Moon Over Oaxaca

by

Turk Pipkin

(Originally appeared in Texas Monthly)

The flight from Mexico City descends into the central valley of Oaxaca and lists sharply to the left as the passengers all rush the window’s on one side for a close-up look of the ancient Zapotec capitol, Monte Alban. From our bird’s-eye view the magnificent ruins—situated on an elevated moonscape plateau—look like the landing strip of the gods.

In the valley below, the long shadows of the afternoon cut at angles across an endless patchwork of wheat and alfalfa fields, their textures soft and inviting like the rugs woven for a thousand years by the descendants of the builders of the ruins we had just passed.

We land at the Oaxaca City airport to a grand welcome from a large and noisy band, but no one seems to know for whom they play. "It's nothing!" a Mexicana Airlines stewardess tells me. "There's always something going on in Oaxaca."

Perhaps the best all round vacation spot in Mexico—Oaxaca (pronounced “Wa-há-ka”) offers perfect weather, an abundance of sights, reasonable prices, and gloriously delicious food. Located between two mountain ranges at an elevation of 5,000 feet, Oaxaca’s weather is pleasantly moderate year round. Winter is the most popular tourist season, but summers are much cooler than in Texas with refreshing daily rain, and highs occasionally reaching the 80's. Springtime is a riot of greens and in the Fall the surrounding hills erupt in bright oranges from millions of marigolds grown for Day of the Dead celebrations.

The music at the airport quickly fades away as I buzz off in a VW collectivo van with several other passengers headed for our chosen hotels. First stop, for the big spenders, is the top-of-the line Stouffer El Presidente, lavishly restored in the sprawling 16th Century convent of Santa Catalina. Those of us unable to spring $120 per night continue on to more modest lodgings. A couple from Canada stop at one of several hotels located near the Zocalo or main plaza—the focal point of most activity in town—while I continue another five blocks and am left at a set of purple doors on a lonely street with no hotel in sight.

Ringing the only bell, I am soon greeted by name and escorted into the charming outdoor courtyard of the Casa Colonial, an American owned pensione dedicated to comfortable lodging. The traditionally decorated rooms surround the large garden complete with parrots, and there’s even a library/sitting room stocked with Mexico travel books and fat novels that were too heavy for trinket-laden tourists to carry home.

Meals at Casa Colonial are shared at one large dining table where newcomers receive personal recommendations on what to see from those who've been around a few days or weeks. The room charges are $35/day per person, including a huge breakfast, which explains why many guests stay for months, not days.

Full board is also available, but one of the main reasons I'd come to Oaxaca was to sample as much of the famous local food as possible. My first dining adventure was at the newly opened Hostal del Noria, a classy hotel and restaurant located two blocks east of the Zocalo at Hidalgo and Fiallo. The restaurant, with soaring ceilings and hand-stenciled walls, is owned by Mariana Franco who—in the spirit of the best-selling book "Like Water for Chocolate"—is cooking dishes from her grandmother’s traditional recipes.

I could not pass up the sopa de cuitlacoche, a true Oaxacan delicacy. Slightly reminiscent in flavor of its more famous cousin, the truffle, cuitlacoche is an inky black fungus which grows on the corn in the region. At first glance the dish looks like black bean soup, but a closer inspection shows what seemed to be billions of tiny black specks suspended along with pieces of onion and corn in a clear broth. Without a doubt, one of the most delicious fungi I’ve ever eaten.

The next morning—still too full for Casa Colonial’s big breakfast of eggs, fruit and fresh juice—I set out early to see some of the city’s sights. A good place to start is just around the corner from the hotel at Cathedral La Soledad which houses Oaxaca’a patron saint, the Virgen de La Soledad (the Virgin of Solitude), splenderously adorned with a four pound gold crown, six hundred diamonds and a pearl large enough to have an oyster inside.

The impressive local museums include the Museo Regional, with the ancient silver, turquoise, jade and pearl Mixtec treasure found in Tomb Seven at Monte Alban; the Graphic Arts Institute with ever-changing exhibitions, and my favorite, the Museo Rufino Tamayo.

Located in a fine old home built of massive cut stone, the museum exhibits the pre-hispanic artifact collection of Rufino Tamayo, one of the Mexico’s most shining artistic lights. Hundreds of artifacts dating back three thousand years represent the deified forces of nature: sun, wind, water, and other natural phenomena. I was particularly taken by the universal artistic styles of these figures. A small statue of a seated woman with a mysterious, all-knowing smile seemed much like an early day Mona Lisa. One figure was posed like Rodin's "The Thinker," another resembled a laughing Buda, and the inspiration of others seemed inexplicably African. Tamayo’s dedication in collecting these pieces prevented them from being sold to collectors or exported from the country, and it’s obvious that he had a keen eye for more than just his own work.

