Part 1
MY TRIP TO MEXICO
AZTECS, BUTTERFLIES, EXHAUSTION
By Dixie Hughes, December, 2000
After an all night sojourn from Seattle with a long layover in the Dallas airport (not a really fun place to be) I arrived to the hustle bustle of the Mexico City airport, surprisingly not as threatening or uncomfortable as I remembered from 30 years ago. They seem to have cleared out most of the hustlers and beggars. I was met by a gentleman from the Geronimo travel agency and had to wait around for other participants of our Elderhostel group. Dave and Susan came in from Chicago and then Ann from Canada - who turned out to be my roommate. She was very nice and quite knowledgeable about butterflies. She has a butterfly garden at her house and is known as the "butterfly lady". She even raises milkweed for the Monarchs to eat and lay eggs upon. Another gentleman - Bill - also knows a lot about the butterflies. He leads ecology trips in Florida.
After checking in and resting a bit, Ann and I walked around the hotel area. We found an Internet hookup place to email home and then wandered through the silver market area.
We gathered the whole group for dinner at 7 - one long table - some were on late flights, but we were all together for the overview lecture after dinner. We got red and gray yarn pompoms for our luggage markers and met our guides - Cathy is from Geronimo Travel in Arizona and Paciano is a birdwatcher from Vera Cruz.
After a shower, I finally collapsed - 36 hours without sleep is about my limit. I even slept well which is very unusual for the first night away from home. Maybe it was the 2nd.
Monday we left the hotel at 9:15 a.m. to travel west to the butterfly area up in the mountains. We had a large comfortable bus with lots of extra seats, which made it very nice. After stops to repair the VCR/video and to get a pump for the water jug, we were on our way. They played an interesting video about the migration habits of the monarchs, but it was hard to hear on the bus. It was a five-hour trip to our new hotel in Angangueo. (Did you know rebar sticks out of so many houses in Mexico because the properties are not taxed until the construction is finished - so they don’t finish.) We saw many agave plants from which the Mexicans make pulque - alcoholic drink of the Aztecs. It’s sometimes called the Century Plant because it takes so long to bloom - about 40 years actually.
"Angangueo" means "high place" or "entrance to cave" - no one’s quite sure which. It’s basically a small town on a steep hill at about 10,000 feet - which means it’s quite chilly at night. Anyway we checked into our rooms and then reboarded the bus to go to the first butterfly sanctuary, called Chincua. All the roads around here have signs that say "CURVAS PELIGROSA" which means dangerous curves. They’re not kidding. Lots of straight up or straight down on either side.
There are about 11 or 12 places in Mexico which have areas the monarch butterflies select as their wintering place. Only a few of these are open to the public - and we’re seeing two of them. Chincua is east of town and not too well maintained. The dirt road up would not take our bus - small wooden bridges - so we walked about half a mile to the "base village" area.
There we were loaded into pick up trucks with metal rail sides and roll bars to go a couple miles higher; and then we hiked the rest of the way - probably another mile. (I found out that when you load into such conveyance, don’t be last! If you are, it means that you have to stand at the back opening and when the truck lurches, everyone bumps against you while you’re hanging out over the ground. Those trucks lurched a lot! I made sure I was farther in on the return trip.)
It was quite steep and very hard work to hike at that altitude so we were rather disappointed in the final destination since it was already 5:00 and getting dark. Although the butterflies are basically dormant in the winter the only time they show much activity is when the sun is out. All we could see were big clumps in the trees. It was too dark and cloudy to see anything very distinctly, plus we couldn’t get really close enough to see more than the dark blotches. There were a few on the ground and on tree trunks, which our guide pointed out for us.
After the long hike and bouncy ride back, Paciano said this is just a "warm up" for tomorrow’s hike. We didn’t believe it could get any harder, since we were already pooped. We were wrong.
During our excursion our luggage was delivered to our rooms - except Ann’s didn’t come. Turned out there were 2 people whose bags didn’t turn up and it was very upsetting for awhile - she had her passport and airline ticket in hers. Stress level was really going up, but the missing bags were finally found on the upper balcony later that evening. She learned to keep passport and ticket in her money belt anyway, so I guess the stress was worth it.
