Tlalpujahua 2 – a preposterous church and some high-altitude monarchs
Friday, March 20, 2009, Tlalpujahua (adorable small mountain town in Michoacan) continued
First, here’s how to pronounce Tlalpujahua: The “Tl” looks intimidating but it’s the same one you say, for example, in the word “nettle.” It’s just that it goes at the beginning. So mentally start saying “nettle” and just open your mouth when you get to the “Tlal,” which rhymes with “doll.” Tlahl-pooh-ha-wah. Tlalpujahua. Very good!
So: on Friday we had breakfast in the market and then watched the endearing Parade of Spring, as you’ve heard.
Sometime that morning we also took a look inside the Iglesia de la Virgen de Carmen, whose square red belltower glows from the crown of a hill in the center of town. The church’s façade is made of great blocks of tangerine-colored rock carved with several tiers of saints and cherubs, columns, leafy niches, and caryatids in the form of muscular mermen with fishy tails and fierce beards. The inside of such a church is often dark and regal, stone columns looming high to the distant domed ceiling where the Apostles gaze down from dim gold clouds. But stepping into the Iglesia de Carmen is like stepping inside the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel: the church is one giant, excessive confection. The dominant colors are baby pink and powder blue with sassy gold trim. Hundreds of appliquéd, pastel fleurs de lis the size of hubcaps adorn the multicolored walls. Where the ribs of the roof come together high above, giant daisies the size of shrubs dangle from the ceiling like enormous marzipan whimsies. With all the pink and sparkle and froth, I half expected to find a jewelry box ballerina twirling on the altar. I was immediately smitten and took many pictures, none of which come close to doing it justice. I will have to have them colorized like the old black and white movies.
By the way, Tlalpujahua is quite high up in the mountains, perhaps 9,000 feet or more, and boy could we feel the altitude. Did I make it clear yet that this is a vertical town? Upon exiting a door to the street your choices are to descend or to climb. We did plenty of climbing, and we did it slowly, stopping sometimes every few meters to catch our breath, feeling our hearts thump while little children with the lung capacity of beluga whales skipped merrily around our leaden feet.
So you may wonder why it seemed like a good idea to us Friday afternoon to drive even farther up into the mountains and go hiking. But there we went, following winding roads through sunny pine forests (and stopping a few times to look for birds) till a rutted dirt drive turned off into a brushy meadow: Sierra Chincua, the back door to the famous Monarch butterfly reserve. It wasn’t until we bought tickets at a little wooden hut that we asked how far it was to the butterflies and they told us: about an hour and a half, walking. What! We cried, having expected something more like “200 meters.” An hour and a half to get there! Yes yes, they declard. But, you can rent a horse.
In the beginnings of a cautionary tale, we disdained the horses to make the unexpected hike on foot. It turned out to be a hike mostly up, along the spine of a pretty mountain ridge with occasional glimpses of distant valleys rolling away far below. The hike began at well above 3000 meters and we must have struggled up at least another 300, maybe more. That’s meters: nearly 10,000 feet. And height is what the butterflies like. It probably took us two hours to hike 4 km, through oak and pine forests that smelled incredibly good in the sunshine, like honey and spices you just wanted to roll around in. Finally we emerged on a small rocky outcropping in the midst of the pine forest to discover the world dropping away in front of us. Panting, we sat down. And in a minute we saw, over the precipitous fall of rocks and trees, wafting about with daft abandon: the monarch butterflies. It’s the very end of their winter season so we didn’t see the famous drifts and carpets of solid orange. Like the last toss of confetti at the end of the parade, perhaps a few hundred butterflies speckled the air, but that was enough. We sat on the rocks, dangled our legs, ate some mandarin oranges and watched the butterflies glinting in the breeze, blithely ephemeral, with what looked like the entirety of Michoacán spread below us.
Symptoms of altitude sickness didn’t truly manifest till we were on the way down, but by the end of the hike we were shot: headaches (both of us), nausea and dizziness (Dad). We staggered back to the car and within ten minutes I pulled over at a roadside chapel where Dad passed out in the car and I sat on the steps listening to the birds and watching passing drivers slow down at the potholes and genuflect in my direction before driving on. We made it safely back to Tlalpujahua where Dad conked out for the rest of the afternoon. I went to the (one and only) restaurant, where I revived myself with an excellent sopa azteca and some tostadas de camarón with weird pink sauce. Then I put on every layer I have and went and sat on the steps of the jewelry box church, high over the little town, to watch the sun set. Went back to the cold hotel room, crawled under the warm blankets, punched the popcorn around in my pillow, and went to bed.
love,
Deborah (currently in Morelia)
Sierra Chincua vista
