Tunisia had it’s muezzin, Marseille it’s romantic cathedral bells, Cholula favors a hearty Mexican polka as its seven a.m. wake up call.  What I might usually find “charming and local” had more of a sinister feel after a sleepless night of humming Zee Avi songs in my head and contemplating future house plans and considering the alternate universes I could be living in.  Even with my earplugs in (I always sleep with earplugs on the road) the music was deafening.  I groaned and pulled the sleeping bag over my head, moaning to Tony, “Make it stop!”  It did a lot of things:  it changed tempo, it changed style… from polka to mambo to salsa… it changed volume, but it did not stop, ever, as far as we could tell, as the music drummed us out of town an hour later.

Popocatapetl

Cholula is a lovely little ciudad, just west of the city of Puebla, nestled in the shadow of the imposing figure of Popocatapetl.  “Popo,” as the volcano is nicknamed, lies south of Mexico City and has been the north star of our travels for several days.  The children were delighted, as we rounded the great cone, to see the crater on the back side, smoke billowing majestically from the center and flowing down the mountainside.  Cholula’s claim to fame is the tallest pyramid in North America.  It is unimpressive, as it lies unexcavated beneath thousands of years worth of growth that has turned it into a big hill, indistinguishable from hundreds of others.  Atop this ancient structure is built an ornate catholic church, one of the prettiest we’ve seen since we were in Europe, gold gilt and a radiant yellow against the deep blue sky.  We were solidly out of breath by the time we reached it.

The cathedral of "Our Lady of the Gasping for Breath"

Our afternoon was spent in pleasant pursuit of more guavas and some fresh strawberries in the excellent mercado two blocks to the north of the zocalo.  It’s exciting to be far enough south that giant piles of hand turned pottery glazed in lazy drip patterns surround little wizened indian ladies who call like carnival barkers to advertise their wares.  I closed my eyes in the basket section and inhaled the sweet dry scent of the grasses and reeds for my Mom, she loves that smell.  Always game to try something new we came away with 200 grams of a pressed white cheese with pimento and chiles and herbs blended in.  The sample tasted better than the wedge we ate with dinner tonight did.

Sharing the road

Even on the cuota (toll road) it’s a long way from Puebla to Oaxaca.  We passed the time in awe of the mountains, and checking on Ezra every so often, who’d thrown up within thirty minutes of departure.  BEFORE the pastries and fresh orange juice, were purchased from a street vendor, thankfully.  It was Daddy who scored the long looked for fifty cents for spying the first saguaro cactus… one of thousands and thousands growing like “extinct trees,” according to Ezra.  I read aloud from our story book for a good three hours and Hannah sewed on the dress she is making herself.  It was the perfect day, until we got to Oaxaca.

A two dollar dinner to die for!

Our friends the Woods are known to say that if you want to get REALLY lost, use a GPS.  Even so, ours has rarely steered us wrong and we’ve been amazed at it’s accuracy south of the border.  Tony has proudly announced that between Tom-tom and Jenn-Jenn we get where we’re going.  Not today.  The hour of tense weaving in and out of traffic, all around the center of town culminated in our dear Tom-tom, who is not known for her accurate identification of one way streets, steering Tony through an illegal turn, straight into the arms of the policia.  Sigh.  If you’ve ever seen the old TV show “Chips” you can imagine the swagger of the main character, his mirrored sunglasses and slick black hair.  Now add silver trimmed teeth and lightening fast Spanish and you’ve pretty well got our man.  After several attempts and him slowing his speech, enunciating in the manner one uses with a mentally impaired child, I managed to get the gist of what he was saying:  “We had committed an infraction, we should not have turned there.  $545.00 pesos.”  Not good.  He took Tony’s license and handed us a payment card.  After another five minutes of wrangling he agreed to take us to the station to pay, where we could get the license back.  Tony memorized his plate number and we set off, keeping his gold helmet solidly in our line of sight as we weaved between buses and tuk-tuks and bicycletas laden with every manner of junk to hawk in the market.  It was a tense ten minutes before he waved us over to park in a spot big enough for a Geo-metro.  He came back.  More repetition and wrangling.  The basic message:  “This is going to take too long, I don’t have time to take you there.  You can pay me here.”  Perfect.  Just what we’d been hoping for in the first place, slip him a bribe and hit the road.  He held Tony’s license just out of reach while we counted out the amount on the card, not a peso more, not a peso less and they swapped dinero and card like they were making a drug deal.  He smiled, we smiled and pointed at the campground on the map with a question.  “Derecho, derecho, iziquerdo!”  He punctuated the directions with energetic hand motions… “Right, right, then left!  Via con Dios!”  As it turned out, we’d need God’s help to find this place.

We’re camped on the side of a mountain in San Felipe, high above the lights of Oaxaca in a field of agave plants that are part of the mescal operation of the owner.  We were let in by some fellow campers, who say that the owner is never here, but when he is, we should pay him.  The place seems to be in actual possession of a pack of dogs that look a lot like pit bulls crossed with zebras;  they bark ferociously and have all but licked the skin off of Ezra’s hands.  Like all good Mexican dogs, they wince and slope away when you stoop down as if you might pick up a rock to throw at them.  This technique worked nicely to keep them away from our chicken as Tony cooked dinner.

So here we are, having contributed more than we like between tolls and “propinas” to the policia toward the improvement of the Mexican road system, but safe and warm in our little tent.  We’ll be here a few days, to tour the area and work a little.  I think we’ll leave the van up here on the mountain and take the bus.