Offrendas and other artwork from Dia des los Muertos...
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
7. Paradise Found, Oaxacan Style (by Craig)
After partying constantly for Dias des los Muertos, eating mucho moles, shopping for chocolate and rugs, hanging out on the Zocalo and all sorts of other activities, it was time for some R and R. Little did I know I was about to find one of the nicest spots on the planet.
We took the all night first class bus from Oaxaca to Puerto Angel. This is a great way to go; very comfortable bus and you save $$ on a hotel. We shared a cab from Patchutla down the hill to the small fishing village of Puerto Angel with Deiter and Mikey, two lovely German folks from Hamburg. They had information on a beachfront hotel, called the Cordelia and this was where we ended up.
What a wonderful place...right on the Playa Pantheon (Cemetery Beach) and it indeed has a cemetery on the other side of the street. The hotel has about 10 rooms, all with views of the town, the bay and the beach. We found the staff a little surly, but the charm of the place made it more then tolerable.
The Cordelia has a wonderful restaurant and the best thing is that the tables are right on the sand. There is something unworldly about the tactile experience of your toes in the golden sand while your finger surrounds a cold cerveza. The restaurant not only has cold cerveza, but the freshest fish you can imagine; Dorado (Mahi Mahi), octopus, prawns and tuna. Caught in the sea that morning.
The bay at Playa Pantheon has great swimming. No waves to speak of and clear water. There is great snorkeling on both sides of the beach. We saw huge schools of small fish that the fishermen here catch for bait. There are also large schools of fish with yellow tails, I have no idea of the name. I even saw a couple of eels, about two feet long each, battling it out over some little tunnels in the coral.
The fishermen here have an interesting way of bringing their boats up on the beach. Basically, they just gun the motor at maximum throttle and drive the boat up on the beach. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it, but they do it all the time. To get the boat back out on the sea, they call over their buddies and just push it out. Once I was standing there taking pictures and they were a bit short handed, so they called me over to help push the boat out. In the lower picture, that's me at the front.
The second day we headed west a few miles to check out some beaches. There are four right after one another; Zipolite, which is a New-Age yoga and surfing beach with huge waves; St. Augustinillo, which would prove to be my favorite beach on the planet; Mazunte, more famous but not quite as charming, and La Ventanilla, a nice nature preserve with a lagoon that harbors 10 foot long crocodiles along with other odd creatures.
We wanted to relax for a few days on one of these beaches and finally settled on St. Augustinillo. There is a wonderful little hotel there called Mexico Lindo. Fausto and Leila have six rooms in a 2-story cabana, right on the beach. You step out of your room and you are in the sand.
I could have stayed here for a long time. I have never really considered myself a beach person, but I could change that for this place. Along the beach are several small cabana hotels; each hotel has maybe 5 or 6 cabanas.
The beach totals about 1 kilometer long, but half of that isn't built on. The ocean here has pretty good swimming, although the waves can come in a few feet high, which makes it fun for boogie boarders, and it's shallow enough, for folks who just like to bob in the waves.
Like the Cordelia, the Mexico Lindo's restaurant is right on the beach. You still get the "toes-in-the-sand-while-drinking-a-cold-cerveza" experience here and also they have great fish. My big find was fresh octopus, fried with butter and garlic.
The big event of the two days here was an early morning boat ride with Efren, the boat owner, and Fausto, the hotel man. We went out about a mile from shore to look for turtles and go snorkeling. The turtles were everywhere. Every few hundred yards, you see one bobbing on the surface, where they like to hang out. We even saw a couple mating, which apparently they do for 24 to 48 hours at a time. Soon we came upon three pods of dolphins, but could never quite catch up to them to get a good look in the water with our snorkel. At the end of the three hour tour we came upon two whales, not sure about what kind. Again, we followed them down the coast, but they would always outsmart us so we couldn't get good look underwater. These were the first whales of the season and all the locals were excited.
We headed back to Puerto Angel for our last night and spent some time in the town. Lots of folks were fishing on the pier and one young lad was showing off his Dorado...
There were also a bunch of cute young girls who were flirting with some young lad and were very happy to get their picture taken...
On the last day we had a very interesting experience. Amy wanted to see this old town near the airport, Santa Maria de Huatulco. So we arrived at the airport three hours early to check in and then took the bus up to Santa Maria. As we were walking around this very small town, we came upon this fellow and he asked if he could help us find anything. Turns out, his name is Kevin Berney and he grew up in Palo Alto, where Amy grew up. They knew some of the same people (they are two years apart) and had a lot to talk about. Talk about a small world! We took Kevin out for a coffee (he is a tour guide to the local coffee farms) and Amy and he talked over the good old days...
What a great two weeks it has been. I would highly recommend both Oaxaca city and the beaches of the Oaxacan coast. Cancun it ain't!
Monday, November 12, 2007
6. Hungry dolphins, whales and sexy turtles. And, Iz (by Amy)
Today we are in Puerto Angel, a pirate´s hole in the Oaxacan coast, after we have been wandering in the warm coast for a week without any idea what is happening at home. We came down from Oaxaca a week ago on an overnight first class bus ride (quite comfy if you took antihistamines and melatonin to sleep well as it's a little curvy) and at 6 am took a wild taxi ride down from the bus destination, Pochutla, 6 miles down to Puerto Angel, on the coast.
This coastal area has a great history. Before the Spanish opened the port in Acapulco, the bay of Santa Cruz de Huatulco is where the spanish galleons arriving from Asia would offload their wealth and passengers, from here everything went by mule overland through Oaxaca and Mexico City to Veracruz and back to Europe. So, in 1579, this was where you came to plunder if you were an English pirate, even a respected one like Sir Francis Drake or Thomas Cavendish. The bay of Puerto Angel is small, calm, protected and guarded by steep rocks you could easily hide a masted ship behind. Later on, coffee began to be grown high on the mountains, which reach a peak of eight or nine thousand feet within just a few miles of the coast, and Puerto Angel was where they shipped it out. Other than a road over the mountains to Puerto Angel from Oaxaca, there were few ways to get into this area without mules and ferries until 1974, so it remained pretty unspoiled.
