Oaxaca & Mérida

(The image above is the main pyramid at Monte Albán, outside Oaxaca City.)

Well wow we're almost at the end of this 13-month Latin American adventure! This is the penultimate blog about our travels; it covers four weeks in the cities Oaxaca and Mérida before we take a bus to the Riviera Maya for a family wedding in Playa del Carmen on May 10. After that, a few more beach/cenote days, and then home!

We arrived in Oaxaca City, the capital and largest city in the state of Oaxaca, on April 10. Full name Oaxaca de Juárez, it was founded in the early 1400's by a detachment of Mexica (Aztec) warriers; later it was conquered by the Spaniards and was officially designated a city by Hernán Cortés in 1529. The "de Juárez" was added in 1879 in honor of Benito Juárez, a liberal lawyer and 26th president of Mexico. Tourism is a huge element of Oaxaca’s economy, with an estimated 77% of its adult population employed in the tourism sector. Many visitors are Mexicans from other parts of the country and there’s quite a wedding industry in town. We saw fancy fun musical wedding processions two nights in a row downtown:

We wanted to bring the band with us to the wedding in Playa del Carmen!

The Zocalo in central Oaxaca is home to the beautiful Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption. Sadly, there was a lot of construction going on and a lot of it was covered in plywood. As usual, people hang out in the square, eating popsicles, getting their shoes shined, chatting in the shade.

Across the street is the Museo de los Pintores Oaxaqueños, featuring a small but nice selection of art by artists from the state of Oaxaca, and this fabulous temporary exhibition…

… from a book of photography on the Carnaval de San Martín Tilcajete, Oaxaca, about 10 years ago:

And this groovy modern Minotaur:

Look closely to see what it’s made of.

Just up the street is the public library where I sat on a shady bench in the lovely courtyard for a couple of hours to work on this blog. Notice the children’s room and the adorable pigs they made; there was also wifi, free magazines and newspapers, a tiny little sceeening room with a good selection of free DVDs, a research room, clean bathrooms where the lady who hands out the toilet paper was doing beautiful needlepoint - so many reasons to love public libraries!

Central Oaxaca is very walkable - here are some images from around this picturesque art-filled town:

Check out the message on the little sticker in the middle.

There were quite a few images of this man’s work around town, as posters on buildings:

And the jury is out on whether these tacos are better than our El Roy’s tacos in Petaluma.

Oaxaca is known for mezcal and mole - I did a delicious and informative paired tasting of seven of each of them:

I learned that a basic difference between tequila and mezcal is that tequila can only be made from one varietal of agave - blue agave - while mezcal can be made from any agave varietal. They both are required to have at least 51% agave liquor. Also learned that most mole sauces have at least 30 ingredients, with some having up to 100! Very complex. I liked the green mole best.

The next day I visited the very cool Museo de Filatelia de Oaxaca, the Museum of Stamps, with their interesting permanent collection displaying postage stamps, post offices and early mail delivery in Mexico, plus a marvelous example of creative curating in a temporary exhibition about birds. The permanent collection includes items ranging from the coveted Penny Black (the first adhesive postage stamp in the world) to a vibrant collection of fluorescent stamps. They also had 7 stamps autographed by Babe Ruth in a baseball-related room.

They also had a nice selection of Arte Correo or Mail Art, and stamp art:

Starting with bird postage stamps from all over the world, the World of Birds exhibition included a comparison of different birds and their brains (crows are the smartest), a collection of bird songs to listen to, samples of nests, maps of weather and migration, bird stamps from around the world, and more… all these ideas coming from a simple postage stamp.

We were in Oaxaca for opening weekend of the Mexican Baseball League, which was founded almost 100 years ago in June, 1925. Los Guerreros de Oaxaca played El Águila de Veracruz and Abram went to a game.

It was a Sunday early evening game with lots of families. A few pics and videos Abram took:

His ticket behind home plate cost $6: here’s a comparison shot of the price for comparable seats at Candlestick (oh wait it’s not Candlestick any more):

The next day Abram took a bus 3 hours south to Puerto Escondido on the Pacific Coast for a 4-day beach holiday. The strip of beaches around Playa Zicatela is a world-class destination for surfers; the entire Oaxacan coast stretches 350 miles, mostly uncrowded and laid back.

