From Dusk Till Dawn Country

The Mexican highway system is a little less robust than we had anticipated and we’re not going to be able to get to the Mayan ruins at Palenque. Having taken flak for not getting to the more famous Bolivian indigenous sites I fear the fallout from a certain over-educated friend of ours at home (you, and your more celtic work colleagues know who you are) and can offer only the Zatopec ruins of Monte Alban in recompense. We’ll try harder in future and offer up the prospect of reports from the pre-Columban sites at El Tajin, Tula and Teotihuacan. I would include the names of the peoples responsible for these as well but quite frankly I can’t yet tell the difference between a Zatopec and an Aztec, so the Olmecs, Mixtecs, Toltecs and all the other ‘ecs are a complete mystery to me. Hopefully as we get round the sites our education will benefit accordingly. For those that have seen the film From Dawn To Dusk, we can happily report that we have not yet been assaulted by vampires nor indeed George Clooney.

One of the more interesting bits at the Uluru visitor centre was the collection of stones that people from around the world had removed from the site, taken home as souvenirs, then found out this was something of a no-no. Wracked with guilt, and in some cases believing themselves cursed, they had posted their ill-gotten gains back to the rock. At the Zatopec ruins of Monte Alban near Oaxaca, the sign says don’t take souvenirs, but that doesn’t stop a few of the locals from trying to carve out a living with a few authentic Zatopec carvings of their own. Having visited pre-Columban ruins in Mexico before I always find it odd that visitors are allowed to climb some of the monuments, but selling off the relics is taking the mickey.

After subjecting ourselves to tour hell in South America we’re now fully independent, having picked up a rental car in Acapulco. It has enough character to have earned it a name; Mabel. C’s choice not mine. Mabel has been knocked about a bit in her long 100,000km life and the walk round check for existing damage has to have been the longest and most productive ever undertaken in rental history. The front bumper is on its way to becoming an optional extra, not helped by some of the dubious roads we have taken to get to the entirely unpronounceable Oaxaca. The Mexican habit of installing sleeping policemen through all their towns isn’t helping things either. Some of them are big enough to stop tanks, whilst others are cleverly hidden until we are almost upon them. On a couple of occasions poor Mabel nearly became airborne as we desperately stood on the only marginally effective brakes. We soon developed the habit of checking the rear view mirror after each hump to see whether Mabel had shed any body parts.

Our departure from Acapulco was delayed by a couple of hours when the car rental people decided that the car needed new tires. Given the general condition of the vehicle we’re not sure why they picked on the tires as deserving of special attention, but as the roads we later took degraded into unpaved tracks we were grateful for them. Used to high speed travel on the roads back home, we were a tad taken aback by the 7 hours it took us to cover the 400km from Acapulco to Puerto Escondido. The 57kph average speed this first day was, however, record breaking compared to the less than 40kph we averaged the second day, driving the mountainous roads from Puerto Escondido to Oaxaco, a distance of some 300km. The suspect braking ability that Mabel displayed on these precipitous roads was briefly supplanted as number one worry by the reckless passing of one of the few petrol stations on Oaxaca route 131. As we climbed one of the steeper hills the fuel guage started to hover worringly around the ‘running on fumes’ mark. Fortunately, having turned off the aircon to conserve fuel, we just about sweated our way to the next refill. We were also experiencing personal capacity issues of our own by that stage, so all in all the town of Sola de Vega was a welcome stop. Of course the average speed this day might have been better had we not spent the hours until sunset mixing it up with the locals on the streets of Oaxaca looking for a decent hotel. Our drivers tip for Mexico is give no quarter because you sure ain’t going to receive any.

For such a famous location Acapulco was only so-so. Even the Mexican tourist board guide admitted that it had seen better days and its future as the Blackpool of the central America’s looks to be well on course. The beach front hotel was comfortable enough, though we suspect that people have died of hunger waiting for service there. If you’re in to beach holidays then you probably can’t go too far wrong with Acapulco. We were glad to be leaving, especially as on the last day there the hotel was over run with busloads of kids. Now in my day when we went on school trips we were accommodated in cabins or tents, never in 4 star hotels and definitely not in rooms with balconies that gave the opportunity for Galilean experiments involving gravity and spit. Pesky little brats!

Prior to Acapulco we had spent three nights in Mexico City. We didn’t do much there, having endured another of those all day travelling events from Rio that always puts us both in such good moods. We did however take a city tour on an open topped bus. Initially this looked like it was literally going to be a bus tour but two bus changes later we eventually got one that worked. We ended up at the central square, the Plaza de Armas in South America, but called the Zocalo in Mexico. Here our quiet appreciation of the architecture of the national palace and cathedral was somewhat ruined by the huge pop concert being staged in the plaza, so we left the hordes of screaming children that are apparently going to plague us wherever we go in Mexico and spent most of the afternoon drinking beer in a nearby café. Being partially and distantly descended from Mexicans myself I naturally settled into the traditional beer with a twist of Tabasco sauce, whereupon the waiter brought out a traditional Mexican beer mixer for me. Whilst pleasing to the taste buds it had the unfortunate appearance of something he had just drained from the sewers. We reboarded the tour bus in the late afternoon and endured the remaining loop of a tour that took in the city park including, obscurely enough, three loops round the funfair there, and a strange passage through a residential suburb, pretty much all of it under the imminent or actual thunderous rainfall that marked every late afternoon in the city. I would say more about what we saw but an unfortunate incident involving a sudden photo opportunity, an over enthusiastic departure from the seat to snap it, and a plugged in tour commentary headset meant that I was without commentary for the final part of the tour.

This brings this journal back to Oaxaca and our visit to Monte Alban, the first urban complex in Mesoamerica. The Zatopecs occupied this site continuously from 500B.C. to around 850A.D., when it was abandoned by the declining Zatopec civilisation but still used for burial ceremonies by the Mixtec people of the neighbouring valleys. See? Already the whole ‘ec peoples thing is starting to take shape. Our visit there is despite the previous night’s assault on the hotel’s stock of Mexican wine, now exhausted I’m sort of proud to say. The wine snobs amongst you may laugh at the way the bottle was decanted into a huge carafe and then sloshed around as if it was a laboratory sample. Certainly C was in fits and explained how this would horrify the French, whose careful handling of quality wine is designed not to upset the sediment. My feeling is if the French are so crap at making wine that they can’t get rid of the bits then more fool them, but that’s the Mexican in me talking. Nevertheless, we enjoyed many bottles in the balcony bar whilst being entertained by the fine sounds of a live Mexican guitar duo, accompanied on percussion and with a great light show by the night time thunder storm that raged over the city in the valley below.

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