At this time, Puerto Angel is a little fishing town stretching around 3 sides of the bay, it attracts tourists during the winter but in early November, there is just not much happening. The main town has a fishing beach in front of it, a few open restaurants. Above town on fairly steep hills there are many small places to stay for about $20 to $35. Though some like the hotel La Buena Vista are quite pretty, you still have to hike up several flights of stairs to reach your room and restaurant. So instead we stayed at the Hotel Cordelia, at Playa Panteon or ´cemetery beach´, it's right on the sand. The rooms are up a floor, you walk down and out through the lobby/dining room past some toucans, and parrots, who say 'bueno?' and 'hola!' and also bark like dogs and cry like babies, and then you step into the restaurant which is a huge shaded palapa right on the sand. The beach has clear coarse clean yellow coral sand which feels absolutely great, and the snorkeling is awesome. The fishermen gather just offshore but the beach is very nice and there are friendly local dogs and each afternoon the local kids come in swimming. The Cordelia also has great hot showers which have a view of the ocean also, hot water now and then is great as most nice coast places still only have room temp showers. At the Cordelia, a large airy room with a great view but with a small double bed, is $35; for 2 beds in a huge room, it costs $60-70, somewhat negotiable. On the hillside just behind the hotel is the town cemetery and since it was still just past Day of the Dead, it was covered in yellow and orange marigolds and people were tending it. Really pretty. Next to the hotel are a couple of other beach restaurants on the sand, at night each one sets up tables out next to the waves with little hurricane lamps, very romantic.
The ocean here is a very nice temperature and has beautiful fish to look at, also tasty dorado-mahimahi and octopus and squid and shrimp to eat. Puerto Angel has a flotilla of 30 or 40 open fishing boats and each evening they cluster off our bay, the Cemetery Bay, to pull out small silvery fish to use as bait for their morning fishing. Off our bay, in the rocks, are all the nice colorful reef fish and also large schools of these small silvery guys. Usually its quite clear.
Just east of Puerto Angel over the headlands there is another small quite narrow bay with two little sandy beaches with small not great palapa restaurants, just out of town, kinda isolated, called Estacahuite; we hear the snorkeling can be great, but it was more cloudy and surgy the day we hiked over there.
The real draw along this coast however is the set of 3 beach villages, Zapolite, San Agustinillo and Mazunte, where you can get little rooms pretty much on the beach and go surfing or swimming. You can get to them easily by colectivo taxis, from Puerto Angel or from Pochutla where the buses stop.
Of the 3 we really loved the middle one, San Agustinillo and we by accident found the beautiful 6 room hotelette, Mexico Lindo, owned by Fausto and Leila, a very handsome and gracious youngish couple from Tabasco via Mexico City (email fafinyleila@latinmail.com). They started this charming hotel+restaurant about ten years ago, about 6 rooms some upstairs and 2 downstairs, right on the beach at the west end of town. We paid 350 pesos, $32 usd a night but in full season they are $50 a night, I think they are usually pretty full. Our little room was downstairs, right on the beach; it had a small but comfy 4 poster with mosquito net, big shutter windows opening onto the beach through our little private `front yard`of fenced in and roofed sand with a hammock and easy chair. Our room temp shower and bath were just fine and the charming way the place is built made it really special. At night we left the windows open to the beach and even though the waves are not high, they make a lovely thunderous noise all night long. There is a great kitchen staff and the only waiter besides the owners is an exceptionally nice local guy named Ramon, and a great kitchen staff; everyone working there seems to be sophisticated, handsome and absolutely charming. It just seems to be their pleasure to have you, to make you limonadas and bring you a cold beer to sip in your green adirondack while you sift sand with your toes in the shade and look out at the open halfmoon swimming beach, 500 meters long, where a few people are body surfing and boogie boarding and surfing and just bobbing in the water. There is a handsome european guy David who you could hire to teach you surfing, and they rent some equipment. The place gets pleasantly busy midday because lots of people who are at other lodgings come to settle in, but it's absolutely tranquil mornings and evenings, at least at this time in the season when the restaurant closes early.
This is just a small part of the San Agustinillo beach which is three fourths of a mile long and has some adjoining beaches. It has a string of 2 story places along it which do not overwhelm it and a lot of it is still pretty wild feeling. Until the last 20 years, San Agustinillo was a turtle factory site and icky; now, with tourism and ecotourism, it is just for fishermen, and hotel owners, and taxidrivers, and a few german/italian expats, and a few aging surfers, and then, tourists like us. Yes, rich people are buying up some of the hilltop land to build retreats, and some of the small hotels on the beach are being turned into luxury-style, and slowly the price of lodging is going up (we found new Balinese-style cabanas down the beach charging $80 for a small double bed in a pretty small room) but so far it feels pretty far from it all.
People are working very hard to restore the local turtle populations and it is working. The beach that the turtles still lay on, La Ventanilla, which is just a mile or two north past Mazunte Beach, has no development allowed and no lights, which discourage them from coming ashore, and it also has a mangrove swamp where you can take a punt boat in and see the lovely birds and a few crocodiles as well.
This time of year there is greenery on and around the coast, the weather is warm but not usually overwhelmingly hot and hardly anyone is around, most beachfront restaurants have just a few clients at a time. In fact Fausto and Leila close, for all of September and October, and we were there just a week into their winter season. At night they closed up so we would go to the nearby italian-owned pasta/pizza restaurant or down the road to Mazunte to eat more seafood on the beach palapa restaurants.
We went out to the ocean with this morning, paying 150 pesos each to the owner, Efren, and Miguel, for a little dolphin-turtle-whale tour and what a tour. At the last minute Fausto also joined us and that was great, because he and the owner are great friends and they took us all over. Fausto had heard that overnight a huge number of turtles had arrived, in the hundreds or even thousands, and out on the ocean, we found sea turtles all over, we saw at least 40 in an hour. He said 6 of the 7 known species of sea turtle are found here, and 3 of them nest here. We probably saw 3 species according to Fausto. Sometimes they hang out resting, bobbing on the surface before going down for a snack, often staying still enough that seabirds come rest on them. Several were paired up, apparently turtle lovemaking lasts 24 to 48 hours during which time they just float along, and some were courting, circling each other. We found one caught in a Dorado fishing line and Efren freed it and I saw there was another nearby just underwater, perhaps its girlfriend or boyfriend.
During the same trip we also had a great time also out there with about 5 pods of dolphins of 3 different species, and saw the dolphins swimming with freshly caught dorados in their mouths and saw one dorado, which is a mahimahi, hiding by swimming directly under a large turtle, but the dolphin was too smart and saw it and chased the turtle-mahimahi pair down in the depths. At the time we were snorkeling to get a better view, and I was amazed at how crystal clear the depths were and how long it took to see them disappear, way way down. We were in and out of the water constantly, depending on where Fausto and Efren wanted to go. Then suddenly up off the very long, open La Ventanilla beach we saw whales, the first pair they had seen all season, very close to the shore (40 feet at one time?) and very close to us. We followed the whales down the shore for about 6 or 7 breaches and got in the water to see if we could see them go by in the deep but no luck. I´m not sure what type of whale, not huge and not small. Dark color and sort of nobbly.
