Next on the itinerary was Puebla, two to three hours drive from the national capital (depending very much on the vicissitudes of CDMX district traffic), the scene of one of Mexico’s most recent and all-too frequent earthquakes (September 2017). Puebla has long thought of itself as the country’s second city (although in pure population terms one and probably two other Mexican cities would be slotted in between it and the “market leader” Mexico City), and it has long frustratingly striven to free itself from its demeaning tourist tag as a Mexico City day trip.
Highway 190 going south-east from Mexico City takes you to Puebla, a journey of around 140km❈. I must admit that before we went there I had never heard of Puebla, and I was surprised, or at least intrigued, a tad intrigued anyway, to discover (according to the tourism info blurb at least) that it was Mexico’s second largest city! And I was even more fascinated (yawn!) to discover it was the BEST city in all the country. ‘Best’ is an absolute descriptor and one subject to being variously evaluated by the use of different criteria.
This peerless assessment of Puebla’s ‘bestness’ was supplied by Hector, our 24-year-old, fresh-faced tour leader who just happened to be a native of that same city. Hector is a recent law graduate from the University of Puebla – you guessed it…the BEST university in all of Mexico! (I refrained from asking Hector if it was also the BEST law school in the country as well, I figured that one was pretty much so indelibly inked in that it could with full confidence be safely left unsaid!).
Soda drinks dispenser machine, Puebla style!Hector’s unchecked enthusiasm for his hometown (which some, unkind people elsewhere might view in a harsh light as compensatory jealousy of the sprawling, dominant metropolis of Mexico City) was something I found nonetheless quite endearing…good to think that parochialism, the provincialism of the less significant periphery, is an always dependable constant in society and in life. I’m convinced that the elimination of provincialism as we know it, along with that of self-interest (in fact the two are synonyms for each other in this context) would surely be clear and ultimate confirmation that western civilisation (indeed all civilisation) was doomed, irrevocably on it’s last legs!
When we hit the city outskirts late in the afternoon we thought our hotel would be close by. Instead it took a tortuously drawn-out period of time to get to it thanks to it being peak time (ie, crawl time for Puebla autos!), traffic was banking up along all the main thoroughfares. After passing half-a-dozen or more hotels that looked like our prospective hotel (not that we knew what it looked like!), we arrived at the Hotel San Angel as nightfall was fast approaching. Outside it looked pretty drab but inside the hotel, the layout, furnishings and stylish central courtyard gave it a very faded appearance of old-fashioned charm.
As we were booking in and being allocated our room numbers, our receptionist, a pleasant young guy with very adequate command of English, made a politely worded request which surprised me. He asked in a most respectful tone if any of us had any spare currency from our countries he might have as he collected them for his kids. Fair enough I thought for him to ask but it didn’t really register any apparent response from the group.
Later on when I came back down to reception to hand in the room key before doing an exploratory walk around Puebla I engaged the reception guy in conversation. We exchanged introductions, his name turned out to be Jose Carlos…as we talked I noticed that under his smart suit and freshly pressed business shirt, a very bright T-shirt was protruding which I found an amusing incongruity. What really got my eye though was the book he had on the counter which he was obviously reading when he wasn’t assisting guests. It was one of Antony Beavor’s war histories, from memory I think it might have been Stalingrad. Having read some of Beavor’s well researched and written military works and posed a question to the author in person at the Cremorne Orpheum when he gave a book talk a number of years ago, I was intrigued by Jose Carlos’s choice of reading material, and even more surprised to find the book was in English! J-C explained his twin interest in war books (especially Beavor’s, he told me he had read other ones by him) and in the earnest pursuit of learning several foreign languages.
El Catedral viewed from the lit-up ZocaloThe hotel was close to all the visitor focal points, the Zocalo (quite small but decked out in a Christmas display of brightly lit arches), the main cathedral, the municipal palace, Oficinas de Turismo, museums and so on. Next door to the Zocola and massively dwarfing it, is Puebla Cathedral. With its twin-towering edifice and fortress-like structure which takes up the whole block between 16 de Septiembre and 2 Sur, it is the largest church in all of Mexico, an honour that you probably think would have resided with Mexico City itself!
When I returned home later that evening after dinner I stopped off at reception where the ever-smiling and likeable Jose Carlos was still on duty and studiously ploughing through Stalingrad. I got José to jot down his address for me, promising to send him a sample of the numerous stock of international bank notes and coins which had been laying dormant accumulating dust in my house for years.
