12 November 2013
If your
name is Tomás de Fonseca and your father brings you and your sister and
stepmother to Mexico in 1534 and you disembark in San Juan de Ulúa and take the
skiff across from the island to the collection of flimsy, palm thatched huts on
the edge of the beach that the boatman tells you is called Veracruz, you and
your family’s next challenge will be to walk to Tenochtitlán. The survivors of
Cortés’s campaign of conquest, and the few thousand immigrants who have
followed him to remake the Aztec capital in the image of Spain, have taken to
calling the place Mexico City. The man who rents you pack mules informs you
there are only two routes you can take: north along the coastal plains and then
over the Perote pass into the high plateau, or over the Orizaba pass. Both
roads meet in Puebla. You are Spanish, so you know about mountains, and they
don’t scare you all that much. The countryside around Veracruz is flat, and you
can’t see any mountains from here except, maybe, a white something that pokes
up in the distance directly west of Veracruz. You flip a coin and decide to take
the southern route. Though you don’t know it yet, the white pointy thing is
Mount Orizaba.
Those are
still the two main routes from Veracruz to the interior: go north of Mount Perote,
or south of Mount Orizaba. The old winding two-lane highways that trucks
groaned over until just a few years ago were superimposed on those old cart
paths. The new four-lane toll roads run along side them. Each of these roads
has to climb 2500 meters (7,500+ feet) to get over the passes through the
Sierra Madre Oriental.
Sometime
earlier, when the earth’s tectonic plates were drifting slowly round and round
the cooling planet, crashing into each other like carnival bump-um cars and
making mountains, sometimes a plate found itself situated over a magma vent, a
place where the pressure of heat in the incandescent planetary core had worked
its way through cracks and fissures to pool threateningly near the surface.
Sometimes the pool exploded, and hot magma shot up to the surface and created a
volcano. Then, sometime later, when the plate had floated a bit further on its
journey to wherever it was going, boom!, the same pool blew its cork again, and
a new volcano spurted in a line with the first. And then another, and another.
One hot spot could give birth to a whole chain of volcanic islands, like
Hawaii. Another hot spot, a belt of volcanoes that stretches west to east
across Mexico’s middle from Colima in the west to Orizaba in the east. They
come in all sizes and many shapes, some now dead, some only dormant, and
some—like Popocatépetl, still spitting cinders. The grand daddy of them all is
Orizaba, at 5,747 meters (17,800+ ft) Mexico’s highest peak and North America’s
third highest. Citlaltépetl, as the Náhuatl-speaking people on its lower slopes
still call it, is of the dormant-ish variety: it erupted 9 years after you and
your family skirted it on the cart path that winds along its southern flank,
and 3 more times after that, the last time in 1687. Presumably the next time
won’t be this afternoon.
At the foot
of the pass the city of Orizaba, named for the mountain, does not attract much
tourism, and that is too bad, because it has a lot to offer. The city is
located in a bowl, surrounded by high, forest-clad volcanic hills, with the
towering giant of Mount Orizaba to the north. The volcano-rich agricultural
lowlands to the east of it have grown sugar cane and cotton since colonial
days. In the 18th century the city grew rich on textile production,
and in the 19th it added cement plants and a beer factory, and
swelled to over 150,000 people. Because of where it is, Orizaba, like Xalapa on
the Perote route, is a major transportation hub for agricultural products and
manufactured goods. All that money fueled construction, so the city has a
splendid array of domed and towered churches, public buildings, and parks. The
churches came too late to enjoy the talents of the best Mexican baroque
architects and sculptors, but they are pretty on the outside, if rather blah in
the interior. It didn’t help that almost every army invading central Mexico from
the coast marched through Orizaba, including the French and the Americans a
couple of times each. Most everything that was worth hanging in a museum or
melting down has long since been carried off.
The town is
huge, but it doesn’t seem that way. Most of the buildings are two or three
story and look to have been built in late colonial times to early 20th
century. There is a smattering of deco architecture and a few modernist cubes. The
streets are gridded and numbered, in the Spanish colonial fashion decreed by
Philip II, but the city has enough up and down about it that it never appears
boring and on every third block there is a church or a park. The old monastery
of Saint Philip Neri’s Congregation of the Oratory has been repurposed as an
art museum, and it has one of the best collections of Diego de Rivera’s work
anywhere, which is one of the reasons we stopped here. The collection is so
renowned that it is frequently—and also currently—out on loan to other museums,
so I had to content myself with enjoying landscape paintings by visiting
German, English, and Italian travelers, the best known being Baron von
Humboldt, the early 19th-century explorer and scientist. There were
some nice maps, too, including a couple of San Juan de Ulúa that I hadn’t
previously seen.
T
he
strangest building in Orizaba is the former city hall, known now as the Palacio de Hierro, the Iron Palace. It
was built by the French (Messieurs Eifel, no less) for the Belgian Pavilion in
the 1889 Paris Exposition. A visiting Mexican of ample means saw it, and
decided on the spot that he would buy it and have it shipped to Orizaba to be
reassembled as the city hall. Voilá! The Palacio
is fabricated entirely, 100%, of cast iron plates and columns and
balustrades and volutes that are bolted together to create something green and
porch-ed and towered that looks like it ought to be a train station in Lucerne.
The walls are made of cast iron plates, each the size of a 40” flat screen TV.
The columns are each cast as a single piece. The balconies and wrap around
porch are cast in separate long sections. In recent years the town fathers of
Orizaba have repurposed this building as an attraction. It contains a classy
cafe, the tourist office, and a half-dozen small museums: A musuem of fútbol,
of beer, of flags, of Mexican presidents, a planetarium, and the one that
sucked us in, of the geology and archaeology of Mount Orizaba. Really well
done: a gem of a small museum. And good coffee in the cafe: several kinds, all
grown locally.
