Last day in Mexico!  And what else would one do than wait out the heat in an internet cafe?  To be fair to myself, I made a good go of the morning, getting out early to check out the final set of ruins on my list for the trip: Xochicalco.  The guidebook says simply to get on the buses at the market for ‘Xochi’ and I followed that advice.  Turns out there is a town called Xochitepac…a nice enough town to make a stop over in but certainly an unexpected one.  Regardless, I was able to finally make my way to the ruins with the help of locals and a taxi driver.

Xochicalco was amazing, only the ruins at Teotihuacan could compete with them.  It was a site that rose to prominence as a trading crossroads between the coasts and the central valley civilizations sometime after the fall of Teotihuacan.  Xochicalco itself faded away over time as well, likely due to too overpopulation and keeping the little guy down.  At least that’s my interpretation of the Spanish signage at the museum on site.

At this point in the trip I’d resigned myself to the idea that I wasn’t going to get the chance to see a ball game court.  For those unaware, the ball game is a long-standing game played across a number of cultures and eras in Mesoamerica with a heavy rubber ball.  Players had to hit the ball with hips or elbows, trying to get it through a hole affixed on the sides of the courts.  The game had religious significance too, and the losers in some versions had the misfortune of being sacrificed, blood spilt on the court itself at times.

So given the above, imagine my excitement and surprise that Xochicalco had not one, not two, but three different ball game courts.  Two of them you could even walk through, seeing the courts as the players would have.  The second one led to an underground observatory used by the people who built the site to track movements of the sun, potentially to keep measure of when certain rituals need occur or to align calendars among different cultures.  Either way, it was pretty remarkable to be in an artificial cave seeing the sun shine down through the hole built above.

From there I made it back to Cuernavaca and finally ate a meal, another giant torta that had more meat than I probably eat in a week.  And I’m not sure that is an exaggeration, it was absolutely heaped.  There is one more temple, a ruin a few kilometres outside of town but frankly I’m pooped and stinky and feel bad for whoever may be stuck next to me on the plane home already.  Besides, I had a cultural experience of a different kind on the return from Xochicalco, being deposited at the town’s main market on a Saturday.  It was quite a scene, absolutely packed with people and activity and vibrancy…and shockingly large too, given how relatively small Cuernavaca is.

The people have been pretty great.  They’ve been very helpful and patient with a hairy foreigner with pinkish-hued skin as I make them suffer through my dumb questions and halting grammar.  There is always a level of trust required when traveling, trusting that locals will look out for you, that the directions they give are accurate, and I’ve been rewarded with warm people always willing to help.  I do wish I could have more interactions with people past the basics, but that will have to wait.

Looking back on the trip, I have to say I’d overlooked Mexico in the past.  Figuring how close it was to the US and how swarmed it already is as a tourist market, I thought perhaps it was just hype.  Well, I was wrong.  Even in the relatively small swath of the country that I saw recently, there is amazing food, a beautiful landscape, and a whole number of sites to see that are truly worthwhile.  The diversity of the country is astounding, both contemporary and ancient, and I really hope to be back in the near future.

The best little slice of life that I may have been privy to in my time here, aside from the violin duet on the streets of Mexico City, may have been the other night in Cuernavaca when I arrived.  The bandstand in the central square was occupied with a large band playing while couples, mostly old ones, danced below.  I’d note that the band itself had a horn section, so I was won over.  The benches were packed with people watching the dancing couples and eating.  For all the planning and programming we do as a city in Vancouver, we haven’t figured out how to create moments like these.