My first morning in Mexico City, January of 2015, I went for a walk down the street, and I discovered that I was home. I lived four years in a far away home. It doesn't always happen. There are places that I really liked to live, like Bangkok or Maputo, where I also stayed for several years, but I didn't have that brazier feeling that I had in Mexico. I don't have it in the New York that I now live in.
How to explain Mexico? I could tell you about the jacarandas in bloom in the spring of the DF - it will always be a little bit of the DF for me.; and the alebrijes of Oaxaca; the dead of Pátzcuaro, the crab a la Frank from Tampico; las calaveras de Pomuch; Sonoran burritos; the peyote of the Huichols in Cerro del Quemado; the memory that burns my guts of the murder of Father Marcelo in Chiapas; the beetles that climb the steep streets of Taxco;the sad jumpers of Acapulco; the iguanas that run between tourists and stones in the ruins of Tulum; the whales of Baja California; the indigenous prison of the Sierra de Chihuahua; the intense blue of Bacalar; my “impossible” trip to Comala in the footsteps of Rulfo; my overwhelm at the avalanche of activities of the FIL of Guadalajara; the sayings of my friend Carlos; that Tlaxcala church on a bullring.
All that is Mexico. Maybe the country, after Spain and Italy, that I know best. My beloved land where I return to recharge a little, to remember that sorrows are happy songs, that people talk in taxis.
So I took a map and hesitated: where do we start? And hesitate little, because for me Mexico City is the beginning and the end.
It was last year, after finishing the route through Namibia, that suddenly I thought about showing a country that I love from militancy. So I took a map and hesitated: where do we start? And I doubted little, because for me Mexico City is the beginning and the end. I guess we'll stay at least four nights., and there will be few for one of the most interesting cities I have seen on the planet. His bad reputation unfortunately fades, and the pandemic made the gringos know it, fleeing to that south to which they always go when they want to make their lives and savings profitable..
The southern neighborhoods with their colonial touch and their volcanic stone facades dotted with colorful ivy. The center, with their old libraries, its organ grinders and its murals. Reforma and Polanco, with its castle of sad emperor of Europe, your museum of all possible worlds, and its streets of happy and excessive strawberry people. Countess and Rome, the hipster areas where the modernuquis go to the theaters and in the taverns the mezcal has flavors. And the taquerias on the street, maybe a concert, wander through a market, eat spicy, walk a lot, climb some pyramid, pray to a virgin or saint.
And then? Well, we will surely go to a very special place in Tlaxcala that a friend took me to just before I stopped living there.. He told me that I couldn't leave without going to a place where volcanoes look askance. Sabino's farm, who today reads books up there, and peace, cultured and good people, where you eat maguey worms and the brave bulls hiss, It is beauty and calm. It smells like a pulque field, and to the sky with lights.
And from there we will go to the domains of the giant cacti. A forest of thorns and prickly pears, and then some monasteries, one of those from the movies, colonial and abandoned between hills and pagan gods
And from there we will go to the domains of the giant cacti. A forest of thorns and prickly pears, and then some monasteries, one of those from the movies, colonial and abandoned between hills and pagan gods, and in the end a beautiful city, very beautiful.
We will stay in Oaxaca for several nights. It is the land of mezcal - the spirit that tastes like earth -, and the alebrijes, real animals that some unsuspecting believe are lies. And the grasshoppers, and the old streets with a taste of Castilla, and the ruins of Montebello, and the Zapotecs and Mixtecs. You drink and eat very well in Oaxaca. and you learn. and it is contemplated. and it is enjoyed.
And from there we will take a plane to Mérida. And from there we will move to Campeche. But first we will stop at Pock y cheaty symptom. I made him a report very broad many years ago. That place is not a souvenir, It is culture. It is seen and respected to understand it. It's not a place for selfies, it is a place of silence, to look without a camera.
And then there's the city, San Francisco de Campeche, to which I went so many times. Like, small, with its walls and its square with arcades, and their women who play bingo at the doors of their colorfully painted homes. And its calm air, gentle, and his old tavern, Colonial Corner Room, where I always go to have a beer and some snacks. Love doesn't have a reason. And I love that place since the first time we met.
We will stop at Pock y cheaty symptom. I did a very extensive report on it many years ago. That place is not a souvenir, It is culture. It is seen and respected to understand it
And again we will leave at Edzna ruins, but just a little so as not to get upset. And perhaps they have decided to reopen the Hacienda Uayamon, that no one should ever have closed, and we can stop at your restaurant with fans from another century, I would say that from another era. But the main course is still further south: the ruins of Calakmul.
We arrived in the afternoon. We leave things, and We will go to the bat cave to see hundreds of thousands of wings emerging from the guts of the world right at sunset.. They come out when the sun sets, and they return after the binge eating they had in the dark jungle. and one is there, still, while thousands of bats brush your head.
And when they return home the next morning, We will be on the way to the ruins of Calakmul. I have been lucky enough to see many Mayan ruins in Mexico and Guatemala. I would say, even, that I could see many ruins of many pre-Hispanic towns in Mexico. My favorites are those from Calakmul. a monument, a city, that springs from the jungle. The last time I was, in 2018, there were hardly any tourists. We got to see them once, just three friends.. We climbed a pyramid and saw a storm coming in the distance. It was hundreds of miles from our eyes. And suddenly, the howler monkeys began to scream, and he was right above it spitting out the slime of the gods like a spring. I really want to go back. I will do it now. My hourglass says it will be Thursday 12 February.
I was able to see many ruins of many pre-Hispanic towns in Mexico. My favorites are those from Calakmul
And finally, spinning under the map, to surround the tourists, We will go to the Bacalar lagoon with its blue waters like the bricklayers' monkey. Huele a azufre, to mud baths, hot liquid with the foam of volcanoes.
From there it goes to Mahahual. It's a hispster beach, marijuana what my friend Carlos says, where to go sailing to the reef and get into the Caribbean. Fewer people go to Mahahual, less when the cruise ships arrive and its narrow beach is filled with shorts and sandals. The idea is to end the trip there, but maybe it will be in Tulum.
I knew Tulum ago 25 years. I go and go. and I get angry. Because I see her getting more and more posh, more for instagramers with their tips 20%. But then it turns out that its sand is white like Word without letters, and its ruins may be one of the most beautiful spaces you have ever seen.: a Mayan “castle” and the sea that ends in Lisbon in the background.
And I leave this 1 February to make all that trip. What I've done a thousand times, but months or years ago. Because at VAP each route we offer is something we know, that we can contribute something. We do not hire third parties, We don't even spend some time and dress up as experts. We make sure our memories don't lie to us, that one thing is traveling with friends or your partner, and another to be responsible for eight people enjoying what we have enjoyed so many times..
Sunday 8 to saturday 21 November. On those dates, day or so, I intend to fit everything that I have told you now.