Since his death two years ago at age 92, Tamayo's mantle as Oaxaca's most celebrated native artist has perhaps been passed to painter and weaver Arnulfo Mendoza, who hails from a long line of rug weavers in the nearby town of Teotitlan del Valle. Mendoza's wife, American born Mary Jane Gagnier-Mendoza, runs an art gallery in Oaxaca called La Mano Magica (“The Magic Hand” on Ave. M. Alcala), featuring both the best of folk art and the work of artists who have combined inspiration from Oaxaca's folk art tradition and their more classical studies at the nearby academy, Bellas Artes.

If you can’t afford the rather steep prices at Mano Magica, you can spend weeks ducking in and out of small shops all over town looking for the perfect rug, pottery, hand-carved animals, or painted tin Christmas ornaments, all at prices that will have you carrying massive bundles on the plane back to the states. I found some of the best goods and prices at Artes Oaxaqueno (ave. J.P. Garcia) and at Aripo (Garcia Vigil 809). For a minscule fee the caretaker at Casa Colonial will lovingly pack your purchases in thick hand-woven baskets for your journey home.

The most interesting shopping, however, is found in several outlying Indian villages, each specializing in a particular craft and holding their own Indian market on different days of the week. Sunday is market day in Tlacalula and, with two new friends from the Casa Colonial, I caught a cab from town to check out the major sights in that direction. First stop was El Tule, a giant ahuehuete cypress tree with a trunk measuring an astounding 130 feet in circumference, supposedly the largest in the world. Over two thousand years old, it completely dwarfs a church which has rested for centuries in its shade.

Vendors at several nearby stands sell Mexico’s best mescal crema in hand-painted bottles that are themselves fine folk art. Mescal, for those who have never acquired the taste, is the sharp-edged tequila-like potion with the legendary worm in the bottle. Mescal Crema is a first class variation with a touch of honey mixed in; very smooth.

We piled back in the cab and headed for the thousand year old Zapotec ruins of Yagul where, miles from the nearest village and with no other cars in sight, we paid off our cabby and sent him away, trusting to the blessing of ancient gods for our next ride.

Though the ruins at Yagul, we soon discovered, are not so impressively preserved or restored as those at Monte Alban, the location has a charm all its own. Situated on a hill overlooking the central valley, beautiful fields of golden corn and alfalfa stretch away to tall mountains, while a small stream lined with bamboo bisects the entire vista.

I climbed to the highest point from where the haunting silence was broken only by the wind and the call of a circling hawk. After a time, from the direction of a group of distant workers in a field, I heard the braying of a donkey and the laughter of a small child. There followed from the stream bank below us, the sound of someone whacking on a piece of bamboo with a machete, followed by the notes of a flute under construction. A few more whacks and the notes found a better tuning, singing out a brief melody of lost Zapotec music, here then gone again, until a fresh piece of bamboo was taken up and the cycle repeated.

After a while, another car arrived at Yagul, two visitors from Mexico City who'd flown down for a friend's wedding. Connie, an elementary school teacher, and Luis, a lawyer and body-builder, graciously offered us a ride which we eagerly accepted. Our next stop was the town of Mitla, with pre-Hispanic ruins featuring entire walls of incredible stone mosaics forming the intricate geometric patterns still found in the pottery, clothing and rugs of the area. This highly detailed ornamentation is a structural part of a collection of religious buildings where the Zapotecs performed what I refer to as "heart-wrenching" human sacrifices.

Connie and Luis later dropped us off at the Indian village of Teotitlan del Valle—home of Mexico's most famous rug weavers. The Oaxacan rug craft has shown a strong resurgence in the past few years with the best weavers once again using natural dyes made from cochineal, wood moss, leaves and sea snails. We wandered from house to house, watching the weavers at work and looking through vast piles of rugs so beautiful as to bring tears to your eyes. The best rugs are not cheap— $100–$150 for one 3’ x 5’, with prices escalating rapidly for larger pieces, but the real problem is they're so lovely you'll never want to put them on your floors.

The state of Oaxaca is largely rural in nature with seventeen Indian groups comprising one third of its 3 million people (a million of whom speak no Spanish). Though they are not so economically disenfranchised as the Indians in neighboring Chiapas, opportunities are limited and there is a strong political movement dedicated to correcting former wrongs. I briefly sat in on a large and noisome town meeting in the main plaza of Teotitlan, the topic of discussion being the allocation of 20 square meters of communal land to each resident of the town. A rug vendor in the adjacent street market told me that this measure would soon pass—and that it would be the greatest day in the history of the town.

The friendly nature of this meeting served to remind me that, unlike Chiapas which is obviously no longer a prudent destination for American tourists, the Oaxacan central valleys have long welcomed American and European tourists and will likely continue to for a long time to come.