A river runs
through the city from north to south, a river called, unsurprisingly, the Río Orizaba. Rivers in most Mexican
cities are not very nice places: sewers empty into them and garbage collects on
their banks. City rivers generally invite the passer-by to look the other way
and pinch the nose tight. This river, dropping from the upper parts of the city
down to the lower valley, runs fast, and has been channeled between banks of
concrete and stone. Since Orizaba is a place of civ
ic pride, and the river is
an asset, the city has turned both banks into a promenade that follows the
current for nearly two kilometers. Many of the city’s east-west streets bridge
it, and each of the bridges is different. Every couple of hundred meters there
is a park: some with children’s play equipment, some with tables, all with
benches. One stretch of riverbank is a zoo! Four ostriches in one cage take
pleasure in running along side people as they walk past. A little further up a
cat house (no, not one of those) has put up a sign that as of November 25th
the jaguar’s new baby cub will be available for viewing. Don’t get me wrong:
this is nothing like San Antonio’s glitzy River Walk. Orizaba’s Paseo del río is still pretty grubby,
especially under a grey sky. The houses that back onto it are from the Epoch of
the Not Nice Rivers, and they tend to present a wall of unpainted, un-windowed,
heavily mildewed stone. When it rains a lot in the mountains, this river can be
savage. Some sections of the walk are closed where the river has ripped away
the concrete. Some of the streets that lead down to the river still show signs
of sand bagging. Still, civic pride being what it obviously is, I expect that
the Paseo del río will only get
prettier and spiffier with time.

The city
administration decided that one thing that would draw more tourists to Orizaba
would be a teleférico, an aerial
cable car that would carry people from downtown to the top of the hill that looms
over the city’s west side; in New England we would call the hill a mountain, and
we would have to drive to New Hampshire to see it. Had we come to Orizaba next
year rather than this, we could have ridden on the teleférico. Pictures of the plans
are posted all over town, and three of the cars sit on a flatbed in the middle
of the main pedestrian shopping stree
t, inviting citizens to marvel at the next
urban achievement of which they can all be proud.
Day one in
Orizaba we walk around. Day two I drive up Mount Orizaba to see, like the bear
of song, what I can see. The road services a string of villages and farms that
cling to the ridges on Orizaba’s lower slopes.
The
mountains here trap a lot of moisture-bearing clouds that sweep up from the
gulf, so it rains a lot, earning the town its nickname, Pluviosilla (Drippyville). Mornings are often clear, but by 10:00
the dew has evaporated, the moisture has become cloud, the clouds rise to
obscure the mountains, and when they get high enough, in late afternoon, they
precipitate a light mist, so characteristic that it has its own local
onomatopoeic name, chipi chipi. By
5:00 the umbrellas come out. By 8:30 the rain stops. And in the morning it
starts all over again. So it is warm in the city when I start, chilly when I go
through the mist layer, warm when I am above the clouds, icy when the clouds
catch up with me, damp enough that I have to run the wipers as I drop down
through them, and then dark grey as I get back to town. I am home before the
rain begins.
The
mountain is spectacular. Orizaba City sits at about 1100 meters. As I climb I
pass cane fields; then a little higher fields of roses and calla lilies; the
upper slopes are mostly pasturage, a few cows and many flocks of sheep. La Perla,
the highest actual town I get to, is at 3,000 meters, which means that I and
the CRV climb about a vertical mile. I go another few hundred meters (vertical)
beyond la Perla, and then the concrete road turns to rock
s and ruts of such an
irregularity that even I am I am not tempted. Orizaba’s peak, with its huge
elliptical crater, is still 2500 meters (a mile and a half ) above me). Besides,
3,200 meters is about my altitude threshold: higher than that I develop a
headache and feel dizziness and nausea. I’ve been up to 5,000 meters a few
times in Perú and, believe me, forty years later I can still feel the effects. The
scenery on Orizaba, in fact, reminds me a lot of mountain Peru. Vast vistas,
small farms perched anywhere there is a patch of land flat enough to plow
(which means anything up to a 60% incline), a town perched on every little
ridge top. For some reason their church towers are invariably painted orange.
Every village has an elementary school with a sign that proclaims it to be
bilingual, which up here means Spanish-Nánuatl; la Perla has a secondary
school, too. The kids are all in school uniforms, different colors in the
different villages.
All the men
dress western; though the higher I go the more the women are dressed
traditional: bright colored under sheaths covered by skirts covered by aprons; blouses
of shiny satin and lace. In the higher altitudes the whole package is covered
with a thick sweater or wrapped with a woolen shawl. Many of the women have
babies on their backs. Though there are cars and pickup trucks in every town,
the higher I go the more mules and donkeys I see. Every village has
electricity, and the lines go up beyond where I am able to drive. Almost every
roof is capped with a satellite dish. But people cook with wood, and as I wind
my way up I can see both men and women chopping with heavy iron axes attached
to obviously home-made handles. In the middle-high villages, men are loading
bound bundles of calla lilies and roses onto pickup trucks to take them down to
the wholesale flower market that is a couple of blocks from the Palacio de Hierro.

Disappointed
and relieved that the paved road doesn’t go any higher, I turn around, put the
CRV into first gear, take my foot off the gas, and start the long serpentine
down to Orizaba City, stopping only where I can squeeze a pull off to take
pictures of the mountains and chasms and waterfalls, the
clouds above, and the clouds below. Tomorrow we go to Oaxaca.
David and Linda