Settling Down

It has been a long time since my last post describing our journey into Mexico and our new home in Ajijic.   So here is a glimpse into our adventures settling down in this new environment.

I may have mentioned before, we are renting a two bedroom two bath condominium on the western edge of Ajijic. We like this location as it is only a 20 minute walk to the center of town and, as a consequence, is not close to the loud celebrations that accompany all of the fiestas and parades that are an important part of life in Mexico. Our neighborhood is also a nice mix of local stores and businesses, as well as a number of restaurants catering mostly to visitors and us migrants.

Upon our return, it was surprising to see how much the water hyacinth had spread and grown on the lake. It was introduced many years ago and is now an invasive species. The wind moves the floating plants around the shorelines and here it has formed a solid mat many yards out from this shore.

 The lake is still lovely to look at as we walk along the m\Malecon.

The lake is at it's highest level, not seen for many years. This playground is now providing perching points for all of the water birds.

We decided to get a local sim card for one of our old phones so that we have a local phone number. The fun part is getting to know how to make calls to different types of phones. Above is the notice board in the local TelCel office!!

 Halloween was a lot of fun, a good time to dress up, eat and drink.

El Dia de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a famous holiday for Mexico and there is much preparation and commemoration. In Ajijic the celebration occurs over two days, November 1 is Children's Day of Day of little Angels, commemorating children who have died.

Locals make sawdust carpets, (Tapetes de Asserin,) all over the town plaza. They are wonderful works of art.

 Alters are set up honoring family members who have passed on.

The cemeteries are covered with flowers and families take picnics and commune with those family members who are buried there.

From the beginning of November through Carnaval (Mardi Gras), there are many fiestas and celebrations. I may not have all of these in order, but following Day of the Dead is Mexican Revolution day.

Well not quite. On November 8 thru 10 is the Feria Maestros del Arte, which is a local art fair.   It is an amazing event, featuring indigenous artisans from all over Mexico showing and selling their wares.  There are roaming interpreters who help out when language difficulties arise.  The organizers arrange and pay for the artist's transportation and housing during the fair so they are able to keep all that they make from their sales.  This enables them to go back to their villages and make improvements for the community and their studios, which in turn, keeps their art alive.

We were attracted to many items, but blew our budget on this carpet, handwoven in Oaxaca.  It took the weaver 3 months to make.

It is hard to see the detail in this photo, but suffice to say it is very intricate..

On Mexican Revolution Day, many children dress up and participate in the parade, boys as revolutionary soldiers, and girls as adelitas (or soladeras).

They dance together as the parade stops at a cross street.

As always, there are lots of horses and their riders.

It is serious business being a revolutionary. What a good way to learn the history of your country.

Probably my favorite photo. These young guys were riding in the back of a pickup truck when something obviously caught their attention. I just love how serious and curious they look.

During November we were invited to join our friends Janie and Norman in a house on the outskirts of Tapalpa. This town has been designated a "Pueblo Magico" by the State. These towns are selected and provided funds to upgrade their streets and other facilities with the idea of attracting tourists to inland towns away from the coasts and beaches. It seems an excellent idea, in that the intent is to bring tourist money into the hinterland and spread it a bit more equally. This is the first such town that we have visited,  but I must say we were a little disappointed. Yes,  the cobbled streets were somewhat smoother, but one of the requirements imposed when you are chosen to get this "improvement" money, is that all businesses have to adopt a common signage and common facade colors.  In my mind, this takes away some of the vibrancy that is common to Mexican towns.

 It is easy to get lost on some roads in Mexico, this sign was on the way to the house where we stayed!!

 We passed this little tortillaria on a back street in Tapalpa. They are making tortilla's and the large mounds of masa were being brought in from a pickup truck to feed the tortilla production machine.

The center of Tapalpa is dominated by the always-present Catholic church. The day we visited, there was a wedding underway.

One of the key attractions to the area around Tapalpa is the Valle de Las Piedrotas, or "The Big Stones". There are many ideas of how these stones got there, including extra terrestrials!! We only know that they have been there a long time as evidenced by ancient petroglyphs.

There are zip lines that can get you to the top of the largest rocks, but on the day we visited, they did not appear to be in operation.

It is an interesting landscape, if a bit strange.

Approaching the end of the year, there were more fiestas and processions almost every weekend,  and always into the evenings with lots of fireworks.

The fireworks tower, or castillio,  before everything started.

It is pretty difficult to get good photos of the fireworks display, I guess you just have to be there!!

