Shiloh and Gareth’s Travelog

(The following segment remained unpublished for almost two years after we wrote it. It never seemed to justly sum up the experience. However, after so much time, I’ve decided to just press the “publish” button.)

It is with some sadness that I sit here trying to gather the thoughts required to write the final chapter in the epic Mexico/Cuba saga. However, that is mixed with a rather large, mixed dose of excitement, happiness and anticipation because I am beginning the writing whilst sitting in Heathrow’s monstrous Terminal 5. Yes, we are on our way back home at last!

The last month has been terrific. Shiloh and I have thoroughly enjoyed every part of being in Mexico – even the few bad times we’ve had have not diminished our experience there. Mexico is a place where things happen fast, stuff gets done, people are generous and just about everywhere is a hedonistic paradise of eating, seeing and doing. The best thing about it all, however, is that these places are as full of Mexicans as they are of foreigners – we felt that by participating in and involving ourselves in all these delicious, weird, fun, exciting and amazing things, we were doing Mexican things with Mexican company.

Near to San Luís Potosí (our base), is an old mining town by the name of Cerro de San Pedro. (loma means hill, montaña means mountain, and cerro is somewhere in between. Don’t confuse with sierra, which is a range of mountains.) Anyway, in the old days, it was a super-cute village with some beautiful churches and accoutrements. However, in recent years, a huge Canadian mining corporation has bought the land surrounding the village and pillaged it in earnest. The result is that the village has been encircled by first a big fence, and behind that a great amount of land, typically destroyed by the process of industrial mining.

It is a sad thing that much of Mexico is literally for sale to foreign investors, in a manner which completely represents what people really hate about neo-colonialism, and Cerro de San Pedro is just such a case in point. The needs and wants of the people who live there have been all but ignored just to allow a big business interest to exist. How sad. Going further, however, the company now wants to move the entire village to another spot so that they can mine underneath the current location! For South Africans, the idea of moving entire communities will always leave a bad taste, even if in this instance it is not for political reasons. Or is it… (read more about neo-colonialism and you will be vastly enlightened)

We visited Cerro de San Pedro with our friends Janet and Gustavo from SLP. Janet is a Scot, and Gustavo is a Potosino (from SLP), and they in fact announced their engagement last month! Congratulations indeed. Anyway, it was with them that we did much of our exciting trips in the last month. Also, via Gustavo, we met a lifelong friend of his, Victor, who lives in the state of Michoacán – one of Mexico’s Pacific states. In true Mexican fashion, he opened up his home to us for a few days and insisted that we go with him so that we could get to know the city of Morelia. Naturally, being the fearless adventurers we are, we couldn’t refuse.

Michoacán is quite a lake-ish state, and quite near to the capital it really is breathtaking. We approached across an enormous bridge, a drive which took the better part of half an hour even at Victor’s supersonic pace. Morelia is a lightly hilly city; not as flat as San Luis, but with nothing like the extremely steep streets of Zacatecas – with the result that it is deceptively large. I always thought that our destination was just over this hill, no, that hill, no that hill. The city has famous attributes, notably an icecream factory and several highly-regarded guitar producers and an important university. We spent a rewarding day in the city centre itself, one again marvelling at the good preservation and use of colonial architecture in modern life. I love the way Mexican municipalities actually USE the old Spanish buildings – they’re not simply put forward as monuments for looking and not touching.

The widely-known aspect of Michoacán, however, is the annual migration of countless millions of monarch butterflies from high up in the North American continent. Each autumn, these little things make their way on a journey which amounts to around five thousand kilometres and which requires several generations of butterflies to complete, a phenomenon as yet unexplained by monarch lepidopterists. They spend the winter in the tall forests, resting after the long haul – a trip for which British Airways and their ilk would charge a fortune even to butterflies – then somehow embed the directions in their DNA so that their children can figure out how to make it to the summer location.

We had a most enjoyable walk around the beautiful forested mountains of the Rosaria butterfly sanctuary, seeing one or two Monarchs here and there and then finally arriving at a series of trees literally jammed with them! To see millions of butterflies all perched together, their wings vibrating with sufficient combined energy that we could hear them from the ground was truly one of the most pleasant experiences of natural phenomena of our trip. I love the idea that an insect weighing less that one gram can massively outperform humans on a physical level and then evade human understanding.

