The rhythm of my life abroad changes when I have company. As my guests are typically only with me for a week or two, we cram a lot of things in. On my own, I tend to take it much slower and easier.
In the seven days that my visitors were with me in Mexico, in addition to touring around the city, Karen, Simon and I have made five excursions outside the city, with a very helpful guide (Fernando from El Planeto Mexico) we found on Trip Advisor.
Over the next while, I’ll be relating our adventures at Teotihuacan, climbing by horseback to see the Monarch butterfly sanctuary at the top of a mountain and the archaeological site of Tula. Another excursion was a boat ride at Xochimilco. I posted about that on Facebook. I’ll also be posting additional photos in albums on my Facebook page, if you’re interested in seeing more of amazing Mexico.
In this post, I am going to take you along with us on our voyage to Puebla and Cholula.
We drove to Puebla mostly to catch a view of Popocateptl and Iztaccihuatl (the nation’s second and third highest mountains). In this photo, Popcateptl is on the far left, slightly behind Iztaccihuatl.
Iztaccihuatl is also called the Mujer Dormida; in Spanish, the Sleeping Woman. Can you make out her profile? Iztaccihuatl is extinct.
‘Popo’, the “Smoking Mountain”, is far from it. It still displays a disturbing degree of activity, having erupting in 2012, in 2013 (three times), twice in 2015 and 2016. A huge plume of smoke blasted debris three kilometres into the air as recently as November of 2017.
We did see a plume of smoke coming from Popo, but luckily for us, it was languid and dissipated quickly.
In a sad testimony to climate change (and the volcanic activity), Popo’s glaciers started decreasing in the 1990s and are now pretty much gone.
There is a charming myth associated with these two volcanoes, which Fernando related to us as we admired them while stopping for coffee on the road to Puebla.
Popo was a fierce warrior. Iztaccihuatl (the white lady), was a princess; the daughter of the Aztec king in Tenochtitlan (present day Mexico City). Popo and the white lady fell in love. The king sent Popo off to war, telling him that if he returned with the head of the enemy chief, he could marry the Princess Iztaccihuatl.
One of Popo’s enemies sent a false report back to Tenochtitlan that our hero had been killed. Distraught at the belief that her lover was dead, Iztaccihuatl fell into a decline and died of sadness. Just as her funeral was being prepared, Popo returned from the wars. Popo took Iztaccihuatl’s body and carried her into the mountains. He laid her on a funeral mound, and then built another for himself, where he sat with a burning torch, watching over her. Popocateptl too eventually died of sadness. The gods took pity on the lovers, and changed them into mountains. Popo hurls fire and death from his peaks, raging eternally against the loss of his love. Iztaccihuatl sleeps peacefully on the mountain next door.
Although the desire to catch a glimpse of the volcanoes had prompted this excursion, we were surprised and delighted to discover the joys of the pretty colonial city of Puebla.
We passed through a sort of flea market. It seemed like you could find everything from steampunk goggles
to vintage luggage
to photography equipment.
I broke my “no buying” rule and acquired two pretty scarves, one with a pendant of talavera ware, which comes from Puebla.
There were beautiful talavera bowls, dinner sets and other pieces as well, but alas, too heavy and big for my one suitcase.
Simon refused to buy a bowler hat, despite our assurances that he looked extremely hip. I told him that every teenager wants to be different, but few are. Here was his chance to start a trend. That argument went nowhere.
He refused to even try on the other hats on offer.
We also got a look at some spectacular churches, each it seemed, more ornate than the last.
My favourite was San Francisco Acatepec. The facade was covered in tile.
The epicentre of the 7.1 magnitude earthquake in September of 2017 was only about 80 kms south of Puebla. We saw damage everywhere. San Francisco Acatepec lost one of its domes.
When he found out we were all book lovers, Fernando took us for a quick look at the Library Polifaxiana, founded in 1646 by Archbishop Polifax y Mendoza. It was the first public library in North America.
Then our savvy guide took us to a local place for lunch. We ate yummy barbecued pork sandwiches on buns, at a cost of less than a dollar each.
We left Puebla reluctantly, but we also wanted to squeeze in a visit Cholula. This is both a fascinating and a frustrating site.
By some measurements, Cholula is the largest pyramid in Mexico and depending on how you calculate these things (height, volume, or area covered), even the largest in the world. It stands 217 feet tall and its base was 1480 by 1480 feet. It was constructed over hundreds of years, from the 3rd century B.C. to the 9th century A.D.
The frustration comes from the fact that it is mostly buried, and looks like a natural hill.
Although the pyramid was covered in earth when the Spaniards arrived, they knew this was a sacred site for the Aztecs. Even after the pyramid itself was abandoned, people had continued to bury their dead around the base. The Spaniards did what they always did in that situation. They built a church on top of the sacred mound.
Excavations have not been very extensive and stopped altogether in 1970, so that not much is known about the pyramid. Officialdom does not want to disturb the church, which is a Catholic pilgrimage site, the Virgin of the Remedies of Cholula. We do know that there are six different ‘pyramids’ built on top of each other over the centuries, as different ethnic groups took over the site. There are some signs around the area that try to help you understand what you are seeing, but mostly it looks like an Escher-like maze of stairs, walls and courtyards.
The earliest structure is in the talud-tablera style of Teotihuacan.
The last stage has stairs on the west side, facing Iztaccihuatl.
There is an altar, built after the pyramid was abandoned, in a time of drought. Children were sacrificed on that altar in order that they would go to ask the god Tlaloc for rain. Interestingly, pilgrimages to the church are also associated with requests to the Virgin to bring rain.
No evidence as to how that has worked out for any of the supplicants from competing ideologies over the ages.
The north side of the pyramid mound was damaged by the Spaniards building a road to Puebla. The west side was damaged by the installation of a rail line at a much later date.
Despite all this, it was a fascinating thing to see an enormous and significant ruin more or less as it would have looked centuries after it was abandoned. The place had a sort of authentic “explorer” vibe. We had to use our imaginations to fill in the empty air above the excavations with tons and tons of adobe or rock, shaped into an enormous human made mountain, with the church at the top standing in for the peak of the pyramid.
Can you see it?
If not, Touropia.com has helpfully provided a photo of a model that shows how it might have looked. 
Next post, we’ll see the reality of massive pyramids at Teotihuacan.
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