Author: jennings@princeton.edu

Back to the Path

We’re heading back to the Southwest Coast Path; we walked a bit less than 100 miles in Cornwall in September 2018 and were eager to do more the next year. As it did for so many people, though, life, in the form of the pandemic, came between us and our plans.

This time will be different from our first solo walk on the path! We’ll be joined by our dear friends Cindy and Gary H. (who inexplicably swapped lovely New Jersey for apocalyptic California twenty odd years ago) and, at the end, by Andrew Dechet and perhaps his older daughter Evie (if she can be pried away from the soccer pitch). So it will be a merry band of walkers.

The plan is to walk the section of the path that covers the Jurassic Coast, a series of cliffs along the Channel Coast in Devon and Dorset that reveal 185 million years of geological history. Erosion has exposed rock formations from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous period. Our walk will take us about 85 miles from Exmouth to Lulworth Cove.

This trip is different in another way as well: rather than starting with a rant against poor old United Airlines, I come to sing its praises and not to bury it. We had decided to take the day flight to London, leaving early and arriving in the evening; we found out just as we left the house that we had been upgraded to Business. That would have been an even more delightful surprise had we been on a night flight, with the possibility of sleeping in a lie-flat bed, but the upgrade made even the day flight plenty comfortable.

We arrived at Heathrow well rested…always a good thing since Heathrow typically conspires to have you walk about three miles from your gate, through border control, and on to the Heathrow Express that brings you to London Paddington.

I seem to have a slight problem with arriving in London. Years ago I was speaking at a conference in Oxford and had flown over with my friend and colleague Joseph Vogl, who was also speaking. While waiting for our train into London, I discovered that I had managed to leave my suitcase at the ticket machines for the Heathrow Express—which, like everything at Heathrow, are separated from the train tracks by a considerable distance! With the help of the friendly train team and several Walkie-Talkies I was able to retrieve my luggage just as it was about to be destroyed. This time around, I tried to pay for our subway tickets by shoving my credit card into the slot intended for paper bills; I was saved once again by friendly personell, who retrieved my only slightly mangled card from the machine. Being an experienced traveler doesn’t help much when you’re also an idiot.

We were staying across town in the City of London, which meant a pretty long ride on the tube. So we walked through the door of out hotel just before 11 PM, plopped out bags down, and retreated to the really great bar for a glass of wine and a whisky. If you’re coming to England from the east coast, the day fight is the only way to go!

Ah London, most beautiful of all cities…

Our hotel, the Vintry and Mercer, is small but extremely comfortable and rather stylish. We slept until after 9 and had a nice breakfast in the hotel restaurant to start the day.

Let me get this out of my system right away: Lizzie has a lot of nerve, planning her 70-Year Jubilee just when we were in London. Central London was bizarre: whole roads blocked off, teeming crowds trying to get a glimpse of a royal (although, on this second day of the Jubilee, two royals were conspicuously absent: the queen herself, who, at 96, understandably felt a bit of “discomfort” after the first day of the celebration, and Prince Andrew, who pleaded a Corona Virus infection but whose “discomfort” certainly stems from his status as a royal scumbag); other parts of town that would normally be busy were totally deserted.

We walked up through the series of narrow, twisting alleys that characterize the City, which is simultaneously the oldest and, with the ongoing construction of massive skyscrapers, the newest part of London. One of the most delightful things in this part of town are the sudden glimpses of St. Paul’s that come out of nowhere.

We popped into a couple of Christopher Wren churches along the way, reaching a kind of high point with St. Mary Le Bow, the Wren church with the highest steeple besides St. Paul’s Cathedral.

After the great fire of London that utterly destroyed large parts of the city center in 1666, the King commissioned his friend Wren to rebuild the city’s churches. He designed at least part of 50 churches, of which 23 still stand today. Many of these surround St. Paul’s. Our friends Lucy and Andrew Dechet were married in one of these…giving them all special meaning!

