Liliana and Alice wanted to watch birds; I wanted to eat spicy food. We all wanted to leave freezing slushy New York and spend New Year’s somewhere warmer. So it was off to Mexico.

We flew into Veracruz on a rainy night, but Alice’s luggage sadly didn’t make it with us. Since Lesson 1 of my Spanish text had anticipated this crisis (“Busco mis maletas!”) I was unfazed. What more could the Third World throw at me? Plus I was excited to see palm trees. Nobody warned me, though, that Mexico on the whole doesn’t have toilet seats. Apparently people steal them (no doubt the lucrative international toilet-seat-smuggling cartels).

By day, Veracruz is smelly, grubby, and clogged with honking traffic, yet unaccountably full of tourists from Mexico City. The economy reflected this: breakfast in a tourist café on the Zócalo was 40 pesos, lunch at our favorite place, the Little Golden Pig, was 30, and dinner at the Cocina Económica, where actual locals eat, was 20. Number of people playing bad loud music or trying to sell you trinkets proportional to price.

Our table companion informed us there was an alley in Veracruz that the Devil lived in. But not really, he added hastily, in case we fled terrified.

A TV poll we watched asked Mexicans which animals Noah shouldn’t have brought onto the ark. The consensus: snakes, spiders, rats, cockroaches ... and cats. A nation of cat-haters? Who knew?

The arrogant West torments the childlike South with empty promises of prosperity.

After a visit to the nearby Totonac ruins of Cempoala, we took a luxury overnight bus. Such fine buses; they put Greyhound to shame. The toilets, free soda, and bad movie made it like an aeroplane with wheels. Unfortunately we arrived in Oaxaca at 5:30 AM, and had to kill time in the Zócalo like vagrants until we could check into the hostel. Beto, a five-year-old stall vendor’s son, kept us amused.

Oaxaca has a lovely colonial center, but is fairly touristy, with junk peddlers, internet cafés, indigenous beggars, and pizza (the only truly bad food we had in Mexico). Lots of gringos; one spaced-out lady bustled up, and asked “Do you speak English? OK, what day is it?”

Santo Domingo has ornamental agave plantings outside and lavish gold inside. Oaxaca made its fortune in the cochineal trade. (I had to look this up too; cochineal is a red dye extracted from a scale insect that lives on cactus pads. Spain had the monopoly for 250 years, until infested cactus pads were smuggled to Haiti by the perfidious French.)

Although the province makes a lot of tequila now, its only remaining monopoly is in little painted animals. These were originally kid’s toys made by the local Indians, but now they’re everywhere. The best are surreal and fanatically detailed.

And the crowning glory of Oaxaca was its hot chocolate, available all over town at dedicated chocolate emporia, frothed with a special wooden frother. Yum. Nice mole sauce, and better bread than the USA generally manages.

We’d read in the guide about a confederation of Zapotec villages in the Sierra Norte that ran no-frills ecotourism. After much phone calling, misdirection by tourist agencies, and trudging about we tracked down their office, and left the next morning on a second-class chicken bus (yes, there were actual chickens atop the bus).

Cuajimoloyas had adorable cabins with hot water, flush toilets, and a fireplace; Llano Grande didn’t, and it was c-c-cold up at 3000 m. What crazy tourists we were, to go to Mexico in winter and stay in the coldest place we could find. Liliana kept our spirits up by reminding us it would have been much nicer at the beach. The villages were wonderful, full of friendly people who had Spanish as a second language, corn drying on the roofs, turkeys and donkeys, and annoying small dogs that patiently hung around hoping you’d drop something edible.

A myriad of little animals, like a biology textbook on acid.

Santo Domingo, tourists and vendors outside, and at one point a band of men in tight black spangly suits and silly hats singing mournfully to their guitars, unaccountably expecting financial reward.

