March 25 & 26: Pátzcuaro & Tzintzuntzan
Wednesday, March 25
On Wednesday we left Morelia and made the pretty drive through hills and small farms to Lake Pátzcuaro, where I had last been in 1982. The fish-filled lake and its surrounding volcanic hills were once the heart of the Purépecha empire, and today people still live in two of their three main towns, Pátzcuaro and Tzintzuntzan. After Morelia we were ready for a less urban (and perhaps more bird-filled) few days, and Dad had extracted from the web information on three pueblitos with cabins for rent. We took a few hours to circle the lake, pausing in the village of Opónguio for lunch in a lovely, totally empty open-air restaurant with a terrace overlooking the water. A pair of kittens played in the rafters overhead as we gazed at the island in the middle of the lake, dining sumptuously on fried charales, the region’s famous tiny fish, which we ate whole by the handful in fresh corn tortillas. Further along we found no sign of a touted “ecovillage” with “Mayan spa,” nor of the cabañas supposedly in tiny Erongarícuaro; but we struck gold just outside of Pátzcuaro with the Cabañas San José, and promptly moved in for three halcyon days.
Built just outside town in a small, sloping meadow with tilled plots on either side, Cabañas San José contained five rustic cabins perched on the hillside, a semi-circular dirt trench we learned was a botched swimming pool, an agreeable picnic shelter, a spaniel puppy and a one-room cabin for the caretaker’s family. Also a rickety baby slide, a row of eight decrepit pickup trucks deep in weeds, a cement laundry trough, and an assortment of pleasant shrubs oddly sited in obstructive places, so that to climb the stone steps to the outdoor bathroom you continually had to duck branches and hop over tiny bushes.
The cabins were built to the local Tarascan model: windowless, of hand-hewn boards, and topped with a steeply-pitched roof for which the pleasing term is “techo a dos aguas”: roof for two waters. In our cabin this made for a rustic box of a downstairs room and a low upstairs garret accessed around the back by a stairway of boulders and some rickety wood steps. The overall effect was a kind of “chalet meets fruit crate.” I am continually puzzled by mountainous Mexico’s evident disinterest in the simple principles of insulation, and Tarascan houses take the prize. During the warm days in our cabin, air circulated nicely through the inch-wide gaps between boards in the windowless walls, and the lines of sun criss-crossed the room like a thicket of tall grass. At night there was also plenty of air in the loft, one might even say a significant breeze, necessitating five heavy blankets, which I pulled entirely over my head.
We loved it.
After we settled in that first evening we had dinner off one of Pátzcuaro’s two plazas, which proceeded pleasantly despite a short power outage. That night I went to sleep under my five blankets, listening to crickets and night birds, gazing at stars through the gaps in the walls.
Thursday, March 26
Thursday we made a short arc around the lake to Tzintzuntzan, a Purépecha town whose name means “place of the hummingbirds.” It’s got to be onomatopoeic: can’t you just hear the tiny birds zip-zapping by, tzin-tzun-tzan? On a long sloping hill (a loma) outside town we investigated the local pyramids, known as yácatas: flat-topped rectangular platforms with unusual semi-circular ells deckling one side like performance stages for a series of bands. In the site’s kitchen-sized museum we eavesdropped as the curator explained to a class of uniformed 10-year-olds that the Purépecha made sacrifices to an assortment of gods because they “didn’t have Religion, until the Spaniards brought it to them.”
Later we climbed a burro track up out of the village along a cactusy ridge with a view of the yácatas across a ravine. An archaeological map from Dad’s travel files indicated Purépecha settlement on the ridge, but all we found were volcanic rocks, red dirt, and a few tiny fields filled with both; and for a brief stretch a sparse scattering of chipped obsidian flakes. I imagined the local knife-knapper, 700 years before, sitting in front of his (her?) house, tossing unusable fragments on the ground, glancing idly now and then at the pyramidal government center on the neighboring ridge. On our sweaty, sun-struck descent back into the village we passed a boy coaxing into the air a kite handmade from sticks and the clear skins of plastic bags. We sought respite from the sun in the shady courtyard of the Monastery of Santa Ana. 500 years ago kindly Bishop Quiroga planted olive trees illicitly brought over from Spain (whose policy was to maintain a European monopoly on the fruit). A sign proclaims them the oldest olives in the Americas, and their ancient braided trunks, as big as our cabañas, still put out thin crowns of green twigs.
In pretty Pátzcuaro that afternoon our visit to the Basilica was foiled by a funeral, so we wandered down to the market streets and bought supplies for a picnic supper at the cabañas: soft rolls layered with cheese and avocado, followed by mango and fresh, faintly-sweet Mexican cookies for dessert. There being no hot water in our adjacent bathroom hut, the caretaker had invited us – the only guests on the property – to use any other bathroom we chose, so Dad hiked off with flashlight and towel to hunt down a hot shower. I climbed up to my tiny balcony, from which I could just see, behind a line of dark trees on the lake’s shore, the hump of Janitzio Island sparkling in the dusk. A scimitar line of long-necked birds glided in front of the first faint stars and disappeared above the dark water: glossy ibises heading to roost. I sat on a stool made from a slice of tree trunk, wedged into the narrow balcony with my knees pressed against the rough slat railings, and watched a thousand stars come out.
