February 21, 2017 – Pluma Hidalgo
Debbi’s pen pal (of 51 years), Linda, her husband Barry, and her sister, Marlene from Edmonton, are here in an all-inclusive resort in Tangolunda for two weeks, and we thought it would be fun to go on a tour together.
Deb contacted our friend Enrique (our Mexican Landlord and registered tour guide), and he is giving us an all-day tour! The tour includes an authentic local town (Santa Maria Huatulco), a mountain-top town that is famous for its coffee (Pluma Hidalgo), and a mountain hotel/cafe/spa where you can go zip-lining through the forest. Saturday morning rolled around, Enrique picked us up promptly at 09:00 in a nice shiny air-conditioned van, and off we went!
The viewpoint overlooking Santa Cruz. The orange building on the right is our apartment building. Left to right: Marlene, Barry, Linda, Steve & Deb tucked away in the back.
We started by driving up to the viewpoint overlooking Santa Cruz Huatulco (where we live), and Enrique told us the story of how Santa Cruz (saint cross) and La Crucecita (little cross) got their names. Legend has it that long before Europeans came to Mexico, some guy came out of the sea carrying a cross-shaped piece of wood, and put it into the ground right where the church is today. No religious significance, it was just an interesting piece of wood, but they were told that this piece of wood would bring them prosperity. When the conquistadores showed up, and there wasn’t anything worth pillaging, they burned the town down, and the only thing that survived the fire was the cross. As per normal, someone decided that the gods had spoken, so both towns ended up being named after the cross-shaped piece of wood. The churches in both towns have pieces of the wood as holy relics, and there is a piece at the Vatican in Rome.
Then it was off on a 30-minute drive to Santa Maria Huatulco. Deb and I have been there before, but it’s a completely different experience when you have a knowledgeable guide. Highlights of the tour included tortilla-making, the church, and the graveyard.
These are really cool. Taxis or produce transport, whatever gets the job done.
Enrique knows a lady who runs her one-person tortilla factory out of a little lean-to on the main street. Tortillas start their brief and generally tragic lives as fresh corn kernels, which are boiled with lime, dried for a week, and ground by hand on a mortar and pestle. Then water is added to make a dough, and a dough-ball is put between two pieces of waxed paper in a hinged squeezer and squeezed just the right amount to form a raw tortilla. Then it is flung onto the outside of a beehive oven until it is just toasty, and voila! You have a single tortilla. It looks pretty easy until you try it, which of course we did. Mine looked like a bat-signal while Deb’s was more avant-garde. They tasted good, though. Maria does this at least 600 times every day, 365 days a year. She is not the only tortilleria in town, but she is one of the busiest and best.
Raw materials. This corn is not edible until it is treated with lime.
This is the paste of treated and ground corn, ready to be squished.
They bubble up because of the gases released with heat, from the lime and corn.
Being coached on the finer points of tortilla-squishing.
The church is in the town square, and looks a lot like every other church in Mexico. The difference is that this one is over 450 years old! The graveyard is very cool. Everything is more or less above ground here, so the grave-things are basically open buildings for each family that house the gravestones, urns, decorations, flowerpots, etc. According to Enrique, funerals are a VERY big deal here, a bargain basement funeral runs 80,000 pesos ($5,000), with friends and relatives pitching in to help pay, and the sky’s the limit. Since a typical wage here is $4/day, that’s a LOT of money! Apparently, the cartel bosses up in Sinaloa have 2-story mausoleums with air-con, music, and security. I guess that means something like “I may be dead, but I’m still winning.”
This place is really, really big, and it’s full of dead people.
Then it was time to head up to Pluma Hidalgo, which is a very pretty 45-minute climb up a windy paved highway to 4,500 feet. It’s a beautiful spot right on the ridge-top of a mountain, so there are scenic vistas everywhere you look as the land falls away in all directions. Not to mention that the temperature is 25 degrees up in the mountains, which is very cool and refreshing!
It started to rain just as we were headed down the mountain. It was very refreshing to have a cool day!
Hanging out on the street.
A very busy yard!
We all visited a coffee factory and ordered a couple of kilos of coffee each, as the coffee from here is locally famous and quite reasonable in price. A medium-roast, low-acid coffee, both Deb and I quite like it. It’s much better than the Weasel coffee from Vietnam, and no small animal has eaten it and pooped it out. Probably.
This coffee business has been in the family since the 1800s. The family has 2 restaurants in Santa Cruz that have been serving this coffee since 1938.
Enrique explains the process, but when he gets to the part where the beans were shucked by hand before machinery, he cannot demonstrate. So the owner did the right thing & demonstrated. The strength in that man’s hands was..well, strong enough to crush a coffee bean!
Processing and selling are all done in this little shop.
The hot water is poured over the grounds, gently stirred for 30 seconds, and poured into cups.
Then we went for a walking tour of the town while they ground and bagged our coffee! It’s a very pretty town, with viewpoints everywhere, there are lots of flowers, and the people are very friendly.
Note the flower in her hand. We were all standing around, looking at the steep streets, and the kids were just getting out of school. This little one walked straight towards me and handed me the flower. I felt very privileged and touched.
Then we stopped at what could be called an orchid garden, except there aren’t many orchids blooming right now. It’s actually a lady’s house, and she has managed to shoehorn a zillion plants into her little yard with twisty little footpaths through the whole thing. It is a very cool experience, with lots of photo opportunities!
This is what the Orchid Ladies’ house looked like, just on one side. You should have seen the rest of the yard.
This is one of her ‘streets’ in this itty bitty yard.
I don’t know the name of these.
This is a vanilla vine. It is not blooming, but once the flowers come and are pollinated, they dry up, and poof, there is your bean.
She had a zillion different pots,.. this is a tire, but she had plants in old soccer balls, shells, cans, baseballs, bricks, broken dishes..just that in itself was interesting
Enrique tells us about the flower that blooms yellow in the morning, but as it dies in the evening, it turns red. It only lasts 1 day.
This is called the Pineapple flower, for obvious reasons.
The coffee plant.
After picking up our coffee, we loaded up, and it was off to the hotel/cafe/spa for a walk of the grounds, lunch, and a zip-line. The good folks at the restaurant serve up an Oaxacan platter for two people along with a pitcher of hibiscus water (jamaica). It’s a great meal for 100 pesos each, including a healthy tip. Better yet, they made up the meal while we had a tour of the hotel and grounds!
The hotel is made of Adobe, which is mud, or fertilizer from farm animals, and water. It is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. We stayed in an Adobe hotel once and froze our butts off as there was no heat and all our clothes and sheets were damp. Not for me, but some people think they’re quaint.
The view from the hotel room.
And a pool!
They have cabins too.
Lunch was great, and then it was on to the zip-lining! This was for the three ladies only, as Barry and I would have loved to participate, but we both had important commitments. For example, I had to re-arrange all the bills in my wallet so that the Mexican guys all faced the same way. After that, I hustled down to the other end and videoed the ladies as they cheated death, hurtling over the abyss and through the jungle suspended from a mere spiderweb. There was much screaming, and it was very cool.
Remember that flower the little girl gave me? Well, it served me well. It kept me from biting my tongue but not from exercising my vocal cords. Yeehaw!
Then it was time to head home, and we were all snuggled back into our hotels by 4:15. A very good day!
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