Monte Alban - Another City, Another Ruin

It felt good to be on the move again.  The toll road from Puebla to Oaxaca City was surprisingly smooth for the most part.  It ran first through long valleys of brilliant emerald green south of Puebla, miles of fertile farmland still dominated by the sky-carving blue silhouette of the La Malinche volcano.  Then it spun up into a belt of rounded dry mountains, on switchbacks cutting through crumbly bluffs of yellow and red rock with vistas of a sea of hills tinted in pale thorny vegetation. 

In about five hours I was entering the ugly urban outskirts of Oaxaca City.  Fortunately, I’m familiar with the pattern: as my Google Maps navigation brought me closer to the center of town, the streets got narrower, the architecture more charming, the old churches more plentiful.  My hostel was close enough to the city center that I felt okay leaving my Miata parked on the street outside.

I’m staying at the Cielo Azul hostel, a rambling place whose buildings are strung around a charming central courtyard full of plants and patio tables.  It’s so rambling, in fact, that the bathroom is quite a long outdoor walk from the dormitory, and the wi-fi only reaches the reception side of the compound.  There are plenty of other travellers here, many of whom speak English, but this is the first real “youth hostel” I’ve stayed at; everyone is in their 20s and I feel out of place, unable to join conversations. 

But that’s all right.  This is just a stop-over point: I’m burned out on cities and am eager to head on to the beaches.  Oaxaca City strikes me as a bargain-basement Puebla anyway: the streets are a little more run-down, the shops a little poorer, the central square a little shabbier.  I definitely feel that I’m further South.

However there’s one “must-see” attraction here, and that’s the ruins of Monte Alban, in the mountains above town.  I signed up for a tour of it yesterday; a van picked me up in the morning at the hostel; the driver stopped at several other hotels in town and by the time he drove up into the mountains we had a group of about a dozen people.  The guide who met us at the site, a pot-bellied fellow with sunglasses, was adept in giving his talk in two languages at once, and I was able to learn a bit of the history, about the Zapotec people (who still make up 24% of Oaxaca State’s population), the discovery of the site in 1931 by archaeologist Alfonso Caso, the “Oac” tree after which the State is named, the local variations of the ball game played in the ancient city, its contacts with the people of Teotihuacan.  After about an hour moving the large group from shade patch to shade patch, in the train of other large groups, we split up for free time to wander the site at will.

The great feature of Monte Alban is its size.  The city was created by leveling off the whole top of its mountain: the resulting flat grass plateau is vast, and the several pyramids anchoring it it like gargantuan building blocks utterly dominate the tiny figures of the tourists wandering below.  From a camera point of view these figures were excellent at establishing scale, though I wished I had wide-angle lens to really drive home the point.

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the most appealing aspects of Mexico’s ancient ruins is their blend of massive architecture and grassland.  The grass is a modern addition of course, helpfully provided by nature and weedwhacked by the government, and Monte Alban in particular seems to be a perfect aesthetic blend of meadow, knoll, and temple stone.  It’s surprisingly pleasant to stroll a wide flat lawn looking up at great edifices emerging from moss and trees, to wander among them and climb their stone stairs for interesting views and a fresh country breeze.  I think modern cities should take a cue from these ruins.  Why shouldn’t soil, grass, trees and hills be the foundation of our own urban spaces?  I think the whole thing is applicable.