Nevado de Toluca Part I - Hiking the Volcano

I. The Tour

I was up at 6:00 am to ride on the near-deserted Metro to the meeting spot at the Plaza de La Transpatencia, and as the street vendors were setting up their carts in the pre-dawn gloom in front of the Tok’s restaurant we introduced each other and climbed into the van.

I took a tour yesterday to hike Nevado de Toluca, a towering inactive volcano about 50 miles west of Mexico City.  Since my Miata wheels are still frozen while I await my new driver’s license, a tour was just the thing, and indeed made for a far more enjoyable day than it would have been on my own: more social, better directed, and I wasn’t the one who had to thread Mexico City traffic to get us there! 

I highly recommend the tour group, Aztec Explorers: it’s run by a friendly husband and wife team, Peter Winckers and Lidia Herrera, who guide frequent day trips in and around Mexico City. 

There were 13 of us in the comfy Toyota van as we headed out, including a couple of Americans my age who were long-term residents living in Mexico City, and who loaded me up with so many “must-see” places in the city that I could almost wish my license delayed further.  The route to the volcano did its best to gainsay them, however, running through nothing but the decrepit urban sprawl of the city’s outskirts, briefly broken by a region of faceless tinted-glass corporate towers still under construction, then back to more littered and crumbling cement landscapes in the city of Toluca.  The megalopolis seemed inescapable (not to mention educational, alas), but finally we were into the green of the countryside, and there was the volcano pure above us.

Traffic delays had meant breakfast at a tamale stand alongside the gas station, and then we were delayed further by attempting a back road up the mountain; the dirt road was all but ruined with ruts and washouts, and our van jounced and crawled along until, forced to squeeze past a returning truck with miraculous tilted inches between, the other driver informed ours that the road was impassable further up.  We had to turn around, retrace our bouncing crawl, drive around to the main road and ascend on that.  The result was a five-hour journey, but a faster ascent, and as we climbed under the mountain’s midday cloud-lid the scenery out the windows became lovely.

The base camp, where our hike began, is over 14,000 ft., and under the grey of the clouds the clean air was cold enough for sweaters and jackets.  From the camp the trail to the crater rim was steep but short, probably only a quarter mile; in the thin air, however, we moved slowly, and talk faded as the beauty of the mountains unfolded around us. 

II.  Photo Essay

Base camp

The view from the rim.  The caldera is a mile wide.

The crater holds two lakes.  Down we went!

Though we didn't have sun, I liked the threatening clouds, dragging their gossamer skirts through the high peaks and spreading varying luminescences and shadows across the landscape.  And it was only when our scattered group reconvened at the base camp and slid open the door to the van that the heavy rain started pelting down.  Perfect timing!

I could have called it a day at that point, but the tour continued.  From there we proceeded to the nearby town of Metepec for lunch and colonial architecture— see Part II for that part of the day.

And More Frida

I’ve been living within two blocks of one of Mexico’s most popular attractions for a month.  It was only a matter of time before I braved the lines and went to the Frida Khalo museum.

A fellow pilgrim at the hostel, Maya from Japan, and myself got an early start and only had to wait 45 minutes on line with the tour buses pulling in to disgorge further hordes behind us and the T-shirt and pastry vendors working the crowd along with the lady going back and forth with the sign you could scan to buy Internet tickets and the periodic eddies in line as groups circled and grinned for a backed-off cellphone before the, yes, actual blue wall of the famous Casa Azul.

The Frida circus is a triumph of personal iconography, and her image is essentially the art-world version of the walking Mickey Mouse who gathers crowds of children at Disneyworld.  For every savant of twentieth century painting come to be breathless over brushstrokes there are a hundred customers paying simply for the privilege of offering homage to the image, and the great wink is the fact that Frida herself is the party most complicit in the transaction.

Somewhere between the famous “Eyebrows!” is a painter, a studio, and a story, and the Casa Azul offers a wonderfully disarranged and overcrowded venue for trying to find them.  The home, which was shared by Khalo and Diego Rivera during their (in)famous marriage(s), is gargantuan enough to encompass a block-long line of lunch guests, and one mingles through a vast courtyard garden full of fountains, pools and inexplicable floral pyramids at the foot of a bombastic stone castle full of stairs, terraces, sunken dens and lofty ceramic-pot crenellations.  If one doesn’t come away impressed with the spoils of artistic fame one need only pause before the spectacle of what was once a domestic breakfast patio now given over to a repeating movie about the hostess’ sex life.

Indoors the traffic is more regulated, and here one confronts the enigma of Frida’s art, which vacillates unpredictably between a soft delicacy of technique and a primitivism that approaches flat-out incompetence.

