The Big Lie

The days were flying by, I’d no idea how we got to May so suddenly. We were getting closer to Mexico City, that big bad place on the horizon that worried me so. Everybody had a horror story. First though, we would enjoy Guanajuato. We arrived on Children’s Day (Dia del Nino) and found our place at the top of the mountain. The city was in a colorful bowl. There were no muted pastels here, houses of crimson, electric blue and lime green were packed into the hillsides. After visiting Diego Rivera’s birthplace and the matching urns filled with the artistic ashes of Olga Costa and Jose Chavez Morado, we’d slog our way uphill each evening, getting lost in the warren of steep alleyways. It was our penance for eating the taqueria big plates.

San Miguel de Allende down the road was as expected with beautiful plazas and well-preserved American retirees. The stores downtown were mostly artisanal and the restaurants upmarket. To visit the city mercado, we dodged bohemian women in kaftans followed by husbands two steps behind. The best part for me was outside the boundaries in the village of Atotonilco with Mexico’s tiny equivalent of the Sistine Chapel.

CDMX!

With tales of the horrendous Mexico City traffic first and foremost in our minds, we stopped 40 km outside the night before and gave ourselves a good two hours to get lost. We started off by getting on the wrong on-ramp and as we got closer we’d no idea if we were on the right freeway or not. There were parallel roads above and on each side, and no signs that matched the directions. Then a miracle, we saw a familiar street name and didn’t let go. Before we knew it, we were ringing the doorbell. The drive took 47 minutes and now of course we had the bad grace to surprise our host early. Even on the drive to the pyramids later that week, with a dead phone, Fran found his way back without a hitch. The Gods of Teotihuacan surely have a soft spot for the Irish.

We stayed with a friend of Fran’s brother-in-law. The house was on the most beautiful wide, leafy street where we were woken each morning to the sound of a multitude of birds. Every night we’d sit in the garden under the patio roof and watch the rain pour down and listen to the thunder. You could set your watch by it. During the day we walked our feet off, dodging office workers in line at taco stands and bus stops and met some very interesting people. Dinner with a sculptor was a new contact for the Yucatan, diplomats provided tips on border crossings and a New York opera singer opened up the world of a very special type of immigrant. Last but not least was a long-anticipated reunion of old friends from work. Talk about two worlds colliding….

I almost wept the day we left. It was so comfortable, that green city refuge, but if we didn’t go now we may have to be evicted. We’d been so fortunate with our contacts there, the big, bad beast ended up having no teeth.

Puebla

After Parral, many moons ago, we fell out of the nanny moto circuit. Apart from Joel and 15-yr old Frank in Chihuahua keeping tabs on us via WhatsApp, we’d had no more contact with the motorbike clubs that unite the Mexican states. It now looked like that lonesome road might end at Ural of Mexico.

After Houston, Texas, there wasn’t supposed to be a Ural dealer until Santiago, Chile so Fran got very excited when he heard one was opening up in Mexico. We ordered a bunch of parts and scheduled a service during our stop in Puebla. But we couldn’t find an address anywhere. It turns out the dealership wasn’t opening till July. Nevertheless the communication from both the owner and the mechanic assigned to our bike was amazing, with hotel recommendations and offers to take us up to see the volcano Popocatepetl.

On our first morning, Enrique the mechanic arrived at the apartment with a starched shirt and a khaki green Ural painted with a silhouette of his dog Africa. He escorted us to the service location across the city and in the shadow of the volcano, worked on Pferdi for two days. When we picked him up again, he was as clean as the day we bought him. Bottles of cold beer were cracked and helped overcome the considerable language barrier. Fran has now added spark plugs and clutch cable to his Spanish vocabulary while I learned to read an invoice. I never get to do the fun things.

We spent our days in the usual manner, exploring the Centro Historico and drinking coffee on the plaza. In one of the many churches, we found our bloodiest Christ to date. He was in his usual glass coffin wearing a lovely white, broderie anglais skirt. The poor fellow was in bits. His face, with a ‘real’ dark brown beard, had a look of absolute anguish while his eyes, under the copper wig of ringlets, pleaded heavenward. A visit to the city library where an orchestra was playing a Sunday morning concert in the central courtyard provided much needed relief from such ghoulish religious objects.

Puebla is famous for its food but we’d spent much of our time there cooking at home. Probably to make up for lost time, the Ural owner and his wife took us out to lunch at a well-known restaurant. We met at 2:15 PM and staggered out again at 10:30. They ordered everything, a feast of all things Pueblan, For appetizers we had maggots (or worms or caterpillars to the squeamish), bone marrow and escamoles: the edible larvae and pupae of ants. Soup followed, each bowl with its own four dishes of condiments. The main course was the tenderest of beef, cooked inside a mountain of salt crystals. It was brought to the table, doused with tequila and set on fire. Coffee, liquers and tiny desserts finished things off, or so we thought but the Tequila and Mezcal bottles barely left the table. Just when I thought the bill was finally coming, evening snacks appeared because now it was dark outside. Now that’s the way to eat!

With small amounts of English on one side and Spanish more butchered than the main course on the other, the eight hours flew by. The Mezcal really helped us along. Before we left, we packed up the bone for Africa, now minus its marrow, and learned that the biggest lie in Mexico is “Just One More”.