Arriving at St. Paul’s the huge crowd was packed so tightly that one could barely move—the whole royal family was in the church for the main Jubilee service, after which the bunch of them, including, to the surprise of many Londoners, Harry and Meghan, would walk down Cheapside to the Guildhall. This picture of the old Temple Gate (also by Wren) gives a sense of the security measures evident throughout London.

The Gate was built by Wren in 1672 at Temple Bar to mark the passage into the City from Westminster; there was once an actual bar that had to be lifted before one could pass through. By the late 19th century, though, increased traffic and impinging construction led to the gate’s disassembly; it was rebuilt to ornament the rural estate of a brewery owner. The gate’s 2,700 stones were brought back to The City only in 2004 and rebuilt at the edge of Paternoster Square, with St. Paul’s directly behind.

We strolled west, first down Fleet Street (finding that one of my favorite London churches, the Temple Church, built as the headquarters of the Knights Templar in 1185, was closed until after the Jubilee) and then its continuation, the Strand. Sue has fond memories of High Tea with her sister Cathy and niece Ariel at the Savoy.

Sue had hoped that one of her favorite things to do—a noontime concert at St. Martin’s in the Fields—was somehow compatible with our 1:30 PM tickets to the huge Raphael show at the National Gallery. But that wasn’t to be. The show itself is massive and spectacular, with loans from seemingly every major museum in the world. It is hard to imagine that so many major works will be shown together anytime soon. There is a particular emphasis on Raphael as draftsman and the relations of the drawings to the major paintings, which works very, very well. But the main show is of course Raphael’s painting…seeing so many madonnas and holy families together was deeply moving. What an experience!

Although we were feeling a bit jetlagged and sore of foot, we couldn’t resist revisiting some of our favorite galleries in this great museum. We don’t know of any great museum that is as friendly and as accessible as the National Gallery. Perched smack in the middle of the West End, your path often brings you to Trafalgar, and, since there is no admission charge, it is easy to simply pop in and do some targeted viewing. The medieval and renaissance collections are remarkable, with exquisite works by Duccio, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Masaccio, and Giorgione…to name only my own favorites. And it was here that I discovered, pretty late in the game, two of my favorite painters, Veronese and Poussin. I owe those discoveries to the privilege of listening to the great art historian T.J. Clark talk about some key works.

It was getting late in the day, but we wanted to walk off our “museum legs” and headed for Admiralty Arch at the other end of the the square. There is almost always something fun in Trafalgar.

But our plan to walk through St. James Park, one of our favorite places, ran afoul of the Jubilee. Much of the Mall, a broad thoroughfare that runs alongside the park from Buckingham Palace to the Arch, was cordoned off, presumably because the royals had made their way along it toward the city. And we literally saw little of the park itself: every square inch seemed covered by picnic blankets or unprotected bottoms, as Jubileee revealers took advantage of the holiday.

Once across the park and into the deliriously named street Petty France, we decided that a ride on a red double decker was just the thing for us. Our grandson Nathaniel is an aficionado of the London buses, and we had promised to bring him video evidence of our bus adventures. It is a good long ride from central London to Fulham, just right for tired legs. And so we jumped off in the center of Fulham, very ready for an evening at a place that is high on our short list of favorite restaurants (full list on request): the Harwood Arms, the king of gastropubs.

We started coming here soon after it opened, and no trip to London is complete without a meal here. The menu centers around game, much of it shot by the chef himself. Over the years, the food has become more refined, influenced by the cuisine of its sister restaurant, The Ledbury, one of London’s best French establishments. As wonderful as the new dishes are, though, I do occasionally miss the rusticity of the earlier menus, with huge haunches of venison on wooden trenchers accompanied by mounds of vegetables and puréed celeriac.

Here’s the menu. Sue went all fish, with a special of raw bream served like a carne cruda and stream trout. I had the warm duck salad and, naturally, the venison. Pretty heavenly.

Sorry for the food porn.

The number 11 bus brought us back into town and a well deserved late evening…of blogging, for you, dear readers!

Green Day

After a late start and a genuinely miserable breakfast—don’t ask—we got on the tube at Blackfriars for the ride out to Kew Gardens. Although the gardens lie pretty far to the west of town, the tube gets you there in a bit more than 30 minutes.

