Butterflies At Altitude

I might as well get it out of the way. We saw no butterflies. It was absurd coming all this way on crappy roads, climbing high in the mountains…

…and we saw no monarchs. Layne was worried about my state of health at these altitudes and she wanted to get back down as soon as possible. I couldn’t argue with that and I was glad she agreed to drive over the high passes exploring the monarch habitats from the road. Next time we will spend more time acclimating at lower altitudes before coming up here. It’s funny as I’ve not felt this before and we drove mountain passes up to 11,000 feet in Colorado and Idaho last summer with no ill effects. The red line was our route, the yellow line I added for emphasis marking the state line between Michoacán and Mexico State. 

The villagers in El Rosario got a special treat that day: two Martians dropped in on them to share the splendidly refreshing morning at their market. They stared and stared in slack jawed silence as we three approached. I might as well have been Gary Cooper in High Noon had I been taller and thinner and armed and at the OK corral. As it was I felt like an intruder. Which was weird really as the monarchs and their annual migrations are a world famous phenomenon and you’d have thought gabachos (gringos in a newer derogatory term) would be a common sight. As it was I saw a nice lady selling coffee and pastries so I peeled off from the vegetable expedition ( wouldn’t you?) and got busy. I asked for a coffee and a concha. Her son forgot his own breakfast and gawked at me as though I had asked for the head of Marie Antoinette on a platter. “Do you speak Spanish?” I asked a not unreasonable question because sometimes Indio tribes  speak  only their own unintelligible language. He nodded slowly fearful of what was to come. Buenas dias I said. He remained tongue tied. His mother crossed herself. I then further confounded their morning by speaking double dutch to my dog who actually  understood me and obeyed. Had I levitated myself into the cloudless sky I could not have produced more astonishment. 

The photo is from an excellent page discussing the history of conchas but also the balance between corn and wheat in Mexican history. Surprisingly interesting. 
https://www.eater.com/2016/2/19/11054298/conchas-mexico-pastry

Under these trying circumstances my usual ploy of engaging in some light banter, asking about their kids and asking for a smile for the camera did not seem appropriate so we neither of us got any pictures of the market. I did manage to get a snap of the guy in the “built for the craft” (!) t-shirt who between using his three words of English on me was working with his wife to set up their restaurant stall for market day. I wish we had been there later in the day  to do a taste test. 

There it is, still standing after the alien invasion. 

Never mind the monarchs, this is very much rural Mexico as we ourselves discovered. 

With much regret and only a small headache I drove us past the butterfly parking lot on up the hill overlooking the valley. 

This was a winding mountain road I wanted to explore before we descended below 8,000 feet to the city of Toluca, several hours drive away. 

Actually I was glad Layne agreed to this deviation as she was quite surprised about me feeling so ill, and she insisted we get a wriggle on. The scenery was spectacular at ten thousand feet. 

This is the road from El Rosario to the delightfully named town of An-gang-gay-oh in the next valley. Luckily we took this little used road in the down  hill direction and you will see, I hope, how steep it was. Photos don’t do grades justice but trust me when I tell you it was steep! 

This weird strip road actually works quite well as long as you keep your wheels in the strips. 

Water tanks on roofs are universal in Mexico and it’s time I bought shares in Rotoplex. This yellow water tank is rather more fancy than the usual rotomolded plastic. 

New construction everywhere. Until your house is completed you pay no property taxes I’m told so you will often see crafty home owners with rebar out of the roof. 

Cows on the road. The protocol when you meet livestock is to be nice and not push. For retirees in a van that’s easy. 

The farmer plodded in the road to protect his animals which knew the way home and turned in at the fence. We waved, he smiled and we were on our way. 

The next time you have a crappy day in the office think about these fields, nearly vertical and neatly cultivated. At ten thousand feet. 

The road deteriorated into a Roman style cobblestone that would shake your fillings loose at anything more ambitious than walking speed. So I stuck Gannet2 into manual first gear and we bounced along.

What I would really like in my six speed Promaster is a crawler gear for those roads where I want slow speed and more power but as it is this is a delivery van conversion not designed for rough back roads necessarily. 

