3/28 – Pátzcuaro to Zitácuaro: forests, pyramids, trout

Saturday, 3/28

We bought breakfast supplies in Pátzcuaro Friday evening, keeping the bag of food cold overnight by the simple expedient of hanging it outside from a nail in the cabin wall.  Our final picnic breakfast (I can’t help it, I consider food details crucial) consisted of sandwiches (rolls, deli ham, gouda cheese – outside of Oaxaca, Mexico doesn’t have particularly distinctive cheeses), with mango (required) and a yogurt drink.  We wore all our layers and huddled at the splintery square table on the meadow in the first rays of sun.  The table setting included pairs of plastic plates, water bottles, and binoculars.  We shared the bird book.  We admired the bug-catching aerial ballet of the resident vermillion flycatcher, and figured out a new bird was another flycatcher, a crescent-throated.  When Dad climbed up to the cabin for a last cup of microwaved coffee, a bluebird landed before me on the roof tiles and posed in profile for a full minute before flying away.

Despite its great natural beauty, Mexico still suffers from a cultural tendency to toss trash out car windows, and the roadside ditches are full of flattened bits of grubby plastic.  Thus I was rather pleased to see that Pátzcuaro seems to employ at least two trash-pickers to tidy things up in town.  Or perhaps they are self-employed, or just cleaning things up in their own neighborhoods; who can say?  Anyway, as we drove out of the quaint town center we passed two pickers on two different roads: an old man and a teenage girl, each equipped with a black plastic bag, using aluminum pastry tongs to pluck tidbits from the verge.

As we left the Pátzcuaro burbs and headed farther up the valley’s hills a man driving a listing pickup flashed his lights at us.  This sort of thing doesn’t come up in the phrasebooks, and we glanced around for clues: Cops ahead?  “Ahoy there, gringos”?  A surprise tunnel coming up, turn on your lights?  Then we rounded a turn and found the answer, planted comfortably in the road: a quintet of cows.  So there’s your travel tip for the day: flashing lights can sometimes mean Brake for Cows Ahead.

We drove east, looping around the south side of Morelia again and continuing past Ciudad Hidalgo and then south to Zitácuaro.  It was a beautiful drive.  We passed modern cinderblock farm houses and old-style windowless cabins built of upright boards, hand-cut with axes.  Up the hills of one mountain valley and down into the forested slopes of the next.  Nestled into the forests were plots of baby trees with glossy leaves planted in tidy rows, each field’s trees bigger and leafier than the last until we realized they were avocado orchards.

As we crossed from one habitat to another we’d sometimes pull over near trees or down a dirt road to look around for birds.  Not far outside of Morelia we stopped for half an hour at the Morelos state park, where we were mesmerized by a lunatic black and white bird with a scarlet belly dancing a flamenco dance in the pines, flaring its bicolored tail like a fan.  (We are now fairly sure it was a painted whitestart flushing out insects to munch.)

More pretty mountain orchards: crops of pines, avocadoes, peaches.  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such a verdant part of Mexico.  Having the time, we opted to drive the Mil Cumbres road (Road of a Thousand Curves), which for a couple hours averaged nine curves per kilometer (we counted).  Well-kept but with no shoulder to speak of, the road offered incredible views down plunging mountain valleys to looming volcanoes in the misty distance.  We ate lunch at the only official viewpoint, sitting on a stone bench while a rusty, long-horned cow gazed hopefully over our shoulders and occasionally ducked behind a wall to nibble at someone else’s discarded watermelon rinds.

In the late afternoon we detoured up into the foothills outside (if I remember aright) Ciudad Hidalgo to visit the largely unheralded Alzate pyramids, which unfortunately turned out to be closed.  Or at least, the gates at the end of the long, potholed gravel road were closed and locked.  But I had noticed some narrow dirt paths wandering off through the woods on the way up the mountain, and we had after all come all this way…  So we parked, ducked into the woods, and blundered about happily through overgrown bracken and large boulders, which after awhile began to look a bit more regular in shape, until we broke out of the dry woods and found ourselves on a pyramid’s crumbling back flank, with a panoramic view of the valley below us.  Looking down we noticed the big square boulder we were standing on was carved with petroglyphs.  We spent the next hour bathed in glorious late afternoon sunshine clambering around this pyramid and its adjacent smaller platforms.  On the highest platform we found a clutch of local teenagers, hanging out on top of the world and bemused to have our company.  We also found some tiny fragments of painted pottery lodged among some of the tumbled rocks, and a flake or two of obsidian, but muy poca cosa (small stuff).  It was a small pyramid group, but the thrill of discovering our own way in, the spectacular view and the honeyed afternoon light came together to make it a perfect, bite-sized adventure.  And we only got slightly lost on our way out.

In contrast, Zitácuaro, where we stopped for the night, seemed at first a place of scant charm: the hotel options were frankly crummy, soulless and dark, the main street busy with cars but few people, and we’d wound up more tired than we realized.  But the late evening was redeemed with dinner in an undeservedly empty restaurant called La Trucha Alegre (the Happy Trout).  A cordial 12-year-old skipped happily around the family business, giggling with her older brother, and brought us refreshing melon water.  We abandoned the glassed-in balcony overlooking the industrial street and moved to a quieter table inside the big room, where the chef’s wife served us extraordinary whole trouts, one cooked smothered in garlic and the other stuffed with shrimp, wrapped in bacon and fried.  Afterward, the chef-owner came out to chat with us and to extol the complicated wonders of the trout, about which he evinced a nuanced passion.  Later we read briefly in our dimly-lit hotel room, where I had taken the moon-shaped light fixture off the wall, the better to see by the single bare light bulb.  And then we slept soundly, our bellies full of trout.