Tepoztlan

I can't believe we've been in Cuernavaca almost a week. The time has sped by and our little brick casita seems quite homely now. This morning I saw a lizard about 15 - 20 cm long, greenish with a gold band around its neck. Al said there was a lizard on the ceiling when he gave his lecture this morning.

Today at lunchtime Enrique took us up to Tepoztlan. It's a charming town, nestled between a couple of picturesque, steep, forested mountains.



There is a very old monastery in town, but if you like, you can climb 300m up the mountain to a pre-Hispanic pyramid that distantly overlooks the town. It takes about 1 and a half hours of walking up an almost vertical slope but they say that they pyramid has very 'good energy'. After a climb like that I don't think that I would have any energy at all, good or bad..

The pyramid is about 2000m above sea level (we are 1900m asl here at the universidad). Our hosts tell us that Mt Ruapehu is around 2200m asl. Being so high above sea level does affect your energy levels. For the first couple of days here I felt a bit light headed and getting around was a real effort.

Lunch was delicious. We ate at a very colourful restaurant called Los Colorines. Enrique wanted to order for me their signature dish made from colorines - red beans that grow on a tree, but they were out of colorines today. Could be just as well, as an internet search this afternoon revealed that the seeds are poisonous, and are hallucinogenic in small quantities. Maybe it is a little joke they have with the tourists!

Instead I had cecina, which is meat sliced very thinly and salted, then grilled. It came with nopales, which are the flat stems of cacti - prickly pear I think. They remove the spines then steam it, slice it and serve in a salad with onion, coriander and a crumbled feta-type cheese called panela. The nopales have a unique taste, a bit tangy, slightly salty, really nice. Al had chicken with mole sauce - this is the sauce made from chocolate, but it has all sorts of other things in it, like sesame seeds, almonds, onions and banana. Enrique had chiles rellenos - big poblano chiles stuffed with mince, nuts and dried fruit, cooked in a tomato sauce. Em has discovered a Mexican alternative to chicken nuggets - tacos dorados - chicken rolled up in tortillas which are fried and served with sour cream, grated panela and guacamole. She wolfed down three of them, plus the guacamole.

Enough about food! We had a wander around - there were lots of street stalls selling interesting things, fruits including an olive-sized drupe called nanches, which I must look up on the internet as well. A couple of stalls were selling incense, not the stick kind, but the kind that looks like dusty bark - you throw it onto the fire - and it smelled really good!

We checked out a small old church that looked quite tumbledown from the outside but it was absolutely stunning inside. Workmen had just finished applying gold leaf - the final touch to the restoration of the interior, and they were putting away their gear as we entered.



The monastery was also beautiful, with a huge old church, very high ceilinged and with lots of colourful statuary. Em liked the decorations very much - she told me that she thinks Mexicans have very good taste. The pictures below are from the monastery itself.