Taxco

Both Tepoztlan and Taxco have some of the best Mexican food ever, and both have great tradition. But what a different feel!  Taxco, though small, is a small city, with cafes overlooking busy squares, lots of fine doning, lots of scooter and Volkswagen noise, and it's got the feeling of an Italian hill town too, with its steep narrow streets, wrought iron balconies, rooftop gardens and the immense and beautiful rococo church with its tiled blue, gold and cream dome proclaiming Gloria in excelsis deo, all around.

There is not a single mention of mystic temescal bath experiences and no herbal soaps.. Just lots and lots and lots of silver and pseudo silver and silvered cheap jewelry and glitzy jewelry.  So many jewelry stores that you can lose your appetite for it real quick. But we have seen some beautiful traditional stare of Guerrero crafts and that has been really fun.  Also there are so many Mexicans from the federal district here to have a good time in the holiday week. It's really fun.  Tasty restaurants are festively jammed and no one really seems to mind.  This particular weekend, some places had lines up the stairs and out the door.

Food that we enjoyed here:

Lunch Friday, a green chile Pozole with chicken in it, and Craig had mole. this was In a small restaurant on a stairway coming out of the market.   Sometime later,  An ice cream stop at TepozNieves. 

Dinner Friday at La Hacienda, tasty fresh young curly lettuce with pecans, first salad in a week,sopade elite which is a cream of baby corn, a little risotto with huitlacoche and then a lomo de puerco saltado. Which was awful. Thin machine slices of Pork in a salty gray cream sauce.  In the square, a tres leches casero meaning home made, but too dry.  but the highlight of the meal, our reason for choosing La Hacienda, was a botle of a favorite wine, actually the oldest winery that still exists here on this hemisphere! casa De Madero. 2011 Shiraz.  I so much wish we could buy this at home, but there is only enough for Mexico!  So they say... 

Breakfast on the house at Mi casita, watery coffee and so so croissant.  Second breakfast was tres leches cake with delicious mocha, Oaxaca style, sitting on the small balcony of the coffee store.

We just had amazing Pozole right on the main square with two choices of broth, mine is a green one like we make but it has some pumpkin seed in it. And very well crisped chic harmonies and perfect avocado to top it. Chased down by the tangy limonada you can only get here in Mexico. Our limes and lemons taste nothing like so good.   Craig had posole with red broth.   Difference between small, medium and large was 44 pesos or 46 or 48. In other words no dif.  We had another leisurely coffee later, then dinner at the Flor de la Vida restaurant in Hotel  Real de Minas.  this was excellent, perfect chiles em nogada with a medium spicy chile pasilla and a rabbit conejo al ajillo.  That had strips of dried chile and plenty of garlic.  Yummy. Dessert was at the local branch of TepozNieves, dark chocolate and cafe con leche.

What did we do in between eating... Well we walked. And climbed. Up, and down.  Up to the church of the Virgen de Guadalupe.  Down, way down, to where the local vendors of cheap costume jewelry, silver or otherwise, seem to actually get their product... And you can buy it too, down in the towns underbelly.   finding your way there and back is actually a lot of fun.  most streets have enough width for the little Volkswagens and alongside, a few pedestrians.  It's a little crowded to put it mildly.  its a little funner to try to negotiate the network of tiny steep stairways and cobblestone alleys that only a pedestrian, normally, would want to use. But it's surprising how steep a road the Volkswagens can negotiate!  Both up and down.

There are some areas of tourist stalls that are not dedicated to silver. In Guerrero state they make lots of colored mats and baskets, and lots of masks.  Jaguars are a big feature.  So are devils entwined with snakes and reptiles. We found one store with art objects we actually loved. A very traditional style of figures of animals and humans painted with geometric designs from a clearly very old tradition. So nice.

Went to the one museum of consequence, Guilermo Spratlng, collector of old precolumbian treasures, and creator of the original twentieth century Taxco silverwork tradition where instead of making European designs in silver, it shifts to very beautiful robust pre-columbian inspired designs, 

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Taxco de Alarcon, Guerrero state, Mexico

Tonight we are in Taxco, the silver jewelry capital of the world,   Sixty years ago my mom was here and now we are here.

