Where The Water Boils

I walked some serious steps to get this photo.  Look at it and thank me for gasping for my art.

It really was a climb both down…

…and up:

You have to be here a while before you get where the ridiculous name comes from: “boils the water.” Huh?

The name hierve el agua comes from the appearance of the place, a pool of water flowing over the edge with too much calcium carbonate thus creating long white stalactites down the hillside…imagine water boiling over and foaming down the side of the pan. 

Unless you come to Oaxaca you’ll never hear of this place but for tourists in the city and around the area it’s a must see. Mexicans come by the bus load so we came on Friday and avoided the weekend. A van we had met briefly at El Rancho was parked and I stopped by to chat with the two women from Québec. They had sudvtvtwo nights in the parking lot (for free) and said it was great to be alone there. 

This was our first visit, a short reconnaissance of a morning to see what the deal is. My long term plan would be to return closer to summer, spend a night aboard GANNET2 and get up with the sun and make the mile and a half hike down the canyon with the best light and cooler air. 

There was no desire to go swimming as, despite the name, these aren’t hot pools of water and at 6,000 feet the water isn’t specially warm. 

There is no prohibition on dogs but we walked Rusty around the lot and the overlooks but he was sleeping aboard as we struggled with the uneven steps and steep slopes. Lucky dog in a van!

Make no mistake the walk to see the stalactites is steep and tough. There is signage, in English even,
There are trash cans…

And there are warnings but things like hand holds, railings and level trails are not park of the program. 

There’s no supervision and common sense is your guide. If you slip and fall or plunge to your death don’t think there’s anyone to sue. You’re free to be an idiot on your own terms but the consequences are all yours. 

They want you to behave but not everyone is up to it apparently. 

We had left the campground early, around seven and the drive takes an hour, so by the time we got there we were almost alone. 

You can stand on the trail and admire the views on your own unmolested. It’s pretty nice. 

There are still discoveries to be made here as archeologists believe the water here was channeled by the Mixtecs centuries ago and used for irrigation further down the valley. Not much of these irrigation channels has been found so far but it seems the channels were unique in that period of history as they were lined by the calcium carbonate. 

For some people the cold water is no  deterrent. 

The views are spectacular and I can only imagine how beautiful it would be to watch the sun coming up. 

Felix has been here for 75 years, raised his children and now has five grand kids to keep him happy. He was curious about our travels, the time it takes to drive here from our home and so forth. A happy guy connected to the world by so many visitors. Rusty and I could have sat for a while but we had places to go. 

Access to Hierve El Agua is iffy from time to time. The villages around the attraction  are are as poor as you’d imagine in this marginal agricultural environment. 

The monies raised are supposed to spread among the locals but mistrust and arguments have led to protests and road closures most recently during Covid. On our visit the locals charged us a buck each,

…while the state police charged three bucks at the gate to the parking lot. The road to the waters is a pretty good state highway through the mountains,

Closer to the villages it becomes dirt, bearable and easy enough rolling along the hillsides. 

This is agave country.

Dog walk break. 

“Keep your eyes out for the Tope!”

The winding waterfall trail: 

The approach road. 

“Some impacts last a life time. Wear your seatbelt.” 

Distant agave fields across the valley: 

On the highway back to Oaxaca we stopped for lunch and had tacos and hibiscus tea: 

Cali keeping the grass green at El Rancho. 

Mezcal Made By Hand

Duan and Greg have been waiting five weeks for their Ford Transit to be repaired and they have walked all over the land around the campsite, sometimes for miles. 

On one of their extended walks they took a cab back to El Rancho. “ Do you mind if I make a stop on the way?” the driver asked and brought them here. It looks like an illegal moonshine still but it is perfectly within the law and is the product of five generations of Gerardo’s family making mezcal. 

I was blown away by the operation. He’s building a sales room for future visitors but we just walked in and watched and touched and tasted right there where he distills the stuff,  Health and Safety be damned. It was brilliant.  

It’s a family operation so in the background Fernando his cousin kept the stills bubbling, adding water, moving crushed agave and stoking the wood fires. This is all done the old fashioned way by hand.

The agave mash looks foul doesn’t it? He let us chew a piece like it was sugar cane. It wasn’t sweet, it was smokey and flat like mezcal without the alcohol. 

Then we got to taste the must or whatever mezcal makers call the liquor they squeeze out of the plant before it ferments. It was a rich full bodied drink, again no alcohol but full of smoke and a hint of the mezcal to come. I asked for seconds and Gerardo laughed. It looks like mangrove water all tannin brown but the flavor was bracing. 

It looks even worse as the agave mash gets closer to being ready for the distillery. I thought it looked like cat shit and wasn’t tempted to taste this stage. 

The owner Gerardo says the many different flavors of mezcal come from the different agave plants. He has even gone looking for wild agave in the mountains to change things up but he’s lucky if he can find one plant every half mile of hiking across the sun baked hills. 

Fernando was hard at it transferring the agave mash as we talked. 

And then preparing the next batch:

Adding water to the still…and then putting the lid on and…

…inserting the pipe to carry the steam out of the still. 

Our job was to taste and admire the clear liquid just as Angelica was doing: 

Unlike other distillers who add cannabis for flavor Gerardo adds the plant to the mash for his cannabis mezcal. I tried it but honestly it wasn’t the smoothest and whatever else it adds you don’t get a high from the cannabis plant. But if you want a cheap thrill here it is: 

The whole operation is under strict observation: 

The mash is used to fertilize the growing agave plants and the excess water is drained back into the fields.

There is little that is pretty about the process and in the photo below you can see the tannic fluid left over from the still going back to the crop. 

Fernando was constantly moving around in the background.

His cousin the boss was treating us to an extended tasting. I soon gave up as I was driving so I had to trust Layne’s taste buds. She took copious notes as there were a dozen flavors of agave. 

They’d recognize this set up in Appalachia whence I have had some very respectable tasting illegal moonshine. 

Omar was the ideal translator and guide on this expedition. 

About the time this posts Gerardo will be cutting this months crop and dropping it into the pit to burn the smoke flavor into the agave. 

Ten feet deep maybe? 

The finished product awaiting bottling. 

We got a bottle of Sierra Negra and Mexicano (500 pesos each) as we thought them the smoothest. Cannabis would have been fun until customs in Belize saw the label. Not much of a joke then. 

It was only thanks to Duan and Greg we found this place. What a morning. 

Blessed be the agave.