A three-hour bus ride from from Mérida took us to the smaller coastal city of Campeche, also a UNESCO site and described accurately in the guidebooks as a “colonial gem.” After the rigors and heat of Mérida, we immediately loved this place. Cooler, due to a terrific windstorm our first day. (Here I am, blown in with one of the 16th century pirates who regularly sacked Campeche and killed its Spanish settlers after it became a rich port exploiting the local resources – once the native Mayan were vanquished, of course).

Quieter and safer since 1685, when King Carlos of Spain ordered a wall built around the city. Some of the ramparts remain, and workers are busy reconstructing the rest of the wall, cutting blocks of the skull-white fine limestone the city is built upon, covering everything with a thin layer of dust.


And more recently, with the UNESCO anointment in 1999, the restoration of many of the one-story houses within the historic center, painted ice-cream tones, and the creation of several pedestrian-only streets. Ah, how I love quiet, walkable, “gawkable” streets.

Plazas and walkways are dotted with the amazing bronze sculptures of an artist we’d never heard of, but will not soon forget, Leonora Carrington.

Born 1917 into upper-class England, Carrington was a rebellious girl who declared herself a Surrealist by age 19, ended up with Max Ernst in Nazi France in the 1930’s, in Spain during the civil war, then in Mexico by age 25, where she joined the great Mexican artistic movement of the period: Frida + Diego, Buñuel, et al. When we saw the date on the base of one sculpture as 2010, we couldn’t believe she was still working. But she was; she only died in 2011, at 94, an iconoclast faithful to her Surrealist visions to the very end. I can’t wait to read her biography.
Back to Campeche: originally a Maya city called A Kim Pech (with the wonderful translation, “Lord Sun Sheep Tick”), the city is doing it best to promote tourism, fast becoming one base of its economy, and interestingly most of the tourists are Europeans – especially French, according to conversations we heard around us. Cultural life abounds with mansions and 18th century convents restored into cultural centers, with music, dancing and readings every night. Young people are everywhere, interviewing tourists for their high school project – “What most you like about our city?” on their way to dance and music classes. I came across several excellent bookstores, which always makes me happy whether I buy or not.
We were sorry to leave after two days but we were worried about traveling during Semana Santa, the long Easter vacation that many Mexicans stretch to ten days. So we bought bus tickets for our next destination: the highlands of Chiapas and San Cristobal de las Casas, a city Michael and I visited in the 1980s during our first years in Costa Rica. Our only choice to get there was an overnight bus trip, 12 hours that turned into 14 hours when some local indigenous communities blocked the road. Although the Zapatista movement has settled down, political turmoil remains, it seems.
More from San Cristobal soon….

Dear Friends: We are heading for Mexico this week and I want to get one more Chronicle out before we leave. These last few years, since settling into the house, it seems easier to travel while we’re here then during our six months in Portland. For one thing, we have more flexible time. For another, we get a discount on flights because we are residents of Ecuador and, ahem, tercer edad – “third age” or golden agers. We usually go to Spain but this year Michael was yearning to return to a place he has loved (and lived in): Mexico. We are spending three weeks in the Yucatán and Chiapas, and I’ll try to send a couple of travel blogs if I can figure out how to do it from my iPad.

So, back to Cañar, where we’ve been lucky to be invited by Tayta Antonio Quinde (above) to accompany him on some exploratory journeys to the past (me as photographer; Michael as guest). He is researching and writing about pre-Inca times, when the local “runas” (or native peoples, now identified as Cañaris), ranged over a wide swath of southern Ecuador and northern Peru. They left many traces, but much mystery, as the invading Incas overlaid their own culture on this territory in the mid-fifteen century, and the conquering Spaniards imposed their customs and religion on the region a mere 100 years later. Written history began with the Spanish chroniclers, and what we know of the early pre-Inca times was told to them by local informants in the aftermath of two violent upheavals of the original cultures.

Still, the landscape we saw on an outing into the highlands near Cañar last week probably hasn’t changed much since then (except for the roads). And folks still live perched on the sides of the mountains much as they have for millenniums.

