1. Mexico - Oaxaca, pronounced Wahaka

covering 3 - 7 January 2020

between Mexico City and Oaxaca just before dawn from a very high ladder

I realised in the first couple of days here that I was suffering from something that no human in history had ever suffered from more than about ninety years ago.  Jetlag.  Maybe birds on long migrations do but are probably tired enough after having to do the flying by themselves to not notice.  Travelling west across six timezones meant that to fit in with local time we were having to go to bed a lot earlier than our body clocks would believe and certainly for me this meant lots of long naps and wide awake time in the middle of the night.  I’m not after sympathy, after all jetlag is essentially self inflicted.  A couple of days after we arrived and during one of my wakeful spells we enjoyed an earthquake (5.8, not too big, no injuries).  Sleepers generally missed it.

Oaxaca is a large sprawling place about 225 miles SW of Mexico City and the old centre is fairly compact low rise and contains pretty much all the city sights we’d be interested in.  It sits at about 5,000 feet which means that it’s pleasantly high warm in the day and often warm in the evening but cool enough for a thin outer covering.  Every day began with a blue sky, a few puffy whites and sunshine.  Oh and breakfast outside of course with our friends Bonnie and Newt from Massachusetts.   They’ve been to Oaxaca several times so we have guides we trust who speak passable English.  My knowledge of Mexico was sparse

a dog day afternoon

to say the least, both historically and geographically.  I remember that in films, Mexico appeared to be peopled almost entirely by poorly shaved men with ponchos and sombreros and women in colourful skirts and blouses who all live in a landscape of desert and cactus.  This is not true !  However just like so many countries we’ve been to it is almost always the women who stick to traditional dress while almost all the men wear basic ‘western’ clothing except at festivals.

a semi-pedestrianised street in central Oaxaca

rather more subtle colouring on this one

Mexicans definitely like their primary and secondary colours, only infrequently in pastel shades.  Many of the buildings in Oaxaca are a riot of colour, sometimes in combinations that you would imagine had to have been chosen by someone with severe colour blindness.  As a whole it works very well here but would look very out of place in say, Basingstoke or Boston.  That said, Basingstoke could do with a bit of jollying up.

 

from the central museum with the hilly terrain outside the city

What Mexico is justly famous for are the archaeological remains of vanished civilisations, many disappearing before the Spanish conquest and leaving cryptic remains behind them.  Whatever you might read there are a lot of probables, conjectures and plain guesswork for many extinct cultures who had no written records or for the one of two who did, records which survived the deliberate Spanish destruction of them.  A New World ‘burning of the books’ as it were.  Physical remains, especially organic can at least be dated.  When I was younger, a mere half century or so ago I thought these civilisations were limited to Aztecs and Incas.  I hadn’t even heard of the Mayans until years later and just as in Peru in 2017 I’m amazed and humbled I suppose at how many different cultures rose and fell that I’d never even heard of.  Both Aztec in Mexico and Inca in Peru were fairly short lived civilisations, the Mayan lasted much longer and they did have a writing system.

Monte Alban

Just outside Oaxaca lies a most impressive set of ruins called Monte Alban, set on a hilltop overlooking the city.  This had an approximately 1,300 year history and was built by the Zapotecs. Heard of them ? No, me neither, or the Toltecs, Mixtecs or Olmecs to name just a few.  Our guide told us that the original name of Monte Alban is unknown but in the circumstances I did think that Newtown would have been appropriate.  Estimates are of a 25,000 population of the city at it’s peak but of course the surrounding land would have been occupied by other Zapotecs provisioning the city.  All of the buildings bar one are aligned north/south.  Incidentally Zapotecs did have a script, so far undeciphered and an estimated individual lifespan of about forty years.  The building which does align differently is one of those artifacts that make you wonder just what these people might have known that is now lost to us or at the very least what we don’t know that they knew.  This building faces SW and is an astronomical observatory with viewpoints to various celestial alignments.  The most notable being an Earth, Moon, Venus straight line that occurs only every fifty two years.  Their long term calendar was based on a fifty two year cycle and observations were somehow recorded and measured sufficiently well for enough fifty two year cycles for them to realise that this is a repeatable event.   Classic science - observe, record and is it repeatable ?   I have to say that I wonder how much measuring and recording of events which did not repeat took place. 

the central square

here are some locals trying to sell their antiques while Moses (in the middle)
explains that nothing is old and it has probably all been made in the last two weeks.

Our guide, Moses (a good old Mexican name) got us all to sit in a circle on the large central open space and described the scene in the old days, clearly a fictionalised account but interesting nonetheless.  The square being filled with people, the buildings much more colourful than now and the probability of many of the assembled throng having partaken of the wide variety of mind altering substances available in the area.  Still available today these would have included plant extracts and hallucinogenic fungi, which are sold by the roadsides (we’re told) as Magic Mushrooms.   Moses clapped his hands and an exceptionally clear echo came from the wall in front of us.  Stepping about a dozen paces left, he clapped again and the echo came from the wall to the left of us.  Once more he moved a similar distance and this time the echo from his clap was from behind us but not of a clap but a bird call.  The Quetzal, the sacred bird whose spectacular feathers were used to make cloaks for the ruling classes.  Now we’ve seen the Resplendent Quetzal in Costa Rica and it is the most magnificent creature but almost certainly isn’t found anywhere near Oaxaca now.   However, how did they manage to construct a wall in such a

the clapping demonstration - as you can see
the walls are quite a long way away

way that it echoed a bird call, not any old bird call but a specific one.  Sheer luck ?  Hit and miss ?  My view is that this would be the sort of knowledge that we would need a computer for in order to design an acoustic wall.  Here at Monte Alban I see this as applied knowledge.  These people had a lifestyle so very different from ours but they were just as intelligent as us.  All they lacked was the technology we have which unfortunately makes too many people feel themselves superior when so many are in fact as dim as a ten watt lightbulb.

the Ball Court, looking surprisingly like Wimbledon

Monte Alban also has a smallish Ball Court, one of at least 15,000 pre-conquest ones in Mexico.  This was for a game played on a rectangular area with sloping side walls.   The rules are basically unknown and probably varied from culture to culture but it appears certain that in some games the winners and in some games the losers were executed.  When it was the winners it appears to be a short cut to the gods but whichever rules were being followed there must have been some fierce arguments about ‘offside’. 
  

Cactus.  Native to the Americas except for one species which
grows naturally in Africa and Sri Lanka.  Not a lot of people know that.