On Tuesday the local museum was open so we paid the $50pesos per person to enter. It had a total of 8 halls with tons of artifacts for the area, with the last two focused on the area’s artisans. We love the talavera pottery and it is a specialty in this area. Some of the samples were extremely detailed and intricately designed and we got to see some examples of how things are made.
This place and the volcanos are familiar to my mom as well since when she was in college she was a member of an extremely prolific the hiking team. One of their trips was to CDMX to hike the volcanos. I spoke to her and she said that the group had stayed at the lodge at the base of the volcano, which is now abandoned because that portion of the national park is closed to visitors due to hazards from the volcano. After the hike, they had headed down to the nearest pyramid and camped on the big lawn to the north and explored the tunnels that went in and out of the pyramid. Today that is the park and fields around the pyramid that the city uses for municipal activities and the tunnels are closed, as is the pyramid site on Mondays and Tuesdays (we came to find out). I teased my mom with a photo we found in the museum of some early explorers of the volcano and asked which one was her. LOL.
We continued to explore the museum and found an exhibit with some incredibly colorful art called Alebrijes, paper mache creatures created in the 1930’s and 1940’s by an artist named Pedro Linares. He had been very sick and had hallucinations that he was in a forest and saw fantastical creatures like a donkey with butterfly wings and a rooster with bull horns and an Lion with a eagle’s head. He began creating these and it later became an art form in the Oaxaca region which included wood carved and painted creatures. He apparently was popular with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The art is relatively new and has taken off since the 1990’s. A deeper dive into this art form can be found here.
We finished up after several hours in the museum and headed to the archaeological site entrance in hopes of seeing the tunnels and exhibits of the largest pyramid (by volume) in the world… but alas, this one was closed Mondays AND Tuesdays, so we headed back to camp and made some guacamole and margaritas (with the fresh limes in the campsite). Stephanie and Xavier had decided to stay another day and we met another couple from Quebec who are traveling in a van. We all hung out, traded stories, and enjoyed the evening with some beverages. The three groups are all headed back North to the USA and Canada in the next few weeks while we continue South and East.
Here are some additional photos we took at the museum.
We are heading out and will make our way south to the Pacific Ocean and Acapulco. Hopefully the next place will have fewer fireworks as Maggie has had about enough of that noise and we are tired of seeing her tremble. It will be a long drive day, or it may take us two days. Who knows these days.