At home with the Subcoyote February 21, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Ecovillages, Latin America, Mexico, Mexico City, Sustainability, Tepoztlan , add a comment
Outside in the darkness, up in the hills not far from here, a chorus of coyotes is greeting the coming of the dawn. How appropriate, I think with a smile. Here in Huehuecoyotl, place of the old, old coyote, I’ve just bid farewell to the greatest coyote of all, Subcoyote Alberto Ruz Buenfil, who is letting me use his home as a base for a few days. Now it’s his time to head into Mexico City, where he is taking the lessons of the Rainbow Caravan for Peace into the barrios of that other place of coyotes, Coyoacán.
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Guadalajara Guerreros: Fighting for a better world February 19, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Esperanza Project, Guadalajara, Mexico, Sustainability , add a commentToday I awoke in the verdant mountains near Tepoztlán in Central Mexico, far from the commotion of city life in Guadalajara. Before I move on, I want to take a few moments to acknowledge the work of 24 extremely dedicated, talented and creative people I met during my time in that city, people who touched my life and gave me hope for a better future.
To read about them, please visit Guerreros de Guadalajara, a bilingual entry in my Flickr account.
La Minerva, warrior woman of old and symbol of modern-day Guadalajara, photo courtesy of TheLittleTx, Flickr Creative Commons.
Tonalá: A step back in time February 3, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Guadalajara, Mexico , 3comments
As is the case in many big cities, one of the best things about Guadalajara is what lies outside its boundaries. That’s the case with two colonial villages just outside the city limits, Tlaquepaque and Tonalá.
Tlaquepaque is the more carefully groomed, tourist-brochure version of the colonial village – and it’s delightful, with its nightly serenades by mariachis, streets that were made for strolling and lushly landscaped courtyards. Tonalá, on the other hand, is still a little rough around the edges, with an outdoor market where you can still get a hearty meal of steak, chicken or fish in the market for about $2.50, or pick out your fresh produce and a cut of meat to go with it, all while watching the children run and play in the plaza next door.
Tonalá is a destination for shoppers of bargain artenanía, which ranges from kitchy Aztec calendars and frog-shaped ceramics to sophisticated creations from some first-rate artists. Here’s a little peek.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
It’s not enough to be biodegradeable… January 31, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Guadalajara, Mexico, Sustainability , add a commentLife in Guadalajara is not so different from life in Houston. Sometimes, only the language is different.
My friend Alicia, like me, struggles to remember to bring the cloth shopping bags when she goes to the supermarket. This day, she remembered. Here’s a little reminder she likes to keep handy:
“It’s not enough to be biodegradeable; it’s necessary to be bioAGREEABLE.”
I liked the way this clever slogan captured one of the most important principles of sustainability: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” In that order.
The Rolling Cameras of Guadalajara January 29, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Adventure, Biking, Guadalajara, Mexico, Nature tourism, Sustainability, ecotourism , add a comment
Last week I had the chance to visit with Carlos Ibarra, news photographer for El Mural and one of the founders of Camara Rodante (literally, “rolling camera”.)
Carlos with his collection of miniature bicycles and a photo of his father, an avid bicyclist.
This intrepid group of biking photographers is dedicated to promoting biking in a variety of ways. Besides their weekly outings, which traverse a variety of rural terrains around Guadalajara and further afield, they’ve organized get-out-the-vote campaigns, children’s outings, first aid workshops, bicycle repair workshops, and a fundraiser for Haiti – all aboard the seat of a bicycle.
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Guadalajara by night – and by bike January 21, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Biking, Guadalajara, Mexico , add a commentIt’s not every day you get to ride with 500 enthusiastic bicyclists to the theater. But in Guadalajara, you can do it once a week.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Matter of fact, you can ride with a herd of cyclists pretty much any night of the week – just pick your flavor. “Al Teatro en Bici” (To the Theater by Bicycle”) is one of a seemingly endless number of bicycle-oriented initiatives in Guadalajara. There’s Camera Rodante, a hard-riding group of biking photographers. There’s GDL en Bici, a group of young professionals dedicated to reclaiming the streets for all commuters, not just cars. Their nocturnal rides, each one with a theme and costumed riders, have drawn upwards of 4,000 participants.
Tuesday I got a taste of the Guadalajara bicycle explosion, as well as why it may have evolved. Guadalajara is a city that has evolved, like most U.S. cities, around the automobile, and public transit is somewhat disorganized. A morning taxi ride to Tonalá, a village on the southern outskirts, took me 15 minutes; the bus ride back, an hour and a half. It took longer than that to figure out how to take the bus back to Tonalá.
And that’s not even mentioning the aggressive stance a pedestrian must take in order to negotiate the glorietas, traffic circles where a seemingly endless churning mass of vehicles whirl past.
Little wonder, then, in a city where many people don’t have cars, that frustrated commuters turned to bicycles, then teamed up to find safety in numbers. It couldn’t have been easy, however; in a city where just a few years ago, bicycles were seen primarily as a vehicle for street vendors and poor people.
On Tuesday, the first ride after the holidays, hundreds milled about with their bicycles in front of Punto del Arte, a classy cafe in the Centro. Suddenly a shout rang out – “Ya vamos!” followed by the voice of Aretha Franklin blaring from the loudspeakers attached to the lead bicycle.
“What you want, baby, I got it… What you need, you know I got it. All I’m askin’ for is a little respect…”
I don’t know about the impatient drivers who waited as the wheeled hordes streamed through the red lights, but the message wasn’t lost on me.
