During one of Julia’s work trips to Mexico City she had some colleagues who had taken an extra day and travelled outside of Mexico City to see where the monarch butterflies congregate during the winter months. Add in her stories of amazing hot chocolate and great tacos and we decided that we needed a stop in Mexico City as we transitioned out of Latin America. It landed around the time of Christmas and though other Central America locations got really expensive around Christmas time, thankfully Mexico City isn’t a traditional Christmas vacation travel spot and prices were still reasonable.
In order to play a bit of catch-up, I’ve decided to do all of Mexico in one post. However, rather than trying to post chronologically, I’ll post by location instead.
Mexico City
Since some of the area Julia wanted us to show was close to the Canadian Embassy, we ended up stay in that neighbourhood. This put us close to some large parks and museums and the nicer parts of Mexico City.
In a park just outside of Museo Nacional de Antropología, we saw people looking up at something through the trees and we could hear drumming. Following the crowd we found this group of men sitting on top of a large pole with the one in the center drumming. Four of them proceeded to drop off the sides with a rope wrapped around their legs and the whole contraption spun while the ropes slowly unwound, lowering the four to the ground with the drummer still at the top.
In keeping with the “making new friends” theme of this trip, we had reached out a couple of months ago to a family that used to send their daughter to the same elementary school as our girls back in Canada. He works as a diplomat and is now posted to Mexico City. Our girls weren’t in the same grade so we didn’t know them too well, however they graciously hosted us for part of our trip. One of our first nights they invited us to join them to see the Nutcracker at the National Theatre which is massive and setup more like a stadium.
On Christmas Eve we were able to find an English speaking church. We were surprised and delighted that they had a small orchestra that evening to play some Christmas carols. The icing on the cake is that after the service we all headed outside to a courtyard for some candle lighting and some more singing. It warmed our souls and made it feel like Christmas.
After church we were invited to our school friend’s apartment for a Christmas Eve dinner party.
Our actual Christmas Day was pretty low key. In an attempt to make it feel a bit like Christmas we had looked in the grocery stories for a ginger bread house kit. The closest we could find was ginger bread men.
Of course Mexico City wouldn’t have been complete without Julia taking us to her favourite taco place and hot chocolate shop. Both were excellent! As a bonus, Julia was able to connect with a couple colleges posted at the Embassy as well.
Xalapa and Teocelo
Sometimes the best laid plans don’t quite work out the way you had hoped. Our plan was to go with our friends to her home town of Xalapa, about a five hour drive from Mexico City. Our first stop though was to a small village where their church was supporting a small home church. They were having a Christmas event at the village square but we ended up arriving after dark and close to the end of the event. We felt a bit like tag-alongs since our inability to converse in Spanish limited our ability to help. The local people then invited us home for dinner and we felt a little undeserving since we hadn’t contributed.
In the Teocelo village square was a nativity scene, but there was no baby Jesus. We learned that baby Jesus is added at midnight on Christmas Eve all across Mexico. The house we were invited to was also the location of the home church where they had an outside courtyard setup as their meeting place.
Growing around the courtyard where these huge pods which the host said were estropajo natural. These are plant based sponges that are often used as bath scrubs. Looking at a full one, I’m pretty sure we had one on a stick before hanging from our shower.
Fellowship, no matter the language, is still fellowship.
We stayed the night in Xalapa. Our friends had family Christmas dinner and we were exhausted after a few days of travel and late nights, so didn’t do too much exploring of that city. We just took a short driving tour of the city, since the markets were packed with Christmas shoppers.
The downtown section had a traditional, beautiful cathedral and some quaint streets and it is always fun to see the markets. The funniest thing though was the size of the bags of Cheetos puffs. They were massive and we saw them in a number of stores.
Puebla
From Xalapa we were supposed to go with our friends to the city of Puebla. Unfortunately due to personal reasons, they had to head back to Mexico City early. With some guidance from them, we were able to make our way around the town and enjoy some of the markets and architecture.
