The drive to Morelia was a breeze and it wasn’t long before we were checked into our very nice hotel called Herencia by Hosting House, a lovely boutique hotel about 200m from the main square called Plaza de Armas. Morelia is a UNESCO World Heritage, founded in 1541. It was originally called Valladolid (the same name as the city we we stayed in the Yucatan) but changed its name to Morelia in memory of Jose Morelos after the Mexican War of Independence.
The city is beautiful. Probably the most beautiful of all the cities, I think, we have visited in Mexico, if not the whole of our trip. The number of churches was incredible, it seemed like there was one on every second corner. The Morelia Cathedral is a stunning building – it took over 100 years to build from 1640 until the mid 1700’s. The main hall was incredible, but then leading off the main hall were a load of smaller alcoves, each with a different saint or statue of Jesus. Other impressive churches were Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe – the interior was a stunning display of gold laced decorations – and the Templo de Santa Rosa de Lima. Although an atheist, I love visiting and sitting in quiet churches. The church plays such an important role in the local community; the cathedral or church is always located in the main town square. We start our exploration of every town by looking for the church steeple!!
The first day we just wandered around for hours, walking into any interesting looking buildings to check out the amazing insides. One building we wondered into was a music school, so we sat in the plaza for a while listening to a beautiful soprano in one ear and a small orchestra in the other. A real treat. We stopped a couple of times in various squares to simply watch the world go by supping on quality coffee. We noticed that there were Way less smokers compared to other parts of Mexico, with a lot of buildings and squares were signposted as non-smoking. Also a hell of a lot of Volkswagon Beatles. I think they are manufactured in the area. That night we grabbed some Subway and watched a movie in our room while munching on the sandwiches. Luxury.
The next day, after an incredible breakfast in our hotel, we walked in the opposite direction to the main square to check out the Morelia Aqueduct. It was built in 1785 and is over 1.6km long. It was built during a drought to bring drinking water to the city. The quality of the workmanship was impressive given its durability. We also found out the Morelia wasn’t just special because of the architecture but also its cooking. Everywhere you went there were restaurants and cafe’s. Deryn and I are not foodies so don’t make too much effort to find decent restaurants in the cities of towns that we visit, but in Morelia they find you. That night we had some of the best fish tacos ever (close call with the Escondido ones) at a restaurant called Tata Mezcalaria.
On our last day in Morelia we tried to go to the Joker movie. It’s a bit of a challenge to see a movie in English as most movies are dubbed into Spanish with very few sub-titled. No luck here as well – only dubbed movies. As we were about to leave the next morning, a bus drove into a taxi outside our hotel which resulted in gridlock in central Morelia. Thankfully the hotel carpark was in the main plaza and we were heading in the opposite direction to the crash. Otherwise we would still be there I reckon.
We drove to a local artisan town called Capula, also where the “Catrina dolls” – Festival of the Dead statues, are made.The artisan crafts were incredible, as were the number of Catrinas – Deryn wanted to buy one but I talked her out of it, on the grounds that we could never carry it for the rest of our trip without breaking it. The town was authentic rural Mexican with its beautiful colours, dirt roads and even donkeys. From there it was onto Pátzcuaro, the original capital of Michoacán founded in the 1320’s (the capital was later moved to Valladolid). Pátzcuaro is one of the 111 Pueblos Magicos (magic towns) of Mexico. Like most Mexican Cities, the roads were all one way which made it beyond the capabilities of Google Maps to get to our hotel Hotel Estancia de la Era B&B. The B&B was another lovely old converted colonial house.
The weather was a bit dodgy; it was also a lot colder than we had been used to but Pátzcuaro is over 2100m above sea level. The town was probably the most indigenous of the bigger towns we had visited with loads of street food stalls and a massive market teeming with stalls selling everything imaginable. We headed to the main square – Plaza Vasco de Quiroga – and on the way checked out Templo de San Francisco, an impressive pink stone building dating from the 1500’s. Trying to avoid the rain we found a place to eat on some outdoor but covered tables and had a feed of tacos to the sound of a baritone opera singer. It was a bit of a feature of Pátzcuaro – actually a lot of Mexico – that buskers use the outside seating areas as a captive audience. They are mostly great but occasionally you get some deranged individual making a noise – which can still be entertaining.
The next day is was back to simply walking around admiring the incredible old buildings. The Basicals de Nuestra Senora de la Salud, a Catholic cum pilgrimage site that was started in the 1540s but was not finished until the 1800’s. The Casa de Los Once Patios (house of 11 patios) was less impressive than expected. It was a Dominican convent in the 1500’s but today is effectively an artisan market. Having spent a couple of days walking around Pátzcuaro, its the place to visit if you want to get some eye wear or pharmaceuticals, with at least a dozen shops of each in the Historica Centro alone. Also there was a load of libraries! While having breakfast in our B&B, we met a Canadian couple who ran their Canadian businesses out of a local town during the Canadian winter. They gave us their details and told us to come stay if we ever visited Vancouver Island. We may never leave.
