Wanderlust

(A Picasa web album of photos of Cuetzalan may be seen at album.) For the past couple of weeks I've been on an itinerary of Mexico City to Tlaxcala to Puebla to Cuetzalan to Mexico City again, but until reaching Cuetzalan I couldn't find the ambition to write a post. Cuetzalan, however, is a first-time experience and a real shot in the arm--a cross between Taxco and Real de Catorce. To be more concrete, it's a town of 45,000, of whom 80 percent are indígenas of the Náhuatl group, located at about 3,000 feet of altitude in the Sierra Norte of the state of Puebla, in the northeast, near the state of Veracruz. There is a second-class bus from Puebla City, which I took (four hours) and a first-class bus that goes to Mexico City (six hours), which I will take from here.

The layout of the town resembles a medieval European city (think Toledo, Spain), the streets that go every which way also going on many different levels, frequently joined by stairways. The zócalo (the main plaza), in fact, is on three levels joined by stairs, the kiosk and two small fountains on the middle level, with the Iglesia de San Francisco and its churchyard on the bottom level. All of the pavements, streets and sidewalks alike, are of very large paving stones. The buildings are mostly white, sometimes with terracota-colored trim, with tile roofs. (I find out from a taxi driver whom I hire for an excursion that the city government gives out white and terracota-colored paint for you to paint your house; if you want another color, that's fine, but you pay for the paint.) The three churches are not colonial, as you would expect, but 19th-century neogothic. (An exhibit in the Casa de la Cultura says that one of them replaced a church that "amenazó ser ruina," i.e., threatened to fall down.) The climate at this time of the year is warm and muggy, with rain in the late afternoon and at night. (The taxi driver tells me that it rains every month but April and May.)

The whiteness of the buildings is matched by the clothing of the indígenas. The women wear a full white skirt and a white huipil with multicolored embroidery around the square neckline and the sleeves. (One woman at the Mercado de Artesanías told me that that part of the garment was woven on a backstrap loom, but another told me it was embroidered, which strikes me as more plausible.) They use multicolored rebozos woven on a backstrap loom or sometimes a white triangular poncho. They sometimes carry their baby on their back in a basket shaped something like a magazine rack with a strap that goes across the forehead. The men wear white pants tied around the ankles, a white shirt worn outside the pants, and a white sombrero. They generally carry a morral woven of some beige straw-like fiber. You can guess which sex wears leather sandals and which sex usually goes barefoot.

I arrive on a Wednesday to stay through Sunday, when there is a weekly market said to be quite special. When I go out just before 9 Thursday morning, to my surprise I find people setting up a market on the two sets of zócalo steps. Asking a couple of people yields the information that the market is twice weekly, but much bigger on Sunday than on Thursday; it turns out that another difference is that at the Sunday market they sell many other things in addition to food. (The following day I discover an indoor market, dark and with no customers.) My approach to a place like this is basically to wander and take pictures, which I happily do on Thursday and Friday. I don't bother to try making use of the map that the tourist folks give out, I just navigate by landmarks and ask directions to the Iglesia de los Jarritos or whatever. (That church is so called because its narrow, pointed tower is covered with clay jars.)

When I am hot and thirsty (I don't like the stickiness of sodas anymore and the warm water I'm carrying with me can be less than appetizing), I find that negociating a lemonade in a restaurant or café works better if I call it an agua de limón rather than a limonada and that it costs between 3 and 5 pesos rather than the 15 or 20 I would pay in a more urban setting. I have a great triumph for my comida at a restaurant where I have read on the Thorn Tree forum that they have crêpes with veggies, which is rather off, but the señor will be glad to prepare for me a veggie version of a guarache, which has a base of a large oval of tortilla, on which is piled beans, cheese, onions, tomatos, avocado, and strips of nopal (cactus), eaten with salsa picante of course and quite delicious. To vary my diet I find a hole in the wall that makes mini pizzas, including a vegetarian version.

I spend considerable time over my first two days locating the one place in town that sells newspapers, which are Puebla papers that come in at noon; I arrange to pay in advance so that the señor will reserve me a copy. On Friday I spend considerable time locating a taxi, which it turns out can be found further down the same street, and negotiate with the taxista an excursion the next day to a nearby botanical garden and an arqueological site. Having the idea that the garden will open at 9 and that it's half an hour away, I ask him to pick me up at my hotel at 8:30. As it happens, we get there in 15 minutes and the garden is closed, but the taxista is resourceful and knows of another botanical garden run by a group that also works with butterflies, grows coffee and black peppercorns, and has cabins. So a muchacho shows me through a garden that is surrounded on all sides and above by screening, to keep in the butterflies, some of which are species that they are working to rescue from the threat of extinction. Then we go to the ruins, modest as prehispanic ruins go, where a muchachito who turns out to be all of eight years old offers to be my guide, which I accept because I have no sense of direction and always have a fear of getting lost in ruins. (Yes, he assures me, he goes to school during the week.)

On Sunday at 8:30 in the morning the town has been transformed--the zócalo and the surrounding streets are covered with puestos selling food, artesanías, clothing, hardware, housewares--you name it. The atmosphere is a quiet bustle; I see a few other foreigners but not a great influx as in, for example, Chichicastenango. An indígena woman approaches me with bags full of artesanías to sell, which of course has happened to me here umpteen times already and I have always managed to resist, but she has an attractive rebozo (black and a sort of mustard color), so I get the price down from 140 pesos to 120 and buy it. I also buy a little packet of delicious nibbles made of crushed macademia nuts.

It will be quite a change to get back to the sound and fury of Mexico City tomorrow.