The eclectic soundtrack weaved from Rolling Stones to Caifanes, from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Café Tacuba to Guns ‘N Roses, and the elation was so high you could feel it bouncing from the Beaux Arts decor in the old city streets. We plied those streets for about an hour before ending up at the spectacular neoclassical Teatro Degollado, where we piled in to see a free showing of ZaikoCirco, a surrealistic international troupe of circus performers who, of course, supported the effort with bicycles in their act.
All in all, a phenomenal performance – beginning with the commute.
Jogging on the Hippodrome January 10, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Latin America, Mexico, Mexico City, Uncategorized , add a commentThe sun peeked out from the clouds for awhile today, and as my afternoon appointment had been canceled, I took it as a cue. I shed the sweater and switched to jogging gear, grabbed my iPod and hit the street.
I’m not a natural-born runner; my body resists it in every way. But I took up the hobby last year, realizing that if I were going to stay fit on the road, I’d need to rely on means that don’t include going to a gym. Besides, running doubles as an aerobic form of sightseeing – albeit without the camera, the only thing I regretted about today’s run.
(From Friday’s walk: One of several fountains on Amsterdam Street)
I headed straight for Calle Amsterdam, a verdant loop through the heart of La Condesa with a tree-lined path in the center. Formerly called Calle Hipódromo, the loop is what remains of the old Condesa racetrack. Now laced with fountains and gardens and lined with colorful cafés and boutiques among the classic art-deco architecture, it bears no semblance to a racetrack – except for the presence of the other joggers.
The high point was Parque México, an enormous stretch of greenery filled with children learning to rollerblade, boys kicking a soccer ball, tiny dogs in colorful sweaters and their attentive owners, elders perusing newspapers, youngsters listening to MP3 players and families pedaling a four-seated bicycle contraption for rent in the plaza.
Smells of roasting corn, savory pork tacos and fresh flowers filled the rain-washed air. A gentleman sat in front of a booth surrounded by small tables and filled with wooden objects and painting supplies; for $3 you could buy a small animal or for $6 a little wooden jewelry box, and you could paint it however you liked.
Further along I found Mejor en Bici (Better on a Bike), a nonprofit group that provides free bicycles for “rent” in several parks around the city. All you have to do is leave your ID and a 200-peso note, and you can take the bike for a spin.
I don’t know whether it was because of the altitude (Mexico City is about a mile and a half higher than Houston!) or that I’m out of shape after three weeks of huddling in the cold, or simply because there was so much to see, but it was a run-walk type of run. At any rate, it felt great to unclench my huddled shoulders and feel the sun on my skin again.
From Mexico to Palestine: Carbon offsets January 10, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Latin America, Mexico, Mexico City, Sustainability, ecotourism , 5comments
Much has been written about the pros and cons of carbon offsets. The idea, if you haven’t been following, is that you pay money to a nonprofit organization to plant trees or invest in renewables or otherwise reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in an attempt to offset the carbon you’ve generated.
There are many calculators online that help you to figure out how much carbon you’ve generated and where you should donate it. Carbon Footprint is a nice flexible one that lets you calculate individual aspects of your life as opposed to doing a whole audit – both can be good, but since I’m on the road, my lifestyle doesn’t easily fit into many of these calculators. Since my main impact is travel, I figured my mileage and multiplied the air travel by 1.9 to account for the increased impact airplane emissions have (the amount used by Carbon Footprint). It then lets you select from a variety of worthy projects from Kenya to Central America.
Critics compare this system with the Catholic Church’s system of indulgences in Medieval times – a system that allowed people to “buy” forgiveness for their sins by making donations to the Church. They argue that there’s a wide variance among carbon offsetting groups, none of them are regulated and there’s no way to know for sure that the trees you’re paying to plant wouldn’t be planted anyway.
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La Condesa blooms through the chill January 8, 2010
Posted by Tracy in : Latin America, Mexico, Mexico City , 17comments
My first 24 hours in Mexico City couldn’t have been more colorful. A cold front has settled in here, as well, with temperatures dipping into the mid-40s, and since there are no heaters, people are huddling over soups and hot coffees in the open-air cafes. Except for a few golden hours yesterday morning, a drizzly grey pall grips the city. Still, the flowers are blooming and a general air of cheerfulness has made headway against the gloom – especially on Wednesday, Dia de los Reyes, a Mexican holiday celebrating the arrival of the Magi to visit the baby Jesus.
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Xilitla’s Las Pozas on the most endangered list November 18, 2009
Posted by Tracy in : Latin America, Mexico , 3commentsThe LA Times has just released its list of most endangered cultural sites in the Americas, and a rare treasure that’s been a longtime favorite is on the list.
(Altug S. Icilensu photo)
Las Pozas, the amazing surrealist garden created by the eccentric English millionaire Edward James in the Mexican jungle near Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, is succumbing to decay and the custodians of the site don’t have the wherewithal to adequately maintain and restore it.
Las Pozas was my destination in a 2007 trip through the magical Huasteca Potosina, and I wrote about it in a piece for the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle, Jungle Wonderland. Here’s a video I created in 2007 together with my cameraman at the time, Altug Icilensu.
Jungle Wonderland
Surrealist garden evokes a strange visionary’s dream
embedded by Embedded Video
For more videos from the Huasteca Potosina, see my multimedia page. And to learn more about Las Pozas and the effort to preserve it, visit Fondo Xilitla, which took charge of the site after my visit with the aim of raising money to protect and restore it.