As it was I stopped from time to time to give the brakes a chance to cool. It was here I spotted a lone monarch. Layne wanted a picture; it was long gone. Here beginneth and endeth our monarch encounter! 

Here’s a close up of the Roman road that was making me crazy. Worse was to come as we got off the mountains but I didn’t know that yet. 

And this is where it got extremely steep. I was glad we were going downhill and the brakes were fine. 

Believe me if it isn’t clear in the pictures that this is steep. In the rain these cobbles would be like slime. I’ve met their ilk before in Mexico and it’s a slippery surface like ice when wet. 

Finally Angangueo and a few tiny alleys, one more stop to cool the brakes and we were in the main road  again. 

The Main Street had an Alpine air and I was out in mind of Switzerland. 

It’s not actually Switzerland of course. Mexico is its own inimitable world, firewood and smart phone arm in arm. 

I don’t know where Cassville is but I assume they traded these trailers onto the used market and they end up improbably in Angangueo.

Climbing up to the pass at the stateline with Mexico. 

I hope this odd tour of back country Michoacán explains a little why I like driving Mexico. Not a single foreign tagged vehicle did we see since we left the campground in Pátzcuaro and our journey across Michoacán has been all to ourselves, the good roads and the bad, the road food and the awful altitude sickness soon to get worse. 

Up next Mexico State, poverty, terrible roads and lots of dead cell phone areas. I ended up missing Michoacán. 

Michoacán

I like Morelia, for a big city it’s surprisingly approachable and it has tons of culture from Spanish language and cooking classes to fabulous museums, art and history. And narrow streets. We drove back through Morelia after our hot showers and creature comforts of the campground stop in nearby Pátzcuaro. I had to turn in my mirrors more than once as Google maps picked some daft back alley roads out of the capital city of Michoacán. 

At intersections you’ll find people looking to earn a van living selling stuff as the best works they can find and I try to always spend a dollar or two to help out. We were ready for a clean windshield so we skipped the nut and fruit sellers and nodded to this guy. He did a brilliant job. 

Personally I’d rather see Mexico give people proper jobs with regular pay. I’m always aware of the fact these people are doing what they must to earn a living a buck at a time. Decent regular work would keep more Mexicans at home as well. Better for us. 

We were driving south from Morelia to visit the monarch butterfly sanctuary high in the mountains on the edge of Michoacán and Mexico states. Mexico is a city, a state and a country! When Mexicans in Mexico talk of “Mexico” they usually mean the capital city. 

I like to try to show a few snapshots of the countryside we drove through because Mexico is not only huge but is varied too. We drive through farmland in all stages of cultivation, dotted with small villages and towns filled with damned topes (“toe-pays”). On the one hand topes are a ghastly nuisance as you will bounce badly if you hit than at speed, on the other hand Mexicans ignore speed limits. I just wish they were all painted and marked with signs. 

Our route took us past an artificial Lake Villa Victoria on which we saw no fishing activity and which looked stagnant.  And yet the eye is always attracted to bodies of water for some reason.  This place was damned to collect water draining from the hills of the Monarch Butterfly Reserve and since 1982 supplies water to five million residents of Toluca and Mexico (City). They flooded 15 agricultural communities for the hydro electric project. 

Rainy season is in summer and the countryside looks dry in February. You would also consider these to be summer temperatures considering the winter the US is going through. 85 degrees anybody? 

Layne needed to use our handy sandy toilet, Rusty wanted a sniff around and I wanted to take some pictures so we stopped. The advantages of traveling with our own home are innumerable. Usually but sometimes it gets rough as we shall see. 

The landscape was becoming mountainous and the trees were becoming coniferous in the crisper mountain air. 

Layne was busy in the passenger seat snapping away with her camera as the countryside passed by. 

And it was obvious we were entering the winter home of the monarch butterflies. They gather in these mountains in winter and trek north as far as Canada in the summer. 

I was kept busy avoiding potholes and watching for topes. 

You’d think the roads to an internationally famous tourist spectacle would be freshly paved and signposted and advertised. Mexico expects you to be able to manage on your own. We were up to the challenge.  More or less. 