Mostly however we have not been doing anything organized, we have just been swimming, a little snorkeling and frequently eating and drinking what the local restaurants have to offer, fish with garlic, fish with garlic and chile, fish with sauteed vegetables chillies and tomatoes, fish with lemon, etc. I have eaten so much fish. Can´t wait for peanut butter, or chicken, or something, anything but fish! just kidding... mostly. We have taken little colective taxis and covered trucks to the local beaches generally comfortably. The place has been a bit more expensive than we had thought and than it is in the guidebooks, prices are up some, but we felt we were seeing something in this rural coast area that is soon to disappear and we felt privileged to be here NOW. I would recommend seeing this part of the world soon before it is more costly. We spent as much as $65 a night. Mexico Lindo cost us $35 a night but in full season they are $50 a night. So for mexico coast it is more than we thought. But you can still find a beachside room with a very small bed or maybe a hammock, a shared somewhat dirty bathroom, for muchless, $15 or so if you are young enough to do this. As for transportation: because of having too much luggage we did take taxis ($30 USD from Puerto Angel to Puerto Escondido) but you could definitely get by cheaper with combi taxis (5 or 10 pesos for a short distance, sometimes in these covered pickup trucks with high roofs) and local buses which are reliable and quite cheap. Our last day, we took a cab for our luggage from Puerto Angel to the Huatulco airport, $30; we met an american guy with a single roller carry on who had paid $3 to take a local bus all the way from Puerto Escondido, 90 minutes away. The buses and combis all let you on and off just outside the airport so if traveling light, definitely would be the way to go.
We went to Puerto Escondido also for a night, found a great hotel there, the Flor De Maria which we'd definitely recommend because it is extremely lovely and has a great rooftop shady area with hammocks and a small pool overlooking the bay and beach, which is a great change from the hot beach, but even though many people absolutely love Puerto Escondido, it was just too hot and the souvenirs too cheesy and the beach too unsafe for our taste - you are told you should not walk the beaches at night.
So we spent 2 nights at Puerto Angel, 1 night at Puerto Escondido, 2 nights at San Agustinillo and a final night at Puerto Angel to reconnect with some luggage and get back to normal mexican village life and email. We had a great time today just wandering the beach and pier of the town snapping little shots of people and boats as the sunset glow faded.
One more story. Our second night on the coast, as we walked the Playa Pantheon after dinner, we heard Iz, singing Somewhere over the Rainbow, coming from one of the restaurants, so we went close. Turns out, that there is a special Mexican celebration 9 days after someone dies, and this restaurant's owner had just passed away. So, they were watching videos of him, to Iz's music and eating tamales and coffee together. They asked us to join but we felt a little shy, so we went off into the darkness back to our hotel listening to Iz's voice.
This coastal area has a great history. Before the Spanish opened the port in Acapulco, the bay of Santa Cruz de Huatulco is where the spanish galleons arriving from Asia would offload their wealth and passengers, from here everything went by mule overland through Oaxaca and Mexico City to Veracruz and back to Europe. So, in 1579, this was where you came to plunder if you were an English pirate, even a respected one like Sir Francis Drake or Thomas Cavendish. The bay of Puerto Angel is small, calm, protected and guarded by steep rocks you could easily hide a masted ship behind. Later on, coffee began to be grown high on the mountains, which reach a peak of eight or nine thousand feet within just a few miles of the coast, and Puerto Angel was where they shipped it out. Other than a road over the mountains to Puerto Angel from Oaxaca, there were few ways to get into this area without mules and ferries until 1974, so it remained pretty unspoiled.
At this time, Puerto Angel is a little fishing town stretching around 3 sides of the bay, it attracts tourists during the winter but in early November, there is just not much happening. The main town has a fishing beach in front of it, a few open restaurants. Above town on fairly steep hills there are many small places to stay for about $20 to $35. Though some like the hotel La Buena Vista are quite pretty, you still have to hike up several flights of stairs to reach your room and restaurant. So instead we stayed at the Hotel Cordelia, at Playa Panteon or ´cemetery beach´, it's right on the sand. The rooms are up a floor, you walk down and out through the lobby/dining room past some toucans, and parrots, who say 'bueno?' and 'hola!' and also bark like dogs and cry like babies, and then you step into the restaurant which is a huge shaded palapa right on the sand. The beach has clear coarse clean yellow coral sand which feels absolutely great, and the snorkeling is awesome. The fishermen gather just offshore but the beach is very nice and there are friendly local dogs and each afternoon the local kids come in swimming. The Cordelia also has great hot showers which have a view of the ocean also, hot water now and then is great as most nice coast places still only have room temp showers. At the Cordelia, a large airy room with a great view but with a small double bed, is $35; for 2 beds in a huge room, it costs $60-70, somewhat negotiable. On the hillside just behind the hotel is the town cemetery and since it was still just past Day of the Dead, it was covered in yellow and orange marigolds and people were tending it. Really pretty. Next to the hotel are a couple of other beach restaurants on the sand, at night each one sets up tables out next to the waves with little hurricane lamps, very romantic.
The ocean here is a very nice temperature and has beautiful fish to look at, also tasty dorado-mahimahi and octopus and squid and shrimp to eat. Puerto Angel has a flotilla of 30 or 40 open fishing boats and each evening they cluster off our bay, the Cemetery Bay, to pull out small silvery fish to use as bait for their morning fishing. Off our bay, in the rocks, are all the nice colorful reef fish and also large schools of these small silvery guys. Usually its quite clear.
Just east of Puerto Angel over the headlands there is another small quite narrow bay with two little sandy beaches with small not great palapa restaurants, just out of town, kinda isolated, called Estacahuite; we hear the snorkeling can be great, but it was more cloudy and surgy the day we hiked over there.
The real draw along this coast however is the set of 3 beach villages, Zapolite, San Agustinillo and Mazunte, where you can get little rooms pretty much on the beach and go surfing or swimming. You can get to them easily by colectivo taxis, from Puerto Angel or from Pochutla where the buses stop.
Of the 3 we really loved the middle one, San Agustinillo and we by accident found the beautiful 6 room hotelette, Mexico Lindo, owned by Fausto and Leila, a very handsome and gracious youngish couple from Tabasco via Mexico City (email fafinyleila@latinmail.com). They started this charming hotel+restaurant about ten years ago, about 6 rooms some upstairs and 2 downstairs, right on the beach at the west end of town. We paid 350 pesos, $32 usd a night but in full season they are $50 a night, I think they are usually pretty full. Our little room was downstairs, right on the beach; it had a small but comfy 4 poster with mosquito net, big shutter windows opening onto the beach through our little private `front yard`of fenced in and roofed sand with a hammock and easy chair. Our room temp shower and bath were just fine and the charming way the place is built made it really special. At night we left the windows open to the beach and even though the waves are not high, they make a lovely thunderous noise all night long. There is a great kitchen staff and the only waiter besides the owners is an exceptionally nice local guy named Ramon, and a great kitchen staff; everyone working there seems to be sophisticated, handsome and absolutely charming. It just seems to be their pleasure to have you, to make you limonadas and bring you a cold beer to sip in your green adirondack while you sift sand with your toes in the shade and look out at the open halfmoon swimming beach, 500 meters long, where a few people are body surfing and boogie boarding and surfing and just bobbing in the water. There is a handsome european guy David who you could hire to teach you surfing, and they rent some equipment. The place gets pleasantly busy midday because lots of people who are at other lodgings come to settle in, but it's absolutely tranquil mornings and evenings, at least at this time in the season when the restaurant closes early.