Kew seems to be a pleasant, prosperous little town, the residents presumably kept in good spirits by their proximity to the royal gardens. Those gardens offer much more than can be seen in a day: acres of planted beds; five different conservatories; a scientific laboratory that dates from the nineteenth century and continues to advance biological science; and a 300 acre pleasure park (arboretum).

The gardens themselves got their start, like so much in England, because of the presence of the monarch. Henry VII had built Richmond Palace, just up the Thames from Kew, in 1501, and courtiers began forming estates in Kew soon after. Henry Capellini, First Baron Capellini of Tewksbury, formed an exotic garden at Kew in the late 17th century; the garden was considerably expanded by Augusta, Dowager Princess of Wales, after the death of her husband in 1751. Several of the structures in the park, including the orangerie, date from the decade after 1760. The gardens became the National Botanical Garden only in the early 19th century.

We took in some of the spectacular borders, some of them extending more than 300 meters and then found ourselves in the area with some of the oldest trees in the park. Five of the trees, including a majestic ginkgo, date from the seventeenth century. We walked through one of the conservatories, housing a remarkable rain forest with displays of rare orchids and….carnivorous plants (some of which have been known to “eat” rats). Sue then spent some time in the geekiest part of the garden, a huge planted area that demonstrates and explicates plant evolution (the first director of the National Garden, William Hooker, was a friend of Darwin and contributed ideas and research to On the Origin of Species). I can now tell a pansy from a clematis, but this was a bit much for me, and I spent some pleasant moments relaxing in a small woodland.

Two of the conservatories are of real architectural interest. The Palm House was built by architect Decius Burton and the iron maker Richard Turner between 1844 and 1848; it was the first large-scale structural use of cast iron. It predates the Crystal Palace built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, which is usually credited with being the first important glass and iron structure.

The Palm House was followed by the Temperate House, built by the same team in 1850. It is over twice as large as the Palm House and is the largest surviving Victorian glass structure.

A visit to the enormous Rose Garden was followed by a stroll down the central axis of the arboretum and across the large lake that bisects it. We finished the visit with a very nice glass of wine and headed back for the tube.

We met Andrew, Lucy, Evie, and Lotte Dechet at their mews house in Notting Hill and strolled with them to Ladbroke Square Gardens, the largest private garden in London. Residents within 100 meters of the garden can purchase a membership for a surprisingly modest fee. Quite a lovely place, with playgrounds, dog runs, extensive lawns, and even a tennis court. Some other parents saw Evie kicking around a soccer ball and asked if she wanted to join their boys’ soccer game. Little did they know: 9 year old Evie ate the lunches of several boys twice as tall as her. She is the striker for the Chelsea FC 9 and under football side, the only girl on the team.

We finished our visit with the Dechets with a very nice meal at the girls’ favorite Italian restaurant, though without Lucy, alas, who had a bad cold.

Back at the hotel, we had a drink at the lovely rooftop terrace, with sweeping views of the south bank of the Thames…and a more intimate view of the church next door.

Another lovely day.

Down to the Sea in…trains

Sunday was one of those London days: pretty gloomy and overcast, with a constant threat of drizzle. Undeterred, we walked across Southwark Bridge and strolled along the south bank of the Thames. Even in bad weather, the south bank always delivers: great views, great people watching, and great reminders of cultural history. Like the rebuilt Globe Theater. When Sue leaves Viv and Iggy, she always says “parting is such sweet sorrow,” and the girls say it right back to her. This theater was the home stadium for the guy who wrote those words, girls!

Normas Foster’s Millennium Bridge offers especially fine views, with Saint Paul’s directly opposite.

The view downriver toward the City with its skyscrapers (and Tower Bridge in the background) was especially socked in this morning.

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You will have noticed the cranes in several of these pictures; the London development boom continues unabated. Where there used to be street art as you walked along the south bank, now you see glossy pictures of new commercial development a la Hudson Yards in New York. This little riverscape was just about the sole exception.

