2. Mexico - Oaxaca two

covering 8 January - 10 January 2020

some countryside a little outside Oaxaca

Oaxaca is a region of Mexico as well as a city and a region which according to the guide for our Botanical Garden tour has a claim (possibly a little partisan, I imagine) as the holder of many records for crops, types, varieties and so on.  However, I did know that

path in the Botanical Garden with
every stone drilled and pegged down.
(boot toe for scale)

until recently the original source plant for Maize/Sweet Corn was unknown but it seem that it has now been identified and (surprise !) was first grown with wild varieties being selected in Oaxaca.  Selecting wild strains of edible plants of course is the first step to cultivation, agriculture, towns, rulers, wars and buying everything off Amazon.  Speaking of agriculture, many restaurants here serve grasshoppers (it’s difficult but yes, I am going to avoid that joke) which must be farmed because like everywhere else it seems, insects are generally in short supply here.  Now there’s not much meat on a grasshopper so handfuls are used, whole or ground up and to my hopeful knowledge I have managed to avoid them.  The food markets have stalls just selling different types of grasshopper which locals tell us are delicious.

probably not the classic Three Wise Men animals

We’re here in January before twelfth night so all the xmas decorations including Christmas trees are still up.  Children here are given their gifts on twelfth night, when I think the Magi were said to have arrived.  One square in the old city has a collection of six of seven groups of Three Wise Men each with a motley collection of large toy animals.  It’s the custom for local families (and for this year only, my travelling companions) to be photographed with them.  Being the Grinch, I refused on various secular and taste grounds.   

no comment required

I only have a sample of one Saturday but it does seem that Saturday evening is a popular time for weddings.  Conveyor belt really.  At one point there were dancing and celebrations in the road outside the church of Santo Domingo with a wedding party, one

proceeding out of the church and another wedding group queuing to get in.  The celebrations were what you might justifiably describe as unrestrained and were led by a band.  There was energetic dancing in the street , the groom was being thrown high in the air by what I presumed were friends but who might of course have been relatives of the bride and a woman  in traditional costume was pirouetting while wearing a headdress of exploding fireworks.  Fantastic.  One surprising thing for me was that the group were accompanied by two over-sized puppets, a man and a woman each about ten feet tall with a person inside as the operator.  They pranced about swinging their arms in and around the wedding group.  The surprise was that I had seen very similar puppets only once before and that was in southern Italy last year in a parade around a town but not accompanying a wedding.

Oaxaca

Tropea, Southern Italy

Coming from New England Newt doesn’t have a natural tendency to be an avid cricket fan but has talked to me about the Red Sox, baseball apparently.  However, England were playing South Africa in a test series so I had to talk a bit about it.  I’d tell him that South Africa have lost three wickets and he’d reply “well if they look hard enough, they might find them again”.  You can see what a task I have ahead of me and I haven’t even mentioned LBW !

those puppets just get everywhere

our hotel garden

One of the two hotels we had in Oaxaca had a luxuriant and colourful garden with most rooms opening onto it and the only place for breakfast was outside so you can judge what the usual weather conditions must be like.  I don’t know if it is true but being outside seems to make it more natural to talk to strangers, even at breakfast time.   While chatting to a Californian couple, the husband told us a story about when he worked some years ago at a Mexican Eco-Lodge.  Out on a boat, the passengers got quite excited because they’d seen a turtle whereupon the boatman dived in, dragged it on board and cut it’s throat with a knife.  Cue tears and horrified eco-tourists.  To the boatman it was food for a week but it seemed that the raison d’etre for what most of us would think an Eco-Lodge stood for had not formed part of the extensive briefing for his job.  The use of ‘Eco’ is one of those many things that irritate me.  It’s undefined but used extensively to add a sort of feelgood factor for people who just accept the term as meaning something.  Regular readers with particularly good memories may even remember when writing from NZ I bitched about seeing “Eco Helicopter Flights” over Mount Cook.  Grrrrrr.

it's about time you had a Sombrero photo -
about as common on a Mexican as a Bowler on an Englishman

It only takes a cursory glance at a map of Mexico to realise just how many pre-Spanish conquest remains there are and you will hear some more from me about them in due course.   With so many ruins still in existence and knowing full well that much has been destroyed (for example, there are virtually no Aztec structures still in existence) it is yet another surprise that it had been thought that the population of the Americas was low before Europeans arrived.  It’s now recognised that numbers had been seriously underestimated and now the estimate is that the population of pre-conquest present day Mexico was around 25 million people, roughly 20 % of the current 130M.  As a comparison England and Wales have gone from 3M to 56M people in the same period.

Bonnie and Newt are flying down but we’re now heading pretty well due south towards the Pacific coast by bus, stopping for a couple of days in the Sierra de Miahuatlan mountains at a lodge outside a small village.

and a final shot which will only mean anything
to Brits of a certain age who listened to Round The Horn
(a 1960s radio show renowned for outrageous double-entendres)