Travel from Puebla to Tabasco - Day 7

Volcano Orizaba
Thursday, October 23

We’ve just descended into the very midst of the mountains. There are countless of them, each filled with green on their steep slopes. It’s summer all year long here, so there are flowers – especially yellow ones. Many fields lie on the mountainsides as well. And in the valley the small village is blanketed in a rising haze. I’m not sure whether it is pollution or fog. There was a snow-capped volcano behind us with a telescope. Mom and Dad remember when the road was a crummy, twisted highway rather than the wide, safe freeways we are cruising along. The valley is wider now, but the mountains are still bordering us everywhere. There seem to always be mountains. There’s Spanish moss on the power lines here. It’s amazing how they grow from almost nothing. Beside us are fields of sugar cane. There are also several banana trees alongside the road.
- Virginia

We saw a restaurant. We had lunch. It was hot. We saw buzzards.
We saw a volcano. It had snow on top. It was interesting. We stopped and took a picture.
We saw pineapple. We stopped and got some. It was good.
We are in a new state. There was a flood. There are lots of pipes.
- Augustus

5 p.m. Now we are in Tabasco. It has been a gastronomic trip. We began in Puebla, somewhere near where chocolate began. Then we went to Vera Cruz, where vanilla began. Now we are in Tabasco where the sauce originated. It is flat, swampy with entirely new plant population. It is a good road, but the toll is high, probably 100 pesos today. It is a travel day. This is Olmec country – Comalcalco is the site of a museum, today’s destination. We picked up a 10 peso bag of castañas. They smell like dog food, taste like garbanzos, tasty if it has been 5 hours since lunch. The consensus was they are OK. Then a chocolate farm. Huge avocados. Jungle – Heavy vegetation – warm, big leaves, coconut palms, skinny dogs & cows. Trees overhanging the road past the center line. Occasional topiary, a 30 foot alligator. In Comalcalco we troiled for a motel.
- Grandpa




Thursday – a day of traveling. Not finding an open eating establishment, we had fruit and crackers in the car as we journeyed. We left behind the volcanoes Popo, Ixta, and Malinche. Soon another little peak appeared on the horizon. As the kilometers flew past we saw snow covering the peak, and the mountain grew. Mile after mile – sometimes in the briefest of glances between other mountains, sometimes for long stretches of plain – as we approached, skirted, and finally retreated, we admired the beautiful volcano of Orizaba. As we drew near the volcano, rather than grow much taller, it seemed to hold its height, as we ourselves were slowly climbing to a higher country. We did lose sight of it rather extensively when our road took us hurtling down from a cool, piney altitude, circling a fertile river valley, cutting through the very steep mountains in tunnels, down, down to the banana and pineapple tropical plain. Our last view gave us a good look at the caldera, empty now, but a reminder of its previous power and potential.

Family in front of Volcano Orizaba

We stopped at one of the many little booths advertising piña y jugo and bought both. While Caleb, Elena, and Augustus ran up and down the concrete side of the bridge in the shade of which the women kept their stand, Dad and Grandpa chatted with the vendor. They learned that pineapple is harvested continuously. When a pineapple is cut, the plant produces runners with daughter plants. Alternatively, the top part of the pineapple can be planted, and in two years a pineapple on a new producing plant will result.
Our freeway thankfully went around both Veracruz and Minatitlan, where there is still flooding from recent tropical storms. The road was well raised above the swampy, flat land. We noticed, particularly as we went through Tabasco, that many of the flooded areas didn’t look as though they were normally swampy. We saw cattle standing on berms and other highland above their grazing areas. When we left the freeway to go to Comalcalco we took the “wrong” road, the rural one through the hamlets, not the big Federal. We hoped that the road to the pyramids wasn’t dirt, because there were no dirt roads, only muddy messes. On the TV that evening we saw a Discovery Channel preview for Sunday – Tabasco Under Water. The flood of 2007 covered 70 – 80% of the state, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. This year, thankfully, is not as severe.
Grandpa was alarmed to see a big billboard in Comalcalco – rare in Mexico – advising people that cleanliness helps to prevent Dengue. He told us that there is no treatment – no cure – and if you don’t die you wish you could. It’s transmitted by mosquito bite, which, of course, breed in water. Although there was water, water everywhere, we didn’t encounter any mosquitoes. Nevertheless, we armed ourselves with mosquito repellent, and our hotel keeper lighted a little smoker outside our 2nd floor room.
- Naomi

We traveled to Villa Hermosa from Puebla, Villa Hermosa is the birth place of vanilla. It was at first through high valleys, well watered with a large variety of crops. Often small plots worked by families with often several family members working in the fields. Lots of it was vegetables. Along the road we passed another snow capped volcano and our drive was pleasantly cool.
Then we came to a cliff, we dropped several thousand feet in just a few miles, down to the coastal planes with sugar cane, pineapple and banana tree. At one overpass in the shade there were a couple of ladies selling pineapple so Edwin stopped and we bought a bag. It was the sweetest pineapple I’ve ever eaten, the bag was far too small but by the time we knew that we were down the road.
We stayed in a blah motel, I ate avocados and bread, the rest did the Mercado thing. Going to Comalcalco we took the free road instead of the toll road and were rewarded for the choice because we drove through the countryside and saw first hand how people lived. It was inviting.
I asked about the internet café and the fellow turned to Angela and asked ‘what is he talking about?’ He thought I wanted some sort of strange food. When I said a place with lots of computers, he knew where they were and directed me to them. There were about 4 within a block of the Zocolo.
- Grandpa