The walk was all too short, since we had to get to Paddington (the station, not the bear; perhaps you saw the video of Queen Elizabeth having tea with Padddington, after which they tapped out the opening beat to “We will rock you?). We were sorry to leave the hotel, which was a real oasis in the city, with an exceptionally warm staff and an unusual intimacy. Some of our regret stemmed too from a certain apprehensiveness about the walk to come. 100 miles is 100 miles, any way you cut it.

We arrived early, anticipating the usual surprises that accompany rail travel in England. And, sure enough, we found that our train had been cancelled. Staff shortages in the UK seem at least as bad as they are at home: we encountered understaffed restaurants, tube stations closed because there was no one to run them…and now our train couldn’t run because there was no train personnel. As it turned out, though, a train scheduled to depart 30 minutes before ours was delayed…by 40 minutes. We were told in the station that this train had been delayed by a slow-moving freight; one aboard the train, we were told that the delay was caused because this train had to be assembled….from the cars of our cancelled train. It was a pleasant trip down to the southwest though…and we were the lucky passengers. The train was terminated at Exeter, our stop, because a signal box had supposedly been struck by lightning. Must have been a phantom thunderstorm.

We were soon aboard our connection, making the short journey down to the sea. The last section of the tracks runs alongside the great estuary of the river Exe (thus the name Exmouth for the town where it meets the sea).

Our hotel is simple but very pleasant, part of an early nineteenth century terrace set on a ridge high above the sea. Our room had a lovely view over a park, across the estuary, and out into the English Channel.

After a short break, we headed down to the seafront and ambled along, thinking we had time to kill before our dinner reservation. That would have been the case had I turned the right direction when we reached the Esplanade…when we discovered our error, we had a mile’s forced march back the way we had come in order to get our dinner.

Dinner was exceptionally nice, at a very casual seafood restaurant on the water called Rockfish. I had never had Dover Sole and, after all, we were on the English Channel…great choice! Sue had an equally good grilled skate wing. We were very happy diners.

The walk home along the seashore looked like this:

As we walked back through the park near our hotel, we saw evidence in the twilight of just how temperate the climate here must be.

Tomorrow brings us to the path…wish us luck!

“Why can’t they flatten this path?”

This from one of many long distance walkers we met today. Why? Because our day started with steep ascents of three enormous cliffs. But more about that in a moment.

I’m usually very careful in my planning for these long distanc walks. But I nodded this time, and selected an inn a mile and a half out of town. This meant walking back after dinner last night (which made for a fifteen mile day) and walking back into town to meet Gary and Cindy after breakfast (which turned this into a nine mile day).

After a stretch of good weather, we were totally socked in this morning, with occasional light rain. So no pictures of the first two climbs, up Maynard’s Cliff and the even more challenging Higher Dunscombe Cliff. But the walks were beautiful, either in grassy fields with what would have been sweeping views of the coast had we been able to see, or through verdant woods full of wildflowers.

Although we had met very few long distance walkers yesterday, we met many today, including a cheerful German woman who had walked the West Highland Way (100 miles) with her little dog, then turned around and started the Southwest Coast Path. She had walked over 500 miles of the path, and would finish the remaining 100-odd this week.

As we descended from Higher Dunscombe Cliff, we felt the sun trying to break through, which finally happened when we reached Weston Beach.

We relaxed on the beach…which was littered with walkers doing the same. We also had a good look at the last major climb of the day, Lower Dunscombe Cliff.

”Lower” means by a few feet, and we climbed this 500 foot monster from sea level.

Once up this final climb, much of the rest of the day’s walk was over the rolling clifftops with sheep and cattle farms all around.

By mid afternoon we walked down into the lovely village of Branscombe, much of which is protected by the National Trust. At the heart of the village lie the old bakery and a thatched roof forge, the only one still in use in England.

We were staying at the Mason’s Arms, an ancient pub that offered what is reputed to be the best restaurant for miles around. We had an excellent meal and lingered for almost three hours, warmed by conversation with old friends.

Princeton to Oaxaca on Delay Airlines

Our plane took off an hour late; United had built in a 67 minute changeover in Houston. So we did the math and started with the usual United anxieties. As it turned out, the pilot made up 30 minutes of the delay and the flight to Oaxaca was…delayed.

