Another for my collection of bad Spanish interpretations.
I'm on a guided tour of the Diego Rivera murals at the Palacio Nacional. They depict an amazing array of Mexican history, and our guide is terrific. He gets to one panel and says that it has some of the "más hónicos" elements in the mural. My brain freezes because I don't have a clue what "hónico" means. By the time I re-focus, he's talking abut a pyramid floating in the sky, and it reminds me of the symbol on Grandpa George's masonic mug.
Finally, several minutes later, I realize that the guide didn't say "más hónicos," but "masónicos." (They're not shown in these pics, by the way, which show another part of the mural. That trampy woman kissing a priest is part of the Capitalism panel.)
I’ve been in Mexico City for 8 days now. After much hemming and hawing, I’ve finally decided to take time off from the city’s endless cultural sites (everything from pyramids through colonial masterpieces to modern murals) to visit the monarch butterflies, who are about 4 hours west of here. Every year, they travel 2,500 miles from Canada to a winter in the mountains of Michoacán.
The trip to Angangueo is a breeze. I get up early and make quick subway connections to the bus terminal (though the Mexico City subway is crowded even at 7:45 on a Sunday morning). Hop on a bus to Zitácuaro, which is speedy. The long distance buses play movies, whether you want them to or not. So my first views of the desert hills and mountains are accompanied by Hillary Swank’s tough-girl draw melting Clint Eastwood’s scabby old heartstrings in Million Dollar Baby. I change in Zitácuaro for Angangueo, a much more local bus, which seems to stop every hundred yards or so for something or other. I ask the fare collector to let me know when we reach my hotel, but he forgets, so I overshoot my hotel by a bit. I’m walking back toward the center of town when a guy on the street asks me if I want to visit a butterfly sanctuary. I do indeed. His name's Enrique and he offers to drive me around all afternoon for a very reasonable fee. So I hop in his big red truck and he takes me to my hotel. I drop off my stuff and off we go. It's a beautiful drive up a narrow winding road to the El Rosario sanctuary.
Great sunny views of the city nestled into its valley along the way. Once at the sanctuary, Enrique sets me up with a guide named David. He's a skinny kid who might be as old as 20. His idea of guiding turns out to be sprinting ahead of me as fast as he can go. Now this is a steep climb up stairs and rocky roads. The sanctuary entrance is at abut 10,000 feet and you have to climb another 1,000 to reach the monarch’s preferred altitude. So I'm panting away, trying my best to keep up with David. Near the top. he points to a tree. I see nothing. He mentions that it’s cloudy, which I’ve just noticed myself. It’s been a beautiful sunny day, but indeed, it started to cloud over while I was trudging up the trail. And I know that the butterflies won’t fly unless it’s sunny. So I give David a tip and send him back downhill, saying I'm going to hang out by myself and wait for the sun to come out.
Just as I reach the top it starts to rain. I finally notice that what David was pointing at was the dark brown clumps in the trees. It’s the monarchs, huddled together in huge, tight, dark colonies.
Then I’m distracted from this impressive sight when heavy hard pellets of hail start to pelt me from above. The skies open up and a torrent of surprisingly annoying hailstones are bouncing off my head (ouch) and ears (worse). I stop looking up because my nose is particularly vulnerable. In just a few moments, the path is covered in pelleted ice. The only butterflies we see are the few poor slobs that are shot down by hail bullets. A guard walks by, picking up the bodies and placing them discretely n the woods so that the path will look a bit less like the runway of butterfly death it has become.
Regardless, I convince myself that it will clear up and the butterflies will fly, so I sit there in the cold wet hail for an hour. An hour. I'm only wearing a T-shirt. I stop taking pictures because a) there's nothing to take pictures of and b) the focus will suck because my hands are shaking and my teeth are chattering.
I finally give up and trudge my way back down. It clears up about 10 minutes later, while I'm having a couple of quesadillas and trying to keep my legs from shaking.
We drive back down to town and Enrique gives me a nice tour and we gab. He was in the Mexican army, but didn’t care for it, so then went to Tennessee, where he worked for a year and a half in a Chinese restaurant. He earned $250 a week and worked every day he was in the States except for the 4th of July, when the restaurant was closed.
We stop at his house and his son joins us for the rest of our town tour. Enrique has a regular job at an electric plant, but he drives on Sundays for his father, who's got a fleet of 3 trucks. So tomorrow Ernesto, the father, will take me to a different sanctuary where hopefully my luck will be better.
I comfort myself by taking lots of pictures of the streets of Angangueo. There's no TV (or heat) in my hotel room, so never mind the Oscars.
Monday, February 23
Ernesto picks me up at 8:00. It’s a beautiful sunny morning, a bit cool, but not a cloud in the deep blue sky. Very promising. We’re off in a different big red truck to Sierra Chincua, a reserve on the other side of Angangueo.
We’re the first visitors to arrive. This reserve feels much more wild than El Rosario. The butterflies return to the mountain every year, but to a slightly different spot. Ernesto hasn’t been inside the park recently, so he chats with some men tending horses at the entrance and finds out where the butterflies are at the moment. At El Rosario, you hike up to reach the butterflies, but here at Sierra Chincua you hike down. It’s a long hike, so I have a chance to find out a lot about Ernesto. Like many Mexicans, he's cobbled together a diverified portfolio of professions. In addition to the mini-fleet of trucks, he has a ranch (corn and feed grain) and a fish stall at the local market. He drives into Mexico City twice a week to buy fish. I also learn that he has ten children, though only three still live at home (and they’re all adults).
After an hour and a half of hiking, I’m beginning to wonder if we know where we or the butterflies are. The trail has long since turned to an increasingly vague set of possibilities.
But then we find them a bit after 10:00. Yesterday’s sad brown clumps have opened up and now sparkle a deep orange in the sun.
Thousands of butterflies are flying about skittishly. As the day warms up, the air becomes quite thick with them. Butterflies as a weather condition. It’s exciting and peaceful at the same time. We walk down a ravine, deep into their chosen ground. After about half an hour, Ernesto tells me that we’re lucky to be there early, because we are now well into the habitat itself, which is off-limits to visitors. We step right up to a fallen branch that's covered with butterflies that are just waking up as the sun hits it.
He tells me about the platforms he helped a film crew install when making a documentary last year. I lie down and gaze upwards, watching the flickering and listening to the soft breeze. Then I realize it’s not the wind, but the flapping of butterfly wings I hear.
My poetic wispiness shatters when both Ernesto and me hear voices. He looks alarmed and we both have to dash uphill about 50 yards or so to get out of the forbidden zone. Running uphill at 11,000 feet is something I do not recommend to anyone used to living at sea level. After two or three strides, my heart starts to pound. By the time we reach what feels like safety, it’s going so fast I can't feel the space between beats.
False alarm. Turns out it wasn’t park guides, but just another private driver and two Canadians. So we loll in a different, equally delightful clearing for another hour, gabbing and watching the butterflies. By noon, the sun has warmed more of the colonies and the air is oranger than ever. At last a guide comes by and shoos us out of our cozy clearing, which was apparently still beyond the limit.
The hike back is long and hard—it’s uphill in this direction and we have to stop many times to catch our breath. We also pass the day’s tourist lode coming the other way. There aren’t tons of them, but I’m extremely grateful that Ernesto got me there before anyone else. He tells me that in March when the butterflies leave, they fly right through town. It must be quite a sight, though I’m quite satisfied with what I’ve seen today.
