Wednesday January 22, Trip around Lake Chapala

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Wednesday, January 22

We arrived at our pickup spot at 7:30AM for a full day tour around Lake Chapala. There were 8 of us in the van. I was a little disappointed when I realized that Rosie, our usual tour guide was not accompanying us. Our tour guide today was to be Herman from Guadalajara.

We left Ajijic and drove through Chapala heading east. We drove through a very small village of Poncitlan where we saw many women and groups of children carrying buckets of corn kernels (Maize) to the mill. Each family then uses the ground corn to make their tortillas. Evidently everything is so fresh the tortillas are supposed to be the very best. I was disappointed that we couldn’t stop and see the mill or taste some of the freshly made tortillas.

The van stopped high on the mountain overlooking Mezcala, a town I am anxious to visit but not this time.

We stopped next in Ocatlan which means place of the ocote (pines). On October 2, 1847, a large and powerful earthquake destroyed most of the city, including the original church. The following day, a Sunday, when the faithful were attending a Mass outside of the destroyed church, a vision of the crucifix was claimed to have been seen.

There we toured the new church and also saw the one that had been destroyed. There is a large statue of the crucifix by the churches. The interior of the new church has murals depicting the devastation after the earthquake and the people observing the vision.

We walked around the central plaza for a while then continued on to Jamay where we stopped to look at another beautiful church and the remains of the original that was destroyed by the same earthquake.

We again walked around and toured more buildings.

I was a little disappointed because I was hoping to see and spend more time in the tiny villages around the lake.

Next it was time for lunch. We stopped in a large family style restaurant in the town of La Barca.

The drive from La Barca along the south side of the lake was very rural. The lake had flooded many corn fields at one end of the lake. There were acres of plastic covered fields where strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and other fruit were growing, protected from the hot sun. The plastic was stretched over metal frames and there was so much of it that I dread to think of the impact it has on the environment when discarded.

We stopped at a place called Petatan which is a major fishing village. The White Pelicans migrate to Lake Chapala from Canada and the United States. It looks like the majority of them like this particular village because they are fed the leftover fish parts regularly. There were many people filleting cat fish and carp. Minnows were drying on long tables. Under a tree, men were sitting drinking tequila and preparing some food. It reminded me so much of the men in the islands doing the same thing “under the liming tree”.

Two young girls carried a crate of fish and a young boy pushed a wheel barrel full of fish toward the beach and fed the pelicans for while we were there. The pelicans went crazy fighting over the scraps.

This stop was the highlight of the trip for us.

When we returned to the van, we continued without stopping the rest of the way back to Aijic. It was a long and rough ride due to major construction on the road. When we arrived in Ajijic we asked to be dropped off at Superlake which is just a few steps away from Lety’s a seafood restaurant in San Antonio. Lind and Ray, friends we met on the Tequila tour and who had taken this tour as well, joined us for dinner.



We tried to go for drinks after dinner at Tony’s or Johnny’s Mama but it was 8:30PM so everything was closed.

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