In Michoacán is the famous volcano of Paricutín, which erupted continuously for nine years from 1943. Fascinatingly, this volcano emerged from a relatively flat farm field into a peak almost overnight, taking the local and scientific communities both by surprise, and during the following years rose to over 400 metres. The resulting lava which burst from the volcano’s top then destroyed the local village of San Juan, obliterating everything except one of the church’s steeples and its altar. Because of our limited time there, we had to choose whether or not to ride (horses) to the volcano or the church, and we chose the latter because it was a little closer.

We have done some riding in the last year. I come from a family with horsey tendencies, but Shiloh was a relative newcomer. In general, the riding has been at a slowish and comfortable pace, never rising much above a trot. However, at San Juan, Shiloh went in a single session through some of the advanced stages of riding which I remember learning over many, many lessons with my patient relatives. Our guide was a merciless and extremely able rider, and we rode flat-out through the forest, during which I was unable to get the rather plaintif and distinctive phrase “mein Vater, mein Vater” from Schubert’s landmark arrangement of Goethe’s Erlkönig. Quite different in context, however, as I did not fear that any phantasms were coming for my life, but similar in pronunciation, as I bellowed out “mein Farter, mein Farter” to Shiloh as my horse tore past her at one point in a bloodshot, maniacal dash through a particularly bumpy shortcut it had espied. Shiloh, learning to canter and gallop for the first time in her life in the first 100 metres of the trip, struggled at one point because her stirrup straps were far too long and thus received a beating far more severe than mine. However, she managed admirably and did not fall once, and both amazed and impressed me with her freestyle move of cantering whilst standing on only one leg. She blames the tack for this, and says that it is because she lacks technique, but the riding world applauds her for her daring and flashy new style.

Because the ride itself was of the sort which requires a grip sufficient to strangle a stone, I was unable to take any pictures from horseback, but our arrival at the lava-coated village was a marvellous and welcome respite. The lava stretches for kilometres from the volcano itself, and the steeple of the church really is a fascinating survivor of the eruption. We climbed across the lava from where our horses sat gathering their strength to the church and spent a wonderful time there, climbing and photographing this unique wonder of Michoacán. The lava itself goes right through the church, through doors and windows and foundations and everywhere, but has left the altar area mostly clear, and in Mexican fashion, this has been adorned with flowers, photographs and bright colours and appears almost as a precious flower in an otherwise quite bleak landscape of destructive rock. The ride back was twice as scary because it was in the gathering dark, but the entire day was well worth it. I have never been anywhere near any volcanoes before and this particular one with it’s amazing aftermath was a sight to remember!

Once back in SLP, we enjoyed a few more trips to nearby places, notably one known as Micro Ondas (microwaves, after the relay towers which adorn the top). This was a beautiful place, close to, yet far away from San Luis; a place where you can retreat from the city and enjoy a few hours of sanctuary surrounded by immense valleys, bluebirds and pleasant walking paths. We then visited Querétaro, the capital of an adjacent state, for a day-trip. In addition to various shops, we saw a really cool public exhibition in the park of life-size people, animals, angels and demons representing a really multicultural take on Christmas. One featured several children beating a piñata, with what appeared to be a casualty lying on the ground. I found this hilarious, but Shiloh insists that I have misunderstood and that they are helping him get up. If that is the case, I still want to know why he is on the floor in the first place.

Gustavo and Janet, as I mentioned, will be marrying next year, and we were very fortunate to get the chance to visit the place where they will have their reception. It is going to be an all-out spectacle, as they will be married in the glamorous and historical Aranzazú church in SLP, then proceed to the hacienda which was used as the set for the movie, Zorro, starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The hacienda is positively grand and although the owners have neglected to keep it up (what morons, they all cry!), it will look fantastic with a bit of touch-up prior to the event. Near to the hacienda itself is a real Hollywood set. (There’s that word again… real. This was a real fake, not a fake fake!) This was used as the scene for old San Francisco, and we had a merry walk around the place, for the first time appreciating the enormous schlep which goes into making a feature film. The wedding is going to be a mind-blowing experience for the Scottish family visitors, and we wish Janet and Gustavo all the best as they prepare!