While Abram was on his beach getaway I got up very early one day to take the “colectivo”, the shuttle bus, to the archeological zone of Monte Albán, just 6 miles out of town on top of a mountain. You have to arrive before 8:00am to beat the heat. It’s an ancient Zapotec site which predates the Aztec Empire by a thousand years. A few hundred years more recent than than the oldest Mayan temple - Tikal in Guatemala - Monte Albán was one of the earliest and largest cities of Mesoamerica. It was founded around 500BC, largely abandoned by 800AD, and later occupied and renovated by the Mixtec people in the 14th Century. Even at 8:00am it was HOT on that mountaintop so I didn’t explore very much. One notable element was the cicadas! So loud! (Turn up the volume)

I grabbed a quick taxi back to town, fueled up with tacos and iced coffee, then walked a few blocks to the most-visited museum in Oaxaca - the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca, located in the Templo de Santo Domingo de Guzmán. The former convent now houses the Cultural Center of Oaxaca, and the monastery garden is now an ethnobotanical garden with a large selection of native plants. Their greatest treasure is the Mixtec hoard from Tomb 7 at Monte Albán, from the 14th century, when Mixtecs reused an old Zapotec tomb at Monte Albán to bury one of their kings and his sacrificed servants, along with a stash of beautifully worked silver, turquoise, coral, jade, amber, pearls, finely carved bone, crystal goblets, a skull covered in turquoise and a lot of gold. The treasure was discovered in 1932 by Alfonso Caso. Oddly, not much of the treasure is in the little museum up on the mountain; it’s mostly all in town. There was also a temporary exhibition of fiber art and clothing made by textile artist Elena Martínez Bolio, titled Una Larga Hebra, a large thread or strand. It was scheduled to close at the end of March but due to public acclaim it was extended - lucky me! The embroidered faces below were displayed to show the front and back of the work.

https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/una-larga-hebra-llega-al-museo-de-las-culturas-de-oaxaca

The building itself is incredible - large and cool with beautiful design elements. The invading colonizers certainly left an architectural legacy in Latin America! Here are some pics of the building, the gardens, and the permanent collection. The skull with the bits of turquoise covering it is the most famous piece from Tumba 7:

After 10 days in Oaxaca we took a quick and easy flight to Mérida, the state of Yucatán’s capital and largest city with 1,000,000 inhabitants, arriving on April 20. It has the lowest crime rate per capita in Mexico, which it promotes heavily to visitors - it’s very calm and pleasant, although dang HOT.

The intense Mexican sun always makes it feel about 10 degrees hotter than the thermometer reads so we chose an Airbnb house with a pool in addition to AC. It’s just west of Centro, in the Barrio de Santiago, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. Like most of the buildings around here, the house has 25-foot ceilings made of plaster and wood slats and gorgeous paver tiles for floors; also a central courtyard, nice art, and a pretty backyard with a pool and a grill. No side windows - it’s in the middle of a long row of row houses - it depends on the interior courtyard and a few small skylights for natural light. The doors have little covered windows built into them so if you open them all you get breeze and light.

Our row of houses, built about 125 years ago:

This is by far the most well-stocked of the many apartments and houses we’ve stayed in over the past year: a toaster oven and a toaster! Colander! Great assortment of pots and pans! Champagne stopper!! And since it’s not high season, quite reasonably priced. They also provided some large water bottles and a handy electric dispenser to use with them:

We had an exciting giant cucaracha attack the first night - at least they don’t fly like palmetto bugs! They are extra active when the hot weather hits, seeking some coolness indoors, and yeah:

Our house is located around the corner from an English library. La Negrita, one of the oldest cantinas in town, is four blocks away, offering live music seven nights a week. They’re really into their coffee here; there’s a great little cafe and roastery a couple of streets away - it reminded me of the

Petaluma Coffee and Tea Company.

A few pics from around Barrio Santiago including the cathedral - Parroquia de Santiago Apóstol - and the mercado:

Time and weather have had their way with these buildings; so gorgeous.

Dzalbay Cantina (above) is just around the corner from our apartment and is a cool little jazz club with fun cocktails. I had a very tasty Thelonious Monk with local mezcal. We saw a couple of groups; had a great time enjoying the music, some bar snacks, and the mixed crowd. And a block-and-a-half walk home yay.

And the crazy 30-foot ceiling made the bass look small!

The “silla confidente”:

These charming double chairs are seen all over the Yucatán. Called the "Silla Confidente" or the "Silla Tú y Yo", the legend says that a protective father invented them so his daughter could gaze into the eyes of her boyfriend without sitting too close to him. Everyone enjoys them!

