Early in the morning we were collected and taken up into the Sierra Norte for the first of our two days of walking. This was arranged by a community project, one of the oldest in Mexico, and very impressive. It’s a collective of several villages that runs an eco-tourism initiative with obligatory community service for all residents, and share the profits at the end of the year through sanitation projects, etc.
The first village, Cuajimoloyas is the largest and highest, and it was certainly possible to feel the altitude. We had with us a translator, a young woman who had grown up in the US, and a guide from the village whose job it was to hand us over to a guide from the next village at the halfway point. The first part of the walk went fairly quickly, through pine forests. From the halfway point it became more beautiful, a steep descent downhill through cloud forests wreathed in mist and hung with bromeliads. Along the way it started raining, but we were at one of the ‘sights’ at the time, an old stone hut that had been done up by the eco-tourism project as a sort of ‘how we lived’ exhibit which offered protection from the rain. In other areas it rained very hard, and apparently ther were hailstorms at our next stop, at the bottom of the valley. This was a trout farm, where we had a simple soup of a light tomatoey broth with a piece of fish in it, followed by a whole trout each, stuffed with courgettes, tomatoes and corriander. Very tasty. Then the walk went steeply uphill, as always my least favourite bit. First we stopped at a woman who made pulque and had a lovely dishevelled garden full of fuchsia. We tasted several types of pulque: one natural, freshly squeezed from the plant and fermented with a piece of wood, then one mixed with brown sugar, and finally one with a peach pulverised into it. All very tasty, and a bit heady, not in an alcoholic way, but one could definitely feel the 400 rabbits taking one over.
The final scramble was a bit hellish but at least it was still cool, though humid after the rain. We arrived at our overnight stop, the village of Latuvi where we were put up in astonishingly luxurious cabins, quite a delightful improvement on accommodation in Nepal’s tea houses. Even the beds and bedding were better than in our Airbnb in Oaxaca, crisp pure cotton instead of a limp polyester blend, and there was hot water in the showers. Very pleasant and a good night’s sleep.