This is just a small part of the San Agustinillo beach which is three fourths of a mile long and has some adjoining beaches. It has a string of 2 story places along it which do not overwhelm it and a lot of it is still pretty wild feeling. Until the last 20 years, San Agustinillo was a turtle factory site and icky; now, with tourism and ecotourism, it is just for fishermen, and hotel owners, and taxidrivers, and a few german/italian expats, and a few aging surfers, and then, tourists like us. Yes, rich people are buying up some of the hilltop land to build retreats, and some of the small hotels on the beach are being turned into luxury-style, and slowly the price of lodging is going up (we found new Balinese-style cabanas down the beach charging $80 for a small double bed in a pretty small room) but so far it feels pretty far from it all.
People are working very hard to restore the local turtle populations and it is working. The beach that the turtles still lay on, La Ventanilla, which is just a mile or two north past Mazunte Beach, has no development allowed and no lights, which discourage them from coming ashore, and it also has a mangrove swamp where you can take a punt boat in and see the lovely birds and a few crocodiles as well.
This time of year there is greenery on and around the coast, the weather is warm but not usually overwhelmingly hot and hardly anyone is around, most beachfront restaurants have just a few clients at a time. In fact Fausto and Leila close, for all of September and October, and we were there just a week into their winter season. At night they closed up so we would go to the nearby italian-owned pasta/pizza restaurant or down the road to Mazunte to eat more seafood on the beach palapa restaurants.
We went out to the ocean with this morning, paying 150 pesos each to the owner, Efren, and Miguel, for a little dolphin-turtle-whale tour and what a tour. At the last minute Fausto also joined us and that was great, because he and the owner are great friends and they took us all over. Fausto had heard that overnight a huge number of turtles had arrived, in the hundreds or even thousands, and out on the ocean, we found sea turtles all over, we saw at least 40 in an hour. He said 6 of the 7 known species of sea turtle are found here, and 3 of them nest here. We probably saw 3 species according to Fausto. Sometimes they hang out resting, bobbing on the surface before going down for a snack, often staying still enough that seabirds come rest on them. Several were paired up, apparently turtle lovemaking lasts 24 to 48 hours during which time they just float along, and some were courting, circling each other. We found one caught in a Dorado fishing line and Efren freed it and I saw there was another nearby just underwater, perhaps its girlfriend or boyfriend.
During the same trip we also had a great time also out there with about 5 pods of dolphins of 3 different species, and saw the dolphins swimming with freshly caught dorados in their mouths and saw one dorado, which is a mahimahi, hiding by swimming directly under a large turtle, but the dolphin was too smart and saw it and chased the turtle-mahimahi pair down in the depths. At the time we were snorkeling to get a better view, and I was amazed at how crystal clear the depths were and how long it took to see them disappear, way way down. We were in and out of the water constantly, depending on where Fausto and Efren wanted to go. Then suddenly up off the very long, open La Ventanilla beach we saw whales, the first pair they had seen all season, very close to the shore (40 feet at one time?) and very close to us. We followed the whales down the shore for about 6 or 7 breaches and got in the water to see if we could see them go by in the deep but no luck. I´m not sure what type of whale, not huge and not small. Dark color and sort of nobbly.
Mostly however we have not been doing anything organized, we have just been swimming, a little snorkeling and frequently eating and drinking what the local restaurants have to offer, fish with garlic, fish with garlic and chile, fish with sauteed vegetables chillies and tomatoes, fish with lemon, etc. I have eaten so much fish. Can´t wait for peanut butter, or chicken, or something, anything but fish! just kidding... mostly. We have taken little colective taxis and covered trucks to the local beaches generally comfortably. The place has been a bit more expensive than we had thought and than it is in the guidebooks, prices are up some, but we felt we were seeing something in this rural coast area that is soon to disappear and we felt privileged to be here NOW. I would recommend seeing this part of the world soon before it is more costly. We spent as much as $65 a night. Mexico Lindo cost us $35 a night but in full season they are $50 a night. So for mexico coast it is more than we thought. But you can still find a beachside room with a very small bed or maybe a hammock, a shared somewhat dirty bathroom, for muchless, $15 or so if you are young enough to do this. As for transportation: because of having too much luggage we did take taxis ($30 USD from Puerto Angel to Puerto Escondido) but you could definitely get by cheaper with combi taxis (5 or 10 pesos for a short distance, sometimes in these covered pickup trucks with high roofs) and local buses which are reliable and quite cheap. Our last day, we took a cab for our luggage from Puerto Angel to the Huatulco airport, $30; we met an american guy with a single roller carry on who had paid $3 to take a local bus all the way from Puerto Escondido, 90 minutes away. The buses and combis all let you on and off just outside the airport so if traveling light, definitely would be the way to go.
We went to Puerto Escondido also for a night, found a great hotel there, the Flor De Maria which we'd definitely recommend because it is extremely lovely and has a great rooftop shady area with hammocks and a small pool overlooking the bay and beach, which is a great change from the hot beach, but even though many people absolutely love Puerto Escondido, it was just too hot and the souvenirs too cheesy and the beach too unsafe for our taste - you are told you should not walk the beaches at night.
So we spent 2 nights at Puerto Angel, 1 night at Puerto Escondido, 2 nights at San Agustinillo and a final night at Puerto Angel to reconnect with some luggage and get back to normal mexican village life and email. We had a great time today just wandering the beach and pier of the town snapping little shots of people and boats as the sunset glow faded.
One more story. Our second night on the coast, as we walked the Playa Pantheon after dinner, we heard Iz, singing Somewhere over the Rainbow, coming from one of the restaurants, so we went close. Turns out, that there is a special Mexican celebration 9 days after someone dies, and this restaurant's owner had just passed away. So, they were watching videos of him, to Iz's music and eating tamales and coffee together. They asked us to join but we felt a little shy, so we went off into the darkness back to our hotel listening to Iz's voice.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
5. the High Forest above Oaxaca (by Amy)
One day, Craig and I took a ´tour´to the highland village of Cuajimoloyas. We went mountain biking, which took us by surprise once we started because we had forgotten that we were up at 10,000 feet (Oaxaca City is at 5,000 feet). Anyway I liked this day. For much of the day we were on high logging roads and a few trails, in a high forest of pines, a few red firs, a few oak-like trees, lots of birds and butterflies to hear when you were quiet. The air quality is lovely and much of the time it is moist so a lot of the trees are festooned with grey epiphytes and mosses and lichens. Overnight it gets quite cold there and even in the day if breezy. Craig got to see a lot of neat craggy rocks with canyon like clefts in them, I got to spend some time in the forest by myself for a while because I could not master my fear of heights enough to scramble up a wooden ladder-like structure then around a cliff using handholds.
