Traveling Mexico’s Backroads

I spent a few days with a family in Tlaxcala - generous and kind, as usual, and what a treat to see the children again. The youngest bought me a copy of the Spanish edition of JAWS (Tiburón) as a going away present. It was no trouble to read - it even kept me up until 4 a.m. trying to get to the end.

After the long bus ride in a non-reclining seat, you can imagine that Motozintla looked pretty good. It’s encircled by mountains, green now from the seasonal rains. Clouds move in over the peaks from the north every afternoon. These clouds are deep gray, relentless, inexorable, seeming almost alive. I’ve never felt this way about a natural phenomenon - no matter what I might do, where I might be, whether I exist even, these clouds will just continue rolling in. Of course we all know that, but I never felt it so keenly as watching those gray masses boil over the Sierra peaks.

But it’s also kite season here. Hexagons, mostly, "homemade" of cane strips and string and colorful tissue paper, streamers gaily fluttering and weaving downwind. Most, of course, end up in the trees or entangled in electric and telephone cables. Stuck up there they resemble exotic birds come to roost with bright plumage loosed to the wind. Add the color and the urgent motion of roof-top laundry, the intensely green hills (cut here and there, showing brown rock and dark earth), black cave mouths lime-streaked above by roosting birds and bats, and you have Motozintla’s rainy weather image, more or less! I cannot recall now, or even believe, just how brown and dry it was a few months ago.

Motozintla has a marvelously healthy, moderate climate. The rains have cleansed everything - houses and streets fairly glisten. For some reason burros (donkeys) have moved into the town this rainy season. They are totally unfettered, untended, roaming where they please. Young, old, strolling, standing, lying - browns, grays, some faintly dark-striped across the withers - and saving all their eeeeeh-haws until 2 a.m.
I really felt I’d come home when I sat down for my first meal in a local restaurant. A piglet preceded the waitress (looking for last night’s leavings), rooted around my feet, around chairs and tables, and then left unsatisfied, complaining - "oink, oink" - to the neighborhood.

Down the road Mazapa is a little lower, a little warmer. Every evening frogs, locusts (or cicadas) carry on a clamorous contrapuntal din - loud and powerful, raucous until morning. All voices are blended, there are no solos, and no pauses.

In neither place did I bother to use protection against mosquitoes. There had been a campaign (spraying) against Anopheles, but I really think there just were not many around - maybe an unusual year.

Jose, Martha, Felipe and I spent a few days as tourists at "Lakes of Montebello" park. The lakes are vivid greens and blues - intense, like a huge bucket of paint - yet at the same time crystalline and reminiscent of Lake Superior where objects deep on the rock bottom are perfectly visible.

We stayed beside one large lake in a run-down hostel where we rented a row boat to go down and across lake to the Guatemalan border in search of a reputed trail to moldering Mayan ruins. We didn’t find the ruins but slogged, "Indiana Jones-ing" it, through some wet and heavy jungle. But less romantic than Indiana, the only wild "attack" came from a stinging nettle, which allied us in spirit at least with more intrepid adventurers.

The boating itself was an adventure - there were holes larger than a lumberjack’s fist all around the fiberglass hull beginning just above water line. All fine in calm water with a cautious crew, but bordering on foolhardy when paddling back against a freshening breeze that whipped the tops of the building "wavelets" to a foamy froth. But we took the battered old boat out twice - beached it and swam for hours in idyllic coves sporting shores replete with orchids - large, small, blue, yellow, purple - growing as thick as daisies in a Colorado meadow. Felipe fashioned a gorgeous bouquet of ferns, leaves and several fine orchid specimens, which he later gave to the innkeeper’s 3 year old. Further away we found blackberries - just at their peak - and across the path, still-green guavas. And there were caves - with the usual limestone formations and eeriness. The hostel wasn’t much - no water and little food - but with a grand view from its isolated perch upon a spit of grassy land jutting out into the lake. . . . the epicenter for a horrendous, violent storm in early evening. And covering the shore thousands of large, fresh-water snails - edible and tasty, the natives emphatically assured me.

San Cristobal was jammed with tourists - I hadn’t reckoned on a global school vacation. Mobs, of the worst sort, Mexican as bad as any, taking pictures of goods spread on blankets in the mountain air. Not buying and scarcely noticing (except as "color") the poor, hopeful, desperate Indians who counted on a few sales for a bit of food. Brief polyester tennis shorts, obscene pot bellies, ridiculous streamered straw hats ... tweaking cheeks, patting heads, cooing to the ragged, dirty children who dearly wanted only to sell a few hand-made "pulseras" or "munecas". But few buyers, lots of shutter-bugs.

Nights were cold in San Cristobal - not what most people would expect from southern Mexico in mid-summer. Felipe tells me that in this southern part of Chiapas there are more than 100 Guatemalan "campementos". They have chosen well - Chiapas is beauty - miraculous - though in their need the beauty may be more torment than not.

I located a back-room hang-out where the locals buy 800 peso beer, cold and good. I marveled at a dapper, slender, quadruple (but ambulatory) amputee seated opposite, conversing with gusto, a sweating Corona gripped in the iron hooks that "did" for hands.

On the road from San Cristobal to Mexico City I made friends with more "locals", survived five searches by Mexico’s “federales,” and a full-fledged, live-round shoot-out - with our bus trapped in the middle . . . an exciting trip. Then, finally, the comfort of a jet plane and Miami.