Portrait of Frida's father

Frida and Stalin

Watermelons

Frida’s two most famous attributes are likewise contradictory, being the crippling pain of a disabled body coupled with the magnetism of a seductress, and the museum presents both in sufficient quantity to render them forever unentangleable, but what I didn’t expect was the focus on a third attribute: her involvement with Communism.  Only in Mexico, perhaps, would a museum so unapologetically lay out such evidence—ranging from the “Frida and Stalin” painting quoted above to a bedside collage of Marx, Engles, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to the several photos of her alongside Trotsky to (I swear) a medical corset painted with the hammer and sickle—without denting attendance in the least.  There hovers just beyond my reach some relationship between the iconography of Frida’s art and the art and iconography of Communism, with the timing such that I’m not sure which influenced which...or whose pain and seductiveness whose...

Upstairs things settled down.  Here was Frida’s studio, and all else faded away before the hard tools and efficient arrangements of an artist at work. 

After that we got to see the bedrooms (with Frida’s death mask!), the kitchen (with “Frida” and “Diego” spelled out in colored stones on the wall), and a gruesomely “surgical” exhibit of her medical supports, undergarments, and prosthetics arranged in harsh light against white tile.  Finally there was another exhibit of her clothes, and, of course, the inevitable gift shop.

But to me the studio was the heart of the journey: the craft beneath the crafty, the workspace beneath the wealth and, hidden in the castle tower as it were, the functioning magic spell of art, being the transcendence of pain through light.

UNAM vs. Av Sosa (with Fonoteca Nacional)

Yesterday was another day when I set out with ambitions that didn’t fully work out, but in this case they led to an unexpected and wonderful day.

I had set out early, on foot, for UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico), the huge university in Mexico City—indeed, the largest in Latin America.  I had heard that its architecture was in and of itself worth seeing, and also on campus were a good modern art museum and an archaeological excavation of an ancient site, called Cuicuilco.  UNAM was a bit of a hike from my hostel, but I had picked out a shortcut and picked up a coffee, and it was only a half hour’s stroll down small streets on the beautiful sunny morning to the nearest protuberance of the campus.

My first setback came when the entry point on that protuberance was gated and locked, forcing me to make a much longer walk, on trafficky major avenues this time, around to the university’s main entrance.  Ah, Mexican shortcuts.  I did finally get onto the campus, and gawped around, but alas the architecture in question left me somewhat aesthetically unrewarded.

It’s quite possible, however, that I simply missed the heralded agora, for as soon as I set out for the modern art museum I discovered the central fact about the UNAM campus: it’s HUGE.

A tiny part of the UNAM campus

To make a long story short, I got lost, found nobody on the late-July campus of whom to ask directions, walked something like four miles along and around various campus roads and paths (past even more boring architecture), saw the art museum from a distance but never did find a path to get to its entrance, noted on Google Maps that the Cuicuilco site was several more miles further South, and gave up.

On my walk back, however, I stumbled into a previously unexplored part of my native Coyoacán, on Av. Francisco Sosa.  And all at once I was walking through the prettiest part of Mexico City I’d yet seen.

Av. Sosa is a narrow cobblestoned street past flowering parks, ancient walls, stone bridges over little rivers, expensive homes aloft in the occluding leaves, sudden clearings for a venerable church, in short, the most walkable secret street you could ask for. 

Along the cobblestoned way I found myself suddenly before a remarkable institution called the Fonoteca Nacional, devoted to “safeguarding the country’s sound heritage.”  It’s open to the public for free, through an inviting orange-and-gold archway, and consists of two parts.  The first, in the shady pillared entry courtyard, is a large touch-screen with hanging headphones, where you can dial up and listen to selections from a vast library of historic Mexican sounds, from indigenous music to political speeches.  (I was able to compare Porfirio Diaz’ slow, sonorous delivery to Lázaro Cárdenas’ rapid, incisive and exhaustive argumentation.)

The second part, opening out through another fanciful orange-and-gold archway, is a large enclosed park filled with trees, paths, flower gardens, arched nooks and ready benches, and is literally a “sound garden” with speakers throughout playing quiet classical music.  Coffee is dispensed for free, a host of kittens have the run of the place, and the whole effect is like a laboratory for lowering urban blood pressure.  Footsore as I by then was, there was no resisting the waiting bench and the book from my pack, and the next thing I knew an entirely pleasant hour had drifted by.

I hadn’t gone twenty steps past the Fonoteca, it seemed, before I came across another lovely courtyard open to the public, this one apparently called the Casa de Cultura and affiliated with a theater, but opening to a wide cobblestoned mini-village of little shops and cafes, with a sculpture garden.