The Yucatán Peninsula - or as people call it - the Yucatán - is made up of three Mexican states, Campeche, Quintana Roo, and Yucatán, and to the south, parts of Belize and Guatemala.

Cenotes, hammocks, henequén, and the Mayan culture are four of its most well-known features.

In English the word “cenote” is less romantic: sinkhole. Remember the meteorite 66 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs? From a local dive company’s blurb: “It’s called the Chicxulub Impact, and while it brought devastation to the surface, it also created an underground wonderland - cenotes! The impact's sheer force fractured the limestone bedrock of the Yucatán Peninsula, forming a network of sinkholes, underground caverns and tunnels. Over time, these cenotes filled with rainwater, creating stunning natural reservoirs that serve as a vital source of freshwater for the region.”

We discovered cenotes on our first trips to the Yucatán in the mid-1980’s. Each one is different, all gorgeous, with cool fresh water and a wonderful escape from the heat. The first one we ever went to, around 30 years ago, was in some farmland off the road from Tulum to Cobá. I think we paid the farmer around 50 cents to go into his property. Long tree roots hung down from the surface into the cavern of the cenote, outdoing Disney for picturesque. No real ladder, just twining roots to climb in and out. Fabulous! We have photographs at home in an album. Look for some pics in the next blog when we visit some of our old favorites from past family vacations. Here are a couple of images from the web - we could have gone exploring to nearby cenotes from Mérida but honestly it’s too damn hot - looking forward to plunging into one in Quintana Roo next week! (Not my photos.)

Here’s a photo Abram took of the “Costco Cenote” after his shopping trip for a new swimsuit - it was revealed when they broke ground to build the parking lot for the Costco a few years ago:

Sadly, people aren’t allowed to swim in it. We think they should allow access with a Costco card. You could take the bus up there, do some shopping, and have a nice swim before getting back on the bus. Just sayin’.

And let’s not forget about hammocks! The Yucatán hammock is the best type of hammock for sure. I remember walking down some small backstreets in Playa del Carmen 40 years ago - when it only had a few paved streets and you could rent a hammock on the beach to sleep in for $15/night - and peeking into little one-room houses with small outdoor kitchens and hammocks hanging on every wall. When not in use the hammocks are just looped on one wall; when being used for sleeping or sitting they are stretched across the room. The hammock hooks are placed so that about 6 hammocks can stretch across one little room. And of course they’re heavenly under a palapa by the beach. Phoebe had hammock hooks - and a hammock - in her bedroom at home. We still have a hammock in the front of our house that gets daily use when it’s not too cold or rainy, and one under a tree in the backyard. We love our Yucatán hammocks.

You can’t talk about the history and development of the Yucatán without talking about henequén. It’s often called sisal, although sisal is actually from a different varietal of agave. A fiber made from the leaves of agave varietal fourcroydes, henequén is also referred to as “green gold” because of the fortunes made from it. The export of henequén products made Mérida a wealthy city in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s - at one point it had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the world. The Spanish-American war in 1898 caused a scarcity in hemp/rope from the Philippines and the price of Yucatán products skyrocketed - instant millionaires! Beautiful haciendas in the surrounding jungle and mansions along the Paseo Montejo still give a sense of life here 100-150 years ago… at least life for wealthy white hacenderos.

It’s processed by shredding the leaves to separate the pulp, then extracting the fiber which is dried and combed before being woven and used to make bags, mats, rope, twine, and soles of shoes. There were dozens of working haciendas in the jungle around Mérida; they sent their product by rail to the Gulf coast port of Sisal where it was shipped overseas. Nowadays there are a couple of haciendas still producing henequén but most of them have fallen into disrepair - some are being renovated and turned into boutique hotels. The haciendas in Mexico were similar to plantations in the southern USA; interesting article here: https://yucatantoday.com/en/haciendas

A few images from a little display on “green gold”, including some crushing, separating, and combing machines:

Mérida has a nice selection of cultural centers, two of which are the Museum of the City of Mérida and the Casa de Montejo, both located on the Plaza Mayor. The Montejo family was prominent among the conquistadors of the Yucatán Peninsula; their home was built in the mid-1500’s in the center of town. The house is said to be the only example in Mexico of a private home built in the 16th century Plateresque or Spanish Renaissance style. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateresque

Here’s a selection of photos from the museums and from Mérida downtown streets; also a few of the mansions along Paseo Montejo, the grand boulevard in town:

“Montejo Palace”:

After visiting the gorgeous Casa de Montejo and seeing all the mansions along the Paseo I wasn’t entirely sure what this little shrine in front of a nearby abandoned apartment building was all about… perhaps a FU to the Conquistadores?

