Graydon's travelog

January 28, 2001, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia

We're sitting in a really nice Internet booth with private booths, thinking over our two weeks in Mexico. We arrived here in the northeast corner of the island of Borneo yesterday, after 36 hours of non-stop plane travel from Mexico City via Los Angeles, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur. Yesterday was spent sleeping and putting bikes together, and this morning was spent swearing and sweating over luggage racks and other accessories. My bike arrived in good shape, but Joanne's front and back forks got bent, necessitating some brute force to get them straight again.

Our first week in Mexico was spent in Torreon, a rather characterless industrial town in north-central Mexico where my mother works as a science teacher in an English-language high school. We did remarkably little there, other than eat well (my mother took us out to dinner almost every night), read and practice drawing (my Christmas present from Joanne was a great how-to-draw book). My mom is keen to get out of Torreon, a town that seems more American than Mexican and seems to lack character (it was only founded in 1887 and has always been an industrial centre). It reminded me a lot of Chile, both in terms of the overall level of prosperity (fairly high) and in little things, like the appearance of streets and the lettering style on shop signs.

After a week of being pampered, Joanne and I flew down to Mexico City, flying in over an endless urban sprawl that fills the Valley of Mexico right to its rim. Poking up above the smog was the ominous smoking cone of Popocatapetl, the nearby volcano that is a good contender for Best Name for a Mountain. As we wandered through the streets around the Zocalo (the enormous central square), the difference between cosmopolitan, historic Mexico City and poky, provincial Torreon was immediately obvious.

Our first order of business was to flee the city in search of some nature. Joanne was keen to see the mountaintop nature reserve west of the city in which the Monarch butterflies that flutter around the eastern US and southern Ontario hibernate. It took a few hours to get there, driving through pretty highland basins separated by forested mountain ridges. I was surprised at how much forest there was and at the general greenness of it all; I had always pictured central Mexico as more of a desert.

After staying overnight in the little colonial town of Angangueo, we set off in the early morning chill in the back of a pick-up truck, bound for the reserve. The butterflies live on high-altitude mountain ridges (around 3000 metres above sea level), hanging in huge clusters from Balsam fir trees. I had pictured an entire mountaintop covered in orange and black butterflies, but in fact, even though there are an estimated 50 million Monarchs at El Rosario Nature Reserve, they cluster together so much that there are only maybe a couple of hundred trees in which they hang. From a distance, they look like brown, dead leaves, and it's only when you remember that these are evergreen trees that you realize that you are looking at the outer wing surfaces of thousands of butterflies. They're pretty inactive in the chilly morning air, and it's only as the sun warms them that a few of them flutter around; they're breathtakingly beautiful as they cross patches of sunlight, backlit into intense blobs of colour.

The forest floor is littered with fallen wings and groggy Monarchs; occasionally huge clumps of them fall off their hanging clusters and hit the ground fairly hard with an audible thump. It was a Kodak moment, but after a while, it was more beautiful just to stand and be surrounded by thousands of orange wings flitting through the forest.

The butterflies breed here and their offspring make the huge migration north in the spring; in the fall, another generation will return south to spend the winter hanging on El Rosario's treetops. It's amazing that such tiny animals can migrate so far, especially when you think of the erratic zigzag pattern that they fly. It's even more amazing that scientists tag Monarch butterflies (a miniscule piece of paper stuck to the edge of a wing) to follow their migration patterns. There's a map of North America at the visitor's centre with pins in it showing the point of origin of tagged butterflies recovered at El Rosario, and the pins cover almost the entire eastern half of the US, along with parts of southern Ontario

That evening my mother joined us, back in Mexico City, having flown down for the weekend. Saturday was spent at the ruins of Teotihuacan. This was a city on a grand scale, with an enormous ceremonial avenue flanked by the ruins of temples, overshadowed by immense pyramids. I can't remember ever seeing a ruin with such a vast central street, except perhaps for Luxor in Egypt. The pyramids aren't visually as pleasing as Egyptian pyramids (they're too asymmetrical and not as steep as their cousins in Giza) but they're still enormous, and have great views from the top, if you can find a spot amidst the throng of tourists up there.

After a while, being dwarfed by the scale of everything palls and you look for details, like carvings and remnants of murals. There's not too much left (much of it is in various museums), but there are a few great carved jaguar heads and serpent heads (they look oddly alike), especially on the Temple of Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent for whom the Aztec emperor mistook the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes). As well, there are a few wonderful remnants of murals left on the walls of private houses and temples. They're mostly red and yellow, with a few blues and greens, and wonderfully complex. They are to pre-Hispanic ruins in Mexico what floor mosaics are to Roman ruins around the Mediterranean, little glimpses into the beliefs and life of long-dead civilizations (Teotihuacan was sacked and deserted in about AD 600.

After nearly freezing to death in shorts and T-shirts in the misty morning, we burnt to a crisp in the afternoon, and our lobster-red skin was glad to spend the next day indoors at museums. The National Museum of Anthropology is Mexico's answer to the British Museum and the Louvre, so full of bits of the past that it overwhelms your poor brain if you try to see most of it in a day. Even with quite a few exhibit halls closed, we still staggered out stunned. After saying goodbye to my mother and loading her into the Metro, Joanne and I went to the museum on the Zocalo showing the remnants of the Aztec's main temple that were dug up in the 1970s, right behind the Cathedral. This museum, smaller and more focused on one culture and one temple, was a bit more manageable. I always feel sorry for the Aztecs and the Incas, overwhelmed by superior weapons and foreign diseases, although the other tribes that the Aztecs conquered probably weren't too keen on providing sacrificial victims for the Aztec gods. The temple always had a rack of skulls outside (echoes of Pol Pot's Cambodia, or of the Mongols); their owner's hearts had been ripped out on the altars of Huitzlipochtli and Tlaloc, the main gods of the Aztecs.

On Monday we headed east to see Puebla, a nice old colonial town with another excellent, smaller museum, and close to the most voluminous pyramid ever built, in Cacaxtla. It was already a ruin when the Spanish arrived, and they didn't even realize that the hill that they built a church on was in fact an old pagan temple, although they probably would have been pleased at the symbolism. There's not much to see today and you can't even climb all the way up because of construction work on the church, but Popocatapetl overshadowed the ruins by choosing that afternoon to belch out a huge cloud of ash and smoke (its biggest mini-eruption in 6 years) that spread to cover the sun and precipitated tiny cinders onto our heads. It was quite a spectacle, although as the cloud got bigger and blacker, we did wonder whether it might be a good idea to run for it, in case a major eruption was about to occur.

The last couple of days were spent prowling around more ruins at Cacaxtla and Tula. Cacaxtla, near Puebla, had wonderful murals, supposedly the best-preserved in Mexico, and they were nice, especially the gory scenes of battles between the armies of the eagles and the jaguars. Tula, north of Mexico City, was a bit disappointing, mostly rebuilt (all the Mexican ruins we saw were heavily rebuilt, making parts of them seem like Disney theme parks rather than archaeology sites) and not too heavily excavated. The huge standing stone warriors atop the pyramid, rather Easter Island-ish, were the highlight, along with a long frieze of jaguars and wolves at the foot of the pyramid.

And suddenly, too soon, it was time to bid adieu to Mexican food and beer and ruins and head to Asia, although with mountain climbs (Mt. Kinabalu the day after tomorrow) and orang-utans, and maybe scuba diving, waiting for us in the next few days, Borneo will provide us with its own delights before we finally hit the road on our bikes in 10 days or so, bound for Brunei and then Kuching in Sarawak. Stay tuned for more photos and blather in the weeks ahead.