What is a lot of fun watching the men send off the rockets. They hold them in their hand and light the touchpaper, usually with a cigarette end,  and then holding on untill they shoot into the sky. The explosions are very loud at the end of the rocket's flight, imagine a stick of dynamite!

I joined a small group of photographers who ventured out to the eastern end of Lake Chapala to visit an old hacienda.  It is known as La Della Cristina,  or Hacienda Maltarana,  and was built around 1907 as a result of some political dealing between President Diaz and some local land owners. The hacienda was built in a French style, it had 365 doors and windows, one for each day of the year. The President apparently gave the finished hacienda to his goddaughter, Cristina Cuesta, so hence the name, La Bella Cristina.
It must have been a spectacular building, however,  it was ransacked during the Mexican Revolution by revolutionaries led by Pancho Villa.
It is still an amazing building, held together by many wooden props. We talked to the man who now owns the land there and he told us that it was last occupied sometime in the 1940's.

There is much more to tell about the history at this end of the lake, but suffice it to say, it has many dikes and rivers that make it fertile farmland. Boatman taking a load of reeds.

As we drove back to the town of Jamay, we came across this wonderful scene. Many thousands of birds were flying in swirling formations known as a "Murmuration". We stood and watched and photographed for a long time, a fascinating sight that I had read about but never witnessed.

Back in the small town of Jamay, we came across the most unlikely sight. This 60 foot high tower was built by the local people in 1876 to commemorate the visit of Pope Pius IX to Mexico. It is quite a sight and almost impossible to photograph!

The Christmas and New Year is full of parades and festivals and we found ourselves a tree and were able to decorate it with ornaments we could not part with when we made our move!

We attended\one of many wonderful musical and theatrical performances available here in Ajijic.  "Go Tango" was organized by one of our local entrepreneurs. It was a great show with local musicians and tango dancers. It was also good to see that the large auditorium (Auditorio de Riberas),was full.

Each year the local artist group, Ajijic Society of the Arts, organizes an "open studio" weekend and this year Diane and I were invited to share a local artist's studio. Diane made her fabric covered boxes and they were a great hit. This photo was taken after many boxes had found new homes.

I think this was how her display looked before the tour began!

This is Judy Miller, an amazing pastel artist, who invited us to share her studio for the weekend show.

I shared space with David Winston and Joan Franklin, both of whom moved here from Ashland.

There are many parades that culminate in Carnaval (Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday).   This involves the masked Zayacas dancers who chase children and pelt them with handfuls of flour. Bystanders are not exempt and I was the recipient of quite a few handfuls. The air is literally full of flour........

It is lovely to see all of the children participating in the parades and, in this instance, finding a good place to see everything.

As I have mentioned before, there are a lot of horses and their riders participating in these parades. This photo says a lot about family participation in these events. What great memories this little girl will have of riding with her father in the Carnaval parade of 2019.

In February of each year, Ajijic hosts a Chili Cook-off, and this year was it's 41st anniversary. It is a three-day affair with many individuals and restaurants presenting their idea of an award-winning chili, as well as salsa and margaritas.

There are ongoing performances of musicians and dancers, and a large array of booths where many local artist's have there work for sale.

American White Pelicans over-winter on Lake Chapala and as I write this, they are preparing to make the long migration back to Canada. Here they are feeding on some fish scraps that had been brought to the shore. It is quite a sight and we will miss them until they return in the fall.
As I finish this, we are headed into Easter and many more celebrations. As you can see there is much to discover here, so with any luck there will not be such a long break before I write again.
Stay tuned.

The Long Road....

It has been a long time since we returned to Ashland in Southern Oregon and smoke from the many fires that surrounded the valley. As I write this we are saddened by the loss of life in the terrible fires in California, and am particularly concerned about friends who retired to the town of Paradise in Northern California  We know they are safe, but do not know if their house survived.  Wishing them the best.
We spent August and two weeks of September, going through all of our possessions to decide what to keep and what to leave for the estate sale. Sorting through much memorabilia was a really difficult task, especially for Diane, who still had a lot of belongings from her parents to sort through and decide what she couldn't part with. It didn't help that we couldn't venture outside very often because of the dense smoke making for unhealthy air to breathe.

We had a storage unit where we accumulated all of the items we wanted to keep.  The remaining contents were left at the house for the estate agent and her team to organize and price, ready for a three day sale. Since the agent and her team needed a week for all this to be arranged, we left and drove to Seattle to visit family. It was a very strange feeling to realize that many of the possessions that had been with us for a large part of our lives, would soon be GONE.
After a few days with family, we decided to wend our way back to Ashland along the Oregon Coast.  We made a first stop in Astoria,  and took a few photos, before continuing on the short drive to Seaside where we had booked one night.