On the flight to Oaxaca I sat next to an interesting guy, probably representative of the big block of voters we see as „independent.“ He had a doctorate in geology and had worked for forty years as a consultant in the mining industry in Central America, living for long stretches in Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador. On the one hand, he was pretty virulently anti-mask (though he kept his on for me) and critical of the excesses associated with „wokeness.“ On the other hand, he was pro-choice and generally what we would call liberal on issues of economic justice. He really knew the indigenous communities around Oaxaca from the inside and was full of fascinating stories of the structure of these societies.

The driver from our hotel, the Parador San Miguel, was at the airport to meet us and we were soon in central Oaxaca. Ricardo is a cheerful guy. He grew up in the state of Chiapas, studied marketing at university there, met his wife, moved with her to one of the pueblas (villages) in the region (Astompa, the village associated with green pottery), opened a photography studio in El Tule (of which more later), and now, after the pandemic destroyed his business, earns his living as a driver and guide. His wife is a teacher and they still live with their little boy in Astompa because they can‘t afford the rising prices in Oaxaca.

The hotel is lovely, with the deep, magical colors of Oaxaca throughout a newly renovated old colonial mansion; there is a lounge in the center that is open to all three stories. Our friends Patti and David had had a very early morning, but stayed awake long enough to hand us a bag of tamales so that we had something for dinner!


We repeated our stroll from years before, down to and around the Zocalo, but were soon ready for the sack after a long day in the air.

Mezcal in the Morning?

We started the day with a very nice breakfast at the hotel: fresh fruit, good coffee, and a tamale with mole for me. We saw the fifth member of the merry band, Mary Lou B., for the first time in about a year.

A brisk walk brought us to where we joined three young people from San José for our mezcal tour. I think we lucked out: the regular guide, Antonio, seemed great, but our guide, Jordany, was a true mezcal fanatic. Trained as an automotive engineer at the university in Puebla, he worked for Volkswagen for a few years before following his heart—and his palate—to Oaxaca and life on a mezcal palenque. He cadged an invitation to work at a small family distillery in the village of Santiago Matatlan and began to learn how to make mezcal. He has since worked at three other palenques, including one in Durango state and one in Chihuahua state, serving as technical consultant and a Mescalero in his own right.

He was currently working in another family palenque, Real Matlatl, and we all piled into a van for the ride up into this high, lovely valley. At the palenque we had an extensive introduction to the main varieties of agave that grow in the Tlacolula valley and to the preparation of the agave hearts. This is the pit in which the hearts are roasted.

The hearts are then chopped into smaller pieces and ground into a fibrous mess by a massive stone millwheel.

The fibrous mess is then dumped into a pine fermentation tank and allowed to ferment through. This is what the cap looks like. There is no temperature control: they just watch it bubble, and punch down the cap one time during fermentation. You begin to see why every batch tastes different!

Real Matlatl makes both artisanal and ancestral mezcal. Artisanal mezcal undergoes a double distillation in copper stills. You are looking at just the covers for the stills, each of which holds 300 liters.

At Real Matlatl, ancestral distillation uses a first distillation in copper stills and then a second one in clay jugs holding 80 liters. At a palenque like Real Minero, both distillations take place in clay.

They also add some unusual elements to their distillates (I‘m bringing versions of this mezcal to selected friends and family):

Top that, Vladimir!

We started off by tasting some mezcals aged in French oak barrels: a joven, a reposado, and an anejo. Pleasant, but with decreasing amounts of agave flavor. Here is Mary Lou showing us how to do it.

We then went upstairs to the bar and worked our way through nine more varieties. Here‘s the list for the geeks among you (the numbers are alcohol percentages):

Espadin 40
Espadin Olli de Barro (ancestral) 45
Espadin Pechuga de guajolote 48 *
Tepextate 48
MadreCuiche (Karwinski) 48 *
Tobala 48
Jabali 48 *
Cerrudo 48
Ensemblem 48

The first three are all espadin, the most common variety of agave. The third bottle, the Pechuga, had been distilled by Jordany himself. He had included a wide variety of fruits…and an entire turkey (minus feathers and skin). It was extraordinary…and we‘re bringing home a bottle.