The next day we decided to circumnavigate the local lake Lago de Platzcuaro and visit a few of the highly rated towns around it. We started out early as it was a weekend and big crowds were expected. First stop was at the easily pronounced town of TzinTzunTzan- our favourite for the day. We spent some time walking around the grounds of the ex convent of Santa Ana, admiring the ancient olive trees in the gardens and then the art work on display in the converted convent. By the time we left the tour buses had arrived and the place was getting crowded. Next stop was Quiroga. We tried to park as close to the main square as we could which turned into a real struggle because all the roads were closed off and converted into markets. We spent an hour walking around the chaos that was Quiroga, really standing out as the only westerners. We have encountered very few westerners in Michoacán, those that we have tend to be older tour groups. We think this is because there is no back-packer infrastructure such as hostels, shuttle buses etc. I don’t think the backpackers realise how cheap car rental is and hence miss out on visiting the many beautiful cities and towns in the province.
We planned to head of Santa Fe de la Laguna but 1km out of Quiroga the road was blocked by some locals protesting against some injustice. We had to turn around and head back to Patzcuaro which was a real shame as we had only travelled a fraction of what we wanted to around the lake. Getting back into Pátzcuaro was a nightmare with all the weekend traffic. As it turned out, heading home was probably for the best as the weathers packed in. We had a fireplace in our room so we headed into town and bought some kindling, and would you believe a Catrina doll – guess who will be carrying it!! We then had a great night playing cards in front of a lovely fire.
The next day was off to Uruapan to climb the Volcan de Paricutin, one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. It started to bubble up in a farmers field in 1943 and within 9 year as it had grown 432 metres. Only 3 people were killed but 2 towns were buried in lava but thankfully it was slow moving so the populations could evacuate. We stayed in Uruapan which was really drab so we were thankful we were only staying for a couple of nights. Our hotel – Hotel Mi Solar – was pleasant and very handily located near to the main square. We headed out to find some food and could not believe how packed the place was – must be a holiday of some sort. Also had a real problem of finding a place to eat – very different to Morelia!!
The volcano blogs suggested getting away early so we were on the road to Angahuan. It took just over 30 min to reach the town. A local flagged down the car and asked if we wanted to climb Paricutin. Indeed, but would like to have breakfast first. “Follow me”. He jumped onto his horse and galloped off. We followed him through the town to a rundown restaurant on the other side. He woke up the owners who proceeded to cook us as good a breakfast as we have had for a long time. From there we followed our guide to the tourist centre where we agreed a price of 1200p ($A90) for 2 horses and a guide. His name was Ryan (well that’s what it sounded like). It was a 12km ride to the base of the volcano through fields of avocados and blackened larva. There was a fair bit of climbing over the last 2 kms, the horses were certainly working hard and so trotting was infrequent which was no bad thing as the wooden saddles were brutal on our butts.
About 90 min later we reached the base of the volcano proper. There were a few run down buildings which housed a tienda selling drinks and nibbles. There were also lots of dogs lazing around,some tied up and some not. Ryan took us around the side of the volcano first to show us a lot of steam vents – some of the you could place your ear my ear the vent and hear the steam bubbling away below. It was pretty cool. We then had a 25 min climb to the rim of the volcano – hard work as you were effectively walking on sand. We walked around the rim of the volcano once we got to the top – the views of the surrounding area were incredible with very clear evidence which way the larva flowed. You could walk down into the volcano but we couldn’t see any point apart from saying you had done it. Heading back down was brilliant and took about 2 minutes – our experience from Acatenango in Guatemala helped. Big steps while leaning backwards and running was the secret. It was fun but still tiring.
On the way home we has a couple of encounters with wildlife. Firstly Deryn spotted a rather large brightly coloured snake which slithered off as we passed it. We were glad we were on horseback. About 20 minutes later Deryn’s horse suddenly stopped, its head went up with ears pricked forward, it appeared really spooked. 30 metres to the left of us a coyote popped up on the rocks and stopped and stared at us. It looked like a wolf. It stood there for about 10 secs, with us staring at each other before walking off. It was a very special encounter. Just before returning home, we stopped at the ruins of the San Juan Parangaricutiro Church. Somehow the main steeple survived the larva flow and now poked out surrounded by a sea of larva. A nearby building had also partly survived and was now a shrine. Quite moving. By the time we returned to base we had travelled 27km, been in a the saddle for 4 hours and climbed over 900m. And boy our butts and legs were sore. Still, we were so glad we did it.
We returned to Uruapan for a well deserved meal in a decent restaurant – the town was a lot more pleasant than the bedlam of the day before. The next morning it was time to head back to Mexico City for our flight to Los Mochis in 2 days. First we did an early morning walk around the nearby Barranca del Cupatitzio National Park. The park centered around the headwaters of the Cupatitzio River which emerges from an underground spring, carving a small ravine as the water begins to flow. It was beautiful and showed us a very different side of Uruapan.
We stopped over back in our lovely hotel in Morelia for the night. We completely cocked it up though trying to get into the city on Independence Day as the whole place was closed to traffic. We had to park the car 1.5kms from the hotel and walk – given we were only staying one night we had minimal luggage which made it OK. We did a rerun of our favourites – lunch at Tata Mezcalaria, visited the Morelia Cathedral and had Subway for dinner while watching a movie. The drive to the airport to drop off our rental was a lot easier than the drive out as we circled the city on toll roads so only had about 15kms of city traffic. That was still a real struggle and we high fived when we pulled into Avis. No problems with the car so all we had to do was settle the road tolls that we had incurred – nearly 1000p ($75) over our 15 days.
We stayed in an airport hotel – Fiesta Inn – which was a classic airport hotel. It wasn’t too bad and I did get to use the gym and pool. We flew out to Los Mochis the next morning on AeroMexico; which again was an absolute pleasure. Copper Canyon here we come.
