Cabana in the Clouds

We left Footloose Lucy safely parked at Overlander Oasis and, armed with fleeces and cags, we set off in a taxi on Saturday morning 11th June to the village of Cuajimoloyas 10,600 ft up in the mountains. How to describe it? We went up through the mist and the cloud and sometimes we came out and looked down on the clouds swirling around the mountains. Really a pretty inspiring sight.

Once we arrived in Cuajimoloyas we were then taken to our cabana which was about 3 km further into the forest. We got ourselves snuck down in our cabana which was made of adobe with a sort of tiled roof and lit a log fire which smoked like blazes to begin with but when we got the smoking sorted out we had a really nice fire. We had a stroll around and were amazed at the quantity and variety of wild flowers - red hot pokers at least 8 ft tall, great fields of wild blue lupins, wild strawberries, purple vetch and orchids.

Our cabana in the forest

Alan in front of large aloe

Wild lupins in the forest

In the afternoon we went back to the village of Cuajimoloyas where there was a bit  of a fiesta going on with a brass band marching around accompanied by a couple of more than life size puppets dancing and flailing their arms. Many of the gardens were adorned with massive marigolds, dahlias, fuschias as big as your fist and lots of other flowers we couldn't name.

Euphonium player (we think) at Cuajimolyas

Village house and garden

There was a tiny kitchen/restaurant next to the cabanas, run by a delightful lady who must have been all of 4 ft 6ins. She also turned out to be the cleaning maid and Alan nicknamed her Senora Mighty Atom because she was always cheery and never stopped being on the go.

Breakfast was hunks of sweet bread dunked in steaming mugs of the local hot chocolate which is nothing like Cadbury's drinking chocolate because it is also has crushed almonds and cinnamon added and is quite delicious.

None of the footpaths in the mountain forests are waymarked and the cloud can fall very quickly so we took local advice and hired a guide who turned out to be a diminutive Zapotec woman who spoke reasonably good English.

On Sunday we walked from Cuajimoloyas to Benito Juarez which is the next village. The walk there was supposed to take about an hour and a half but, in fact, in our case it took over two and a half hours, the reason being that we had not properly acclimatised to the reduced oxygen at ten and a half thousand feet. However, we learned a lot from our guide about the herbs and flowers that grow in the forest. There are herbs for all or many ailments, herbs for repelling mosquitoes, herbs which they put on the altar on the Day of the Dead which is the same as our halloween, and a great profusion of flowers which seem to grow well in this mountain environment.

With guide en route to Benito Juarez

Local resident

View from the forest

Butterfly on red hot poker

On Monday we walked to the Canyon of the Coyotes. The canyon itself is a narrow rock passage that is quite steep but then after that we walked up to a lookout which was very, very steep, in fact, it was a bit of a climb. The lookout itself is really quite hard to describe without getting a bit poetic. It was like being in the clouds, like coming down in an aeroplane, like hanging on a parachute, looking down on the clouds in places where they were swirling around the trees, looking down a mile or more to little homesteads and farms and patches of cleared ground where people were growing corn and potatoes and other stuff and the loudest noise that we could hear was the buzzing of a beetle coming past.

Sue coming up through Coyote Canyon

Coming up through the cave at Coyote Canyon

From there we went to our guide's family homestead and on the edge of the farm there was a wooden platform which looked out on a view at least as good as the one from the lookout that we had just left. Sue made sandwiches and we drank water and sat and gazed at the shifting panorama that was the product of the movement of the clouds and the coming and going of the sunlight. We can't recall ever having a nicer picnic spot, it was wonderful!

Picnic above the clouds

Once we got back from our walk we went back into Cuajimoloyas in the pouring rain to enjoy a little more of the continuing fiesta. The celebrations were part of a religious festival to do with San Antonio who is the patron saint of the village. We went down to where the band and a lot of people were gathered together under a series of leaky tarpaulins. The band was basically a collection of young men and not such young men who were gathered round standing in puddles with their instruments: big bass drums, snare drums, cymbals, the usual euphonium, silver trumpets, trombones and clarinets. It was very loud, but a lot of fun and really quite moving.

Cuajimolyas village

The forest around Cuajimoloyas is quite famous for the wide variety of wild mushrooms which grow once the rains start and, with the help of our guide, we collected a nice bundle whilst on our walk. We took them back to Senora Mighty Atom who then kindly cooked them for our supper. We were thankfully still alive next morning!

Guide holding wild mushrooms in front of very large aloe

We came down the mountain and returned to El Tule on Tuesday after a remarkable experience for us. The way of life in the mountains is so close to the natural world, they know things that we in the West forgot a hundred years ago.

On our return to Overlander Oasis we were informed that the brake pads had arrived and these were duly fitted on Wednesday 15th June. Time to get on the road again!