on the edge

Mexico City: Post Swine Flu

We are among those who have been observing the whole swine flu fiasco from the Mexican side. Like most people in the world we were initially scared and wondered what we should do. Should we immediately get tickets and fly to the US? Wait and see what happens and possibly be trapped in a bad situation?

We decided to wait because the information we were getting from the internet was presenting some really different information from that being presented by the mainstream media.

The authorities in mexico City were quoting figures of 159 deaths while the WHO was saying there were only 9 deaths. Clearly a discrepancy this large pointed to some very large problem. In the end we found out that the Mexican government had no swine flu testing facilities and were sending the tests to Canada with a 5 day delay to get the results back. Clearly their numbers were guesswork and in all probability included standard flu deaths and possibly others with similar symptoms. As the WHO numbers began to rise, the Mexican numbers began to fall at a much faster rate. Currently the WHO claims that there have been 60 confirmed deaths in Mexico 99 less than originally reported.

Because of healh needs of our own it was necessary for us to visit Mexico City for treatment of a chronic condition. We have been here 5 days and have asked everyone we have met whether they know of anyone who had swine flu and we have not found a single person. Consider that we are visiting a hospital daily for treatment and have talked to the hospital personel and still have found no one with any knowledge of anyone with swine flu. People here like us were very scared. In the end the city has gone back to work and is dealing with the economic impact of the week of no work and no income.

Where we live in Puerto Vallarta, the economic effect has been devastating. May is usually a slower month, but this May there are no tourists there. The travel warning from the State Dept. has effectively stopped people from travelling to Mexico. So far there have been no documented cases of swine flu  in Puerto Vallarta. Business are open, but clients are missing. I hope the truth of the situation will begin to emerge and people will realize that this is another example of media hysteria.

Road Journal: Zacatecas

Originally uploaded by waywuwei

On the road north we stopped at the 400 year old colonial silver mining town of Zacatecas for two days. Zacatecas is beautiful, with streets made of cut stone and sidewalks made of black cut volcanic rock. Zacatecas is a UN World Heritage site.

Road Journal: Saltillo-Monterey

Saltillo-Monterey
Originally uploaded by waywuwei

This is the mountain range to the south as you drive from Saltillo to Monterey. They are predominately limestone, the remnants of some sea floor long ago. They are mining here in several places to make cement to build Mexico's rapidly expanding industrial and residential sector. From the looks of things they have enough limestone for the next 1000 years.

Road Journal: Zacatecas-Saltillo: La Fogata

La Fogata
Originally uploaded by waywuwei

"The Bonfire"

On the road from Puerto Vallarta to New York. This desolate stretch is between Zacatecas and Saltillo. It is a high plain dessert. It is green ths time of year (August) because of the seasonal rains, but is otherwise dry. There are no rivers, lakes or other sources of water. When you look at this picture imagine nothing around it for miles. Nothing but scrub brush and yucca trees. I'm not sure that is their proper name, but they are not more than 20 feet tall, most being about 10 feet tall and have beautiful white flowers this time of year.

We stopped here for some lunch and they gave a us a limited choice: all meats. We chose borrego: goat and were brought 2 legs of goat about twice the length of the plates they were served on with a few very greasy french fries on top. We looked at this and had the same thought: "I don't think I can do this". We had a few bites, but had it wrapped up to go as our dog Sugar thought it was great. She finished up the last of it that evening. We stopped in Saltillo at a McDonalds.

In the end, La Fogata is best fo gotten.

Fritz: 1992-2008

Fritz: 1992-2008
Originally uploaded by waywuwei

Our wonderful dog Fritz left this world today. He had been ailing for some time, becoming increasingly unable to walk, loosing weight and had become incontinent. We called him Buddha dog because he was totally nonviolent. He couldn't be enticed into a fight by even the most aggressive dogs. He was part Australian Cattle Dog which Mary found at the Berkeley Humane Society on 9th St. He hated that place and would stop and refuse to walk if we went anywhere near it. He was born in New York and was adopted by a young college student who brought him home to California. The student's mother had other ideas and took him to the Humane Society. We are thankful for that since he probably would not have been around for us to adopt. In my first meeting with him, I came home from work and walked into the dining room where Mary was sitting and Fritz was under the able hiding from me. He looked out at me skeptically as if to say "You're not going to take me back to that horrible place are you?" In a few minutes we made friends and I assured him that he had a home and could stay as long as he wanted. He moved with us to Mexico in 2003 and loved it here. He never had to wear a leash again.

El Repollo Rojo

El Repollo Rojo
Originally uploaded by waywuwei

The Red Cabbage
Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico

A small restaurant tucked away in a Mexican neighborhood on the Rio Cuale, the river that runs through Puerto Vallara. With great cooking and eclectically decorated.