And survive in much the same ways:

“We’ve been here at least 3,000 years,” Cañaris usually say in speaking of their history, but recent research indicates that South America might have been peopled much earlier, perhaps 9,000 years ago (red ocher cave paintings in Brazil) or 22,000 years ago (stone tools in northeast Brazil) or even up to 30,000 years ago (giant sloth hunters in Uruguay). And then there is Texas, where archeologists have recently found projectile points showing that hunter-gatherers reached Buttermilk Creek as early as 15,500 years ago.

We’ve come today to see a petroglyph that Antonio says is Cañari, which means it might be a mere 1000 years old. When I ask how he knows, he says the spiral form is indicative of native iconography of pre-Inca peoples. Near the spectacular site of the rock (here outlined in a piece of carbon from the fire), Antonio points out where, years before, he saw ancient terraces and stone pathways. He asks the man who lives in the nearby house what happened, and the man says, “My father-in-law cleared them to make space for the pigs.” So much for prehistory; but then I suppose a pig in the hand is worth more to a landowner/farmer than a pre-Inca site.

Later, Antonio showed us a worked stone near his highland property, revealed when a neighbor hired a tractor to plow the land and tip the stone to the edge of the field. Which just goes to show that Cañar’s prehistory continues to be uncovered.  

Finally, indulge me with a few shots of the beautiful native flora we saw at this higher elevation, quite different from that in Cañar. Sorry I have no names, but if some of your request it I will ask a Cañari friend for local identifying info. 

Pawkar Raymi is the Quichua equivalent of Carnival, the celebration that marks the beginning of Lent in Catholic Church. In the indigenous cosmovision – world view, loosely translated – Pawkar Raymi marks the “flowering of the crops” planted earlier in the year and the promise of a good harvest ahead (with another fiesta at summer solstice called Inti Raymi). It’s all about abundance and sharing and my favorite fiesta of the year. Only in recent years have Cañari communities begun to recreate what they claim was a pre-Inca indigenous festival, co-opted first by the Inca invaders and then by the Spanish conquistadors and the Catholic Church. But as Pawkar Raymi always falls on the Monday before Ash Wednesday, and its name comes from the Inca language, I think it’s safe to say it’s a perfectly melded day of old and new traditions from far and wide.For me, it’s a long and arduous workday, beginning with a procession that starts early from a host community, usually deep in the country, picking up participants along the way as it winds through town and then out to a field prepared for a celebration that lasts far into the night of music, dancing, eating, and throwing cornstarch, water and canned foam on one another (more on that later). I usually take a break between morning and afternoon, come home for lunch to download my photos and charge the batteries. But my job is nothing compared to the work of the women who carry the cuynaña for hours and hours, a sort of cornucopia platform loaded fruits and vegetables, drinks and cooked cuys – guinea pigs, so important to Andean life. There’s one in the photo below, impaled next to a …chicken? Here’s the cuynaña from above in a moment when the women rested.When I first started photographing this fiesta, live cuys were dangled by their little feet around the platform, usually not surviving the day. After a few years, animal rights concerns put them in cages attached to the bottom of the platform, and now live animals seem to have disappeared altogether.

After lunch, it’s back to the field, where each community sets up a choza to offer food and drink to the carnavaleros. Over in one corner, women and men from the host community are cooking in huge pots on wood fires to feed about 1000 people. As I said, Pawkar Raymi is all about abundance and sharing.There I run into many familiar faces, and it’s one day where I’m allowed to photograph everyone without asking, In return, I give CDs of the photos to anyone who asks. 

Families have spent weeks preparing for this day – the women making special clothing and the men fashioning flutes and drums and these amazing hats, made of cowhide stretched over a frame and decorated with everything from fresh flowers to cooked cuyes to deer heads and antlers.

Every year for over 20 years, my old friend Pedro Solano has brought out his Tayta Carnaval sombrero topped with a stuffed condor, each year more desiccated and missing more parts. 

By mid-afternoon it is raining hard, and I’ve finally had enough of trying to protect my gear while dodging cornstarch and foam sprayed from cans (called kareoke, for some strange reason), and I’m exhausted from shooting over 500 photos. I trudge home and say to Michael, “I’m not sure I can keep doing this every year.” But I know I’ll be back next year – walking backwards and stumbling along the road, trying to capture the procession as it heads toward me at a fast clip.