Guanajuato to Uruapan - or - Paradise to Hell

A not-so-quick recap of the points on the map I've hit in the past five days...

Guanajuato
Guanajuato is Mexico’s most fanciful, imaginative creation – it’s like a real-life trip down the rabbit hole. Tunnels carved out of solid rock lead into a city where colorful houses stacked on one another crawl up the mountains, and the crooked, narrow streets that wind between them are microcosms of lively characters and daily routines: in the paths that surround Plaza Baratillo (where I stayed), old crotchety women vend bright flowers out of plastic buckets just a few steps from the three “gordita sisters” (as named by an American friend) – one to cook, one to stuff and one to collect the money – who dominate the food-cart market and will send you away hungry if you arrive too late. Inside a nearby storefront is Guanajuato’s first and only sex shop, opening their doors after the sun goes down to reveal a confused mix of hemp/Rastafarian wares and adult-only playthings, and across the plaza is Café Zilch where American students pair with Mexican locals for acoustic guitar duets – sometimes singing out-of-place Beatles tunes and other times originals about black cats and love. Wander through the dense trees and sidewalk tables of the central garden and you’re bound to run into a crazy curly-haired teenager who roams town banging on a cowbell and screams “Photo!” whenever he sees you, then jumps onto something or dangles off a ledge for a quick pic. (at night he serves up drinks at the dim, artsy hangout, Barfly). Church bells (along with roosters and dogs) don’t ever rest. Spanish teachers teach by way of immersion, escorting lucky groups to shady, all-night salsa clubs. You meet other Americans who will hitchhike with you in the back of a rickety truck to the seafood tents at a nearby lake, and others who will challenge any slew of locals to a game of pool. Guanajuato is Utopia. The sun always shines.

(So much happened in here that to throw it in with these others and skip the details it deserves is to do it a serious injustice, but for the sake of time, we must go on…)

Next I drove two hours east of Guanajuato to…

San Miguel de Allende
In San Miguel, German DJs manage trendy jewelry boutiques (with streamlined turntables dangling at waist-height from the ceiling) and hip hostelers drag on Mexican-branded cigarettes and talk about the silversmith classes they’re taking. A man from Italy, the self-appointed “city guide” who speaks five languages, roams the town with news of the latest gallery openings and live music and adds (with a business card), “My profession is in real estate”. Sushi and expensive coffee and Middle Eastern fare are readily available in high-design restaurants alongside hoards of “Mexican” eateries with fountains, tropical plants, waiters who speak English and baskets of bread in the place of tortillas. The guidebook claims “Locals are especially fond of fireworks…” and sure enough, I was jolted awake at 5 a.m. on Sunday to the sound of what at first thought was a gang riot but turned out instead to be that of super-powered firecrackers… ending in just enough time for the church bells to start ringing (at least an hour later). Some years ago the city was named one of the top twenty places in the world to retire and it definitely wasn’t kept a secret: San Miguel feels like SoHo taken over by the AARP folks who never cash their social security checks.

(Admittedly, however out-of-place and vulgar the foreign capital here, the rich, artsy feel was like a hot bath after a long day. Indulgence, if only for 24 hours.)

Crossing over to the state of Michoacan, 200 miles southwest of San Miguel, I found…

Pátzcuaro
The rough story of this town, as I understand it, is that a resourceful priest came to Patzcuaro centuries ago when it was inhabited by the Purepecha people and taught them all sorts of “crafts” to reduce eventual dependence on the spreading Spanish empire. Craftwork must have seemed rosier than field labor, because they’re still mad about crafts today. The small red-roofed town has a few interesting plazas where sticky-faced kids holding melting ice cream crowd around Purepecha dancers in ceremonial mask and costume, and women selling enchiladas try to entice you into a spots at their plastic-covered picnic tables with promises of “free drinks!” (pointing to the grape and orange Fanta at the middle of the table). Once the towns sights are exhausted, it’s off to nearby Lake Patzcuaro. This is not a trip made in search of jet skis and parasailing; though the lake is enormous, it’s been a repository for untreated sewage long enough to move the whitefish business out of nature and into hatcheries (and to make squeamish tourists cringe when a local boy jumps in for a swim). The tiny villages surrounding the lake each boast a trademark craft: lacquered goods, corn cane figures, copperware, stone statues, etc. When I went to see the home of “Mexico’s most famous mask makers”, I expected that the masks would be on prominent display, like in the rest of the towns… Not the case. Locations of the mask makers are marked with small signs, and you have to knock on their door, enter through their courtyard and make yourself a guest in their home to have a look at the clay creations depicting kings, snake-faced men, Eskimos, and yes, even Shrek. (The flaw in this knock-and-enter system is that it’s easy to mistake doorways. Luckily, residents are kind, even when you interrupt their cooking.)

There’s an cone-shaped island – Janizito – in the middle of the lake that is the place for Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, but to visit in the off-season, it appears to be not much more than steep walkways filled with cheap knick-knacks and men making butterfly nets. Crowning the top of the island is an odd mosaic-statue of revolutionary hero Jose Morelos thrusting his fist into the sky – odd yes, but somehow wonderful.

Thirty miles further south…

Uruapan
Uruapan is a dump. The guidebook’s description as it being “… a very traditional ‘Mexican’ city retaining some colonial ambience”, is like calling Gary, Indiana “a waterfront town with real estate potential”. This city is a whole lot of dingy billboards hanging over crammed storefronts selling plastic shoes and hoochie women’s clothing. In my hotel room, the windows are cracked and don’t shut all the way; the toilet is missing its seat and the back lid is broken in half; the one light in the room casts an orange-ish, mind-of-a-serial-killer tint over the dingy floor; and a desk with three legs leans precariously in the corner. Also, just outside my door is a rock on a pedestal. It's not a pretty, sparkly rock or one of those semi-translucent ones that people put lights under. It's just a plain, grey rock. And it's on a pedestal. (I am only paying $10 a night for this place). To make matters worse, the people are about as sunny as the grit on their streets. The night shift manager at the hotel will not feed my knowledge of the area nor further my Spanish with my favorite game, “Ask the front desk”, because he is much too busy IMing someone a lot of hearts and smiley faces.

The odd thing about this charmless place is that is has beautiful “surrounding attractions” – a volcano, waterfalls, national park (see picture) – so I’ve been using it as a homebase for exploring anything NOT in the city. Tomorrow I leave Uruapan for Playa Azul, which, after here will doubtless feel like paradise regained.

(Just as an added item of interest, I was pulled over here – or waved over rather by two cops standing on the corner – for going the wrong way on a one way street [ironically, because I’ve gone the wrong way on a one-way in Mexico many times on purpose and never had more than a finger shaken at me, but this time it was totally on accident], and when I went along with the ticket they were giving me and asked when I could pay it at the station, the possibility of cash in their pockets disappeared and they let me off. A useful thing to learn about Mexico – don’t feed the crooked.)

Up next: The story of how I lost a volcano.