It has great cooking from around Mexico. Their signature dish is Chilies en Nogada. Developed over a hundred years ago to celebrate Mexican Independence, it's colors match the Mexican flag: red, green and white. It consists of a green poblano chili stuffed with a picadillo mixture of: meat, dried fruits and nuts. It is covered with a white almond sauce and sprinkled with red pomegranate seeds. It is served cold. I can't go here and not get one. They are too good. It is best when you get a poblano chili that has some heat to it. Sometimes it has no heat and sometimes it's heavenly.

They also have great moles, mole Poblano, mole Oaxaceno and pipian mole, made from pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds.

Salsa Verde - Green Salsa

Salsa Verde is one of the staple sauces of Mexico. Often it can be kind of gloppy and glutinous, but when it's good it can upgrade the simplest of meals. This recipe which was made from Rick Bayless book "Salsas That Cook" is very traditional. Rick uses the oven to cook the ingredients before hand, I would suggest grilling on an outdoor grill to get a more smoky flavor, but you will also loose more of the juices.

To see how to make it, check out the photos. They will take you step by step through the procedure. Salsa Verde

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
  Originally uploaded by waywuwei

Every December in the weeks before Christmas, is celebrated the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe who is the patron Saint of Mexico. It's a big deal, especially in places like Puerto Vallarta where she is the town patron also. It goes on for over a week and each day groups of pilgrims come from different places to the local church. They arrive with candles and elaborate floats that they've brought from the place where they live. Many walk all of the way. Each time a group of pilgrims arrive the church bell ring. This goes on night and day for a week. At the peak of pilgrim arrivals two days before the feast day, the bells ring every 15 minutes night and day.

Rooftop Singers

  Rooftop Singers 
  Originally uploaded by waywuwei

One of the things I love about Mexico is this phenomenon that occurs on occasions. When we lived in Bucerias about an hour north of here, we had two neighbors, Juan and Maria. Juan was in his 90's and had lived through the revolution and would often talk about it. Every year on Juan's birthday, we would be woken up in the early morning by a Mariachi band. Maria would hire them to wake Juan on the morning of his birthday. It was an incredibly beautiful way to wake up in the morning and a beautiful gift.

This group began playing around 5:15 am this morning. They are still playing now as I write this at 9:45 am. They are not quite as wonderful as a full Mariachi group, just a drummer and an accordion player, but the accordion player is really good and knows enough songs to fill 4+ hours. I'm not sure what the occasion is but I suspect it is someone's birthday who loves music.

A Mennonite Vendor

There are areas in Mexico where there are farms owned by the Mennonites. The younger members of the community show up from time to time selling cookies and cheese at the traffic lights in the Banderas Bay area. They are always young, the men wearing overalls and straw cowboy hats and the women wearing long dresses and little traditional caps. They don't speak a word of English, just Spanish but with blue eyes and blond hair look for all the world like gringoes.

Chacala

The Village of Chacala is about 2 hours north of Puerto Vallarta on the Pacific coast in the state of Nayarit. Because Chacala is on a small bay the beach is almost always swimmable. Many beaches on the Pacific coast here are not often swimmable. The Pacific rarely is "pacific". In the Puerto Vallarta area, the towns are on the Bay of Banderas which has many swimmable beaches. This is why it is a favorite vacation destination for foreigners as well as Mexicanos.

The restaurants along this beach were started by fishermen and their wives. Many actually live there in the back of the restaurant. The dish of choice is the pescado sarandeado which is a fresh fish, split, maranated and cooked over a wood fire. Often the fisherman will bring a bucket by your table and let you pick out the fish. You often have to wait until 2 o'clock for the meal because the fishermen don't return from the morning fishing until 12 o'clock, but you always know the fish is fresh!

See where Chacala is... [?]

A new year- 2007

This year for Christmas, we were contacted by some folks who wanted to rent our house for the two weeks over Christmas and New Years. They made us an offer we couldn't refuse so we decided to head off on a vacation of our own. Many say, why, you're living in paradise already. The problem is when you live here full time it's home and sometimes it's nice to get away from phones, internet, newspapers and kick back, read a book, do some diving, walk in a rainforest, etc.

So we chose the island of Dominica, one of the windward islands in the Caribbean. There's great scuba diving and most of the island is a mountainous tropical rainforest with literally hundreds of rivers, waterfalls, hot springs and rainbows. you see, it rains a lot in a rainforest, so rainbows were a daily thing. It was quiet with lots of opportunities to sit back and read a book with some real exercise too.

Now, we're back in Bucerias, a different sort of paradise, but it's good to be home...