There is a small restaurant in Teotitlan that the New York Times has called one of the ten best destinations in the world. Tlamanali—run by Abigail Mendoza, sister of weaver Arnulfo Mendoza—serves traditional Zapotec food. As in many Oaxacan homes, the kitchen is openly located at one end of the dining area allowing patrons to see the preparation and cooking. When we first wandered in, the masa for the tamales was still being hand ground on a stone metate. By lunch time that same masa had been combined with chicken, wrapped in giant banana leaves, and covered in molé amarillo (yellow molé). Molé is a Oaxacan tradition and don't let your preconceived notions of that funny chocolate/chilé sauce with twenty-six ingredients lead you astray. There are at least seven distinct molés, with only molé negro or molé poblana including chocolate.

The following day I found an even better restaurant, perhaps the best in all of Mexico. A short cab ride from Oaxaca, the Nuu Luu restaurant in the suburb of San Felipe is a picturesque outdoor spot perfect for a Sunday afternoon feast. Beneath a lovely flower-shaded patio, Señora Guadalupe Salinas serves a veritable feast that is all too rarely partaken of by tourists. Welcomed like family, we were quickly served a small apperitivo consisting of mescal crema, grenadine, orange juice and lime, with a sprinkling of guisano around the edge of the glass. Guisano is a spicy margarita salt comprised of salt, ground chiles and ground guisan, the small worms usually found in mescal bottles, but only after being removed from the maguey plants from which the mescal is made. A true culinary adventure.

There is no menu at Nuu Luu, the food just arrives. Among the many plates of appetizers placed on our table were chappilenes (grasshoppers, a Oaxacan specialty which taste like hot salted peanuts with legs), nopales (finely sliced and sautéed cactus leaves), guacamole, fried pig skins, tiny boiled red potatoes and a variety of delicious quesadillas. The sopa ranchero was followed by chicken with molé amarillo, calabicita squash , chicken in banana leaves, rice, black beans and a large bowl of super hot chipotle or roasted jalapeño sauce.

We washed down this banquet with cold Bohemias while I struck up a friendship with a charming one-toothed gentlemen named Señor Beto Palacios Gonzales, a famed local tour guide better known as "Mr. Oaxaca." Staging a banquet for some visiting Mexican businessmen, he invited us to share in the entertainment: first a quelgaletza, a variety of traditional local folk dances in spectacularly colorful costumes; then music from a large marimba band; and finally a weaving and wool-carding demonstration.

My companions and I rolled out of the place after two and a half hours, having spent the paltry sum of $13 each, including the cervezas. Mr. Oaxaca, by the way, can be found at 9:00 a.m. every morning at his makeshift office, the Jardín Café on the Zocalo in Oaxaca, where he arranges custom tours.

You can eat wonderful food in a different Oaxacan restaurant every day for a month and I also recommend the Oaxaqueño food at El Topil (near the El Presidente), the goat barbacoa spareribs at La Capilla in the town of Seychilla (a beautiful drive on the way to the ruins of Cuilapan), and the pre-hispanic food at Yumenisa which serves armadillo, iguana tacos and other rare delicacies for the brave of heart. Even if you can’t afford the rooms at the El Presidente Hotel, you’ll be welcomed at their poolside courtyard bar for their two-for-one happy hour with complimentary appetizers, and at their big Sunday buffet.

What with shopping, touring ruins, eating, and taking long siestas, my visit to Oaxaca began to blur into one long happy memory. One experience, however, stands out as a sublime vacation experience. My visit coincided with a full lunar eclipse which I felt should be viewed from the observatory of the gods—the ruins at Monte Alban.

A daytime visitor to Monte Albán will find a large expanse of ruins, some of which datesback to 200 B.C. At its peak, from 300 to 700 A.D., the Zapotec city had 25,000 residents. By 1100 A.D., the Mixtecs had moved in and began to reuse old tombs to bury their own dead. Because the site is so large and has such a long history, Monte Alban is one place well worth visiting on a guided tour. Unfortunately for me, the site closes at 5:30 p.m. and the eclipse was booked for midnight. The ruins are also miles from town on a steep and winding road that can best be described as dangerous.

I tried to persuade a couple of cab drivers to undertake this journey by celestial navigation—pointing out the partly missing moon—but the first said I was "borracho!"(drunk), and the second that I was crazy.

Admitting my prospects for the journey were dim, I headed to the Zocalo where I found the mariachis packing up and the tourists long gone. Taking a seat at an empty café, I leaned back for a better view of what was left of the moon.

"Sabé Ud?" asked my waiter nervously, pointing at the sky. "Do you understand what it is?"

"La sombra de la tierra." I told him. The shadow of the land.

He didn't seem to understand. I held up some coins from the table to the streetlight: a five peso piece for the sun; a two peso for the earth; and had him hold fifty centavos for the moon. Moving the earth, it cast a shadow on the coin in his hand.

"La sombra." I explained.

He whistled low in understanding.

After a while I paid my bill and went in search of a darker spot to contemplate the lost gods of Oaxaca. A short time later I noticed my waiter inside the cafe where he was holding up two coins for la cajera—a pretty girl running the cash register who was obviously delighted by his display.

"La sombra." I heard him explain to her, then he looked over his shoulder and gave me a glorious smile.