We made our trip plans so quickly we really didn’t have much time to pre-plan any activities. Fortunately, Mexico City has so many things to do that it was easy to find interesting activities on short notice. Day one we decided to visit Xochimilco. Briefly, Mexico City was founded around 1325 although the area was occupied far longer. The city used to be on an island of reclaimed land in the middle of a lake. Goods were moved by canals all through the city, similarly to Venice.
Xochimilco is all that remains of the canals and the lake. Here brightly colored boats move tourists and bachelorette parties through the canals. The scene seems a little chaotic with boats bumping and tequila flowing and food vendors selling boat to boat. It was all super fun and relaxed and sort of life in slow motion.
Xochimilco is also the only home of the Axolotl. Here’s a link if you want to know more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl None of these little guys remain in the wild but there are many in captivity around the world.)
The second day we took a locals tour of hidden gems of Mexico City. We hired a guide that walked us through the Palace of fine arts, and we discovered that the street we were walking on dated back to the original Aztec main street of the temple complex that Mexico city was built around. This easily makes this street the oldest continuously used street in the Americas – dating back nearly 700 years. We saw murals painted by Diego Rivera and the most important muralists of the 20th century in the Ministry of education, We looked over the original Aztec temple complex that was discovered when utility work was being done near the Mexico City cathedral in the center of the city near the presidential palace. Diego Rivera’s wife was named Frida Khalo and she might be more famous than Diego Rivera. Her art and likeness are everywhere in Mexico. We toured her home with a another guide near the Coyote Fountain in Coyoacan district square.
Mexico City has some wonderful museums. If you remember pictures of the Aztec and Mayan calendar stones from your middle school textbooks, those are in the museums we visited. Although you aren’t supposed to touch these centuries-old artifacts, for the most part these exhibits are not preserved under glass or behind barriers. The experience of standing beside something carved so many centuries ago is mesmerizing.
For our last full day we toured the archeological site of Teotihuacan. This site is much older than even the Aztecs. These pyramids date back 1700 years and had already been abandoned when the Aztecs saw the eagle eating a snake perched on a cactus on an island in a lake. (This was the prophecy that caused the wandering Aztecs to settle in what would become Mexico City – and this image still adorns the Mexican flag today).
The temple of the Sun pyramid is over 200 feet high and it is immense. Built as a ceremonial site, it was the center of a city that had between 115 and 220-thousand people in it. Our tour covered perhaps a mile of walking but in the surrounding area I doubt there is anywhere that one could dig without digging into ruins.
There are still visible murals of jaguars and birds that have survived there for centuries. At one point we stopped and a local artist drew us a picture using completely natural ingredients including red from insect larvae and blue from lapis lazuli (a mineral that had to be imported by this culture from the southern end of South America). He was kind enough to give it to us.
Mexico city has some world class restaurants and a ton of street food. During our locals walking tour, at one point we walked down a row of street food vendors a block long with every variety of taco and fried Mexican food you could imagine. At the end of our walking tour we stopped in a very tiny and very popular taco place in Zocolo. In the evening street food vendors lined the street near our AirBnB. Often we were on the go and probably didn’t take full advantage of the Mexico City street food scene. At one point we took a too-expensive cab ride to go to a world renowned restaurant only to find they were closed. Darn! Near the end of our stay we found a wonderful restaurant serving food from the Chiapas (Southern Mexico) area. They had absolutely outstanding mole sauce and we sampled a number of different kinds!
We’re really glad we visited Mexico City and we’d definitely leave this city on a list of places to return to someday.
Now back to the boat! The new engine manifold and heat exchanger have cleared customs and are here in Mexico from Yanmar U.S. Hopefully, (if they are the correct parts. . . there was a bit of a language barrier when ordering them) we can get them installed this weekend. In the meantime, our boat watcher, Israel and his staff, are washing and waxing the boat which usually takes a few days. They do incredible work!
If all works out with the new parts in the engine and the wind and tide align, we hope to leave the dock on Monday. It’s a shallow passage in and out of the Paradise Village Marina and we have a deep draft so a high tide is important. It’s been fun being here at this beautiful marina enjoying resort life but after a month tied to the dock its time to release the lines and start heading South.
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