The following morning I passed on the option to visit the nearby Pyramide Tepanapa (apparently the world’s largest pyramid by volume, surpassing Cheops in Giza)✦. In its place I did the afternoon option trip to Cholula – not out of any great desire to go there specifically, but partly because it was only 10 km by coach from Puebla, minimal disruption and inconvenience being the deciding factor! And thus it came to be, Cholula did not rise above it’s very modest expectations – it had nothing exceptional to recommend it, sightseeing-wise, that stood it out from any other average tourist destinations.
To save our visit from being a complete fizzer, Hector shepherded us towards the nearest restaurante/ cantina for a little culinary cultural fix. The diversion proved worthwhile as we got to taste Cholula’s most famous Mestizo local dish, mole poblano…this was basically a curious culinary concoction which looked like chocolate sauce, but didn’t taste like it! Rather, it was a spicy-sweet, sienna-coloured sauce containing spices, a variety of nuts and fruits, which you pour over mains, especially chicken. It wasn’t bad, certainly different, and the lashings of sangria which we washed the mole poblano dishes down with, helped as well.
PostScript: Museo de Artesanias – more a shop than a museum?
On our second and last night in Puebla I happened upon a quiet little, rather specialised, museum tucked away on a corner directly opposite the people-infested Zocalo. The few display cases inside showed a cross-sample of Mexican handcrafts and arts with displays of alfareria (pottery), sombreros (headware), etc. The sign at the entrance, “Museo-Tienda” was a hint prompting the question that quickly formed in my head: was this really just a shop masquerading as a museum? There seemed to be more merchandise, various crafted items for sale (especially women’s garments, bags and purses), than exhibits mounted behind glass! Given that entrance to the museum-cum-shop was free (fairly uncommon in museum-obsessed Mexico), it should come as no shock that everything on sale was a bit on the pricey side! Tienda more than Museo?
Footnote: Puebla has something else to recommend itself – the best pasteleria I encountered in the whole Mexican tour (with real chocolate!)…on Calle 16 September opposite the all-overshadowing Catedral.Pasteleria deluxe!
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❈ the countryside between the two cities was fairly nondescript, probably the only really memorable sight was a couple of not extinct (still smouldering in fact!) volcanos. We stopped several times to get photos of them but never ever got closer than about 500m from them – an overly conservatively safe distance I thought!
✦ having already trampled been all over Teotihuacán and with Chichen Itza et al still to come, I thought it prudent to minimise the chances of contracting POS (Pyramid Overload Syndrome) during the tour! /span>
After a couple of nights staying at the Metropol I heard through the tour grapevine that we were changing hotels for the rest of our stay in the Mexican capital. I got this unofficially, second-hand, from my travelling companions because my Intrepid travel agent had neglected to inform me of this switch…she was too busy off on another holiday of her own! (she did contact me several days after the move mentioning that I was probably already at the new hotel by now! – very helpful indeed…thanks for coming, duh!).
The new hotel, the Hotel Geneve was in a part of the capital known as the “Pink Zone” (Zona Rosa). The check-in was unfortunately far from seamless…a process needlessly prolonged because the front of house staff (or perhaps it was Intrepid itself) transposed all of our names on their tour list (Chinese nomenclature style!) and kept telling us they had no bookings for us! A state of inertia and confusion that was mercifully ended when Hector, our guide for the Mexico tour, turned up and was able to bring light and clarity to the situation (no points for perceptiveness on the part of the staff, being incapable of figuring out by themselves that they had our names there in front of their eyes all along, just in the wrong order!).
Lindy memorabilia
As is my wont, after dumping my bags in my room I went on a bit of reconnoitre of the hotel’s immediate environs but found it a bit drap and pedestrian (we were now a long way from the city centre and the tourist precinct). I used most of my free time before the tour introductory meeting and dinner exploring the common areas of the hotel itself. The Hotel Geneve has quite a history in itself, famous in Mexico for its “who’s who” inventory of international guests that have graced its rooms over the decades. The hotel has an appearance of being a tad past its prime now, but the management has assiduously made a concerted effort to preserve that rich history in the memory of visitors and guests. Just beyond the reception area there are a series of exhibits in the foyer, mainly in glass cabinets, displaying a miscellany of pre-war items associated with the Geneve…this ranges from the old uniforms worn by the porters to early 20th century relics of luggage bags and some colourful old city maps which would fully engage the curiosity of a dedicated cartographer!
‘Viva Zapata!’