We had to stop and visit the column since it is quite a landmark, and the spiral frieze around the column is quite amazing. It depicts many of the historic events of early days in Oregon, including the Lewis and Clark expedition, which concluded at a nearby location.

Sunset from our hotel in Seaside.

We made several stops along the coast and were reminded just how beautiful this part of the world is.

We stopped at the Tillamook Creamery and Cheese Factory as we drove south. We did not realize what a large operation this is and enjoyed walking around the visitor center and taking part in the cheese tasting.

The packaging conveyor line.

Another view of the factory floor.

We then returned to Ashland and the challenge of packing the car. We spent two days making sure the house was clean, and all the nail holes from hanging art were patched and painted. We felt fortunate that all the remnant debris from the estate sale had been cleared away and everything was left tidy.  The photo above is all that we had decided to keep and, hopefully, take to Mexico.  The next challenge, how much will fit in the Prius and on the roof rack!

The car, empty and trying to make sure that every nook and cranny was utilized. It is quite amazing just what can be tucked under the front seats!

Just a few more things to be squeezed into the roof-top carrier, while at the same time worrying that maybe we had overloaded the car!

We did decide to keep a small 5 X 5 storage unit for items that would not fit in the car and that we would "deal with" on our next visit to Ashland.

Packed and ready to roll.........
Our plan was to drive to Ajijic, Mexico by way of Carlsbad, CA and Scottsdale, AZ to visit friends and break the journey a little. The drive from Ashland to Ajijic is about 2,500 miles, and so we set off with some concerns over how potentially overloaded the car might be.

We were to see many more scenes like this as we made our way south.

We hit a major downpour as we approached Scottsdale, which made me a little concerned that the roof rack "bag" was waterproof, as advertised, it was.  After spending two nights with friends in Scottsdale, we  stayed at a Best Western on the Nogales side of the border, ready to make an early start through the inspections. etc. at the border.
We made it in good time and after some cursory looks at what was in the car, a customs officer peered into tightly packed boxes, and was finally convinced that all we had in the car was for our "casa", we were waved on.

We had a lot of concern as to just where the immigration station was located, it is NOT at the border where you might think it should be! It is at km 21. Fortunately for us we had a lot of help in locating this stop from our friend Norman McKeithan, who walked me through the approach using Google Earth. It was just as well, as the signage to this important stop is all but non-existent, and the "off-ramp" is into a gravel parking lot. We received the important immigration forms, as well as the temporary import permit for the car, quite easily with minimal wait times.

Mexico is making major upgrades to Hwy 15, which did make for a great drive most of the time. We would come upon "diversions" quite quickly where we were directed to the other carriageway which was now a two lane highway, so we needed to stay alert.
We had planned and booked hotels in Guaymas, Culiacan and Tepic, giving us approximately seven hours driving between each stop. We had good experiences and most times were able to find the hotel location, with a lot of help from our trusty Garmin GPS.

There were a lot of trucks to be aware of, but we only had one long back-up that you can see here. The cause we believe was a bus that had crashed up ahead.

On this approach to the toll booth, there were trucks everywhere and we were getting directed into booths that were on the opposite side of the highway. There were many toll booth stops, occasionally ones not operating officially.  Barriers were up and  there were workers standing at the booth with a coffee can where you were expected to deposit the normal toll amount. We never quite understood what this was all about?

Some parts we passed through, notably between Tepic and Guadalajara, reminded us a lot of France or Britain, with rolling green hills all around.

A typical wayside stall selling food and fruit, this on what is described as a toll road, not a "freeway", though it looks pretty much like one, only with additions such as these!

A toll booth entry, you just have to be prepared with money to hand the attendant, or the random bucket, if the toll barrier is raised.

On our arrival back at our condo, we were greeted by "welcome home" gifts from our dear friends Janie and Norman. They had kept an eye on our place while we were back in Oregon preparing for this move.

Even more thoughtful were some food supplies so that we did not have to go grocery shopping the moment we arrived.

Even the fridge was stocked with the essentials, milk, orange juice and beer!

Lake Chapala is at it's highest level in years, it had risen six feet while we were away.  For a lake 50 miles long and 10 miles wide, that is a lot of water. It has continued to rise since we have been back.

The egrets love it, there are a lot of fish in the lake and occasionally you see the egrets catch mouthfuls. The pelicans are now arriving, so we will be entertained when we walk the lakeside boardwalk.

More later, stay tuned.