Val’quirico
The local family in Teocelo had recommended that we go visit the small village of Val’quirico. What we didn’t realize was that this was a tourist village that had been built on an old hacienda (estate) to mimic a Tuscany village. It was fully of shops, restaurants and a few hotels and was very well done, mixing new buildings (with old world style) into the existing Mexican/Spanish ruins that were there.
Teotihuacan
This ancient city is an hour or so outside of Mexico City and was one of our day trips. It was believed to be started in 100AD with its peak inhabitance being between 500 to 1000 AD. They estimate it had about 125,000 people, making it the largest city in the Americas at that time. It is considered Mesoamerican so pre-dating the Mayan and the Aztecs.
The largest pyramid, in the center of the avenue complex, was the pyramid of the sun.
Looking down the avenue towards the smaller pyramid of the moon on the left and back towards the pyramid of the sun on the right.
Pyramid of the moon and the large plaza in front of it.
A royal palace just off the plaza for the pyramid of the moon.
Pretty interesting architecture in that they surrounded the large stones with a line of little ones.
The museum had a great model of what they think the city used to looked like. This was made in a room with large windows so you could look out and compare the model to real life.
The smallest pyramid was the government or administrative area. This one you could climb the platform just before the pyramid and the pyramid steps were partially intact with these large jaguar head carvings.
Piedra Herrada Sanctuary
About two hours outside of Mexico City is a monarch butterfly sanctuary. This unfortunately was a bit of a Machu Picchu type of experience for us: something we were really looking forward to but we were thwarted by weather. The forecast had shown Tuesday vs Monday as being the day with the most sun. Because of that, we had chosen to do the pyramid trip on Monday and the monarchs on Tuesday. However, as we drove there it started to cloud over and stayed cloudy the whole time we were there. This meant that after our 2-3km hike up the steep hills, we could still see the butterflies, but they were clumped together to stay warm and weren’t flying around in huge swarms, as anticipated/hoped. It was so disappointing that we decided to try and do the 4 hour round trip the next day as well, even though we had a flight out of Mexico City that Wednesday afternoon. The second trip was sunny the whole way there but on the hill itself, right above us, was a long cloud that the wind was blowing length wise right in the path between the sun and the butterflies. So though we could see sunshine in most directions, we were still in cloud shadows. The sun would poke out in breaks of the clouds and a couple of butterflies would be brave enough to take flight, but the clouds would scare them back to the trees. Seeing three or four fly every ten or fifteen minutes during cloud breaks was better than the day before, but not the thousands in the air we were expecting to see.
We had patches of sunshine on the hike-up both days, giving us false hope.
And these are the pine trees that butterflies winter on. Cloudy on day 1 to the left, and the pesky single cloud of day 2 on the right.
It is hard to see on the wide shots, but the trees have clumps of butterflies hanging from branches and some of the trunks are covered in butterflies as well. It is pretty amazing that this is generation 4. This generation here will mate and the males will die. The females will fly to Texas and lay eggs there and then die. Generation 1 will then fly from Texas to Kansas to lay eggs there and then die. Generation 2 does the same thing from Kansas to Pennsylvania, and generation 3 from Pennsylvania to Canada. Generation 4 are the superstar generation and fly all the way from Canada back to Mexico to the same 1 acre of woods their great-grandparents were at with the females going the extra mile(s) to return to Texas. Pretty amazing.
Lesson from our guide: the males have thinner lines and the two black dots on the center back wings. The female has thicker lines.
And here is a pretty poor video (but the best we got) of some butterflies actually flying. Its a bit of “Where’s Waldo” so don’t blink but it really highlights how disappointing it was.
Even with the disappointment, there is still an opportunity for a bit of fun. At the entrance there were some arts and crafts stalls and one lady there made homemade baskets out of the pine needles from the hill. They are similar to Ontario White Pine needles but even longer. Marika decided try and braid some needles as we walked up on day 2 and succeeded in getting it done, though it looked surprisingly like a braid of her own hair.