And not twenty steps from that, it seemed, was the perfect place for lunch: an attractive Mexican restaurant with an upstairs balcony patio overlooking a public square, where I had a delicious chile relleno.

And that capped off a terrific day, all found in my local Coyoacán!

Desultory Museuming

I’m still in Mexico City; I’m still awaiting the delivery of my replacement bank card and driver’s license.  

On Sunday I finally bought a new cell phone, at a “Sanborn’s” department store in the Centro Coyoacán mall, putting it on my credit card.  It’s a cheap phone (a Polaroid, it cost about $140 US with the plan) and it works like one—i.e., very slow and full of pop-up ads.  But at least I have phone capability and Google Maps again.  In one way it’s superior to my old phone: it works!  My old one, with Sprint, was supposed to give me service in Mexico through “Sprint Worldwide,” but it only did so for a few miles past the border; after that I could only get data in wi-fi zones.  This cheap thing is on a Mexican carrier and has a 4G connection everywhere. 

My new Mexican phone number, for those who want to call or send me texts, is: (+52) 55 6903 0700. 

My first task with it was to call my bank and WSDOT and ask where my cards were.  BECU said they thought my new bank card would be mailed on Friday.  WSDOT confirmed that they received my replacement form but had no idea when or how the new driver’s license would be mailed.

Great.

In the meantime my Spanish class has come to an end, which gives me more free time in Mexico City.  So yesterday I went back to the city center to visit some more of the many museums there.  I had grand, multi-museum ambitions, but for various reasons the day became a bit of washout.  My first instinct was to catalog it as below blog-worthy, but then I thought, well, first of all no one has heard from me in a while, and secondly, there’s something valid in the experience of a vacation day where things just...don’t fully succeed.

I started my morning at the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia, which is dedicated to honoring the victims of genocide throughout history: a “downer” museum, but from what I’d heard quite a powerful one. 

Unfortunately I misread the ticket options, and tried to buy a General Admission ticket only to wind up with a pass to the temporary exhibit only.  I didn't realize it until I tried to proceed to the general exhibits, whereupon I was stopped by a guard (who rushed into the elevator to prevent me from going up), and at that point I didn’t feel like either trying to ask for an “upgrade” or paying again for a full ticket, so I left.

But I did see the temporary exhibit, which was a series of art installations on the subject of “Feminicidio,” or the murder of women.  (Strangely appropriate as I’m working on a feminist novel.)  There was a room projecting gigantic slides of murdered girls’ bedrooms; another arranged like halls in a police station with dossiers on slain women and posters of individual stories; a third with photos of female faces in which one could step close to speakers on the wall to hear “Sounds of Death” (my morbid curiosity resulted only in the sound of a subway station). 

My Spanish class enabled me to at least contextualize the wall displays full of sobering statistics for Mexico, and all in all it was a case of powerful facts overwhelming one’s subjective opinion of the artistic frame.  An effective museuming downer, then (though energizing for my rape-and-revenge heroine within), at any rate enough so for me to willingly postpone the barred Holocaust/Rwanda rooms for a return visit.

Almost next door to the museum was what I hoped would be an antidote: the Museo de Arte Popular, which is dedicated to Mexican handcrafts and folk art.  The kitsch alert was front and center here, with a painted Volkswagen Beetle next to the ticket booth, but I bought my ticket anyway and went in.

The museum is four stories around an atrium, the upward view through which is enlivened by a population of gigantic colorful creatures on the balconies, which I gather are taken out and put on parade during a festival in October.

The static displays, alas, mostly failed to live up to their whimsically evocative ushers.  There is an essential problem in distinguishing a museum of pop art from an actual art gallery, kitchenware shop, or toy store, and in this case the four floors of folk art couldn’t help evoking those more specialized venues where one felt one would find better stuff.  In short, and quite possibly because the objects weren’t for sale, the museum was somewhat dull.

Four floors of museuming is four floors by any other name, and when I emerged into the crowded streets at midday I was already tired.  I had a quick torta lunch at a little restaurant on the pedestrian mall, and then decided on one more outing: I hadn’t yet seen the interior of the Palacio Nationale, which hosts several large-scale murals by Diego Rivera. 

It was a long walk down the pedestrian mall, dodging crowds and the small army of shouting hawkers trying to push cards into one’s hand, to get to the Zocalo, scene of my first day in Mexico City.  There, impossible to miss, was the block-long Palacio Nacionale, Mexico’s main government building. 

Alas, it was closed to the public.  The flag was at half mast for, I later learned, the anniversary of the death of Benito Juarez, but the metal barricades and ranks of policemen standing under the arcades with plexiglass shields suggested the presence of a more current dignitary as a reason.

And that concluded my day of desultory museuming.   I headed back to my hostel to rest.