Also decorating the foyer are several glass-encased displays reminding us of the past stays at the hotel of famous international guests. The stand-outs of these were probably one honouring the American aviator and polemical, authoritarian public figure in pre-war US politics, Charles Lindbergh (an exhibit entitled “Lindy’s Post”), together with another celebrating Marlon Brando’s stay at the Geneve in the early ’50s. The actor was resident at the hotel whilst filming the story of the legendary Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata (Viva Zapata!) on location. Other equally famous hotel guests during its nearly 100 years to get a mention in the Geneve’s annals include Winston Churchill (the Geneve was apparently one of Winnie’s fave away-from-home stays), Marilyn Monroe and opera singer Maria Callas, plus a host of Mexican luminaries, no doubt famous to every Mexican but nondescript names to me.
Hotel Geneve: foyer study
The real highlight to me though was located in the rear of the foyer section…management has given it a retro makeover so that it resembles a 1930s/40s fashionable, upper class gentleman’s drawing-room/study with an extensive in-wall library, period furniture and large landscape period paintings. The setting had a very stylised look to – the sort of thing I could easily visualise in a typical English country estate mansion. Very landed gentry English in fact…no doubt about it, Winnie would have felt totally at home here in his silk dressing gown, comfy slippers, cosy open fire, a copy of The Times in hand and a tray filled with his favourite after-dinner beverages.
The Zona Rosa district where the Geneve is located is something of an Asian restaurant hub…by walking either north or south to the nearest cross-streets I was able to find a host of eating outlets which gave me a wide choice of Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Indian. One of the bonuses of travelling through Mexico was a chance to taste authentic Mexican cuisine (rather than the dreadful Tex-Mex abominations that masquerade as food in Australian and American eateries), however the availability of Asian options this night provided a welcome respite from the gastronomical onslaught of all those corn tortillas breakfast, lunch and dinner!
On the way back to the hotel the sight of a delicious pasteleria (cake shop) teased my sweet tooth and weakening, I popped in for a little after-dinner treat. Inside the shop there was a young uniformed female attendant behind the counter on which was a glass cabinet with various postres (deserts) and large tarta. I looked around and saw what I was after, pastels (small cupcakes) and pan de dulce (sweet bread) in rows of bins in the middle of the shop. I noticed though that there were nether tongs to pick out my selection with nor any small paper bags around to put them in. I wavered round hesitantly for several seconds before the attendant beckoned me over and gave me a small square of clear plastic (like a strip of cling wrap). While I stared at the piece of plastic wondering what I was supposed to do with it, she made a fist and simulated a snatching hand motion. I picked out an enticing small cake and following her example enclosed it in the plastic sheet and placed it on the counter. The attendant picked it up and in one rapid, wrapping motion, twirled the plastic around the cup cake until it formed a tightly knit bundle and handed it back to me. Ingeniously simple…tong-free, bag-free handling!
Pastries, cakes and sweet breads are an essential culmination of any Mexican lunch! I appreciated this even more after my farewell lunch in Mexico City – I went to the extremely popular La Casa de Tono opposite my hotel where I had a workman-like quesadilla (no better than that!), washed down with a local Indio drink. As I was finishing the mayor comida, a waiter lugging a wooden display box full of pan dulces and pastels asked if I wanted to have one…I declined his offer but a short while later changed my mind – only to discover that they had all been snaffled up by the lunchtime punters within 10 minutes! Those Mexiqueños sure do love their sweet treats.
Modelo Especial
A word on Mexican cervezas Before coming to Mexico I associated Mexican beer exclusively with the extremely popular and well-known Corona cerveza (although since returning I have seen Dos Equis (XX) in Sydney bottle shops as well). Over there I discovered two things about Mexi-beer, the industry is dominated by just two producers, Grupo Modelo (who make the best-selling export Corona) and FEMSA; and the preference among locals is not for pale lagers like Corona but for dark beers. During the tour I road-tested most of the local dark brews. Modelo, Indio, Leon, Bohemia, Noche Buena (the Christmas beer!), Tecate, Estrella, in fact all well-known Mexican brands have a negra (dark) beer. My own preference though was for the Modelo Especial, an excellent (no negra) pilsener brew.