Taxco has an amazing feel, due to its being on a very steep hillside with tiny intersecting streets and paths and stairways, of being in Europe somewhere. Rather than Indian-ness, it mostly has small town ancient-ness, with a few overhanging wrought iron balconies thrown in.  The main square is a blend... More typical of Mexico with the friendly crowds hanging out, the shoe shine stand, the churro stand, the ice cream stand and mid 1800 french layout of the gardens, not to mention the mariachi band waiting to be hired.  But when the dark bronze church bells ring and you look at the Italianate mansion next to our hotel and gaze up at the ornate baroque cathedral bult by a super rich Frenchman in the 1700s, it looks and feels like an old European town all the way.   The main Mexican touch is the hundreds of VW bug taxis. Mexico was the last country in the world to turn out VWs, and they all ended up here!  The second Mexican touch way at the top of the steep steep town is the church for the Virgen of Guadalupe, with the small kids running and jumping and playing soccer. Ok, if the soccer ball went over the wall, it would land a thousand feet down.  But no matter!  The kids have it under very good control.

The three Tepoztlans. Or is it 4

Third night in Tepoztlan, bells are clamoring nonstop.   is it because there is a ceremony? Or because the town's lights have gone out? 

We are cozy in bed thinking back on 3 days here.  The first two were of course crazy with Christmas celebration, but today was time just to enjoy the beauties of this place. 

Tepoztlan's valley setting is spectacular. It's not so much hills, as craggy towers of volcanic stone, separate ranges on each site of town and the entire town sneaks up a fairly steep slope without you,realizing it. 

We've come to understand there are at least three towns here. There is the mercantile section.... the sidewalk vendors, the store owners on the four or five shopping streets, the market stall ladies.  Then there is the surge of tourists that flow in like a tide  every morning and flow back to mexico city and cuernavaca in their cars at the end of every night, having a gay old time climbing the steep shady mountain trail, buying every flavor of TepozNieve ice cream, exclaiming over hundreds of shawls and earring and recuerdos that look so local but are made in India Bali and China.  Then there is backstreets Tepoztlan.

This is a great town.  Ever since a few decades ago when they stopped an Arnold Palmer golf course and apparently since have stopped or are stopping a freeway, the town has had strong local pride.  The graffiti and murals around town emphasize this.  Then there is a lot of esprit de corps in each barrio neighborhood.  Apparently in the early 1500s, the spaniards, colonizing the place, organized it by placing a strong buttressed stone chapel on every site that had spiritual significance to the locals.  And the strong spirit held. We've walked the neighborhoods uphill and down to find each of the chapels and its been great, we can tell that each highly decorated churchyard has hosted all kinds of parties, soccer scuffles and blessing of the musicians and parades.  The Christmas lights and paper lanterns and music imported from china only add to the festiveness.

A night ago walking the streets we saw a group of fifteen or so practicing fancy dance patterns for the waltzes and quadrilles of a wedding or quinceanera, and tonight we think we stumbled on the party.  Or a similar one. As we've walked in twilight on the cobbled and flagstoned single lane streets, quite often we've looked into a yard or alley and seen rows of tables set for the local outside reunion or meal.  And coming home tonight we saw men in matching light blue tuxes leaving the party where we are pretty sure they did their carefully  rehearsed quadrille or whatever.  We've seen all kinds of musicians from accordion players tackling O Sole Mio to mariachis to oompa oompa parade music. Right now it's all horn players and staccato drums from a party or procession we can't see.

Ok a fourth tepoztlan is the city of good food.  For dessert we had the light layered cooky with shortbread outer layers, light fluffy egg white center, caramel inside that, an alfajor, and the same made in a chocolate version with elegant red marbled ribbon on chocolate. 

For dinner chiles en Nogada and a local soup which is broth to which you add your own tortillas, cracklings, white crumbly cheese, thick Mexican cream and avocado. With a tall tequila anejo, don Julio.  For a snack, thick cappuccinos.  For lunch, incredible chicken mole poblano enchiladas, and wild mushroom soup.

For breakfast in the market we had tlacoyos of refried beans. 

Xochicalco Ruins

In the morning, we went by cab more than an hour and 20 minutes past and through Cuernavaca toXochicalco  ruins and then (our choice),  by (frequent) bus an hour and twenty min back to town and change buses in Cuernavaca for another 50 min trip by local free roads  home to Tepoztlan. 

