Day 6 16.07.15
After the early night in we were all ready to wake up quite early in the morning, head over to the same restaurant we had been to for dinner, and just really enjoy the little restaurant again. It is one of these restaurants that overlook a cute little plaza and you can feel a town coming to life in the morning.
Oaxaca is a wonderful town. I really enjoyed it! Its really colourful and still not very touristy (as for example I feel San Cristobal is…) Especially walking around in the early hours of the morning is quite special.
Just to throw this little part in, Oaxaca was the first town I decided to find a place to do my washing. Its not even the time you need to wash all your clothes, but more the problem that you don’t know whether it will dry. So having the option of handing in your washing and receiving it the next day is just a luxury that I am willing to pay for. You should put anything in that you would not want washed at high temperatures, but then again you shouldn’t be taking that sort of stuff with you in the first place. It was quick, nicely folded and smelt great of some sort of floral stuff J. Sometime the hotels offer this service sometimes you can do your laundry around the corner at an external place. This time I could in the hotel, which by the way looked like a jungle. Loads of plants and in the centre some birds and parrots. Theoretically a nice idea, practically these birds can be hell when you are trying to sleep in the morning! But they will make it up to you when they start whistling a small tune or when they are catcalling you.
Our day tour was packed with different sites and first of all we headed off in a private bus to Monte Albanín. The streets in Oaxaca are covered in wonderful paintings and murals, which are sometimes hard to capture when you are driving past them. Some of the slogans are great too: “Voy a guarder intacto, el recuerdo de este instante por que todo lo que existe ahora mismo, nunca volvera a ser igual” – “I am going to keep intact, the memory of this instance, because everything that exists right now, will never be the same again”, or something along these lines :) . I also found another mural with a great saying: “La medida del amor es amar sin medida” – “the measurement of love is to love without measurement”. The Mexicans really have some lovely street art.
We got to Monte Albanin, another indigenous site of the Zapotecan indigenous people. The name Monte Albanin comes from the trees that grow up there that produce white flowers. If these flowers blossom and fall to the ground the mountain looks white, therefore the name Monte – Mountain, Albanin – Albino. We had a quick look into the museum where for the first time I could see how the Zapotecans lived, which can be translated to many of the other civilisations too. If you look at their pyramids, the top half of the pyramid which is normally flat is the building ground for their houses, one story, windowless housing, and the bottom of the pyramid is where they would have cellars and “tomb halls”, where they would bury their ancestors. So yeah, the German saying, “Der hat bestimmt noch andere Leichen im Keller”, really fits well – “I am sure he also has other corpses in his cellar”.
This Zapotecan site has a whole bunch of pyramids that are all set up in a similar way, the pyramids lined up facing each other and the North Star, and in between the pyramids you would have enough space for people listening to speeches to sit down or stand, some sort of altar and the houses on top of the pyramids from where most speeches were supposedly held. The pyramids and the houses were all built by slaves that were recruited by the “Zapotecan royalty”, who apparently even had ties to the indigenous of Teotihuacan. It is funny to think that a civilisation that was holding their own slaves and were royalty, were being repressed by the Spanish and made into Spanish slaves. I guess it comes down to who has the biggest and fastest bullet.
The view from this arrangement of pyramids was spectacular and we took many photos. They even had a ball court where many ball games were held back in the days. (They even sometime wore helmets like in American football to protect their heads from the hard plastic balls they used to play with.)
From these indigenous sites we headed to the thickest tree there is on earth. It is even in the Guinness book of records. It needs about 55 people to hold hands to go all the way around it. It is the arbol de Tule, which has a circumference of 42 metres. It is said that this tree is up to 1600 years old and it stands on the church grounds in the town centre of Santa María del Tule. It’s quite a lot of wood! Right next to it we got to witness a church celebration that has followed us for the whole duration of the trip. We were told it has to do with the celebrations of Santa Carmen, but is has already been going on for the whole July. A normal church procession involves music, singing and gospels and several cannon shots. (Maybe not cannons but some other sort of pyrotechnical explosion) The shots let you wince every time though. There is no regularity to it, but they are just randomly shot and can be heard from everywhere in the city or town.
Something else that has been following us the whole trip is “El Chapo”. We strongly believe he has been riding along with us in every bus ride we have taken. Especially after we heard he had escaped the prison and there was a wanted poster on all the police cars. Apparently the police think he is currently in the north of Mexico and not in Oaxaca, but the police have obviously not checked the busses we were riding on like we have ;).
We went for a quick meal at a Mexican buffet, and were surprised by the rain. We were sitting in a restaurant that was covered in a metal roof. The noise such a storm makes on this roof is incredible. I managed to make a video as proof, but overall it was a very eerie moment.
We headed over to our next stop, a fossilised waterfall called Hierve el Agua. Wow! Apart from the view from the top of the waterfall, the actual waterfall is a sight in itself. The orange, blue and green colours on the grey and white background are a majestic image.
We got to walk around the waterfall but raced back to the top as there you could jump into little pools that were formed by springs from this fossilised waterfall. What an amazing natural infinity pool! After our little hike, this was the most refreshing swim we could have hoped for. We also were extremely lucky, because as we got out of the pool and raced back up to the car we avoided a big storm that would bring down torrential rain. Quite impressive if you are swimming in a natural pool and suddenly you hear, not so far in the distance, the rumbling of thunder.
Our next stop was at a little handiwork shop that produced their own textiles and weave their own carpets all with natural dyes and natural wool. How they derive their individual colours is quite interesting. Red for example is extracted from little bugs that are actually pests on the cactuses. They are properly harvested and removed to provide a very vibrant red if the bugs are squashed. (And no, that’s not their blood). Different tones of these colours are achieved by adding a limestone mix to achieve different chemical reactions. Other materials that are used are those of camomile flowers, indigo, different herbs and occasionally pomegranate seeds. The most difficult dye to produce is that of the true black. The normal sheep or lama wool will only achieve a greyish black colour, to dye the wool black a long process of boiling with minerals, and leaving the textile to really absorb the mixture for up to 2 weeks is necessary. That is also why the colour black is not really used often in the Mexican textile culture.
After learning about the textiles, we headed to an activity that had everyone going the whole day. The Mezcal tasting. Mezcal is a spirit that is produced from the family of the Agave plants (cacti like plants that also look a bit like the Aloe Vera plant). The plants are harvested, burned and boiled, their juices extracted and the actual alcohol distilled. Depending on the agave plant and type the Mezcal can range in price. There are also different aging processes influencing the ripening process, taste and price of the Mezcal. Additionally to the actual spirit, there are also different modifications to the Mezcal for example using the Mezcal cremas. These add any imaginable flavour to the Mezcal for example a coffee flavour, a peppermint and chocolate flavour, piña colada flavour, mango and passion fruit flavours and many more. I feel like we tasted them all. I am estimating a total of 24 Mezcal shots. You can just about guess how much fun we were on our way back. A lot of Mezcal was bought and some was directly drunken on the way back to the hotel. To relax our bodies and livers a bit we had dinner at a very good pizza place where unfortunately my table got their food last. Which meant that we drank more to pass the time. Wow. I sound like an alcoholic. The food was good, the tequila shots well, probably not the best, but we were ready to go out after that. And we did. We went and discovered the Oaxacan nightlife. We went to one club and met some lovely locals that took us girls from one club to the next and the conversations we had in Spanish in English were just good fun. Unfortunately still no dancing, but hey, I am sure that will happen at some point during this trip :) .