The highlight was a very way too expensive but interesting traditional steam bath, a temezcal, that was hosted by 81 year old Dona Manuelita, the town´s traditional healer and midwife, and her daughter Soledad. This was in a steam bath built adjacent to a leaky mountain cabin with a tin roof, filled with single beds and in the corner were large canvas bags filled to overbrimming with black potatoes. To get into the steam bath you had to wriggle, naked, under some blankets, into a 3 foot tall room where 2 or 3 could lie stretched out while the woman doing the temezcal could swat you, in total darkness, with herbs while she ladeled herb-filled water onto the stones of the fire that had been heating all day. It was steamy, hot, and a bit smoky. Could not tell if the interested fragrance was all woodsmoke, or part woodsmoke and part magic herbs. After emerging from the steam you were each wrapped in a sheet and told to lie down. Then you were told you had to go straight to the van and go home and not go out for the rest of the evening in case you were affected badly by the cold. In the town when we left it was 8 degrees celcius, but as we went down the long windy road back to Oaxaca, it slowly warmed up to 21 degrees celcius, about 72 degrees, according to the car thermometer.
If going to Cuajimoloyas: we took a guide for transport, for $30 US each. A young lady from Germany took the second class bus, for 25 pesos or $2.50. Guess what we think we should have done! Once there you need to pay a local town fee of about $5 and an fee for guides and $10 each for bikes and who knows what else. But it was fun. We´d recommend setting it up with someone else than our guides though. Maybe Tierrraventura, which we used a few years ago, run by Claudia and Yves from Switzerland. They do an overnight trek where they drop you at one village and pick you up at another.
4.random Oaxacan treasures (by Amy)
Random things to enjoy about Oaxaca.
Santo Domingo, the museum-monastery in Oaxaca. I had forgotten how exquisite an experience it is, to go inside. You see it every day as you wander but I didn´t make time to go in til the last day here. It´s made of green-gold-yellow stone, 2 stories, and it's huge, it spreads out over a half mile in all directions, with several open courtyards and many long, tall, wide hallways which end in open-air windows that look out across the Oaxacan town to the mountains that encircle the large valley. The monastery is surrounded by large walled-in grounds which are planted in geometric plant designs that match the cactusy prairies nearby, it is a sort of botanical garden but it has stonework which is sculptural, too, including narrow zigzags of water and this time of year because of the day of the dead some are filled with yellow and orange marigolds which streak in cool lines across the land. So looking from the large open windows you see this colored landscape then the yellow stone walls then the distant green mountains and the blue sky. Meanwhile, there is a breathlike wind that is very softly blowing in or out of the stone monastery depending on the temperatures. it´s very cool. The rooms are filled with archaeologic treasures including gold, turquoise, pearl and seashell necklaces found at Monte Alban, and other artworks too. Sometimes the hallways meet in arching domes and-or stairways, and there they have traced the carved lines in the stone, with thick gold lines and they look pretty great.
Another thing that´s great about Oaxaca is adventures that can happen to you on local buses. If you start at the bus stations, you get a seat, then as the bus winds on the Periferico around the downtown towards whatever small town you are headed to, people get on, and on, and on. I like Oaxaca because there are modern young folks, stylish career ladies, and a fair sprinkling of tiny old ladies who like to wear green plaid aprons and have a grey and black woven rebozo wrapped and piled around their heads. Many times they have long braids wound around their heads too with turquoise purple or rose colored ribbons. Oaxaca also has a fair number of people in from the outlying areas to sell stuff to tourists and they wear bright costumes which they are often quite proud of. One lady was trying to sell me a gorgeous dress like hers for about $250 dollars, not able to, and she said, ´look at mine, it lasts, it is 12 years old and it still looks new.´she was right. One very unusual thing that happened to us on a bus is we were riding back from Teotitlan on a bus that originated in the large market town of Tlacolula, which is a huge market on Sundays. Our bus had a number of small wellbehaved mexican kids on it, american kids would have been going nuts. Anyway soon we heard a squawk like a parrot and I thought, wow these kids are talented. It was answered by another squawk. and a third. Turns out that on the bus were 3 different small parrotlike birds, we could not see any of them and they were being brought home from market in paper lunch bags. Sad for the parrots and ecology but how interesting for us! squawk squawk squawk. Hope they all got home ok.
We´ve been really enjoying Oaxacan food as before. When we were last here in about 2004, it was quite the culinary destination! After the political upheaval some restaurants have changed hands and one of the old haute cuisine-nouvelle cuisine places, El Naranjo, got sold.So we went there last night and had the following: a little appetizer plate for free of two fresh sauces one made from chiles cooked in a molcajete, one of ´pasilla chiles from the state of mexico´as opposed to ´pasilla chiles of oaxaca´, and a dish of butter with sour orange peel and chile, to dip with either tortillas or bread or crackers. then we had a soup of ´cream of baby corn with cilantro´ layered next to a soup of ´cream of chile poblano and epazote´. Then we had meatballs made of minced beef and pork in a bed of ´charred tomato and chipotle´sauce. Then we had fresh pasta with squash blossoms, goat cheese,mushrooms, herbs and fire roatsted chiles. Then we had red mole with roast pork, the sauce included chiles, peanuts, herbs, sesame and other flavors. We were quite pleased. The new owner is a gringo from Connecticut, Andrew Peterson, we wish him quite well. Earlier that same day for lunch, at the Flor de Oaxaca restaurant which is more traditional, we had had ´chile pasilla filled with picadito which is minced meat, that day it was chicken, another day we´d had beef, quite sweet and savory, the chiles were coated with fluffy batter and then lay in a savory orange-red tomato sauce that was really good, and also one of our favorite moles, Coloradito, which is a lighter not choclatey red savory sauce, over chicken. We were offered great desserts but kept being too full. We drank limonada with gas, bubbly water, and for dinner in addition to water, mostly margaritas since red wine is too costly here compared to its quality.
Another big treat here is music, and unorganized or unexpected musicians. A few nights ago after eating at another great restaurant, Los Pacos, we had come down to the Zocalo and found ourselves dancing romantically with a bunch of other tourists on a street corner of the Zocalo, to this marimba band that includes 3 marimba players, a percussionist, wind instruments and a few others, playing caribbean-cuban-mexican oldies. So last night, a similar band was set up on the bandstand in the center of the square, with rows and rows of chairs holding locals listening, and the first two rows of chairs contained older couples who got up to 1920s hits and did elegant foxtrots when it was slow and elegant latin dancing when the music bridged into something a little more rhythmical. it was very nice to see these older couples with their affection and practiced dance steps.