The next five are all wild varieties of agave. We all loved the Madrecuiche and the Jabali.

Here is Jordany getting things set up.

And here he is with his pride and joy, his turkey pechuga.

Because the crushing floor at Real Matlatl with its enormous millstone was driven by a gas powered machine, we visited a second nearby palenque, El Rey Zapoteca, where a horse turned the stone. This one is for you, Viv, Iggles, and Nathaniel!

We tried a few of their products, too…but only for the purpose of scientific comparison. Jordany told me that they made his favorite espadin in all of Oaxaca, and it was really great.

We then headed back to Tlalocula for a late lunch at a wonderful little restaurant, Casa Tierra, run as a kind of collaborative project by a bunch of young people: terrific moles, chorizo, and several variations of tlayudas and quesadillas new to us.

We finished the meal with, what else, some new distillations. Antonio brought over his own creation, an Espadin infused with cannabis. It was actually pretty interesting, with a lingering and very pleasant vegetal taste.

Then Jordany shared two more of his own distillations, which he had made while working in the mountains in Chihuahua. Sotol is distilled from a completely different plant, one of the 16 varieties of the Dasylirion. The first sotol was straight: a bit sweeter than mescal, a bit more rustic, but delicious. The second one was a pechuga sotol, this time with a haunch of venison…also intriguing and really tasty.

It had already been a long day, but Jordany wanted to introduce us to a weaving family with whom he was friends. We saw the demonstration of the carding and spinning of the wool, and the production of native dyes that we had seen on the last trip, but this time without any hype or salespitch, just love of what Donna Elvira was doing.

Mary Lou bought a gorgeous hanging with a bird motif (Sue was tempted), and we took photos of a rug that we think Sarah would love.

We didn‘t get back to Oaxaca until after seven, tired but exuberant. After a siesta, David, Sue and I went to the Zocalo, sat in a restaurant on a balcony overlooking the square and watched the dancing, happy crowds. You can‘t ask for a more splendid day.

Monte Alban, again…and then Alebrijes!

We had a light breakfast in acknowledgment of the eating ahead, and met our guide and driver outside the hotel at 9. The guide was Riccardo, the same young man who had picked us up from the airport; the driver Raoul…both were delightful.

The road to Monte Alban rises steeply from the valley floor; Oaxaca sits at 5100 feet, Monte Alban just over 6000. The van dropped us off below the archaeological zone, and we hoofed it up. On our last visit, we had gone right to the plaza, arriving at its southwest corner near the ball court; it turns out that we had missed a good deal! The tier of the mountainside just below the plaza was the site of a number of large residences and tombs belonging to the Zapotec elite, and many of these have been excavated.

David led us up a steep set of steps, and we found ourself at the back end of the enormous north platform. The platform, which sits high above the main plaza, is an enormously complex site, with several building complexes and temples behind the main feature, a huge sunken patio that was originally fronted by an enormous portico supported by twelve massive columns.

Looking down over the plaza and the edifices that frame it, the achievement here is stunning. Starting in 500 BC, a civilization leveled a granite mountaintop and built these enormous structures without the wheel and without any tools not made of stone. Just as remarkably, we know almost nothing about a civilization that stretched well beyond today’s Oaxaca State. This is a view of the main plaza looking down from the north platform.

There were five ball courts, but only one has been excavated.

The main plaza is littered with steles bearing complex pictographs. This is one of the largest, sitting beside one of the large building complexes comprising an edifice in front with a large patio behind it and a tall platform behind that which would have held a temple. None of the temples themselves have survived.

One of the most intriguing structures is called the Temple of the Dancers (Danzantes). The original building had its facade decorated with many incised stones. The figures depicted on these stones were originally thought to represent dancers, given their mobile arm gestures. There is now consensus that they represent captured enemy warriors who have been tortured—often genitally mutilated—and sacrificed.

We sat for quite a while on top of the south platform enjoying the splendid view.