Land Crabs

Each year in the spring the land crabs make their yearly migration back to the ocean. If they are lucky enough to actually make it there, they dig burrows on the beach, mate and deposit their eggs in the ocean. With humans increasingly populating their territory, they have to cross highways and cross properties many of which are surrounded by fences and walls. During that time we find them everywhere. Our little dog will often find them in closets and under beds. If I can catch them I take them to the beach. Sometimes they don't survive the encounter with the dog. Sometimes they stumble into the swimming pool where the chlorine does them in. It's a hard life being a land crab.

Sunset in Puerto Vallarta over Gringo Gulch

The houses on the hillside are on the north side of the valley of the River Cuale which comes down out of the mountains and flows to the bay through Puerta Vallarta. It is called Gringo Gulch because during the filming of "The Night of the Iguana" in 1964, a film that put Puerto Vallarta on the map, many of the stars such as Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, and director John Huston bought houses in this area. The church in the distance is this church, the church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The town of Puerto Vallarta is built at the base of the Sierra Madre mountains. The mountains in the distnce are the Sierra Vallejo mountains in the state of Nayarit where I live.

This picture was taken from an old condominium building in the hills above Play Muertos named "La Alborada" which means "the dawn".

Oaxaca: At Night

What struck me more than anything about Oaxaca was that it is a people town. It’s the kind of place where people go out at night or during the day if they don’t have to work that day, and enjoy the beautiful weather, the cafes, the parks, the music, the parades and whatever is happening that day.  The street, Macedonia Alcala is a pedestrian walk that runs from the Zocalo north for six blocks. The walk starts at the Santo Domingo Church on the North end and ends at the south end of the Zocalo. While I was there the next street east, 5 de Mayo, was being redone as a pedestrian walk. There are also a number of side streets around the Santo Domingo Church that were closed to traffic. The net effect is to create a large area where people can gather, walk and enjoy being social without traffic.  Here people are king, not their machines. With the winter weather dry and in the 80’s during the day and cool in the 50’s during the night, the word ideal comes to mind.

Oaxaca: Language School & Change of Residence

When I got up in the morning of the first day, after lying in bed for 10 extra minutes because it was very cold in my room, I dashed across the intervening space between my room and the building where the shower was. Standing there shivering, I waited for some warm water to come, but there was none. Reluctantly I got dressed and decided to skip it. Later at breakfast I mentioned to Angela that there was no hot water. She took me into the bathroom and showed me what to do. My conclusion was that I had done something wrong. In the afternoon I took my delayed shower, but the next morning I did the same thing and again there was no hot water. I reached the conclusion that the person who turned the hot water heater on in the morning was probably getting up about the same time I was and it took about half an hour to get hot water. That night I had difficulty getting to sleep because there was someone occupying the room next to mine and there was a doorway between rooms with a very thin plywood door. I could hear people breathing, the wood was so thin. In the evening there were about five people sitting around talking loudly with the TV on and this went on until almost midnight. At around five in the morning the dog next door started barking and continued until I finally get up at 7:00. Again there was no hot water so I reluctantly made the decision to find new quarters. The distance between the language school and my home stay was around 14 blocks and after two days of walking back and forth twice a day it became clear that this along with the other issues I had with the home stay wouldn’t work for two weeks.

Oaxaca: On the Way, Arrival & Home Stay

Taking off in the morning from Puerto Vallarta, we always take off toward the Bay, unless rarely, the winds are coming out of the mountains. We circle 180 degrees and climb out over the coastal mountains. The mountains are always misty and ephemeral before the sun burns off the mist. We head almost directly west to Mexico City. I change planes in Mexico City, just a short, less than an hour layover.

Taking off from Mexico city we circle around and head south-east right past the major volcano in the Mexico city vicinity: Popocatepetl ("the smoking mountain"). It was not smoking today, who knows, maybe it gave up the habit. Somehow I doubt it. In just over an hour we descended into the Oaxaca valley.

Bucerias: The Fiesta Of Our Lady of Peace

A reminder to those who are interested, the festival of Our Lady of Peace, the patron of our local Catholic Church is just gearing up. It will run for about 10 days, culminating on January 28th with the blessing of the boats which happens around 12:00 noon central time. The nearby restaurants are usually jammed so reservations are necessary for a good seat. Adrianos is the the place to be for a view of the boats. There is always plenty of standing room on the beach and on the plaza. The festival culminates in the evening at around 11:00 pm central time with the lighting of the castillo, a three story tower filled with fireworks. An event not to be missed. Unfortunately, I will be in Oaxaca this year...

Here's last year's report...

Road Trip: Oaxaca

Tomorrow I head off for a three week trip to the Mexican city of Oaxaca. I will be attending 2 weeks of Spanish language intensive and for the third week my wife Mary will be joining me for a week of exploration. I have never been to Oaxaca so this will be a new experience and if I can get online to download pictures, I will share with you my experiences there.