New Year’s Eve was a strange affair; the live band didn’t show, so most of the locals decamped to the party in the next village, leaving a group of sad single guys, who drank mezcal and stood around listening to wailing Mexican music about men who missed their dear mothers (Solid Gold Oedipal Hits, Volume 1), something like: “Ooooooh, mamacitaaaaa... you are the only love for meeee... all other women are just whooooores... why did I ever leave my hoooome... I’ll lay flowers every weeeeeek and I’ll weeeeep... on the graaaave... of my little mamaaaaaaaa...”

What is it about Mexican men and their mothers? I asked my Mexican friend, and he sagely advised I read The Labyrinth of Solitude. Right.

The next day was the procession of Baby Jesus, where a brass band and villagers made a circuit of Cuajimoloyas, with frequent stops for prayer. The parade was led by three boys on horseback, wearing gold cardboard crowns and sneakers. Baby Jesus was represented by not one doll in ornate swaddling clothes, but about nine. Supposedly this is a result of fierce competition to have the best Niño Dios in the parade, but it looked like Jesus and his security contingent of body doubles.

We hiked from one village to the next through mixed pine/oak forest festooned with bromeliads, birdwatching all the way and the next day too. L & A were overjoyed to see a trogon; I wished I had a collecting permit to bring back some of the beetles I found under logs and stones. (“Crazy gringos,” thought the guide.) Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were in the local comedor with the villagers. Cheerful matriachs did their best to fatten us up with endless no-choice-but-plenty-of-it food, and I wished my Spanish were up to getting their recipes.

Instead of taking the bus back, L the enterprising third-worlder insisted we hitch, so we arrived in Oaxaca bundled up in the bed of a pickup truck, with glorious views and lots of fresh air. The only way to travel.

Possibly the worst brass band in the state of Oaxaca lead the Niño Dios procession. (But an A for effort, particularly since they’d been practicing, almost certainly with pounding mezcal headaches, since early New Year’s morning).

The scenic route back to Oaxaca.

Behind Santo Domingo in Oaxaca is a huge cultural history museum in a converted monastery. And in the monastery ground is an excellent Ethnobotanical Garden, with free admission and tours in English and Spanish. Wonderful for biology junkies like us, and we learned the amazing fact that the bottle gourd of the Americas is in fact from Africa. Even more amazingly, it was domesticated by Indians maybe 9000 years ago, long before Africans got around to it. How did it get here? Drifting from Africa, washing up on the beach and being planted by enterprising locals? We itched to get out hands on gourd DNA and check this strange story out.

The next morning we visited the impressive ruins of Monte Albán, just outside of Oaxaca, with a picnic lunch (which I shopped for all by myself at the local market, the high point of my Spanish to date). Picnic brunch from market: 10 pesos. Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate from museum café: 51 pesos. Monte Albán is the archetypal Mexican Ruin: pyramids, carvings, plazas and vistas, and tourists wandering about in inappropriately skimpy clothes thinking “Did the Mixtecs come before the Aztecs, or was that the Totonacs, or the Olmecs...” Guess which of us was observing the mighty ruins with awe, and which were staring off in the other direction with binoculars? That’s right.

Rather than stay a night in Veracruz, we took the bus back to Xalapa, a nice little place in the hills with the Best Tacos in Mexico (prove me wrong). Sadly, it was a Monday, so the famous anthropological museum was closed. I was disappointed; I wanted to see lots of giant Olmec heads, and the Lonely Planet promised it would be open. And then Liliana foolishly ate shaved ice with condensed milk, despite her father warning her for years never to do this, and got the first and only stomach trouble of the trip.

A 4:30 wakeup call, three slices of white toast at the airport café (you’ll be amused to know the popular gluey sliced white bread in Mexico is called Bimbo), then home, with the customary glowering at my passport by the INS in Houston. And there was still snow on the ground in New York.

Avenues of columnar cacti in the Ethnobotanical Gardens.

This is the real deal! Great big sacks of chillies I'd never heard of. (Liliana: “Is that the way gringos spell chiles? It looks god-awful.”)

You may also
want to read
Liliana’s version.