We then climbed down to look at the arrow-shaped Building J. That’s it directly behind Sue. It was long thought to have been some sort of astronomical observatory, but of what kind wasn‘t known. The recent discovery of a building with an identical orientation in a second mesoamerican civilization suggested that the building points to one of the brightest stars in the low night sky.

On our way out we learned about several trees: the copal that furnishes the carvers, the jacaranda that came from Japan, and the Cazahuate whose white flowers gave the mountain its name.

Riccardo and his family live in Aztompa, the town at the foot of Monte Alban; he offered to take us to his neighborhood restaurant, which proved to be a gem. Como en el Pueblo (like in the village) was lovely, and they fired up the woodburning comal for us. Most of us had an order of three huaraches, longish thick tortillas in the shape of a sandal, one with chorizo, one with „taco beef,“ and one with mushrooms.

Next stop was San Antonio Arrazola, one of the two famous woodcarver‘s villages. First stop was the workshop of Manuel Jimenez Ramirez, the master credited with the translation of the fantastical animals—alebrijes—created in paper mache by Pedro Linares in Mexico City into wood. Don Manuel died in 2006, but his family carries on his work.

His son Isaias gave us a tour of the carving area, a small museum dedicated to Don Manuel‘s work, and finally the gallery. Isaias walked us through a number of testimonials to his father‘s importance. He was very concerned to make two points. The wooden alebrijes originated with his father, making his father the most important Oaxacan carver. And they originated in Arrazola and not in San Martin Telcajete, which is now the much better known carving village.

Origin myths aside, we were enormously taken with the family’s work. the style here is somewhat simpler, more direct, more colorful than that developed by the Angeles family and other carvers in San Martin Telcajete…probably much like the earliest alebrijes.

Mary Lou bought a spectacular bird; David bought a highly ornamented bull, and I bought a companion for my raccoon: a fabulous snake. We also bought various gifts to be revealed in person. It was a wonderful visit to a special place.

In the course of our visit, Riccardo had given us a comprehensive introduction to the Nahual, or spirit animal, so important to Zapotec culture. Each person has one Nahual who protects him or her during life, and a second to protect them after death. This is perhaps the central aspect of Zapotec religion: Nahuals are shape shifters, and there is a frequent transmigration from human to animal form and back. Don Manuel’s Nahual was a dog.

Back in town, we had time for a brief siesta before our return to Criollo, which we remembered as one of our favorite restaurants anywhere. Like much of Oaxaca, the restaurant has become enormously successful, and had opened a vast garden space behind the main restaurant. We we’re initially seated in this garden, but we pleaded successfully for one of the lovely tables on a terrace beside a verdant cactus garden.

The meal was splendid: palate teasers of crispy cauliflower in a peanut mole and a ceviche of dorado, watermelon and chiles; an appetizer of paper-thin pineapple slices covering slices of quince accompanied by an unusual and delicious apple butter; a tamale with quessio, the wonderful Oaxacan string cheese and a mole Colorado; a tostada with a piece of fish nestled into a pile of chorizo on top of a bed of lentils (a surprising combination that worked extremely well); a tostada with a ribeye Tatar, nopal (cactus) buttons, tomatoes, and chiles; and a complex dessert that included a glass of coconut / almond milk; yoghurt ice cream with berries in a tuile, and a piece of tres leches cake.

We made a fundamental mistake that took a bit of the luster off the meal. We opted for the menu option that included drinks. In our boomer naivite we thought that meant wine courses and perhaps a margarita. We should have looked around at the other diners: all millennials downing “cocteles.” And that is largely what we got. Yuck.

You say Moreles, I’ll say Morales

Riccardo and a new driver, Omar, picked us up at 9 and we headed into the southern arm of the valley toward the lovely town of Ocotlan de Moreles. The town is named for a Mexican revolutionary hero; José María Morelos, who organized the struggle for independence from Spain.

We had planned our visit on Ocotlan’s market day, and the town was joyously alive. The market sprawls out from the town square and down the side streets. And all of this is only a supplement to the enormous covered market that is open every day.