The language school is Academia Vinigúlaza which comes very highly recommended by several friends who have studied there. I will be reporting back on how that experience turns out. Through the director of Vinigúlaza I was able to connect up with a Mexican family with whom I will be staying for the two weeks of language school. This will minimize my reliance on English to communicate and force me to get up to speed quickly. I have done several intensives before but never a total immersion experience. We'll see how that works. My goal is to be able to read and communicate on a conversational level.

Oaxaca is known for it's cuisine. I am looking forward to that and to taking a cooking class or two to learn how to make moles, one of my favorite dishes of Mexico.

The valley around Oaxaca contains many towns each of which are known for their arts and crafts. That is also a high priority for exploration.

Another must see is the ancient Zapotec city of Monte Alban. We'll have a report on that too.

Stay tuned....

Chico's Paradise

Chico's Paradise is one of those places that I tend to avoid. During the high season here it is a featured destination for tourists out to experience something a little different. It was September, which is the dead month here and the Mexican vacationers have returned home because school has started and the "snow birds" from up North will not arrive until late October and November. So the locals call September, Septiembre in Spanish, Septi-hambre, hambre meaning hungry. It's very quiet.

A Surfing Contest in Sayulita

In December our neighboring town to the north held one of a series of surfing contests. Sayulita is a beautiful little town that has a reputation for attracting young people and it's probably mostly due to the fact that there is an excellent break that produces some fairly reliable surfing conditions. One of the purposes of the contests is to select the best  surfers for the Mexican National team that will compete worldwide.

The surfing contests draw large crowds of spectators. The beach restaurants all have chairs set up on the beach with umbrellas or palapas so that their patrons can relax, drink, eat and watch the surfing. As long as you buy a few drinks you can take a chair and spend the day.

Getting back to our roots

As promised we revisited the new vegetarian restaurant in our little town of Bucerias and had another outstanding meal. The maestro behind these works of culinary art is Andrew and I don't use the words "culinary arts" lightly. My wife and I lived in the San Francisco/Berkeley area of California for over 12 years and great restaurants were plentiful. Roots in my opinion is right up there with the very best of the SF Bay area.

Last night I had the Black bean cakes. They were phenomenal! I can't wait to go back. My wife had the Sweet Soy Ginger Bowl and said that it was incredible, so much so that she refused to share a bite with anyone. The sandwiches brought raves from the crowd. They were served on home made whole grain buns. I watched the portobello sandwich being inhaled accompanied by moans of delight. My son raved about his roasted vegetable sandwich.

The fresh fruit and vegetable juices are also outstanding. My favorite is the Red Beet mixture. My wife favors the watermelon creation. Both are excellent.

On the next page I have put the menu. Unfortunately it does not contain the juice menu but I'll add it when I get a copy.

In summary I have to say that this is a world class restaurant. When we were eating we were debating whether they should even say that they were a vegetarian restaurant, just because many people would not come because the word vegetarian puts them off. I think as the word gets around, this will change because this is really great food, so great that you'll wonder why you thought meat was so great anyway....

Another vegetarian Restaurant this time in... Bucerias?

It's hard to believe, but we actually have a vegetarian restaurant in the little pueblito of Bucerias. Not only that, the chef worked for, I think it was, 4 years in a five star vegan restaurant in Toronto. So the food is not only healthy, but is a gourmet experience. The name of the place is "Roots". It is located on Lazaro Cardenas in the block before the foot bridge into El Centro. I've only been twice and can't wait to go back, but I'll update this with a more complete description of the really excellent menu.

A Vegetarian Restaurant in Puerto Vallarta

I know it's hard to believe but there really is a vegetarian restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, and not only that it's really good. It's called Planeta Vegetariano. It's located a half block north of the big church on a side street near the intersection of Hidalgo and Iturbe. They are open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's buffet style with several entrees, soup, rice (whole grain and white), at least 10-15 different salads. For 65 pesos it's a good deal and the food is healthy and excellent.

The Festival of Our Lady of Peace

Every year in January, in our little town of Bucerias there is a festival celebrating Our Lady of Peace (La Virgen de la Paz) who is the patron of our local Catholic church. The fiesta lasts for  ten days during which the streets fill up with vendors of everything under the sun as well as scores of carnival rides. On the last day of the festival, the festivities begin with the blessing of the boats. Bucerias and the town just north of us, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle are both fishing villages. At  around noon the boats congregate off shore and one by one they gun their motors and race at top speed for the beach. Just as they hit the sand everyone hops out of the boat and as a team they try to haul the boat up onto the beach as far as they can.