Oaxaca City is the capital of Oaxaca and a small town set outside the ruins of Monte Albán. The lights from their Independence day were still strung up all over the square and served only to add to the charming atmosphere. Cafés, restaurants, a government building, and a church lined the little center.
We ate at the same outdoor café every day we were there. At the table, children attempted to sell us jewelry, nuts, or gum. Women dressed in their indigenous wear offered hair brushes of all sizes, hand cut painted bookmarks and toothpicks, and hand-woven fabrics. On this trip, I’d seen only one person selling those bookmarks and really loved them; She must have been from Oaxaca. We politely declined their items but it was a steady stream of vendors the entire duration of our visits. Musicians also came by offering to play us songs. One man who was part of a trio was particularly talented with his mandolin.
We stayed in our first shared dorm hostel with an Israeli guy, a French guy, and French woman. The hostel was typical and clean with shared bathrooms, showers, and a kitchen. There were 3 resident Bassett Hounds with scruffy white fur lining their muzzles who enjoyed asking for pets if you were lounging in the hammocks hung in the common area.
I was excited to use their kitchen since it had been awhile since I’d had a proper serving of veggies. Mexicans eat a lot of carbs, protein, and more carbs but you’ll be hard pressed to find enough veggies to balance out your plate. I went to the market and bought every vegetable I could find to make a soup and salad with avocado dressing. The only down side to that meal was the pesticides-flavored lettuce. The market also sold live maggots.
One of the days we were in Oaxaca we spent at the ruins of Monte Albán, high up in the mountains. The ruins are of historical interest because it seems as though it was abandoned, not taken over or destroyed. Thus, it was well-preserved. Their population decline coincided with the rise of Teotihuacan which suggests there was a shift in trade centers to a more convenient location other than the high mountains.
We climbed to the tops of their temples and imagined the purposes of the large square. Markets? Town gatherings? Religious events? Likely all of the above.
Some of the well off “palace” foundations were still intact. I found it entertaining to walk through their “halls” and imagine what types of art hung from their walls or how they set up their bedrooms. What did the area look like when all the now-long-gone organic dwellings were also present? What seemed strange were the tombs in the center of their homes. Who held such high importance and where did the other family members go after death? Wouldn’t it smell to bury a person in your house?
All within the ruins were vendors selling mass manufactured masks and temples. One old man rested in the shade and offered us a hand carved jaguar.
Back in Oaxaca City, we sat at our regular café. The same vendors walked by with their products and the same musicians offered us songs. One old woman I’d seen the day before walked by again. She was barefoot with her ankles and feet swollen from diabetes and hunched over so far from osteoporosis that she could only look forward with great difficulty. She carried two baskets; One with hand crafted black vases and decorative pieces typical of Oaxaca and the other basic snacks.
Sometimes beggars try to “sell” things that no one wants. It’s more often a guise to mask outright begging. There are beggars that are young women, shamelessly holding out their babies to incite pity. Others are handicapped and attempting to contribute to their family income by selling snacks or gum. The worst are the whiners who stand by and relentlessly whine at you to give them a coin but contribute nothing to society although they are able-bodied. This old woman was none of those things. She shuffled by and offered what she had and wordlessly moved on if you had no interest.
I waved her over to me. She was resting 6 feet away and with great effort brought her baskets over to me and put them down by our table. I handed her 30 pesos but didn’t want anything she was selling. After a minute, she told us she’d been sick since 1990 and was 81 years old. We made some small talk and she continued on her way. The waitresses at the café quietly told her to return in a while for her bread and coffee, likely all she ever has for dinner.
We finished our meal but I felt unsettled. On our way back to our hostel, we walked by the old woman and I folded up 100 pesos and put it in her pocket. She stopped me and insisted I take something from her basket. I chose a small black vase.
In the square stood a woman dancing for money, dressed up in Day of the Dead attire.
The Oaxaca square also had many vendors selling large and colorful balloons. This woman stared into the distance as I stole a photo.
At our hostel, we spoke with our Israeli dorm mate for a while. He was sharing his Jewish practices and customs. But mostly I found myself thinking about the old woman. I retired to my bunk to write about her and admire the small black vase.
The next night, our last night, in Oaxaca we saw the old woman again. I was hoping not to see her because I wanted her to have a single day off. But as hardworking as she was, of course that was not the case. A table of two wealthy old men bought an item from her and had her walk to find change for their 500 peso bill. When she saw me, a large smile grew across her face and she told me to take something else. At my refusal, she handed me a child’s independence day clapper. The Guy picked up a bigger vase, which we paid for with another 100 pesos.