For the artistically and culturally-inclined no trip to Mexico City is complete without a taste of its monumental art. Regrettably, due to a combination of a double-booking in the tour itinerary and the distance from our hotel, I wasn’t able to fit in a visit to the Frida Kahlo Museum during my few days in the capital…its location in Coyoacán (“place of coyotes”) was down in the southern afueras of the city. I had hoped to redeem the omission on my return to Mexico City after our stint in Cuba, however I found myself doubly thwarted as my only full return day in the capital was on a Monday (the day of the week all museums, in this city with the most number of museums in the world, is closed!✱).
Stairway triptych on the Conquista
Having missed out on seeing Frida’s brightly azure casa made me more determined to at the very least take in a truly representative sample of her partner Diego Rivera’s public and very political art. Before the trip I had promised myself to try to get a glimpse of Rivera’s famous mural at the University of Mexico, but I gave that up when I discovered it was located a bit too far away in the opposite direction. As a compromise (but a very good compromise as it turned out) we opted to stay around Centro and make for the Zócalo, the mayor square of CDMX. On one side of the Zócalo sits the imposing fortress-like Palacio Nacional where visitors can view Rivera’s great “History of Mexico” mural series. Palacio Nacional or the grounds on which it lies in Cuauhtémoc has been the seat of power in Mexico since the Aztec Empire.
Palacio jardens
Entrance into the National Palace was free but queues coupled with heavy security held things up and made the process a bit of an obstacle course. Passports had to be shown and tourism police were en mass at the entrance and liberally sprinkled all over the complex. To reach the colonnaded central courtyard of Constitution Square✥ we first passed through a spectacular and varied Mexican desert garden, a botanical bonanza full of agaves, cacti, yuccas and other hardy desert plants intersected by circular and diagonal pathways.
The murals took up huge slabs of wall space on the first floor of the palace, each mural depicted different phases of Mexican history starting with a scene from life in Pre-Columbian indigenous society. Rivera’s murals are all about social commentary, especially articulating the attitude of the conquerors towards the indígena peoples after contact – the mistreatment and abuses exacted on the Aztecs and other Meso-American Indians. One of the politically committed Rivera’s societal concerns in the mural project was to express through his art a counter-view to the prevailing European perception at the time which tended to wholesale denigrate the mestizo and native populations.
On the staircase between the ground floor and the second floor a very large mural is devoted to Rivera’s take on 20th century Mexico, his summary of society in the first-third of the century…the vast canvas is peopled by an eclectic mix of historical characters with portraits of his beloved Frida, Mexican political figures, American capitalists like Rockefeller, powerful revolutionary warlords Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, and in accord with the artist’s communist allegiances, Karl Marx. This panel is in fact part of a ‘triptych’ of murals which on the stairway – the other monumental sections, reaching up to the ceiling almost, convey the ferocity of Cortes’ assault on the Mexica and the indigenous determined attempts to resist the Conquistadors.
The history murals are a very large body of work undertaken on a massive scale, a monumental project which took Rivera around six years (ca 1929-35)…the murals were intended to encompass all four open corridors of the square building but he never found the time to complete it. There are other large-scale panel paintings by Rivera (does he ever do small-scale?) on the third floor of the building, but the mural depiction of Mexico’s course of history from pre-Hispanic period through the Conquista up to the 20th century are the principal attractions of this magnet for tourists wanting to experience more of CDMX’s distinctive cultural ethos.
On our way out we popped into a side wing of the palace which houses the chamber of the Parliamentary Assemblies, a vacant spatial entity whose sanitised condition and sombre burgundy, claret and vermillion colours give it a feeling of sterility. Revisiting the Mexico jardines on route to the exit for a final glance and picture we noticed some unofficial residents of the palace, a couple of sleek looking cats who, unperturbed by our presence, seemed very much at home in the garden grounds.
⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤⌤ ✱ missing out on the Kahlo house also meant I missed the house (now also a museum) of Leon Trotsky just a block away (where he was assassinated on the orders of his rival communist leader Stalin in 1940) ✥ this open courtyard with a central fountain, from which the Diego Rivera murals look down from the second floor balcony, is a favourite place for visitors to the palace to take selfies against a backdrop of elegant white arched columns
The day after I saw the excavated ruins of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (Templo Mayor) in Centro Historico which the Conquistadors under Hernán Cortés had razed in 1521 to build what became the Spaniards’ capital of New Spain, Mexico City❈, I took an excursion to Teotihuacán to see a preserved and restored native city which long predates the Aztec capital.
