Mexico – Oaxaca – It’s Fiesta Time

This feels like a holiday, no more Spanish school. Our routine has gone out the window and we can stay out later at night. We were tempted to hire a car to explore the area surrounding Oaxaca, the villages, the countryside, the lovely mountains,  but hire-car prices are simply not affordable on our budget. The car is affordable, it’s the insurance that’s exorbitant. This is a country where you can drive a car at 14 without having to pass a test, where drunk-driving is common and the roads are hairy, all-in-all a recipe for an unpredictable day out. I am quite happy to be driven. We are introduced to Hugo and Ismael, good drivers with charm and interested in our kids, who go out of their way to please us. They also have good cars and they will ferry us around, cheaper than a hire car.

I remember the day my mother passed her test in Mexico City, having driven for years in the UK and South America. She turned up at the test centre to go through the formalities, for bureaucratic reasons; the examiner was so stunned that my mother had driven herself across Mexico City and was still in one piece and alive,  that he passed her instantly, on the spot!

First we start with Tulum, the Mayan ruins. It’s a hot day and the children are bored before we have even got out of the car. If only we hadn’t mentioned the word “ruins” – it has that instant effect, like  “going for a walk” or “going to a museum”; long sighs follow and a  “do we have to?”

Mark and I can marvel at a huge mountain levelled off to create an entire empire, before the Romans had even reached London, where Jaguars were so revered that the heads of children were bound so tightly as to actually emulate the shape of their skulls, and where the solar system was so accurately studied and contemplated and understood, well before the Europeans had made such calculations. Our guide says very honestly, “I can’t lie, we simply don’t know what happened here, why they built this site, or how these people lived their lives.  We simply don’t know…we can only guess.” This is all very perplexing for the children , who see only a pile of stones. I can’t say I blame them!

Next we visit the Huge Tule tree, measuring 11 metres wide. When I came to see this tree as a child it stood in a hot dusty plain, next to an old church and a small gathering of houses, surrounded by flat countryside and pink peppercorn trees, a railway line running the length of the valley.  We could touch it and stretch out our arms in measurement. It is all built up now and cordoned off entirely, quite a tourist industry surrounds it, from markets stalls and playgrounds. A diminutive little boy of 9 insists on being our guide. With the help of a mirror, he shines a light on the tree to shows us the animal shapes  gnarled in this huge trunk, 2000 years old. “You see gorilla? You see elephant?”  If trees could talk, maybe this one could tell us how the Mayans chose Tulum as their great site.

The markets here are amazing, bustling, colourful, from ordinary household goods and fruits and vegetables to piles of plastic buckets, sombreros, ropes, tortilla makers, grinding stones, baskets and artesanias. These embroidered smocks and dresses are not just worn by the peasants, but fashionable amongst middle class Mexicans too. Frida Kahlo’s influence on fashion lives on here, though I wonder whether her style was more ubiquitous here in Mexico. It certainly isn’t unusual to see huipils worn over long colourful skirts, and headdresses with ribbons and flowers.

Oaxaca is a lot more prosperous than San Cristobal. The roads are wider, the buildings that much more handsome and grander, a moneyed place. The courtyards are prettier. It also attracts a different sort of expat, a different American tourist.. More hustle and bustle and less gentle, less volatile too.

Laura and Renee, the two Dutch sisters who we met on Sam’s ranch have moved on here to go on a retreat and they stay with us for a few days before they indulge in their 10 days of no talking. We are all  delighted that they are coming to stay. We are spoiled with their infectious fun and laughter and poolside chat. This will be their last chat for 10 days! I can’t quite imagine that, so punishing to not be able to talk. It has been so noticeable this year how readily the children make friends with others, starved of friends  their own age, they easily make conversation with adults and strangers, the relief of having someone other than mum and dad to talk to no doubt.

Laura and Renee recount the week following our idyllic stay at the ranch in San Cristobal. The villagers, about 70 of them – mostly male, but children too – their friends, the friends of Zoe and Cheyanne, had turned up at the farm on a frenzied hunt for signs of drugs growing on the ranch. They had had a tip-off the day before from a local, and had managed to uproot the few marijuana plants that were purposefully growing for home consumption. But this interrogation and hunt for something on a more  commercial scale was more menacing and took them all by surprise, with what must have been a sense of betrayal. This wonderful country,  which in many ways seems is so free, unentangled from the entrapments of health & safety regulations that have burdened our lives in the west in so many ways is also hellishly volatile and uncertain. My brother Marcus, who lived in Valle de Bravo for years, working independently as a teacher, left in the end because life here without the protection of a government or a company which is beholden to you is quite simply too dangerous.

Marcus (Dalrymple)  has just written his third book about Mexico called “Flesh and Blood”.   I vowed to him I would read it as soon as I arrived in Mexico, keen to read books about the country I am in, except that now I am here I just don’t have the courage to read a Narco book which will put me on edge and make me feel nervous after hearing the story about Sam, and El Chapo’s seemingly easy escape from a high security prison. I want to play safe. It will have to wait until I am back in the safety of my walls and home soil of St Margarets.