5am we left el DF one Monday. The car was freezing. Turns out the fuse that was thought to fix the heat just wasn't that one, I suppose. It brought back almost-painful memories of fall fruit picking, of every single vein in your body aching for the sun to push the blood back through it, and the utter magic when the first ray shoots over the mountain. Never mind that it will still be another hour or so before the sun's warmth reaches your bones, that is THE SIGN. We got to Puebla, and as we were running on approximately 2 hours of sleep, we took a nap at Tio Miguel's house, who had driven us to Puebla, ostensibly so that we could sleep in the back seat. Only the cold!
Back on the road. We're not good, serious road-trippers yet. We stop after about 15 minutes to eat. Luckily, we did. Quesadillas that made one forget about the proximity to diesel fumes, oh my that flor de calabaza, can't get enough! Sufficiently enchilados, we got back on the road. Don't want to drive at night. We do anyway. After all the curves and the sunlight that seems to be funneled directly into our eyeballs by a poorly designed windshield (thanks GM) and the dust and the sometimes sticky, stagnant, serious calor, we arrive to Oaxaca, late. Tired. That kind of tired where someone talks AT you, and you don't even know if your eyes are open or if your jaw has dropped to the floor and you have distant, wispy thoughts that maybe you're too old for this, in complete disregard for your lack of sleep, food, water. Our host, a couchsurfer, very friendly, very hospitable, soon realized this and lights out.
What alegria the next day to find a dear friend, Claire. Suffering under the beady-eyed gaze of the same Lebanese boss in San Cristobal, we became friends quickly. What was first a survival-mechanism became the basis of our now 3 year long friendship. And here she was, finally outta San Cris! I was happy to see her and even happier that it wasn't in San Cris and almost in tears happy that we could travel together like we'd always talked about, even if it was only for a day and an hour out of Oaxaca City. We took pictures of the Arbol de Tule outside the gates. Why pay 5 pesos to go inside when the tree's so big it barely fits in its fence?
We nearly choked ourselves on thick dust winding through houses with fences out of cactuses, up up up into a mountain, back down the mountain, where the hell is HIERVE DEL AGUA, and suddenly we were there. It's surreal, I don't think I could aptly describe it, but when Claire said it felt like it was the end, a place where you simply couldn't go any further, the end of what she didn't know, but the end...I had to agree.
Tlayudas in the belly, deep sleep.
