I enjoy the Internet because I like having history, geography, literature, biography, music and art at my fingertips. I don’t mind being offline if that is a necessary condition of travel. However I do get a teeny weeny bit frustrated when the promise of connectivity is not upheld.
I mention this because our situation currently is such that we pay $12 a night to park in the city of Cholula where we have a grassy parking lot with water faucets, household plugs for electricity, a toilet with seat but no paper and a cold shower. The swimming pool is lovely but cold at 7,000 feet though Layne and I enjoyed it but the WiFi is a sad case of “oh what a failure!” and the Telcel phone signal isn’t much better.
Mike from Yorkshire, below, cleaning his solar panels. I climbed the tower in the campground to get the aerial pictures. He rescued the brown dog in Baja. The campground husky pisses on everything which is why my computer case now looks so shiny and clean:
Campgrounds are useful places in Mexico. A friend told my wife a place to park in Santa Cruz California charges $150 a night. We fell about laughing at the idea of paying 3,000 pesos to sleep. I understand a hotel room in Key West goes for a thousand dollars a night. We could live for three weeks on that if we didn’t drive or shop at Costco.
Mike and Galleta (Biscuit) caught in an uncharacteristically pensive mood. He has a British registered 2002 Sprinter van built for the French market painted red and driven from Argentina to Alaska. The Swiss Toyota camper was driven by two young kids on their honeymoon on their way to Chile. Nice people but they left after one night. We are moving out of the sphere of fear filled US RVers into the world of casual European overlanders. We feel like neophytes but they like our ridiculously comfortable fat two wheel drive home. So do we.
Laynes sister has organized a family reunion near Zihuatanejo next month and we have four weeks to spend in southern Mexico to be around the family April 11th. We dreamed up a Southern Mexico itinerary instead of heading north as we first planned. Our plans are changing constantly but it looks like this, starting today: Puebla, Veracruz, Villahermosa, Tuxtla Gutierrez, Oaxaca, Morelia, Zihuatanejo - all subject to changes deviations and side trips following the letters of the alphabet on the map below:
I am looking forward to spending a few weeks wild camping on Baja beaches deserts and mountains after the family reunion but for now we will poke around campgrounds close to cities and see what we can find. Probably not many Americans as this area is considered a long way from the Rio Grande, too far and too “risky” and it is a long drive but even modest Cholula has its fascinations as we found out yesterday.
It was Mike who turned us on to a fabulous pastry shop in Cholula five minutes from the campsite, flaky pastries filled with English style creamy vanilla custard. Layne prefers more austere crispy elephants’ ears: flaky sugary pastries. Once beyond that awful temptation we parked the van, walked Rusty, put him in the van and then by ourselves struggled to find the entrance to the Biggest Pyramid in the World. Where dogs aren’t allowed.
And you have to decide how much toilet paper you’ll need before you go into the toilet (sanitario). Mexico is magical I tell you.
If you look up the giant pyramid of Cholula important writers will tell you it is the largest pyramid by volume in the world. An unimportant writer like me will suggest you listen to Gracie Fields, a beloved British music hall singer from generations ago singing one of her most popular songs about a plant popular in the North of England last century, a symbol of respectability called an aspidistra. Her brother crossed it with an acorn and her family had to live with The Biggest Aspidistra In The World. This is the song that went through my head as we walked the desert dry field around the World’s Largest Pyramid.Gracie Fields Link
But before we found the barely marked entrance to the Biggest Aspidistra In The World I had my Anthony Bourdain moment. One audio book we have listened to on our journeys is by Tom Vitale the TV chef and traveler’s director on his show made famous by CNN. In The Weeds is a funny and revelatory book in that it describes Bourdain as a multi faceted human being and not surprisingly he was not in real life the person we saw on television. One nugget I found especially intriguing was that he was not especially into weird food. He ate it to be polite and no doubt to feed a story to the camera but when I was faced with a bucket of fried insects in Cholula I thought of it as my Anthony Bourdain moment.
Yup. I ate several scoops of different flavored fried grasshoppers, legs and all. The texture was that of a papery cracker and the flavor was imparted by the seasonings. Garlic was my favorite.
If you check Layne’s Facebook feed no doubt you’ll find a picture of me on there stuffing my face with grasshoppers. She tasted a few and pronounced them “okay” but I had to persuade her to buy a dollar’s worth to take back to the Gannet Cafe for a more thoughtful taste later. We also bought fresh macadamia nuts in their shells, a first and some blackberries and delicious cooked sweet potatoes.