There are a few marimba players who set up their 2 marimbas in the daytime and move counterclockwise around the square one direction, taking tips, and there is a saxophone player who is very good who plays The Girl from Ipanema and I left my heart in San Freancisco and moves clockwise, at the same time. At times there are some other odder musicians. There is a guy in dreds who plays bongos. There are a few guitarists playing peruvian-charango hits. There are one or two traditional Zapotec musicians playing solo guitar or solo horn then singing the same tune, both offkey whether it is on the wind instrument or singing. Those we could pass on. There are some mariachis, always welcome but not as much fun for us as the marimbas. And every now and then, some street vendor of some kind has to let steam out of whatever machine he has, and it lets off a big loud steam whistle. This is often happening at the same time as loud fireworks explode. Sometimes also there is an accordion player. Right now at this very moment I am writing email in the Zocalo and the marimba guys have set up again. Also they are building a small stage in the street for another unclear event. The big festivities ended 2 days ago for day of the dead and it´s only Tuesday, and the foxtrot dancing was on MOnday, so we don´t know. Oh yeah, Saturday night also there was a pretty good violinist playing beethoven on a stage in the square with a sort of moog synthesizer playing the rest of the orchestra.
Some other good food we had includes one day, we took the 2nd class bus out to Teotitlan del Valle, the rug town, for 12 pesos out, 8 pesos back. The bus stops at the highway where taxis come by and take you into town for 5 pesos per person. Some of the taxis are tuk-tuks. Anyway we recommend going to Teotitlan this way, because if you go with a guide or a tour, the rugs cost 20 to 40% more due to the kickbacks that go to our guide. Whereas we went to see our favorite rugmaker, Bug in A Rug on Hidalgo, and we were able to negotiate prices down about 10% for no guide, and 10% more for paying in cash. Anyway, while in this town we ate at the very overpriced but very good small restaurange, Tlamanalli, which is run by some women in town. There we had the lightest, flakiest blue corn tortilla chips i have ever imagined, browned on a clay comal, with extremely fresh guacamole and salsa made from the local tasty savory roasted chiles. We had soup made with local herbs and a small fresh quesadilla with squash blossoms and epazote, and some kind of tasty tamales du jour.
Craig is wanting us to go out for our last meal here, meanwhile I will just say one more thing about hot chocolate. We used to always get hot chocolate frothed with hot milk, but lately I have a taste for ´chocolate de agua´which is made with water instead. So it is freshly ground chocolate, cinnamon, almonds and sugar, frothed up with water. Such a great clean dark chocolate flavor. Amazing.
Monday, November 5, 2007
3. Dia de los Muertos, Chocolate and a Sauna, Zapotec Style...Craig
Rug maker from Teotitlan del Valle 
Comparsa dancers
Oaxacan offrenda
Day of the Dead in Oaxaca is fabulous. We got here on November 1st, the second day of the three Days of the Dead. We immediately headed down to the Zocalo for some Sopa Azteca...Aztec soup. A rich tomato broth with pieces of fried tortilla in it. On the side, a plate of pork rinds, avocado and Oaxacan cheese that you stir in. Nothing is better.
Refreshed a bit, we headed down to the Pantheon San Miguel, the main cemetery in town. Folks were just starting to dress up the graves with flowers. All around were beautiful offrendas....three tiered alters covered with skeletons, sculls, food, drink and flowers. Many were quite gorgeous. In fact, you see these all over town...in the hotels, restaurants and all around the zocalo. Right next to the cemetery, in the street, were several stalls selling yummy food. We had some quesadillas filled with zucchini flowers, Oaxacan chees and epazote, a wonderfully tasty local herb.
We took a tour in the evening out to Etla, 15 miles out of town. Here we were to see some ´comparsas´, which are some very strange dances where people dress up in some great costumes, devils, skeletons, bishops, Mexican wrestlers, Elvis, and some pretty ladies (although all the dancers are men). Then the brass band starts up, playing quite out of tune most of the time, and the dancers hop around in a strange kind of dance, dancing by themselves, never with another person. It was great and quite unique.
The next day, Nov. 2nd, we went to a lovely little cemetery that Amy had read about, San Felipe del Agua, about 5 kms north of town. Very small, maybe only a couple of acres and very few tourists in site, this turned out to be the perfect place for a Dia de los Muertos experience. Around noon when we arrived, the folks were just starting to set up their families graves. Lots of flowers, fresh paint on the grave, model skulls and sand paintings depicting skeletons. We walked around, trying to be as quiet as possible, but nobody seemed to mind.
We came back in the evening, around 8pm, and this is when things were really hopping. We wandered around the gravesites...people were sitting around granny´s grave, drinking mezcal, eating dinner, and just enjoying the place. We heard a guitar trio over in one corner and wandered over. The music was great...traditional Oaxacan songs played by three men. At the grave next to this, we met a lady who´s brother had died four years ago. Her family offered us some mezcal. When Amy told them that her mom had died a few weeks ago, they invited us to join them. We sat around for an hour or more, singing Mexican songs...the only one I knew was Celito Lindo, but all the others were traditional local songs. This was an awesome experience.
The next day we headed up to the high mountains above the valley of Oaxaca to a town called Cuahimolyas. We did a four hour mountain bike tour, which turned out to be quite difficult since at 10,000 feet your lungs just don´t work all that well. So we ended up riding downhill and doing a lot of walking uphill. But the views were superb and the pine forests lovely. At the end of the day we had a ´Temescal´, which is a Zapotec sauna. We went to this old lady´s house, which is a shack on the hillside. On the side of the shack is a little brick room with an oven on the side. So you take off all of your clothes and slide in feet first (it´s only about four feet high this room). You then lie down stark nekkid on a rug and it´s HOT inside, full of steam in which herbs have been boiling. The old lady is in there fanning all the steam around you and then takes this mop like thing and starts beating you with it. I guess this is supposed to help get the toxins out, but she isn´t all that carefull where she is hitting you with it, if you know what I mean.
The last couple of days we´ve just been kind of hanging out, doing lots of shopping in the market and around town in the various stores. Yesterday we took a bus out to Teotitlan del Vallee to do rug shopping (this is the rug town) and Amy got a couple of nice rugs.
The last two nights we´ve had some amazing meals. The best restaurant in town is called La Cathedral, near the Zocalo. I had a great Aztec soup and Amy had a marvelous soup of alote and chile poblano. For a main course I had roasted pig which was to die for...tasted a lot like kalua pig from Hawaii. Amy had some wonderful chile rellenos. These were downed with the help of some tequila anejo and a couple of margaritas. Last night we went to El Naranjo, a famous place that was recently bought by an American. I had a pork mole in red sauce.
