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Photo Album: Oaxaca & Monte Alban
Our rental private bus took us from Puebla to Oaxaca through some winding highways with great open landscapes. The Mexican highways are of good quality, and the drivers are generally quite polite, even in the mega-metropolis of Mexico City.
As soon as we dropped our bags, we were out walking. Our hotel was only a block or so from the busy and chaotic ( unlike Puebla ) town square and market.
We tasted the renowned Mexican brew, Mezcal, somewhat between a liqueur and a wine....and there are some 12 varieties...enough to drive me drunk.
And there was the chocolate factory sweetening up the deal. Not to forget the sampling of the famous Mole source, a chilli chocolate sauce very popular in Mexico, originated from here.
And I forgot to mention the spicy fried grasshoppers...some small then dried shrimps, some big ones. When I took the camera to sample some, the hawker lady quickly flick a newspaper over it, sorry, no pictures!
The town square was full of people, seem very rural types, there must be some sort of a gathering for them there.....
The next morning, we went in our bus, with a very knowledgeable indigenous guide for Monte Alban, a pre-Columbian archaeological site.
Sitting on top of a man made leveled ridge, Monte Alban ruin, dates back to 500 BC, was the power centre of Oaxaca and the surrounding regions for many centuries.
This particular site has many carved stones depicting various stories, and a language that is still undecoded today.
Interestingly, the diggings also revealed a people of great vanity, in order to project power and nobility. Means are used to make a human with a jaguar look...flattening their foreheads and their skulls by pressing the babies’ head when they are young, fashioning their teeth, cut their forelips to expose the ornaments drilled into the front teeth etc.
This piece of old grand vanity was built on a man made plateau, by all estimation, would have taken 150 years just to prepare. And more centuries to finish....then it all went to ruin, forgotten, until the first intensive archaeological exploration of the site conducted in 1902.
And we played Indiana Jones in one of the tombs....
After Mont Alban, some of us decided to continue with our guide, Benito, to visit a few other attractions of Oaxaca.
When the fat lady sings..., so they say!...well this one does not sing, but if she does, she’ll be a super dame.
With a girth of 58 meters, she safely claims to the fattest, Arbol del Tule of Oaxaca, Mexico, the fattest tree of the World.
I’ll let your imagination run wild here.
The local kids call one part of
it, Clinton, the other, Lewinsky....why, ......I really shall leave it here.
And there local weaving masters,
candle masters, not to mention, more Mezcal breweries that show the entire
making process.
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| Weaving Master showing her colours |
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| A great selection of Mezcals |
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| Mezcal brewery |
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| Candle Master at work |
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| Candles for asking a girls parents for her hand.... |
And tonight, we are taking a 13 hour bus ride, on first class comfort ( however comfortable a bus can be !) to get to San Cristabol de las Cases.
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