January 7, 2009

Another great day driving around this interesting country!! We left Patzquaro this a.m. and managed to make our way (as planned) to Paracho. Paracho is world famous for the guitars that are made here and there are a lot of them!!! Every other store on the streets of the city are filled with them and the artisans who make them are working on their “made to measure” orders. We had heard of this place from a man we met in Troncones who was coming here to pick up a guitar that he had ordered for himself 3 years ago. It had taken that long for the artisan to make it special order for him!!! What a long time that seems to wait for something you’ve ordered and paid for!!!

The drive here was good. At first we thought we had missed the toll highway but were impressed with the free highway we were on so weren’t too worried about it. Before we knew it though....there were the signs pointing us to the toll highway and we were back on track with the original plan. En route to Paracho we had to go through a large city called Urupan where we managed to locate a Wal Mart and make a few necessary purchases. You don’t find many stores like that anywhere down here so it was kind of a treat to go in and find some of the things we had on our “shopping list” all in one store. The shopping list began with a small set of drawers for Lynda’s room and before we knew what had happened....we had completely decorated her room with a new mirror, some scatter rugs and a new bedspread. It was fun trying to match up the colours and since we had a car with us it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Carrying stuff home on the bus is a lot more difficult than just being able to load it into the back of the car!!

After our Wal Mart experience, we were back on the road to Paracho and as luck would have it we were stuck behind some huge trucks that were going super slow around the tight curves and up the hills we were climbing into. I didn’t mind a bit as it was a treat to drive so slowly and to be able to enjoy the scenery a little more than if we had been travelling at the usual designated speed of “as fast as the car will go”. We drove through some very different areas and we’re definitely in real Mexico again. All the women in a couple of the towns we passed through were dressed completely in traditional dress that I’ve never seen before. They wear brightly coloured long skirts that have hundreds of skinny pleats in them. They have a different coloured apron over the skirt and a totally different coloured underskirt under it all. Their blouse is another colour again (most were white with lots of embroidery on them) and they pretty well all had at least one shawl over all of it. It’s not that it was cold when we saw them out today...in fact it was very warm but it is obviously their everyday dress so they put it on regardless. The other thing that almost every female has here is a baby. It doesn’t even matter if they’re only about 15 years old....they have a baby in a sling made out of a shawl that they hang on either their front or their back. Their hands are most often free to carry other things or to complete whatever task they’re involved in. This has been the case in every city and village we’ve visited in all of Mexico, there are more babies here than you can imagine and they’re all either walking on their own as the mom has another one or two on her back or they’re in a sling. As soon as they’re old enough to walk (maybe about two years old) they’re walking everywhere and for long distances too. The other thing we’ve noticed here is that none of the kids are crying or whining. They just have to keep up and they do. There was one mom we saw on the side of the road today with 3 kids who looked to be under 5, she had another one on her back and a huge machete slung over her shoulder. They were all just returning from the fields from the look of it and so my guess is that they had all gone to work with mom for the day and were on their way home. As you can see....things are a bit different here!

Another interesting sight we came upon today along the road was a man riding his bike along the shoulder but down the wrong side of the road (ie: into the oncoming traffic) with a huge basket balanced on his head. The basket was full of bread so my guess is that he had just finished baking and was off to market with his wares. Vendors sell bread in the evenings and I’m assuming that people buy it for the morning.

Paracho is a pretty quiet little place and our hotel is very comfortable. It is called Hotel Melinda and is just about a block from the main square in the town. The room is large with two beds and cost $375 pesos ($37). There is secure parking in the courtyard at the hotel so all of our purchases should be safe overnight in the car. For dinner, we were directed to a restaurant that was supposed to be a “good one” and although it looked lovely and the lady working in it was lovely...the food was not so lovely. She served us some rice and chicken with mole. The rice was okay but mole isn’t a favourite for either of us and the chicken was so tough you could hardly chew it. We heard a rooster crow when she went into the kitchen to prepare our meal so I’m guessing it was his older brother we’d have on our plates!! Oh well.....not all the eating experiences can be as good as Rufie’s sopes or Roberto’s coconut shrimp in Troncones.
We’ll head back to Urupan and then south to Troncones tomorrow as we have to have the car back by 5:00 pm. It’s been another fun adventure and we’re both so conscious of how fortunate we are to have seen so much of Mexico and how lucky we’ve been at every stop along the way.

Lorrie