Next time you think we are being too gringo by shopping at Walmart or Costco remember we ate grasshoppers in Mexico. Legs and all.
I’ve added a bunch of pictures here of the pyramid so you can see for yourself but beware this place has an odd, unexpected effect on some people.
Let me confess right away I was underwhelmed by the place. We weren’t allowed to walk anywhere near the ruins, there were no cement walkways or access areas to get a feel for the place.
I envied Rusty his cool shady bed in the van.
Much of the pyramid is buried and it’s story is vague at best.
When you read about ritual child sacrifices one’s bourgeois natural revulsion tends to rise to the surface unbidden.
Why in hells name you’d put children in pots and bury them here I couldn’t say. But whatever the reason I came away from looking at this hole thinking not much good came from the Spanish conquest but these people too had a few things to answer for. I’m glad I live in the 21st century for all its faults and failures.
We haven’t learned much have we as we keep sacrificing people instead of nurturing them.
The other profoundly odd thing about this place was the Catholic church’s need to lord it over these early heathen influences. There is a church on top of the pyramid. You reach it by a separate free acess path. At noon it celebrated the Angelus by having the bells play Schubert’s Ave Maria which was a first for me. When I was child in Italy we said a short prayer at noon when the church bells sounded but we never heard popular classical songs ringing from the bell towers. Magical Mexico interrupting the Biggest Aspidistra In The World.
Catholicism brooks no competition.
The Angelus (/ˈændʒələs/; Latin for "angel") is a Catholic devotion commemorating the Incarnation or the Annunciation. As with many Catholic prayers, the name Angelus is derived from its incipit—the first few words of the text: Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariæ ("The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary"). The devotion is practised by reciting as versicle and response three Biblical verses narrating the mystery, alternating with the prayer "Hail Mary". The Angelus exemplifies a species of prayers called the "prayer of the devotee".- Wikipedia
I was rather relieved to get out of there and return to the world of crass commercialism outside the fence. I have a hankering for a sarape (a poncho for you illiterates) to keep me warm at altitude but Layne says we must get it in Oaxaca as they have the best. As long as I get one before we tackle the Andes.
We drove downtown and parked near the zocalo for some dog walking and people watching. We bought some home made chips sprinkled with hot sauce to restore our grasshopper’ed taste buds to normality.
Police canine training on the central square:
Shopping and they had some delicious looking ice creams. Layne said custard counted for a weeks worth of sugar. Grrr.
The parish church where dogs are forbidden. Dogs don’t have souls in Catholic dogma which was the last straw for me.
And yet, glorious architecture:
Abbey Road. Sort of. Cholula has lovely clean modern streets with easy sidewalks and lots of small businesses, few street dogs and a general air of modern prosperity.
Most people wear masks so we do too even while outdoors and socially distanced. It’s polite to follow community standards.
We accidentally parked near an Agua purificada store and this added 15 gallons to our water tank and Layne spotted a key maker during our travels.
We wanted a key to open the doors so we can have an extra secreted outside and never get locked out. The van has the modern remote key fob arrangement so all we wanted was an extra key to unlock the door.
It’s a family bike shop. She sells he fixes and he took time away from a fork rebuild to find a blank that would fit the Promaster lock. He looked grim. “It will take some time.” Our faces dropped. How long? We wanted to leave tomorrow. “Oh about 15 minutes.” We retired to the van to have lunch, roast chicken wrapped in tortillas. Half an hour later I handed over 200 pesos ( ten bucks) and we have our extra key. Magical Mexico.
We returned to the campground where we had a swim and Mike brought us coffee poolside saying the water was too cold. He then found himself cornered by a Mexican widow who took a fancy apparently to van life and Mike. There is no accounting for taste… but she moved in on him hard core. He was squirming at the attention but if I had been single I’d have taken her out to lunch. She was sweet and funny and apparently has an adventurous streak. All a van lifer needs in a partner. I left him to it and walked Rusty and then climbed the well worn water tower in the campground.
The view from the top:
Solid more or less but oxidized.
The biggest pyramid in the world on the horizon.
The other altar of worship:
Mike who had no desire to climb the tower. The bottom part was I’ll admit a scary rickety ladder.. .
And there endeth another long day. A shared box of wine with Mike and some stories, with a final parting planned in the morning. We are headed to the sea at Veracruz over some reputedly lush tropical mountains while he is possibly going north to find a new clutch for his Sprinter. That’s how you make friends and lose them on the road.
