or, less charitably, la Chingada. We took a day trip to the silversmithing town of Taxco, ate lunch and looked into the shops but didn't buy anything. At one time we must have contemplated continuing on to Acapulco, because our itinerary included pages all the way down to the Pacific coast, but we didn't go and that's one thing I can't say I regret. We probably stayed a second night in Cuernavaca. Our planned course was now to the south and east, to Oaxaca and beyond. We backtracked part of the way towards Mexico City, then cut across somewhere to hook up with the Inter American highway. My recollection is that there was a stretch of modern highway for a few miles at the beginning of this route, and I think it was there that we pulled into a very Americanized rest station with a large cafeteria-style restaurant, where they served a sopa de hongos so perfect I indulged in a second bowl. There was one bad stretch of road not long after this — construction — and after that we spent the rest of the day driving on a two-lane highway that climbed through tracts of rugged upland forest, broken here and there by villages, church spires, and little plots of corn. People sell a lot of things along the road in Mexico. We saw large iguanas for sale a couple of times, and shacks selling cokes and other sodas (served warm) were a fixture of the rural economy everywhere we went. But I'll never forget seeing, on one misty, deserted stretch of that road south, a young girl standing by herself along the edge of the highway, holding a little cluster of white flowers aloft as we passed. We had crossed into a different Mexico, one that remained largely Indian, populated by the Zapotec and Mixtec descendants of the builders of ancient Monte Albán. The Hotel Principal in Oaxaca is marked in my guidebook, which says that it “offers the unique feature of allowing you to drive your car into the patio.” Maybe the patio was full, or maybe we stayed somewhere else; I don't know. I do know that we parked on the street and that when we got up the next morning our car had been broken into. Other than a tent and a new suit that I had never worn nothing of value was taken. Our customs documents and other important papers, carelessly left by us in the glove compartment overnight, were untouched. But the shattered window would remain unrepaired until we got home, and from that point whenever we left the car untended we were forced to lock anything of value out of sight in the trunk. Ironically the broken window was the same one that we had tampered with when we had locked ourselves out in Mexico City. The thief could easily have pulled the window open without smashing it, as the catch was no longer functional. For years afterwards bits of broken glass would continue to rattle around the inside of my car. There was a lot going on in town, not all of it positive. The city had a reputation among Americans as a good place to find hallucinogens, presumably collected and brought into town by the Indians from the surrounding mountains. (The region's botanical diversity would later draw neurologist Oliver Sacks, who came with a group of fern enthusiasts.) Political unrest has since erupted in Oaxaca, but if it was already simmering while we were there — as in many places in Mexico, there were political posters on many walls in the city — the signs weren't evident or we didn't know how to read them. One of Oaxaca's drawing points — besides drugs — was the local crafts industry, including the famous black pottery from the village of San Barolo Coyotepec. We didn't visit the village, as we didn't know the area well enough to venture onto back roads, but I did buy three pieces of ceramics at a well-stocked store not far from our hotel called Yalalag de Oaxaca: a tripod bowl, a shallow bowl with incised and colored patterns around the rim, and a kind of whistle or flute in the shape of a fish. They were packed up for us in the store and made it home safely, and I still have all three. In the main squre in town, during the evening paseo, I cast an eye on the little quartz or alabaster turtles being hawked for a dollar or so. They were crudely carved and no doubt cranked out by the thousands for the tourist trade, but even so I still regret that I didn't buy one. We visited the large indoor market (since demolished, as I recall), and took an obligatory day trip down Highway 190, to the enormous ahuehuete tree of Santa María el Tule, to the ruins of Mitla, noted for their elaborately patterned wall mosaics, and to the less well-known archaeological site at Yagul. But the high point of any visit to the area is, of course, the ruins of Monte Albán, which occupy a plateau a thousand feet or so above the city of Oaxaca. While the ruins, which were crawling with countless small lizards, are not perhaps in themselves as interesting as those of say, Palenque or Chichén Itzá (at least to a non-specialist), they are dramatically situated and offer a commanding view of the valley below. They are also the home of the friezes depicting the so-called danzantes, contorted human figures now generally thought to represent victims of torture and ritual sacrifice rather than dancers. (To be continued; but first, a digression) February 9, 2008 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me