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Published: July 17th 2005
Hello all,
Well, I´m back in Oaxaca after a wonderfully relaxing weekend away to this tiny town called Ixtlan. It is up in the mountains. I went with Erica and her friend Radie came for one night.
It was pretyt funny because we were going to go to another town, but we waited for the bus that was supposed to come at 4·30 for aboiut 45 minutes and finally decided to go to Ixtlan instead. This really nice Senora kept telling us that everyday the bus comes at 4·30, but then, around 4·45 or so, she was like, well, some times it comes at 4·10, or 4·20. We were like, alright, let´s just go to Ixtlan. Since we really hadn´t planned our trip at all, it made it easy to switch locations. (Later in this blog you will once again noticed how we hadn´t planned at all...)
We had to go up this really windy road up there and I had points of being really sick to my stomach, but thankfully the drive was only about an hour and a half. Once we got there we tried to get a cabin at this ecotourism site. They were sort of full, but they had two cabins open. Of course, we hadn´t reserved anything because, once again, we hadn´t planned the weekend at all.
The problem was that someone had reserved them but hadn´t shown up yet. Of course we had to sort of discern this information over time becuase they weren´t really upfront with us. We listened to this like 15 year old kid who really didn´t know what he was talking about. That was problem number one. The second problem was that they talked really fast and kind of swallowed their words. Thus, after they would talk to us I would turn to Erica and say what I got from what they said, and she always understood something totally different! Well, that made things interesting. So anyway, we waited in the office for about 3 hours until they finally gave us the cabin. While we were waiting we talked to this anthropolgist who has been doing work in the region for a long time. We got a lot of good information about the project from her.
Basically, all of these little towns up in the forest have made ecotourism sites where they willt ake you on tours to see waterfalls and other beautiful stuff in the forest. Plus, the people of the community have built these cabins out of the wood from the forest. They are beautiful and can sleep either three or six people. They all have fireplaces and are set among the trees. Plus, they constructed a huge central meeting, eating area. Its all quite tranquil.,
Not only that, the anthropologist told us that this community has worked so harrd on this project, and have really organized it to the point that everyone in the town needs to volunteer their time for the project or the everyday functions of the town. So our guides for the tour we went on were a 16 year old kid, who didn´t really tell us much and an adult driver who spoke English well and pointed out a lot of stuff to us. More on the hike and stuff later.
So we got to stay in one of those for one night. We made a fire, but the wood was a little wet, so it took quite a bit of work on Radie´s part.
The next day we went on a hike/drive where we saw all this beautiful stuff. I´ll have to upload my pictures when I can figure out how to do it.
Saturday night Erica and I stayed in the town and walked around. It is set among all of the mountains and it rains about four times a day, so it is really green and lush right now.
After some more puttering around we came back today.
Tomorrow I´m back to school, but I think I´m only going to go for one more week because I really want to travel to Chiapas and some other places. More on that later as I figure it out...
Hope all is well in your various places. Thanks for the emails and the comments on my blog. Keep them coming!
Love,
Dina
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Joe
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Hola Dina!
¿Que tal? Yo estoy en Huaraz, Peru! I did not get any of your blogs, I guess I´m on the "B" list. Sounds like your having a good time there, I love how we are both in Spanish speaking countries, lucky for me, the Peruvians speak slowly and it is not as crowded here. I can definitly relate to some of your stories. I had to leave the climbing trip due to altitude sickness, bummer. Look for really long and detailed blogs from me soon, with lots of nice photos so feel free to skip the sophmoric ramblings of a ex-journalism major. Be well, Joe