More Adventures on the Peninsula and Under the Gulf

The world is clouding over again; 4 days of gorgeous sun and running around, but all things must pass, as a great English coleopteran once said.

Back to business...

Part 3 Cont'd: QUINTANA ROO

Moving along from Pet-cakab, we went to see a parcel of pitahaya, commonly known in Gringolandia as ''dragonfruit''. It's a cactus, but in vine format, and they grow it on giant posts. The parcel was owned by a little old lady, and the soil was red.

Part 4: YUCATÁN

A kid from Mérida once told me that the best hammocks are Yucatecan hammocks, and that was the first thought on my mind rolling into Pisté, Yucatan in the afternoon. After food. Because food is always first... so a few of us went out to find food. There are a couple of typical dishes we tried, one being cochinita pibil which is like pulled pork in a delicious sauce, and sopa de lima, which uses a fruit similar to the meyer lemon for flavor in a tomatoey brothy soup with meat and vegetables. After food came the hammock search. Well, I'll go ahead and tell you that there's not a whole lot in Pisté, just motels and tourist shops, and in one of them I found a beautiful cotton hammock and sat around chatting with the little old shopowner, who lowered the price a bit for me (or that was his claim), but it seemed reasonalble at about 25 bucks so I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Later, the lot of us went to Chichen-Itza for the Espectáculo de Luz y Sonido, which I very much do not reccomend, because though it's cool to see pyramids at night, they don't let you wander around, they just sit you in one spot and talk at you with colorful lights.

The following day we went to see a henequen (sisal, as it's often called) hacienda called Hacienda Sotuta. We did the whole tour, which included a walk around the giant beautiful Spanish-tile laden, wooden-furnished house, and a ride on the little donkey-pulled carts they used in the old days to move the henequen around. Henequen is funny, it's an agave that they use for fiber, so after cutting off the oldest leaves, they bundle them, move them, unbundle them, smash them, brush out the fibre and dry it, then they make twine and rope and such things out of it. It's incredibly strong material.

This photo of a little old man I took outside the

hacienda, where he was selling his peeled oranges: I'm including it in the blog because he has this cool little springloaded orange lathe which is what he uses to peel them! Fun machines!

Part 5: TABASCO

Ah, Tabasco, land of mosquitos and chocolate. We arrived in Comalcalco in the late afternoon, at the house of a friend of the professors. We were to camp on his porch and in his backyard in his outskirtsy and pleasant town. This friend studied with them at the University in the '70s, but two years ago he got multiple sclerosis and now he's paralyzed from the neck down, in a wheelchair, barely able to speak. But he chatted with us students, and even gave us a little motivational speech on our last night at his house. It was pretty incredible.

We spent three days in the chocolate orchards, looking at problems with diseases, learning about exports, and of course, the process of making chocolate, which is one of the most amazing-smelling things I have smelt in my life.
The cacao tree gets to be about 5m tall maximum (COMMENT: THE CACAO PHOTOS ARE

NOT MINE, I STOLE THEM FROM THE VAST BELLY OF THE INTERNETS), though often it's pruned shorter. There are various varieties, but supposedly the most precious and cocoa-

butter-rich is the creole cacao. It's native to Mexico, and traditionally made into drinks, such as polvillo, a mix of ground cacao, cinnamon and toasted corn. It's delicious... Tabasco is the most important state in cacao production, but Oaxaca appears to be more important inasmuch as the production of chocolate (processed cacao). Let's see, it grows in giant pods, or 'cobs' on the

trunk of the tree, and these pods house about 20-ish seeds per, which are surrounded by a fleshy white pulp that tastes a bit like

a litchi. These seeds are dried in the sun, or fermented,

these processes producing different flavors. Normally the fermented grains are mixed with the dried grains to get a nice mix of smooth and 'robust' flavors. I ought

to mention that it's a shade plant, so they plant a variety of nurse trees, usually banana when the cacao are saplings, later establishing leguminous trees and mangoes, chico sapote (chicle, or gum tree) or other species to not only shade the cacao but also provide other sources of income.

Finally, I'm going to make mention of a tree worth mentioning, the noble ceiba, of which there are several examples in the UCD Botanical Conservatory (though they pale in comparison to the real deal in its rainforest wonderland...). This is a ceiba portrait I took in Palenque.