Xochicalco is a pretty large pyramid complex, dating from about 700 ad, just after Teotihuacan.  It is in an impressive place and has two big draws: a beautiful temple with Qyetzalcoatl  bas reliefs that also have Mayan features, and,  a pretty impressive deep, black tunnel deep underneath it that ends in a black room with a tiny shaft of light where the sun shines directly down, certain times of day.  and its pretty impressive in its multilayered monumentality,  with amazing views of soft flowing hills in al, direction, far off popocatepetl.  And because its pretty big, seeing its museum and then climbing all over the site, takes three hours or so. But it is quite remote... a little far... From everything but Cuernavaca.  It is nice though to come back from it by second class bus, because you are retracing the route where all the wealth from the orient and peru which got offloaded  in Acapulco, including Chinese people and pottery, made its way overland through Mexico City, down to Veracruz, over to Europe. If pirates didn't get it first.

Back home, we got to see the pride of Tepoztlan, a world heritage site monastery from the  1500s that had been closed for Christmas.  it really was very very lovely.  its a great example of the artistic grandeur of the Dominica  Monks convents. Incredible old, old 1600s  illustrations and murals. With, from the many windows over its nice gardens, great distant views of the last rays of sun gilding the mountains, and white puffy cumulus clouds high above.

And later on we saw from our rooftop, the mountains again with the evening star shining through the slight smog and mars looking very red in the southeast sky.   

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Chrismas Day in Tepoztlan

Christmas Day for us and many other visitors was a chance to hike up an amazing series of stone stairways, up a series of very vertical clefts, to the high promontories above Tepoztlan, where, just before the Conquistadors arrived, the local kingdom had finally finished or re-built a very beautiful 3 step pyramid.  soon after, the kingdom (probably a sort of Toltec) was promptly conquered by the amazingly aggressive newcomers, the Aztecs just in time to be in turn conquered again by the Spanish when the Aztecs folded ( of course, it took a while, these locals being so independent.)  In fact the carvings on this pyramid document their subjugation by the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and may even record the Europeans' arrival.  when they came and were almost ousted. this local king was very motivated to help get rid of the Europeans, sending warriors over to the Valley of Mexico to help. Didn't work out in the long run unfortunately.  

The hike is beautiful and steep and has amazing views the whole way.  There is birdsong and even a few raptors soaring overhead.   The last quarter mile is up a chimney where you need the help of steel stairways with railings, it's so steep.  There was quite a ceremonial center up here and no wonder.  The plants are beautiful all the way up, and up in the rebuilt ruins, several of the local raccoon or possum-like mammal, a coatl, are around, happy to eat Mexican Cheetos. You're not supposed to feed them of course, but quite a few people were unable to resist.  

Its a long way down again and by midmorning, hundreds of happy tourist families are on their way up and down.  The lower part of the hike on the way down flattens out a bit and there are all kinds of stalls to get a bite to eat and to buy little souvenirs, especially refrigerator magnets and  clay models of the cliff and pyramid you've just climbed.  Also little figures in velvet and gold  that we thought were the three kings but actually they are of a very special dancer, the local Indians put a lot of energy into creating a kind of hopping dance in costumes of long velvet dresses and beard making fun of their European overlords.  These are still especially important at two times of the year: in early autumn there is a feast celebrating the deity Quetzalcoatl and just before lent they have an amazing Carnaval. 

Later back in town, after of course another opportunity to eat amazing food and ice cream, we wandered back streets admiring crèche scenes with lots of amazing animals, lots of elephants in Bethlehem, 

"Rica pancita!" 

In the Market we had lunch at "Antojito Mayre". Mayre's specialty was an enormous cauldron of  sopa de pancita and also they made great blue corn  huaraches.  In addition to the cauldron there is an enormous griddle and two ladies are always tending it, patting blue corn masa and yellow corn masa into huaraches and tortillas and itacatl thingys.  All served with your choices of squash blossoms, cheeses, refried beans, cecina, onions, avocado, cilantro, and salsas.  To be washed down with beer or agua de limon or agua de tamarindo or agua de jamaica. 

Later back in town, after of course another opportunity to eat amazing flavors of ice cream, we wandered back streets admiring crèche scenes with lots of amazing animals, lots of elephants in Bethlehem

Soon enough it was time for dinner, We had dinner at Los Colorines on the main drag.  While lots of Mexico City-ites poured past, we had Margarita with "tequila tradicional", a soup of Mushrooms in beef broth, an unusual local amaranth green, kind of stemmy and seedy, called Huazontle en chile Pasilla and then our favorite, Chiles en nogada.  

And with still more fireworks and sounds of distant parties, Christmas came to a close.