Cuetzalan

Last week Regina and I were talking (probably complaining about school and our big test last Friday) and we decided we should do something fun this weekend. Our mama told us about this little mountain town that is typical historic Mexico, so we thought why not? We invited Destiny and on Saturday morning we ventured off on a “short” 4 hour bus ride. If only we could have imagined how great a weekend we were about to have. On Saturday we arrived high in the mountains after our gorgeous bus ride and we made our way to a hotel that only cost 100 pesos per person (something like 7 or 8 dollars I guess). We relaxed and went to the zocalo where we watched the voladores (see pictures). Then we found a guide to walk us to the waterfalls named Benito and he took us to some caves as well which was actually really scary, but cool. We had to walk through some crazy corn fields and then we descended into the rocks and ended up at a giant, dark, damp, scary cave. We could not see anything at one point in there and I think we almost had a collective panic attack, but we survived. Then after a muscle burning hike we got to the waterfalls which were so beautiful. We went to two and swam in one (Regina and I forgot bathing suits so we swam in our clothes which refused to dry later in the 90% humidity). Upon our return from the waterfall we ate at a restaurant called Yoximichtl or something where we filled ourselves up with a ridiculous amount of spicy, delicious food (I might finally be starting to be able to handle spicy food, but it still makes me sniffle a lot). That night we were super tired, so we hung out in our hotel room listening to music and talking until we all passed out…
...only to be woken at 5:30am (!!!) by the sounds of a huge band in the Zocalo. I think we decided it was a procession going to church, but wow, we were stunned and very disoriented/upset. It was a bleak and pathetic scene in our room at that point, but we managed to overcome our plight and fall back asleep until a reasonable time. When this reasonable time arrived (9:30) we made our way out of bed to a pastry shop where we bought about 12 pastries for 15 pesos or something ridiculous. I don’t even know what to say, it was an amazing moment. Anyway, I took a stroll through the market where I bought a beautiful hand-woven scarf (Cuetzalan is really well known for its weaving and embroidery and the women there do it all throughout the town at the markets and things). We met up with Benito at 10 and headed off the Totonaca ruins which I’ll also add some pictures of. Pretty impressive. We visited a church and the local museum and ate at Yoximichtl again before taking a walk, looking through the market again, and making our way to the bus station to come back to Puebla.
Cuetzalan was really beautiful. It’s in the mountains and it’s so misty and lush. It’s also cool how traditional it is because it has a really big indigenous population and a lot of people there speak Nahuat, actually some people only speak Nahuat. They still wear traditional dress, too and the women have some impressive hair/hairstyles. There are a lot of people who sell things all around and come up to you offering to sell you jewelry and different things and we met some of the cutest kids! This little boy named Abel came up to us at dinner on Saturday night and broke off half way through his sales pitch in this big smile saying “hey I saw you guys at the waterfalls today!” then on Sunday he was selling things with two of his buddies who were also ridiculously adorable. Needless to say, we got hustled big time. I was thinking about when my mom used to tell me to be cute when we worked in the fry bread stands at powwows and these little boys must have gotten some seriously good instruction from their moms/grandmas because we bought hella stuff from them.
Well I have a lot more thoughts after my last couple of trips, but I guess I will save the rest for now...




The church the Spanish built out of the stones from the pyramids. Typical.



Pyramid ruins







Ducks and Chickens on a roof!








Cave, ah!

The descent




The cornfield we were about to walk through on the way to the cave.



Voladores!



They jump off the top of this!