A Week of Waterfalls

Hello again, faithful blog readers. It’s great to be able to post again and reconnect with everyone back home. Make sure to keep those comments coming so we can know how you’re doing too. And Charlie, if you’re reading this in San Blas, let me know!

My body is telling me something. My skin is a golden brown, and my Mexistache is filling in nicely. All this physical work and time outside is both invigorating and exhausting. I go to sleep completely spent each night, and wake up stiff but energetic each day at 6:30am sharp. My shoulders are tired from chopping wood for barbeques and swinging a pickaxe to dig trenches for chicken wire. My feet hurt from the steep 2 mile hike we take into town and back most days…sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. My palms are sore from swinging a machete at everything from bamboo to coconuts to banana trees (yes, I can chop an entire banana tree to the ground in one swing!). Every day at noon I shower off the layer of chicken filth and dirt that’s accumulated in my hair and in all my clothes… and underneath are the burns, scratches, bruises and bug bites that cover every inch of my skin. Literally every work day I haul hundreds of pounds of river stones from one specified location to another, either by wheelbarrow or by hand (Says Wally “What’s a day if you didn’t haul any rocks?”) Even the cuticles on my fingernails are shredded from the seven or eight hours I’ve spent threading fishing rope through sharp metal chicken wire. But the craziest thing of all is that I love it. I mean really love it. The feeling of a good day’s work on your muscles, the peace of the jungle at twilight, a dog by your side (preferably Opie, the three-legged wonder, or Sparky, the golden eyed Alpha male) and a beer in your hand – that’s a mighty fine thing indeed. I find myself each day, multiple times a day, thanking God for sending out into this beautiful land. We continue to have terrific adventures every day, and when Amaranth asked if we would stay an extra week in order to acclimate the new WWOOFers, (she’s leaving to help her mom move to Arizona)… we quickly said yes. Therefore, we will be staying until March 5th.

Remember us mentioning that Michelangelo reproduction on the ceiling of our house here? Well, the painter of that mural showed up 3 days ago to commission another picture in the home of Amaranth & Wally. We got to chatting, and I learned that he’s a nature lover. One thing led to another, and he ended up inviting me on a walk along the river to a beautiful valley he knows of. His name is Dante, and he’s 53. I checked with our hosts, and they said he’s trustworthy and everyone knows about his “nature walks.” We left around 4pm yesterday, and what an experience it was! He took off jogging, and I did my best to keep up with him. We ran a good 2 miles into the Aztec jungle, hopping from one path to another, jumping along river stones upstream, darting through barbed wire, and sliding down steep slopes. My thoughts alternated between “I feel like I’m on a hunt with a wizened Aztec warrior in the middle of the Mexican forest.” and “ I bet this guy’s going to lose me, and I’ll end up lost or macheted in a ditch somewhere.” Since I’m writing this, the latter obviously didn’t happen. Dante liked to stop along the river to dip his face in and drink. Every so often he’d warn me about this guy or that guy nearby who has a pack of dogs we might run into, or he’d let out a wailing grito (the Mexican cries you hear in Tejano music that sound a bit like a laugh). We finally ended up at a pool at the base of a beautiful waterfall. He stripped down and dove in with just his underwear on. He asked me to join him, but I declined (thinking, “Yeah, the second I do, he’ll run off with my shoes and shirt!). He slid down the waterfall, cooled off, then redressed and we headed back out. On the way back we ran into the dogs, and the owner, who graciously said we could use his road any time we want to return to the falls. Returning, we took a different route, and got a bit turned around. Upon asking a family in a truck that was picking fruit, they pointed the way, told us to jump in, and drove us there… through winding, forgotten roads, and past a little lake. Dante ate about 5 of their starfruits during the journey. We made it back before nightfall, and we had Dante over for a delicious spicy yellow curry and lentils that Julia prepared. We talked and laughed together as Julia practiced her Spanish, and then I escorted Dante back to town with my headlamp.

