Once upon a time, we rode through a land where they build the roads around trees. Malinalco is another of the Pueblos Mágicos of Mexico. I stopped to take this photo of Neon and chatted for a bit with a mother walking her daughter home from school. I effused about the magic in the middle of the road. She smiled, accepting it as a personal compliment, and glanced up at a ridge rising to the west, “asi es,” she laughed. I was already enraptured and still had no idea what unraveling and wonders awaited amidst the ruins on that rise.

We had just clambered through the mountains where the ancient stories tell that Quetzalcoatl brought forth the first kernel of corn to feed the early humans.

Like Greek and Roman mythology, the cultures of these regions often had overlapping deities, calling them by different names. To the Aztec he was Quetzalcoatl. To the Maya he was Kukulcán. By some accounts, born of a virgin. Giving of his blood (he ground up the bones of the first 4 warriors he won back through a series of trials and mixed in his blood to make a masa) to give life and soul to the 5th warrior, human kind.

Then he merked off eastwards, and there was promise of a second coming. Though, historical accounts give no indication of a misnomer commonly quipped today, that they confused the Spanish for their god. They were more interested in the weaponry and thought they could get the Spanish to share if they were welcoming and friendly.

Either way, when the Catholic Orders of Franciscan (converters), Jesuit (scholars), and Dominican (travelers) priests came with stories of Jesus, it was easy for the locals to be like, “yeah, we know him.” And the priests were like, “but no, his name is Jesus. He’s OUR God, we’re bringing him. He’s different.” and the locals were like, “okay yeah, cool, we can call him that.”

A modern manifestation of this kind of thinking as we’ve experienced it has been beating my head and notebooks against frustration that they don’t care much about fixing a concept into a singular structure. Not time, spelling, business open hours, pronunciation.
Details are. Squirrely.

Any one town may have several names and you spell it how you like. Even different eras of government road signs placed next to each other will spell it differently. It’s really hard to nail down details. Even time is mutable.
“Another gringo came through here once!” They like to tell us.
“When?” I ask.
And they gesture over their shoulder. Sometimes it was two weeks ago, sometimes it was two years. Sometimes, I know the guy.
It is embarrassing for everyone if you press for details such as, “who” “when” or “how” and don’t even try for a “why”!

I am only nominally comforted that it is not a “lost in verbal translation” thing. I assumed for the first 3 years I was asking wrong, that my command of the language was sub-par, and it is. Still, from watching them interact among themselves, they seem to have just as hard a time understanding one another. So, it takes the mesero several tries to get the table set up to the satisfaction of the father of the family hosting the birthday party.

The lack of efficiency is easy to observe from this angle but what can be harder to wrap my mind around is: they aren’t too worried about efficiency or straight lines or pretending like an event is fixed because their stories reach back to time immemorial. Oral traditions about creatures long since extinct. Birthday dad just wants to feel important because he paid for the event and his guests need to see his power, so, if it wasn’t the tables, he’d be pushing around for something else. Why not let it be the tables?
Everything is mutable, from the name of god to the table arrangements.

It comes down to the difference between cultures which beget linear thinkers and cyclical thinkers. Let me put it in a less threatening way: their calendars were not rows, they were circles.

It’s a tough concept to translate, especially by these means, and bringing masters such as God and Efficiency into it may make you bristle (it has taken me years to grasp even these threads), and that’s okay. It’s just what it is. And it’ll change.

For a mere 60 pesos (about $3 usd) anyone can climb the 426 steps up to the Malinalco Archaeological Site, the sacred ritual temples once available only to Mexica warriors graduating to the highest order, or esteemed prisoner slaves, destined to die.

The slaves would be painted (red on yellow) and given a stick with feathers to fight a properly armed warrior. How well they fought, was to their dignity and augmented their glory when they transitioned to death. In the end, their skin and heart would be made a sacrifice.

The ascending warriors would engage in a variety of forms of self sacrifice. Inside the temple are reclined stone chairs carved like eagles where they would lay as priests enacted gauged piercings or splitting septums. A specific act of auto bloodletting was covering their bodies in cuts (as if scratched all over by an eagle or a jaguar) to pour their blood into wells carved into the stone.

Women who died in childbirth earned their own rank of warrior, Cihuateteo. They too were honored here. [The Featured Image at the top of the page is labeled as a ‘Post-Classical Mexica sculpture of the Mystical Feminine’ and it looks to me like she has had just about enough of bringing to life, cleaning up forever afterwards, and being left out of the story.]

All of this was done to feed Huitzilopochtil, the god of war and sun. Nursing venerated life energy into holes in the ground to give him the strength needed to do battle every night as he passed through the underworld. It wasn’t for wanton cruelty or personal gain but belief that it was necessary to keep the universe balanced.

I was taught a very particular perspective on these patriarchal cultures as a child growing up in Latin America. It’s interesting to sit with what a difference even just a couple decades can make in a gal, much less hundreds of years between cultures. Sitting on the steps of the temple and in the reflection afforded by my education, the Mexica systems don’t seem much different from modern marketing, politics, and war. Has your boss ever acted like the world is going to crash if you are 15 minutes late to work?
I want to know where all that blood goes.

It felt really special to hold our daily check-in at such a space as the temple site. To have a corner of the grounds to ourselves, to watch the birds soar on drafts over the cliff edge and let our eyes wander up the fissures of rocks and the trees growing out of the cliff faces. To size up the mountains we would soon be riding through (behind us in this photo).

The treasure of this journey is not lost to me, thought the true price in effort to get here may be lost to those who have not sweat, bled, or given flesh for something they believe in. I my never be ripped open birthing a child, or otherwise take up arms in battle so this is my way of tasting sacrifice and exultation.

When the Augustinians arrived and converted most of the population, they had them disassemble the Mexica temples and carry the stones down to build the Monastery of Transfiguration. A name which I spent quite some time chuckling about. Here are my blessed little feet (wearing our gear partners, Xero shoes sandals), amidst the rocks which have been carried back up to the original site, overlooking the monastery (white) in the town below.

Eventually my bird gazing, sketching, and musing ran into closing time (another mutable feature). I had also had been watching a fellow visitor, at first I thought because he was the only other non-Mexican visiting the site. I’d watched his camera angle and noted an eye for architecture and informed scrutiny. I felt curious about his curiosity and from my perch, suspecting I was watching a fellow Slow Traveler.

I walked down the first half of the stairs with one of the archaeologists on staff but once he started asking for my phone number and relationship status we caught up to Marc and his guide. One of us found a way to make the necessary initiations and start to chat about both the impetus to travel and to build community around those travels.

The ensuing email exchange has confirmed my initial suspicion, and he gave me permission to share this snippets of insight and reflection which I have been pondering for many miles since:

If you have an interest in photography or travel and wish for open access to high quality images and researched and amusing juxtapositions and historical notes, you will enjoy his website, Seeing the World Through the Eye of my Lens: Travel and Pics, which spans the globe. You can also reach him by email to be included when he updates from his latest travels.

I made my way back to find Neon and we wandered out, hunting for food beneath a thundering sky. We resumed pedaling the next morning.

---

How to get involved:

-Contribute and join the journey with monthly support on Patreon.
-Make a 1 time gift via PaPal to itineranthughes@gmail.com
(All proceeds go to the Odyssey and at least 10% is given back to communities along the way)

-Subscribe to receive weekly stories at the bottom of page here.
-Like and Follow on Facebook.
-Follow on Instagram.
-Subscribe on YouTube.
-Follow on Twitter.