The fourth of the well-known aspects of the Yucatán Peninsula is the Mayan culture; the largest and most extensive museum in Mérida is the Gran Museo del Mundo Maya. Here’s a very small selection of the hundreds of items on display; I loved the embroidered depictions of daily life:

These embroidered panels are fairly modern and come from villages all over the Yucatán:

This last photo is of Chac Mool, who is everywhere in the Yucatán.

As mentioned in the Mexico City blog a couple of months ago, the Richman family first encountered him 30 years ago and dubbed him the Couch Potato/Pizza God since he is so clearly reclining on the couch, head turned to watch TV, with a nice flat space on his tummy to put the pizza when it arrives. In reality, he’s associated with water and rain; the flat dish is for people to leave sacrifices when they asked him to ask the gods for rain.

There’s also a Mexican rock band called Chac Mool, which was popular in the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s and is a bit of a cult band today. I’d love to find a band teeshirt!

Uxmal, Tulum, Cobá, Ek Balam, Chichen Itza, Edzná - these are only a few of the Mayan sites in Mexico - plus Lamanai in Belize and many in Guatemala. Two important names linked to the “discovery” and world-wide promotion of Mayan temples and culture are John Lloyd Stephens, a journalist and archeologist from New York, and Frederick Catherwood, an English architect and artist who had already traveled widely, including visits to Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine, where he did many drawings of the monuments.

Between 1839 and 1841 the two men explored the jungle and studied Maya civilization, funded by the Montejo family. They sailed from New York and landed in Belize, went overland through Honduras and Guatemala, then up to the area around Cobá and Tulum. They sailed from there, went around the top of the Peninsula to the spot where Progreso is today; then into the jungle, discovering Chichen Itza, Palenque, and many more sites. They wrote several books together: Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, text by Stephens and illustrations by Catherwood, had only 300 copies printed but was widely distributed. It launched a world-wide appreciation of and curiosity about the Maya. When I visited the Casa Museo Catherwood, just a few blocks from our house, the man who manages it told me that when Señor Montejo approached Stephens about exploring the jungle to find “some big constructions I’ve heard about from my Mayan servants”, Stephens said he’d only do it if Catherwood accompanied him to do the illustrations. It’s mind-boggling to imagine the conditions under which they traveled! Catherwood didn’t ever live in the Casa Catherwood - in fact, the edge of town ended a couple of blocks away in 1840 - but for some reason this building where 25 original lithographs are rather casually displayed:

http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2007/07/casa-catherwood-at-dawn-of-lithography.html?m=1

Yucatán has the highest percentage of indigenous people in any Mexican state: 59%. The peninsula has always been somewhat isolated from the rest of Mexico and more than a million people still speak Yucatec Maya.

As Yucatán‘a capital city, getting around town in Mérida is quite easy; the area around Centro is very walkable and if you need to go farther afield there’s a very good public transportation system, although the full-size buses are a bit disconcerting when you’re walking on one of the 16” sidewalks on a narrow one-lane street downtown, like the street we’re on. When you leave our house and are locking the door behind you, you need to check to make sure the bus isn’t going by right at that moment - not quite enough room to maneuver. The buses are air conditioned (hallelujah) and there’s a bus card system for the Va-y-Ven network. There are also cash-based colectivos in small buses.

And yes, I did buy a chocolate bar from this young man:

Our last night in Mérida is tonight, May 5. Cinco de Mayo isn’t really celebrated here in Mexico. Somehow the US co-opted it but it’s just a date commemorating a battle in Puebla that Mexico won against the French. They have a parade in Pueblo but that’s about it.

Tomorrow Abram and I will take a bus 4 hours east to Cancún to pick up our daughters - yay! - to start the family festivities! First we have 3 days based in Akumal, staying on the little beach that our family, friends and extended family stayed on numerous times in the ‘90’s and 2000’s, including a super fun Y2K celebration. Then the wedding in Playa del Carmen, more family fun, and back to Petaluma 10 days from now!

In the upcoming blog expect some relaxing raucous Richman revelry to wrap up this travel adventure: some wedding pics, beaches, cenotes, a lake with a funky hotel that would be right at home in vintage Miami Beach, poolside drinks, music and dancing, rooftop bars, and maybe even a picture or two of Petaluma.

¡Hasta luego!