About the moles, there are at least seven here locally. My favorite is the Coloradito, which is kind of between the negro and the rojo. Very spicey and rich and good over pork or chicken. The making of mole is incredibly complicated, but you can buy some really nice ones in the market here, which we did. We also got a LOT of chocolate, as they make it fresh for you on the chocolate street here in town. But you have to buy 2.5 kilos, so we have chocolate for anyone who wants some.
Tonight we´re taking the all night bus to Puerto Angel and we´ll spend the rest of the trip on the coast. I´m really looking forward to the warm water, fresh seafood and palm trees.
Hasta Luego, Craig
Sunday, November 4, 2007
2. To be in Oaxaca for Days of the Dead (by Amy)
Four nights of being in Oaxaca at this very special time of year, and we have not blogged once so I am hoping to report on it now. Wait til you see photos, of beautiful Oaxacan nights by candlelight in the graveyards with many friendly masked, and unmasked, spirits around.
We arrived in Oaxaca city early on November 1, 2007, a day or two after many of the graveyard celebrations had started. On October 31, the spirits of children are celebrated at several cemeteries, most notably Xoxocotlan, called hoho for short, but we were not there. That´s ok, Oaxaca takes a little getting acclimated due to the altitude and we saw plenty of celebration and took part in it too, Nov 1 and 2.
Our first day of the celebration, we headed after breakfast in the lovely Zocalo of quesadillas with a tasty flavoring plant called epazote, black beans, spicy hot chocolate, coffee over to the main graveyard or Pantheon General to see people getting ready for nov 1, the day the adult spirits return, by sweeping and painting graves and bringing in armload after armload of bright orange marigolds (tzempazucil) and red cockscomb flowers. Outside the walls of the big cemetery, foodstalls and small carnival rides and games were setting up. From one stall we bought skeleton costume gloves, they were also selling masks. We thought this was because halloween is getting popular with kids here, but actually it was different than that. While we were still outside, we saw some brass bands appear with costumed participants on stilts, adult witches monsters and goblins, with many ids in great costumes as red devils and skeletons especially. Whole costumes for kids in black with white bones painted on, are very popular, with pull on gloves. The band went on into one of the many courtyards of the main cemetery, which is just a 30 peso taxi ride from downtown by the way, and set up in a corner and all the small kids danced, egged on by admiring parents. Meanwhile, in the sunshine, adults started washing graves and setting up flowers. In the alcoves where people have mausoleums, they had already set up a great many elaborate ofrendas, or offerings, where tables laden with flowers breads and photos and sand or flower paintings honored specific organizations or the beloved deceased. รง
There are many cemetaries in Oaxaca city and in the valley of Oaxaca. Some are decorated elaborately, others with just bunches of flowers. You can take expensive tours to each of these. We did too, but after learning how day of the dead is, I realize, this is not necessary! no one guides or controls day of the dead here. Our most satisfying time was at a lovely lovely small cemetary above town, San Felipe del Agua, which I had read about in a blog. we went up there the morning of Nov 2, to see preparations, in a taxi for 50 pesos, and went back at night, and had a wonderful time. There is no difficulty getting there or back, for all day, to get ready, people are going up there with flowers and fresh paint and all night people are coming home.
Back to our remembrances. Our first night Thursday Nov 1, we did pay for a tour, and this was kind of neat. We went to a hillside town far outside Oaxaca, to see something called ´Comparzas.´Comparzas means parades, of some vanished ritual significance. In these parades, many people dress the part of ´the dead´, meaning they wear skeleton costumes or wear sort of darth vader like suits of chain mail, mostly capes and body suites sewn with many glittering coins and jingle bells, with monster like modern rubber masks. They encounter some archetypal figures also in costumes: bishops, doctors, magically powered dwarfs and very sexy nurses. Some looked a lot like wookies. There are little plays about trying to cure the dead from death. It was a little like The Christmas Revels. We understood nothing of it but it all took place in great dance arenas with out of tune brass bands in these distant village streets. We spent all night from 9 to 2 am following these silly bands and costumed figures around town, sometimes drinking lots of local mezcal which is clear, white, odorless and tasty out of tiny little plastic shot glasses. We rapidly become plastered and one with the occasion. I don´t think we could have done this, without a tour, it was to a town called San Agustin Etla, it went on a bit long and was very disorganized and we have not much clear idea of the religious significance but what an experience! I got to talk to some of the local townsladies, since the men were dancing, and they said the women get to do it too about 9 days later. Everyone not dancing or playing in the band or in costume was looking on transfixed.
The second day of the Days of the Dead, we were in the morning watching preparations at the small cemetary, San Felipe del Agua, how lovely. This is about 2 acres of tombs under a few big trees, and people were using flowers, blossoms, petals and colored sands on the graves to create great pictures and heart and designs. Every grave with a fence got a new coat of paint. Every concrete multilevel grave got fresh bright colors, pink orange and turquoise. Every place got new flowers and some had many many candles and a bottle of wine stuck in. often groups of people were working together, more often it would be two ladies and our favorite corner of life, we just got to watch one man, probably in his 70s, just sit and gaze at his loved ones site. We sat on the large roots of a giant ficus tree for a while and just watched the weeding, painting and washing.
In the afternoon we went out of town again with a tour, to the town of Santa Maria del Tule, where they have a huge old tree. we went to their graveyard, here mostly people plopped down vases of orange and pink flowers and ate and began to get really drunk. there was a covered patio where bands were playing and we got to participate in the early dancing, then out come dancing like the comparzas of the night before, with costumed men women and kids. None of the noncostumed folks danced. You will like our pictures. As it got dark, we went back to Oaxaca and this time our van of tourists asked to be let off, on our own, at San Felipe del Agua again. What a contrast! if drunk, people were vibrantly happy. the lovely decorations and candles flickered everywhere. we had brought along a candle or two to light for our loved ones and when I mentioned to a family that I had recently lost my mom, we were taken to heart. We had such a time. We were all drinking clear mezcal and tequila, a trio of guitars started playing at the one gravesite, at the other gravesite we got to take pictures of everyone including lovely 10 year old Nayeli, a local zapotec name for ´lovely one´, wearing her devil costume, and we sang old Oaxacan favorites and other songs. We were with a new friend of ours from Columbia who also sang along. we had so, so much fun. in between times we would go eat street food outside the graveyard, great empanadas and oaxacan moles and specialties and drank hot chocolate, coffee, beer and atole, a warm spicy grain drink sometimes with chocolate.
I think that´s enough for now, our pictures will show the wonders of being out on the graves. It was easy to go and be there, bringing our own memories and some candles along.
When we are in Oaxaca we've always stayed at Las Golondrinas, cost is about $45 per double, very pretty rooms around courtyards, about 4-5 blocks from downtown.