Speaking of waterfalls, Julia, Gina, and I visited a 70 foot high waterfall about an hour out of town. We booked the trip through the hotel in Aticama we use for internet. They hired a taxi for us with a preset rate (475 pesos, or around $35US for a 5 hour trip). We left Saturday morning from the hotel. He drove us out to a remote town, dropped us off, and he waited there the whole time until we returned. It was a treacherous climb down to the bottom, but once there, the girls swam, and I climbed up the rocks. The pool was supposed to be 40 feet deep, and boy was it cold!
We came back from the falls, cleaned up, and got ready for a fun day-after-Valentine’s Day dinner. Around seven in the evening we went to a restaurant called El Delfin, inside the Garza Canela hotel in San Blas. It was really exceptional, easily the best restaurant meal we’ve had here, and one of the best experiences together anywhere. The chef is a woman that trained under a 3-Michelin-Star chef in Paris, and this place is supposed to be one of the top restaurants in coastal-Mexico. We both started out with an appetizer, a curried seafood soup for me and an apple/avocado/goat cheese salad for Julia. Both fantastic. The wine list was…well…the only wine list we’ve seen in Mexico, so there’s not much to compare it to. The only wine by the glass was their house red and white, that was the only description, and Julia decided to get the white. The prices were amazing, about $3.50 US for a glass, which turned out to be quite enjoyable. Then entrees-- me with a seafood stuffed poblano swimming in a yellow saffron sauce, Julia with a tender chicken breast stuffed with goat cheese and pear comfit with what seemed like mashed potatoes, all in a cinnamon-coffee butter reduction. They were both divine. We ate as slowly as we could, thanking our very kind and attentive waiter for everything. We were quite satisfied, but we had to look at the dessert menu. How could Julia resist a lemon cake topped with bananas, a caramel sauce and house-made ginger ice cream? She couldn’t. It also came out with a selection of house-cookies, little anise-flavored crescents, much like teeny biscotti and white/dark almond fudges. They even sent us home with extra cookies-- in honor of “el dia de Santa Valentino”. Best part was, for three courses, coffee, wine, and beer, our tab only came to $50 – and that includes the tip!
Needless to say, we left quite stuffed and immensely happy.

Julia will finally get a chance to fulfill a lifelong dream. For her Valentine’s Day present, I promised we’ll go out and view the whales along the Pacific. There are lots of trips out there each day, but they cost a lot, so we originally decided against it. We’re going to work to put together a group of 6 to go out so we can all pay less per-person.

Gina (our room-mate) left on Thursday for Chiapas, Mexico. She decided to cut her stay short by three weeks (and we’ll be staying longer at Amaranth’s request). Our new roommate is named Phoebe, she’s 22, and she is supposedly the manager of a farm or farmers market in America. She's arriving in a week.

On Thursday we strolled into town laden with Julia’s famous coconut macaroons. We stopped and doled out care packages to our friends, and we’d stay and chat about Julia’s recipe, their families, and the quiet, quaint town of Aticama. Each day my love for the people grows. Wally and Amaranth have really opened up to us, sharing funny stories, recipes, and knowledge. Amaranth recalled to us the first time she went to her ancestral home of Tokyo, and how it felt to look like everyone on the street for the first time in 40 years. Wally’s eyes sparkled as he told me about his “Hollywood experience.” As we were salvaging old fence that was thick with twisting vines, he told me about the screenplay he wrote. He and Amaranth took the script to Hollywood, hired a company that held a mass “script-pitching” event, and he described his story to producers like John Malkovich. The infamously heartless L.A. left them misled, frustrated, and embittered, and he’s since soured on the whole screenwriting process. He’s going to let me read the script one of these days. Still, it was sad to see a seasoned, capable man like Wally walk away from something he seems to enjoy so much. He was a cook in the army, he worked crabbing ships in Alaska, he ran a junkyard, and he built his own house… but Hollywood was more than he bargained for. And the stories about the colorful WWOOFers they’ve had in the past 3 years have left Julia and me laughing ‘til we cried more than once.

Tomorrow we hope to be taking a day trip to Tepic. It is the cultural center of the indigenous Huichol Indians, famous for beautiful bead work. We only stopped there on our way to Aticama and didn’t see much, and it’s about a 2 hour bus ride. Hopefully we might be able to catch a van/taxi that leaves from Aticama rather than a bus, it would be much faster.

Be well, let us know how life is back home, and keep us in your thoughts and prayers. Until then, as they say in Aticama, se le vaya bien!

~Philip