For the most part, though, we passed our time seeing friends, gathering our things (and shedding some, too!), practice-packing, weighing, re-packing, tasting some delicious things for the last time (oooh, candy-floss ice-cream!), teaching Alejandra to cook, spending late nights playing salsa in the club and re-reading the baggage limitations imposed by the airline companies. Before long, it was time to say goodbye to some of our really excellent friends, especially Adrián, our digsmate and host for the past year. It is sad to think that it will be so long before we see any of them again, but we are pleased to know that we left our work, friends and associates in San Luis on excellent terms and that our reunion will be a particularly joyful one.

As I mentioned at the outset, our connecting flight to South Africa was from Heathrow, and we had the wonderfully authentic re-connection to home in the form of former archbishop and national hero, Desmond Tutu. He was ambling through the airport and I ran up to say hello. My Xhosa has been mortifyingly combined with Spanish, but I think he got the general idea and wished me and my family a wonderful Christmas and gave Shiloh a big hug!

The total travel time from our home in San Luis to Grahamstown amounted to around fifty hours, including bus, taxi, car, airport layover and flights. The first flight was in row 37 which I only mention so specifically so that you are all warned. The problem with this row is that the seat in front can recline, but you can not because of the presence of the latrine immediately behind. The result was that whilst Shiloh fitted fine, I spent 11 hours in a miniature torture chamber. Beware ye the 37th row! The second flight was marginally better (a margin of about 20 cm, to be specific, but each centimetre gratefully appreciated), but our TV systems didn’t work, so we had to drift like homeless people if we wanted to use another set to watch anything.

At one point in the middle of the night, our pilot made an announcement about heavy turbulence. The bouncing had not woken me, but the announcement did, and with it arrived an urgent sense of needing to visit the facility at the back of the plane. I know that toilets have been a common theme in this epic tale, but I would be at fault if I did not mention the curious experience of attending the teflon device during a spell of vigorous turbulence. There is a large billboard at one entrance to Grahamstown, which for years read “SPACE TO LET” as it stood unused. Naturally, the university students realised the omission and completed it to say “SPACE TOILET”, providing simple-minded folk like me with something to smile about every time we passed by. I thought of this sign a great deal as well as the videos I have seen of Skylab as I hung on in the near-weightless environment effected by the circumstances. There are few things as terrifyingly commital nor as thrilling as pressing the flush button in an aeroplane. For the consequent few seconds, you stare at the contents of the non-stick receptacle before they mysteriously vanish in a loud implosion so vigorous it makes the booth compress slightly and the ears decompress. One day, I want one of these in my house.

In Johannesburg, we were visited by James Bassingthwaighte, mentioned before in these tales, and Mike Bester, long-time friend and colleague and this year’s winner of the SAMRO competition. It was great to see friends again, and they were shortly joined by Anriette, my contact and agent at the endowment for the arts at SAMRO itself. Throughout this whole trip, she has been a star and a great support, yet that was the first time I have ever met her in person. It was great to be able to thank her properly because this really has been a remarkable year.

In Port Elizabeth, we finally made contact with our parents in the airport and felt the excitement of approaching home! We were almost detained at the airport by a suspicious policeman who wanted to sort through our bags, but once again my hybridised Xhosa/Spanish managed to entertain and he and his colleagues let us go after I communicated that no, we had not had an opportunity to wash in more than two days.

I’m finishing writing this segment on the morning (at 4 AM, to be honest… yay for jetlag!) of the wedding which has brought us back at this particular time. One of my dearest friends, Steve, is marrying one of my other dearest friends, and a lifelong close companion of Shiloh’s: Jeannie! A wedding is supposed to bring together friends and family in a celebration of joy for the union of the couple, and the past two days have been rich with a tangible sense of that joy. I am honoured, delighted and in complete accord with this wedding, and I simply can’t wait for it to start in a few hours’ time!

It’s going to be a happy Christmas season here, with the wedding, coming home, family time and the ability to feel normal once more. There is a sad element, as we miss our new friends from the other side of the planet, but we wish them much happiness over there as we celebrate here. To all of you who have maintained and survived reading this epic tale, we thank you and wish you everything of the best for this season and for what the new year may bring. I will continue to write as news develops, but the last year has been special and the knowledge that our experiences have been shared by such a wide public is deeply meaningful to me. May you and your loved ones have a very happy Christmas indeed, and a well-deserved rest!