We started our visit to the workshop of the internationally famous folk artist Josefina Aguilar.

There are four Aguilar sisters and each of them has developed a variant of their mother’s work in painted clay figurines. Josefina’s renown comes from the charm of her scenes of Mexican village life. Her figures have a certain rustic realism which is central to their character. If you look closely at the image below, you’ll see a woman giving birth in the lower right corner.

Careful readers of these pages know that I brought home two figures in 2019: a market woman with a basket of fruit on her head and a woman making tortillas, complete with a separate comal and grinding stone. Well they’re going to have company: I purchased a nine piece band and three men playing a giant marimba! Here are eight of the little guys waiting to be packed.

We stuck our noses into sister Guillermina’s workshop; also lovely things, often wittier and more refined, but somehow less moving.

Next stop were the murals in the town hall by native son Rodolfo Morales, considered during his lifetime to be one of Mexico’s greatest living artists.

On our last visit, we had toured his home, which had served as the headquarters for his foundation. This time, we headed straight for the town’s major church, Santo Domingo, which had been restored with funds from th Morales Foundation.

Cultural urges satisfied, we plunged into the market.

I needed a big sombrero, since I was getting burned despite the cap I was wearing. Sue scored some of the large woven baskets that she loves, and found a lovely tablecloth for a lucky recipient. At moments like these, one feels a bit of guilt: considering the hours it took to weave this handmade piece, the price was ridiculously low. The others made similar purchases, and we headed into the covered section to see the food stalls and stands. For those of you looking for the perfect gift for that Frankfurt School fan in your life, you can purchase your very own Adorno in Ocotlan!

Our friend the Frida Kahlo imitator was still going strong!

We were eager to repeat our meal at the Azcucena Zapoteca restaurant outside San Martin Tilcajete. We had intended to eat lightly, but the food was just too good. Some of the freshest, most delicious guacamole ever, followed by a tasting of four moles (negro, coloradito, Amarillo, and estofodo). Most of us followed this up with the sublime quesadillas with Oaxacan cheese and squash blossom flowers.

We paid a relatively quick visit to the workshop of Jacobo and Maria Angeles, where I had purchased my raccoon. Riccardo had suggested that Jacobo and Maria weren’t carving or painting much anymore, and they indeed had only a few pieces on display. All lovely, but the prices had doubled in three years. Most of what was on offer was student work—very nice but not close to the masters in quality.

Riccardo wanted to show us the work of a friend, Ovidio Fuentes and his wife Alicia. We had a long talk with them. They had both come up through the ranks with the Angeles. Alicia became a master painter, Olivia a master carver. A few years before they had broken off on their own. Their work was exquisite, but the best things approached the prices at the Angeles workshop.

One of the highlights here was the revelation of the nahuals for each member of the group. Sue’s lifetime Nahual is the hummingbird; mine the frog. And we each share one of the most powerful protectors in the afterlife: the snake.

It was getting late, but we made one last stop at the artisan’s collective in San Bartolo Coyotepec, the home of black clay (barro negro) pottery. The technique of forming vessels from this clay was known for centuries to the Zapotecs and Mixtecs; the result was a sturdy grayish product. In the 1950’s a local woman, Dona Rosa Real, discovered that the pottery emerged with a deep black shine if the pieces were polished before a second firing. Sue added to our homeward load with some gifts that will be revealed all in good time.

We got back to the hotel rather late, and had to scramble for two cabs to get to our restaurant for the night, Alfonsina. It came highly recommended: the chef had made all the moles for Pujol in Mexico City, and had the worked at Cosme in New York. I just hadn’t realized how far out of town it was: after battling the traffic in downtown Oaxaca, we drove south toward the airport…and past the airport…and through a couple of dark villages…and onto a street barricaded…right in front of the restaurant. This was certainly our most unusual meal. I won’t try to describe the courses, because they were all built around local ingredients whose names we couldn’t really catch. We chatted with the chef at the end, a really nice young man…and we wished him well. We had a wild ride home in two claptrap taxis: ours had lost its seatbelts and interior door handles somewhere along the way.