The Viajezote: a glorious 3-week disappearance from civilization

Today the rainwater is running down the stairs of the lonely basketball courts across from my house. It winds between the cobblestones in the street and out of the poorly-gauged drainpipes of the rooves, up through the soles of my shoes (all of which, I have discovered, have secret capillary entrances designed for discomfort on rainy days), and down through my hair onto my face, neck and glasses. And what do we do on days like this? We drink! No, wait... we blog.

Bueno, so were did we leave things? Oh goodness, we abandoned then so long ago...

Introduction: The Viajezote

5pm, 2 January 2010: Arrive at school with two overstuffed backpacks. Meet up with Alfredo and Jacobo, and we basically have the run of the vacation-swept, abandoned school. But as the weather totally sucks we mostly sit inside a classroom we've taken over and eat and shoot the shit. 11 pm the same day means the arrival of the buses that will take us all away to various parts of the Republic: I am off, in the absence of my closest friends, to the tropics: Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. We load up.

A full night of fitful rest later, I awaken to a Oaxaca sunrise, a good stretching session in the humid cold of the roadside, and another long haul out to Tapachula, Chiapas.

Part One: CHIAPAS

We arrived at about 6pm, everyone groggily unloading their stuff from the 17-hour torture chamber into the Tapachula Youth Center gym, where we were to spend the following three nights. Then we all hungrily set upon the town, to wolf down not-very-good food (why the food in Tapachula is so bad I will never know, but everyone agreed that Tapachula sucks, foodwise). The next day we set to work: day 1 was a visit to a mango and rambutan farm (the photo of a rambutan, which is like a furry lichi, is not mine, it is from the vast belly of the INTERNET). The kid who showed us around the farm (the farmer's son, actually), was right out of the '70s for his haircut, moustache and cowboy shirt, loaded us all into his pickup truck and took us rollercoastering around the semi-rainforested landscape to get to the orchard (because the bus obviously wouldn't stand such a rough trip). So we went crawling around in his orchard a bit. The soil in that orchard was SO gorgeous... they don't use machinery and they don't sweep the orchard floor, just cut down the weeds with machetes, so the soil was this black, deliciously friable substance with hordes of earthworms writhing within... and since it was the off-season the weeds were growing these beautiful pink flowers (it's some kind of Apocynaceous plant that you see all the time in gardens and nurseries, but in this orchard it's a weed). Furthermore, he fed us the famous and yet little-known jackfruit, a 10-pound mofo that looks disturbingly like a durian. It tastes like a mix between cantaloupe and banana, and has a wet, slimy, resistant texture that makes it kind of an adventure to eat. Furthermore, the inside of the rind produces latex, so you wind up helplessly sticky after you've eaten a piece... it's sort of exhausting.

Anyway, that night we stopped at the Guatemalan border, for the mere thrill of setting foot on foreign soil: frankly, I think northern Guatemala looks a lot like southern Chiapas, but whatever, it was novel to change pesos for quetzales and look out over the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala, see people (illegally??) crossing that river with giant boxes on their backs. I think the border patrol here is a little more relaxed than what I'm used to...

Next day to the papaya factory, and I say it like that because not only is it one of these high-tech operations with its own packing plant and the whole enchilada, but also because of its tendency (welcome to capitalism, Cat...) to convert people into machines. Pay 'em cheap and work 'em to death, then go to Guatemala and get some more. And congratulate yourself for it. The people picking papaya went shoeless in the fields, and the women who washed the papaya in dilute bleach work eight-hour shifts with their hands in the bleach bath. I asked the engineer who gave us the Grand Tour if they switch jobs during the day or at least during the week, and he said, 'Oh, no! These workers are highly specialized. ' Can you imagine working half-drenched in bleach eight hours a day? Imagine your hands, you eyes, your nose, your neurons... The engineer that toured us around was an incorrigible twat with no respect for the earth or human life, as it turns out. But he did give us boatloads of free papaya, so though I don't forgive him, I do have fond olfactory memories of the occasion.

I should mention how unbearably humid Tapachula is. It's one of the low-elevation zones of Chiapas and for that reason totally unpleasant if you're from California.