Ejido El Rosario is the best known community that offers tours and horseback rides through the hanging monarch colonies. An “ejido” (“eh-he-dough”) is a peculiarly Mexican form of land distribution created after the 1910 revolution whereby the government owns the land which can never be sold, theoretically, but the people who live on it get to benefit from its worth, be it in tourism or in coastal areas sun fishing or agriculture. It’s a system under attack of course by people who want the land but so far it’s a system that gives poor people a toehold on the economy.  

And the schools of course are named after revolutionary heroes, tons of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa schools but also local heroes you’ve never heard of like the revolutionary priest Miguel Hidalgo who was a leader of the original 1810 revolution that overthrew Spanish rule. A Mexican founding father with a whole state named for him. And monarch butterflies now a source of cash. 

It really is glorious being retired. We choose a destination, we set Google maps on our phone and with very few glitches the phone on the dashboard gets us there. Just like you do at home. You can try it yourself for fun. Use Morelia as your starting point and El Rosario Monarch Butterflies as your destination. Don’t bother to avoid highways as there none. And there your blue line. 

If you look carefully below you’ll see the cursed Tope. Right in front of the approaching car. In Mexico if you see cars bouncing there’s a tope. If they swerve unaccountably they are probably avoiding a known giant pothole. Be alert! It’s tiring too let me tell you. 

We stopped for a late lunch. I was tired and hungry and Rusty was ready for a walk. I spotted a turn out in the woods and we pulled off the road about twenty minutes before El Rosario at around 9,000 feet elevation. 

We were on a logging road with a small turn out large enough to fit GANNET2 out of the way of any traffic. It felt remote as hell to us but there is always someone around in Mexico and over Laynes’s objections I pulled back off the torn up dirt road. She was afraid of sinking but I was confident the ground was solid. I could hear chain saws up above us and sure enough a car went bouncing by later! 

Rusty loved the spot but I had trouble keeping up. I carry my walking stick the one I got after my motorcycle accident and it came in handy here as I found I couldn’t catch my breath. I was wheezing like I had emphysema. It was awful. 

A short walk, normally a breeze, was a huge effort. Rusty, who normally is never as ambitious as me, had to hold back to let me catch up as best I could. 

There was tons of traffic back and forth on the road. I forced down some food and went to take a nap. I woke up two hours later to find Layne and Rusty passed out. I read in bed and finished my book on the Magdalena River in Colombia.  Clearly I was going to need acclimation at altitude. I had a migraine headache and was still breathing shallowly. 

Layne said I looked terrible and wanted to backtrack. I took some Tylenol and insisted we sorbs the night and see what morning might bring. We decided to spend the night here. The spontaneity of van travel. 

It turned out to be a good spot for us, no local dogs to intimidate Rusty, not much noise after traffic died down in the night. Before dark a pick up came down the track with a load of cut logs. They waved but didn’t stop as they bounced by and drove off down the road.  

We had the place to ourselves. Too bad I felt so crappy. Layne looked at me like she didn’t like what she saw but I said in the morning I’d like to see how I felt. Having got this far I wanted to see some damned butterflies. The night was uneventful after we saw a flashlight coming down through the woods around 7:30 pm in pitch darkness. Some wood cutter walking home through woods as familiar to him as they were remote to us, no doubt. He must have been surprised to see our van!  The light went by and we saw no one else. 

I didn’t sleep soundly despite the breathing assist I got from my CPAP but when daylight cane I got up to let Rusty out into the cool morning air. I heard shouting and rustling up the hill and suddenly we had neighbors. “Photograph the white one - she’s pretty” the leader of the cow herders called out. I admired his cattle and told him I couldn’t breathe and they were walking the woods. He got a big grin on his face and said “Watch me,” as he ran up the hillside twirling his machete and laughing at me. I cheered him on breathless as I was. 

They didn’t worry about traffic as they walked up the road before plunging back into the wood on the opposite side. A wave of the machete and they were gone, just like that. 

Layne agreed to drive up to El Rosario to check the place out. More altitude for me!