Since we wouldn’t accept change, she left her baskets at our table. 15 minutes later, she slowly shuffled back holding two toy drum sets for our “kids.” I laughed and said, “But I don’t have kids.” I also knew she had no use for these items after Independence Day so I took the drums and gave her 20 more pesos. She began dabbing her eyes with a soiled napkin.
We hugged and took a photo together. The language barrier left us with nothing else to say, but I hoped she understood what I felt. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t do any of it out of pity. This strong, independent, beautiful, and exceptionally proud old woman didn’t evoke pity. She didn’t want anything that was not hers, nor did she act entitled or angry at an unjust world. She just genuinely needed and deserved some help. It felt more like a duty, something I couldn’t ignore. I admired her spirit and how she carried herself despite all the things that she struggled with. It really was an uncommon sight to behold and so very beautiful.
We left Oaxaca with her in my thoughts and my heart heavy with a sort of guilt that I hadn’t done or said more. But alas, the show must go on.
We entered the state of Veracruz toward Playa Villa Del Mar.
It was a beach town but the beach was covered with empty restaurants and the surrounding area ran rampant with abandoned buildings.
We went to the Veracruz aquarium and saw some different animals. They even had an actual tiger shark, considered the most dangerous, on display.
The Guy had never seen a manatee before so it was exciting for me to be present for that.
After a few days we left for the small town of Catemaco, surrounded by Lake Catemaco. It’s most famous for its witches, “brujos.” Within the first hour, some drunk kids cut all the straps holding down the items on Ernie’s roof and took our propane tank and cooler. Such behavior from a small town in broad daylight directly in front of a store window with onlookers surprised me, but the poverty in Catemaco was apparent. Men lounged along the lake offering “launchas,” boat rides, but we were the only tourists in sight.
We ate dinner at a quiet restaurant overlooking the lake. The only other people in the restaurant were the owner and his wife. The owner was visibly intoxicated but didn’t want to drink alone. He continually brought entire mugs of alcohol to The Guy who kept pouring half of them into my margarita until it was comical. Or until we were drunk. Probably both.
To accompany our liquor, we had Catemaco’s specialty, togogolos (fresh water snails), for dinner.
By the end of the night, we were attempting conversation in terribly broken Spanish with the two of them. His name was Charlie. Charlie had “El Perro” tattooed to his leg, which he said only came out if someone did him wrong. He’d spent several years living in Brooklyn but felt the need to return to his home country. He now considered Catemaco to be the very best of the best. His wife, Sulma, was born in Catemaco and had never left. She opened up and was showing us the gallon sized alcohol container her husband drank with friends and we laughed about it. Charlie invited us to stay at his house as Sulma kept trying to quiet him down. By that point, he had the pirate eye which was the signal for us to leave, but the generous display of hospitality was not unnoticed.
The next day we hired a boat to see the nearby monkey islands. Along the way, I saw a shaman inside his spiritual shack who gave me a cleansing of the spirit. His ritual included removing all the negativity and illness from my body. With the use of herbal aromatic liquid poured on special leaves, he smacked me from head to toe with them and chanted.
He then gave me a short palm reading and said I was good in business, love, and would live for many years. Also that I didn’t have problems in my head, to which The Guy chortled in the background (he thinks I’m action packed with issues). Honestly, I think it was the only English the shaman could muster together. Afterward, I rinsed the mud mask that had been applied to my face and we headed to the monkey islands.
On another day, we went off-roading in search of Playa Escondida (Hidden Beach) in the state of Tabasco.
Lonely Planet and Froder’s (guidebooks) for Mexico have sorely let us down with outdated, inaccurate information and outrageously priced suggestions. Playa Escondida was the worst example of this. We drove on a trail that hadn’t been used in years to find abandoned buildings, a crumbled trail with a steep drop off, and spiders the size of my fist.
On that beach, there were supposedly gorgeous caverns. Part of me felt disappointed I couldn’t get to them safely but another part was marveling over how quickly nature could reclaim an area and how different it felt to be in that space. There was nothing like traipsing through an abandoned remote area to make me feel like discovering. Like a piece of the world could still be uniquely mine. Like no one had ever stepped foot right there just like that before. And yet thousands had already stepped there before and would step again, like all the other things over the generations that bind humanity together. We’re all in this thing called life together. Big and small, rich and poor, young and old. Traveling never ceases to give me such a feeling.
It is touching!