They're pouring concrete for the bedroom floor this week, and it will take a while for the walls to go up, so this seemed like a good time for a trip to Guadalajara with El Arquitecto. Drives with El Arqui are always a trip.
As with so many things in Mexico, one has to go backwards to get sideways. Guadalajara is due east of San Pancho, but you have to go north first on the highway to Las Varas, then up a steep and nasty piece of road to Compostela, then southeast to Guad. Normally this can be done in four and a half hours or so, but I suspend any expectation of anything direct or speedy.
Our first unscheduled stop is in La Peñita for "five minutes" at the nursery.
We wander about, admiring palms and gingers, jasmines and fat red heliconias.
We're still several months from being able to plant, but it's lots of fun to examine the options. We discuss texture and placement and dirt, and after a longish visit with the owner who abandons his midday tortillas to chat, we're off again.
We almost make it to the Pemex station until El Arqui asks if I've tasted jaca (jackfruit), so we have to stop at a roadside stand and buy some for me to try. Not as easy as it sounds, as it involves watching the vendor open the huge, prickly, sticky fruit, clean it and carefully remove the edible nuggets which I find delicious. The orange variety tastes like cantaloupe, and the yellow is tropical and fragrant. The tree is slender and looks hardly able to hold its giant fruits. We add jackfruit to the list of trees to buy for the orchard.
Without fog, rain, or big slow trucks, the twisty road to Compostela is no problema. Before long we are high on the plateau, with views opening up--mountains and valleys, cultivated fields of blue agave, little towns scattered like spilled pearls. Time to stop at another roadside stand for some fresh-squeezed mandarin orange juice, pulpy and seedy and tasting like sunshine.
Now we are passing wide fields of sugar cane ready for harvest, feathery as pampas grass waving in the breeze. Have I tasted jugo de caña? NO? How is this possible? How about a detour? So we leave the cuota, the faster toll-road, and enter the libre--the pokey free road--into the tiny town of Santa Isabel. El Arquitecto knows of a stand where an old couple squeezes the best juice from fresh sugar cane. Sure enough, there is the old lady, who reproaches El A. for having stayed away so long. She pours us plastic cups of greenish-gray juice. It tastes the tiniest bit grassy and not as sugary sweet as I expect, and is cool and refreshing once you get past the color.
Of course, there is more to this visit than cane juice. There is fresh sage honey and molasses to buy and giant squashes to try on.
There is mango candy and coconut candy and brown sugar candy to consider, and a clever little parrot to chat with.
Finally we say our lengthy goodbyes and promise to return. I leave the parrot there, although I am sorely tempted to become a birdnapper.
Soon we are driving through stark stretches of black rock, lava fields from the eruption in the 1870's of the nearby volcano Ceboruco. We return to the cuota before Ixtlán del Río and summon the discipline not to go into the town of Jala and visit the witch. Instead, we unwrap divine sandwiches of fresh cheese and vegetables prepared for us by Arqui's angel wife, and finish a bag of chips.
From Jala past Tequila, I nearly get whiplash looking at the view. This is a stunningly beautiful area of rolling hills studded with oak trees and vistas of the Sierra Madre. I fantasize for a bit about building a stone hacienda in the hills...but I guess I have my hands full at the moment. We cross the line from Nayarit into Jalisco and enter the outskirts of Guadalajara. I recognize right away that we'll have to make another stop. Here is the restaurant that makes El Arquitecto's favorite tamales, and beside it a stand for corn on the cob, to which he is addicted. (I usually pass, having found the corn in Mexico a very different culinary experience than young, tender sweet corn. It takes me a week to get it out of my teeth.) We pull off, precariously, and he buys a sack of tamales to take to his sister, then happily devours a steamed cob sprinkled with chile.
By now, I am craving the peace and solitude of a nice hotel room. There's still some heavy traffic to stop-and-go through. We arrange the morning start to our busy tomorrow, congratulate ourselves on an excellent trip, and soon enough Arqui drops me off at my lovely hotel and heads to his sister's.
Guess where we're going first thing in the morning? Salvage Guy's!!
Your drive........ it is such a beautiful description of the lava fields, the blue agave growing in the fields on the hillsides in neat little rows and the splendid vistas on all sides... we once did that trip and stopped at the pyramids in Ixtlan del Rio..... The whole thing reminded me of Carlos Castanenda's book Journey to Ixtlan... magical and alive, as your days in Mexico are turning out to be! I really want to see that Salvage Guy's Stuff!..... GG
Posted by: Gretchen Goodliffe | January 22, 2010 at 09:45 AM