From there we went to Comitán, where we stayed at a coffee farm. There we learned nothing about management, because the guy in charge was basically an accountant who had bought the farm and had no idea what he was doing, but he was trying to establish an agrotourism kind of thing. There were ziplines and little palm-roof palapas for guests to hang their hammocks. There was also a gorgeous river in which we all did our bathing at night (which is to say we swam around in the dark, floating on our backs and staring at the stars and mars and the moon through the canopy of trees, listening to the chorus of birds and bats and bugs). Here are some observations: 75-kilo sacks (that's how much I weigh) of fresh-picked coffee: both adults and children (all of them Guatemalan imports because they put up with less pay and lots of abuse) carry them out of the hilly fields on their backs, strapped to their forheads. Then they pour them out to dry on the concrete patio... but bueno, the kids have to work with their parents, because what are they going to do, leave their kids alone in the forest while they go pick their coffee all day? They reach their quota faster if they've got a little help anyhow...

Then we moved right along to the heart of the matter: the rainforest. Sweeping due north from Tapachula we passed through Ocosingo (Zapatista territory) and up into Palenque, home of the famous Classical city. The coolest part about Palenque if you've already seen the ruins, is that when you're hiking up the giant hill to get to the archeological site, there are all of these tiny, unmarked paths just quietly sneaking away from the main road and if you're subtle about it, you, too, can sneak off with them, and find yourself entangled with aerial roots, the screaming of the sarahuates (howler monkeys), and the creeks that carry fossilized snailshells in their rocky beds.

The next day we went to Metzabok, and saw another rainforest that's not to hot (though equally as rainy), and a nice lady Doña Cristina, took us around... I think I'm going to have to devote another post to this topic, so remind me to do so.

Part Two: CAMPECHE

Racing across the Tabascan bottleneck to Campeche, we went to Calak-mul, another Classical ghost town, and the adjascent Biosphere Reserve, the latter being the coolest part, because we got to learn about rainforest management. The trees are thick and house more howler monkeys and spider monkeys, toucans, guacamayas (macaws), parrots, and leaf-cutter ants. It's like, epiphyte-central, too. If you perch on top of a pyramid, the other pyramids stick out of the foliage like rectilinear anachronisms. It's not one of the most-visited sites so it's really quite nice to go running around there.

Part Three: QUINTANA ROO

Arriving by night to Bakalar, Quintana Roo, all we knew was that there was a laguna. It wasn't really visible in the total darkness, but we went swimming anyhow, the brave few who support cold water on a cold night. I mean, I couldn't resist, personally, because I was sweaty from rainforest-running the previous day, and that clean natural bodies of water require that I immerse myself in them, period. So I jumped into the starry water and floated on my back again, wandering around the shallows and appreciating the uninterrupted sky.

The following day we saw what a marvel we had been soaking in the night before: the 7-color lagoon of Bakalar, its white sand full of snail shells, its sparkling surface. So we jumped in again, 7 am, even colder than the night before, but who cares-- when you have a lagoon to yourself, you just have to.

So from there we split into two groups, and we went to invade two different ejidos in the region, and I went to Pet-Cakab, where we met Doña Romuela, a little old lady who is the community's traditional herbalist. She devoted the day to showing us around the roadsides, introducing us to the local vegetation and how it can be used in medicine and a little witchcraft. Later, she took us to her house to show us how it works on the treatment floor (that's to say on her bed in her house): she took Rafa, who had injured his leg playing soccer some time before and had a hard time on the hike, and informed us that she was going to heal him.

'Take off your pants, kid.'

So there's Rafa in his underwear, and she's rubbing this weird ointment on his knee and explaining to us how tendons work, massaging his calf and shin and ankle with her tiny hands, as we all sit and stare, barely fitting in her tiny wooden house.

It fits to mention here that the south of Mexico is the only part in which I have seen wooden houses. Wood is an extremely uncommon building material in Mexico, but in the tropical countryside it's the only building material you see. The houses are usually painted candy colours and don't bother with glass windows (some don't have windows at all).

I should also mention that that night began the town's fair, which consisted of a carousel, some arcade machines, a spanish-bingo game and some food stands. But it lit up the tiny square and brought the very small population out. We were staying in the ejidal house, right in front of the square, so it was pretty fun to jump outside and see what was up.

Furthermore, there is extensive exploitation of the forest for the hardwoods they have there, especially caoba. The ejido has a sawmill, and the president of the ejido took us around. It's really incredible how much wood they waste. What's more incredible is the shaved patches of forest where they go cut the trees... But what are they going to do? It's the only source of income they've got.

I'm going to stop here and keep going next week ish with more Quintana Roo, plus Yucatán, another round in Campeche, and the grand finale in Tabasco...