Our lecture during the evening was on the Monarch butterfly migration habits and how the ones from east of the Rockies all migrate to Mexico funneling down through Texas, while the West Coast monarchs go to California. The migration begins in September and they leave again about February. The male butterfly has a small black spot on his lower wings; the female’s body is fatter.
After that we spent a rather cold miserable night - no heat in the rooms and strong mildew/disinfectant smell nearly gagged us. Not fun at all to wish for earmuffs in bed - I don’t think any of us showered.
The "Big Hike" day arrived - we were going to Rosario area where there is a much bigger colony of the butterflies. There were three Suburban type vehicles in front of our hotel at 9:00a.m. , and we headed up. It was supposed to be only seven miles but on a very bumpy dirt road winding higher and higher into the Sierra Madre Mountains. The view was magnificent - the road was not.
We saw a farmer plowing alongside the road with a team of oxen. I guess they work best on such steep hills.
We finally reached the parking area, walked about 100 yards to the village area and the start of the path to the butterflies where we were assigned guides - one for the fast group, one for the middle group, one for the slow group - guess which one I was in.
We hiked up about 200 yards to the house where they rented walking sticks for 2 pesos - well worth it; we really needed them! I guess the "fast group" made it to the top in about an hour - it took me almost 3 hours - but I made it. Several of our group got sick on the way and couldn’t make it to the top which was very disappointing to them. They wound up waiting at the bottom in the lovely rock garden that has been built there. They told us later that many of the butterflies came down there when the sun came out to get to the water. Supposedly we were at about 13,000 feet at the top - which is why the altitude was really affecting us - and the path that was supposed to be a mile or so was actually 2 1/2 miles with a 45 degree incline for a lot of the time. The meadow (where they had visited the butterflies last year) was only about half way, so Cathy and Paciano were surprised at the distance too. The last hundred yards was very steep and a real killer in spite of the rope that’s strung alongside the trail to pull on. There were, of course, other tourists going up or down at the same time - the three "pleasingly plump" black ladies who were coming down through one of the steeper sections entertained us for awhile. There was a lot of loose gravel in one section and the top one slipped and fell into the middle one, who fell into the third one - thought we were going to have dominoes for awhile but they managed to stay upright. ,
And then there are the Monarchs - millions of them in great clumps.
The people in the "fast group" (as opposed to those of us in the REALLY slow group) said when they got up there it was all gray and foggy. Just before we got there the sun came out and thousands of butterflies warmed up and started to flutter around. It was definitely an unbelievable, awesome sight - like an outdoor cathedral with music provided by butterfly wings. It was so beautiful - almost worth the hike.
One landed on my hand, another in my hair; we had to be careful where we walked because some were resting on the ground before flying back up to their clump in the tall trees or down to find water.
By the time we got back down to the hotel, we had stiffened up and getting out of the trucks was a real struggle. Almost worse than coming down the mountain - not up; nothing’s worse than up at that altitude. One of the guys said the Elderhostel blurb in their catalog that says this is a trip for "active seniors" should have said "Olympic Class seniors" because we all felt that we had "gone for the gold" when we made the top. Quite a trek! The mountain we climbed is called "El Campanario" which means "the bell". I don’t know why - maybe because of the way your head rings when you finally reach the top.
That evening we got to see the monarch video that we had seen on the bus but this time we could hear it better. We learned that the monarch butterfly weighs half a gram and has a brain the size of a pinhead. It has an average speed of 12 kph and is under siege by the logging in Mexico and the weed killers in the U.S. (that kill the milkweed plant it needs to live.) The usual life span of an adult monarch is one month, but the fall generation does not become sexually mature and flys south instead. Then it lasts 8 months until it flies back in the spring. It takes four generations to get all the way back to Canada and other northern areas. By eating the milkweed plant, which is poisonous to mammals and birds, the monarch and the monarch caterpillar are poisonous to eat also.
We left our very cold hotel the next morning; we were supposed to go climb a pyramid some place but instead decided to wander around the town plaza for a few minutes. Most of us were not in the mood for another climb.
There are two big cathedrals in the plaza - with one steeple each.
Supposedly the government taxes the churches with two steeples, so the millionaire type who wanted to build a big church in Angangueo decided to build two of them to get around the taxes.
We also enjoyed the colorful candy stand on the edge of the plaza - especially sampling the goodies. The brown rolled sticks in the middle tasted like brown sugar fudge.