We arrived in Oaxaca city early on November 1, 2007, a day or two after many of the graveyard celebrations had started. On October 31, the spirits of children are celebrated at several cemeteries, most notably Xoxocotlan, called hoho for short, but we were not there. That´s ok, Oaxaca takes a little getting acclimated due to the altitude and we saw plenty of celebration and took part in it too, Nov 1 and 2.
Our first day of the celebration, we headed after breakfast in the lovely Zocalo of quesadillas with a tasty flavoring plant called epazote, black beans, spicy hot chocolate, coffee over to the main graveyard or Pantheon General to see people getting ready for nov 1, the day the adult spirits return, by sweeping and painting graves and bringing in armload after armload of bright orange marigolds (tzempazucil) and red cockscomb flowers. Outside the walls of the big cemetery, foodstalls and small carnival rides and games were setting up. From one stall we bought skeleton costume gloves, they were also selling masks. We thought this was because halloween is getting popular with kids here, but actually it was different than that. While we were still outside, we saw some brass bands appear with costumed participants on stilts, adult witches monsters and goblins, with many ids in great costumes as red devils and skeletons especially. Whole costumes for kids in black with white bones painted on, are very popular, with pull on gloves. The band went on into one of the many courtyards of the main cemetery, which is just a 30 peso taxi ride from downtown by the way, and set up in a corner and all the small kids danced, egged on by admiring parents. Meanwhile, in the sunshine, adults started washing graves and setting up flowers. In the alcoves where people have mausoleums, they had already set up a great many elaborate ofrendas, or offerings, where tables laden with flowers breads and photos and sand or flower paintings honored specific organizations or the beloved deceased. รง
There are many cemetaries in Oaxaca city and in the valley of Oaxaca. Some are decorated elaborately, others with just bunches of flowers. You can take expensive tours to each of these. We did too, but after learning how day of the dead is, I realize, this is not necessary! no one guides or controls day of the dead here. Our most satisfying time was at a lovely lovely small cemetary above town, San Felipe del Agua, which I had read about in a blog. we went up there the morning of Nov 2, to see preparations, in a taxi for 50 pesos, and went back at night, and had a wonderful time. There is no difficulty getting there or back, for all day, to get ready, people are going up there with flowers and fresh paint and all night people are coming home.
Back to our remembrances. Our first night Thursday Nov 1, we did pay for a tour, and this was kind of neat. We went to a hillside town far outside Oaxaca, to see something called ´Comparzas.´Comparzas means parades, of some vanished ritual significance. In these parades, many people dress the part of ´the dead´, meaning they wear skeleton costumes or wear sort of darth vader like suits of chain mail, mostly capes and body suites sewn with many glittering coins and jingle bells, with monster like modern rubber masks. They encounter some archetypal figures also in costumes: bishops, doctors, magically powered dwarfs and very sexy nurses. Some looked a lot like wookies. There are little plays about trying to cure the dead from death. It was a little like The Christmas Revels. We understood nothing of it but it all took place in great dance arenas with out of tune brass bands in these distant village streets. We spent all night from 9 to 2 am following these silly bands and costumed figures around town, sometimes drinking lots of local mezcal which is clear, white, odorless and tasty out of tiny little plastic shot glasses. We rapidly become plastered and one with the occasion. I don´t think we could have done this, without a tour, it was to a town called San Agustin Etla, it went on a bit long and was very disorganized and we have not much clear idea of the religious significance but what an experience! I got to talk to some of the local townsladies, since the men were dancing, and they said the women get to do it too about 9 days later. Everyone not dancing or playing in the band or in costume was looking on transfixed.
The second day of the Days of the Dead, we were in the morning watching preparations at the small cemetary, San Felipe del Agua, how lovely. This is about 2 acres of tombs under a few big trees, and people were using flowers, blossoms, petals and colored sands on the graves to create great pictures and heart and designs. Every grave with a fence got a new coat of paint. Every concrete multilevel grave got fresh bright colors, pink orange and turquoise. Every place got new flowers and some had many many candles and a bottle of wine stuck in. often groups of people were working together, more often it would be two ladies and our favorite corner of life, we just got to watch one man, probably in his 70s, just sit and gaze at his loved ones site. We sat on the large roots of a giant ficus tree for a while and just watched the weeding, painting and washing.
In the afternoon we went out of town again with a tour, to the town of Santa Maria del Tule, where they have a huge old tree. we went to their graveyard, here mostly people plopped down vases of orange and pink flowers and ate and began to get really drunk. there was a covered patio where bands were playing and we got to participate in the early dancing, then out come dancing like the comparzas of the night before, with costumed men women and kids. None of the noncostumed folks danced. You will like our pictures. As it got dark, we went back to Oaxaca and this time our van of tourists asked to be let off, on our own, at San Felipe del Agua again. What a contrast! if drunk, people were vibrantly happy. the lovely decorations and candles flickered everywhere. we had brought along a candle or two to light for our loved ones and when I mentioned to a family that I had recently lost my mom, we were taken to heart. We had such a time. We were all drinking clear mezcal and tequila, a trio of guitars started playing at the one gravesite, at the other gravesite we got to take pictures of everyone including lovely 10 year old Nayeli, a local zapotec name for ´lovely one´, wearing her devil costume, and we sang old Oaxacan favorites and other songs. We were with a new friend of ours from Columbia who also sang along. we had so, so much fun. in between times we would go eat street food outside the graveyard, great empanadas and oaxacan moles and specialties and drank hot chocolate, coffee, beer and atole, a warm spicy grain drink sometimes with chocolate.
I think that´s enough for now, our pictures will show the wonders of being out on the graves. It was easy to go and be there, bringing our own memories and some candles along.
When we are in Oaxaca we've always stayed at Las Golondrinas, cost is about $45 per double, very pretty rooms around courtyards, about 4-5 blocks from downtown.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
1. Back to Oaxaca (by Craig)
Oh yes, we will be shopping for rugs.
Zocalo, Oaxaca
Puerto Angel
It's been three long years since Amy and I have been to our favorite city in Mexico, Oaxaca. We will be there for Dia de los Muertos and plan on visiting some graveyards with the locals. After 5 days or so in the city, we will head down to the coast, to Puerto Escondido. We will spend a week or more exploring the Oaxacan coast.
Please stop by every once in awhile to check out what we're doing. Our trip is from November 1st to November 13th.
Zocalo, Oaxaca
Puerto Angel
It's been three long years since Amy and I have been to our favorite city in Mexico, Oaxaca. We will be there for Dia de los Muertos and plan on visiting some graveyards with the locals. After 5 days or so in the city, we will head down to the coast, to Puerto Escondido. We will spend a week or more exploring the Oaxacan coast.
Please stop by every once in awhile to check out what we're doing. Our trip is from November 1st to November 13th.
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