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It was a longish drive from central Mexico City as Teotihuacán is situated about 40km to the north-east. A few hundred metres before we got to the Pyramids (or ‘Piramides’ as it was written on highway signposts), the well-paved highway road morphed into an uneven, roughly cobble-stoned path in keeping with the ancient site of Pre-Columbian civilisation. Teotihuacán was as touristy as I imagined it would be (ie, totally!) but such a spectacular vista into a pre-modern past that was well worth the effort of traipsing several kilometres all over the vast site. It was even worth the effort of having to put up with an extremely annoying battalion of souvenir sellers at every turn. They tested our patience though especially with one particularly annoying habit of theirs…as we walked from one temple to another, every single time we got within cooee of a new group of hawkers camped strategically on the edge of a monument, one or more of them would commence to blow for all their worth on little jaguar whistles emitting a noise approximating the growl of a member of the big cat family! By the 12th time this happened I was experiencing the sort of visceral tremor one gets when someone very deliberately and slowly drags a fingernail down a blackboard! My instinct was to get past and away from them ASAP…unfortunately this wasn’t possible as in the echo chamber of that wide valley the sounds made by the jaguar imitators reverberated all over the site.
href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/image-23.jpg”> The ubiquitous in-your-face hawkers all over the site! [/ href=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/F19F0B48-9E07-4761-A252-268F3F2E4B37.jpeg”> Templo El Luna[//span>
Teotihuacán was so well-preserved (or restored) that the layout of the city at its height could be easily reimagined⊙. Dominating the complex of buildings were two great temples, the Pyramids of the Moon and the Sun, bisecting them is a central roadway known as the Avenue of the Dead. Nearby is a third, smaller and less impressive pyramid, the Temple of Quetzacoatl. Passing this temple our learned guide couldn’t resist the temptation to demonstrate what I later discovered through its repetition was a standard tourist guide manoeuvre at Mexican archaeological sites: clapping loudly adjacent to the pyramid to trigger an echoing effect.
Climbing to the very top of the steep Moon and Sun pyramids was no walk in the park (although the vertical rail was a big aid). The narrowness and condition of the ancient steps made them tricky to climb up but the taller El Sol could be broken down into several stages rather than the one long, sharp climb of El Luna. Once at the top though we were rewarded with a 360° panorama of the surrounding valley from fantastic vantage points. While we gazed into the distance our guide explained the mathematical dimension of the temple complex: Teotihuacan was laid out according to geometric and symbolic principles. The two pyramids were intentionally positioned by the indigenous inhabitants in such a way to be aligned astronomically with each other.
Back at ground level we visited a more recent archaeological discovery on the city’s outskirts. This much smaller temple had suffered more wholesale damage than “Sol and Luna” and was in the slow and painstaking process of being extensively restored to something resembling its former state and symmetry.
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The heat of the midday sun (quite a shock to our system after the distinctly cool weather of Mexico City) was sapping our energies so we trudged laboriously back to the car park, stopping first at the gift shop where we didn’t loiter once we got a sighter of its heftily over-priced items. Outdoors, sampling the range of choices and much more favourably prices of the souvenir stalls, I picked up a little memento of Teotihuacán, a five centimetre-high black graphite ‘replica’ pyramid with Aztec hieroglyphics…I use the term replica incredibly loosely as the model bore no resemblance to any of the ancient, stepped pyramids we had just visited, save for it having a square base and four triangular sloping sides in a very stylised sort of way.
PostScript: The bus trip back to Mexico City was largely uneventful, a chance to rest our fully extended hamstrings after the strenuous Piramides climbs. Two-thirds of the way back we passed a hill that framed a pleasant picture, dotted as it was with a kaleidoscope of different coloured houses. An amusing ‘encounter’ on the return journey momentarily left me spooked!: as the traffic banked up on the road into Centro I looked across at a vehicle in the adjoining lane and noticed what I initially believed was a corpse with a limp leg dangling off the end of a flat-back truck (see the apposite photo)…in reality it was merely a still very much alive but tuckered-out worker taking the opportunity for an early afternoon siesta on a level if not especially comfortable surface!¤
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❈ as the Spanish conquerors of Peru under Pizarro did in the city of Cuzco a decade or so after Cortés ⊙ the original inhabitants of Teotihuacan prior to the Aztecs (Nahautl-speaking people but of uncertain ethnicity) disappeared suddenly from the region ca 600-700 AD
¤ and quite dangerous too given the traffic in motion all around…where I ask were the highway police to pull the offending truck over and charge the thoughtless miscreant with leg protrusion! Another reminder, as if it was ever needed, that we were experiencing Third World realities
