Macheros

On to the bus into another world. NOT deluxe. Very much like our voyageur buses only a little scrappier, a bit of gum stuck to my seat and a different clientele. The bus was pretty full when we got on but it was the milk run with twenty stops, two before we even left Morelia. Many people standing in the aisle, with their plastic bags of leftovers, big fleece blankets, luggage and small kids. A couple of screens dropped from the ceiling and we got Antman in Spanish with the soundtrack on the bus-wide speaker. Despite the fact that it’s packed, everyone is super polite and smiley. Young men get up for old ladies. One sits across the aisle from us and we end up sharing our little travel snacks which she very happily accepts for her and her grandson. She is no taller than 4’10”, dressed in slightly traditional garb but her little cellphone keeps ringing, which she pulls out of her apron pocket to chat, making party plans for her arrival. “Tell your mother this, she says. Tell your mother that.” After sharing, she asks us for the plastic bag our snacks were in and then Alice’s bikini bag.

The views are gorgeous. Morelia is already 2000 metres high but we keep climbing, the road switchbacks through tall pine trees. We’re only going 150 km but the trip takes three and half hours with all the stops. So much fun to go through the towns and watch daily life happening. Dogs trotting by the road, men tending their fires for roasting chicken, women packing up bread for sale, people standing in clusters by the road waiting for collectivos. Many Mexican towns seem to have a specialty product, which makes sense, but it always surprises me how one teeny, tiny village will have ten stores in a row selling EXACTLY the same products. One village, for example, seemed to have the monopoly on “pan regional” regional bread. One roadside stand after another, back shelves lined with pots of honey and a front counter covered in bags of flat, round loaves with a little woman sitting on a colourful chair beside it. Times ten. You’d think they’d confer so that their line of products be slightly different but no. As a buyer, these kinds of situations make me feel so awkward as it all seems a bit arbitrary which stand you decide to patronize because you can also be sure that their prices are no better or worse than their neighbour’s.

Lots of little mountain villages with signs advertising sheep or lots for sale. A colourful steeple towers above every town and there’s usually a little playground for the schoolkids and a soccer pitch. The mountains are all around us. There is a changing lineup of people standing in the aisle. We pull over at one point and one of the passengers runs behind the bus to relieve himself.

We pull into Zitácuaro and get off at the dusty little bus station. We find a taxi driver willing to take all of us to Macheros (a thirty minute drive) and we squeeze in, mexican style, with Alice sitting on Henri’s lap and her head out the window. More climbing. We get passed by two black pickups with Policia Federal standing in the back, masks on & big guns in hand. We arrive in the little village of Macheros, population 400, to JM Butterfly B&B, a joint venture of a local man, Joel and his American wife, Ellen. Most of the staff seem to be one of Joel’s nine siblings, each one sweeter than the last. Roosters crowing, sheep bleating, turkeys gobbling and dogs yapping away. We’re in a deep green bowl of peaks with a view of undulating mountains as far as the eye can see. The rooms are scattered around the property, colourful spaces with big windows and beds piled high with fleece blankets. The welcome is warm. We have our first meal of the day at the little restaurant run by Joel’s mum, Doña Rosa, next door. Tortilla soup and sincronizadas (quesadillas with extra stuff) totally hit the spot. A little lounging around and a walk through the nearby woods, along a dusty path through tall pines around the flank of the mountain. It is lush. Vegetation grows everywhere. The trees host bromeliads and what looks like spanish moss drips from the branches. The ground is covered in fragrant pine needles and loose rocks. The sounds of the village drop away as we get farther away and the quiet is like a tonic.

The next morning we’re up for breakfast and a quick 101 on what we’re about to see. Monarchs generally live about six weeks. They are born and come to adulthood here in early spring and they start heading north, following the flowering of the milkweed plant. It takes three generations to make it all the way to Quebec. The crazy thing is that the fourth generation, the great grandkids of the ones that leave Macheros in February lives seven or eight months, making the 5000 km voyage from Quebec back to one of two mountains near Macheros in a little over two months, spending the winter hibernating in the trees and finally finding a mate and laying eggs before dying in February or March.

We’re introduced to our guides and we walk further into the village to find our horses. The guests all stand to one side and on the other is a long line of boys each holding the reins of a saddled horse. Rogelio, Joel’s eldest brother, stands between us and chooses a guest based on which horse is up. Each horse in the village has a number which is called up in rotation. You could see that some of the guests’ wish to walk came as a disappointment to the last five guys in line who weren’t going to be working today. They’ll be first in line tomorrow. The horse handlers’ ages range from twenty to ten. The one encouraging my horse along was twelve-year-old, Cervando. Every family in the village has at least one horse, he told me, so the system is fair. He stands just behind the horse, going from side to side depending on the slope, prodding my steed with a tiny switch. He tells me he is in his first year of high school, right here in Macheros. The school has 28 students, all taught by a maestra (teacher) who is very nice. After three years of secundaria come three years of prep and then on to university. He’d like to go to Mexico City but we’ll see, he says. The trail starts out fairly flat but is soon zigzagging perilously close to a major drop. If my arm pointing to the ground was six o’clock, the downhill slope is at seven and the uphill slope is at 11. It was better not to look. Thankfully, Bon (my horse) was sure-footed, something I don’t understand seeing as he has four legs but can’t see where he’s putting any of them. There are tiny little flowers along the path, bright orange and deep red and purple and white. The pines are enormous, their bark ridges deep enough to slide my whole hand in. Many of them have vertical gouges several feet long with the bottoms of plastic soda bottles wedged in below. Ana tells us they collect resin which the locals sell to a glue factory in Morelia or use it to make medicine or gum. Logging used to be the big industry here but it is now illegal to protect the monarchs so resin-collection allows people to make a living without overly damaging the forest that is the livelihood of this and many other towns in the neighbourhood. We climb for an hour and a half and I spend the whole time chatting to our young guides, probably to the annoyance of our fellow travellers. Little José-Luis in front of me is ten but he handles his horse like a pro. The older guide handling Wil’s horse is having to use all his tricks to get the unwilling beast to haul him up the hill. It turns out many of the handlers are related. I suppose with families of five or more kids, a village of four hundred can’t have that many last names.

We finally come out in a high meadow ringed by more pines. We dismount, the saddles come off and the horses are allowed to graze. We step into the woods and climb another few hundred metres. And there they are. A dozen or so trees which look diseased. Big brown clumps hanging off the branches or on the trunk are actually millions of monarchs trying to keep warm. The timing of our visit is a bit off as they rarely take flight unless it’s 16º celsius and sunny. It’s ten and cloudy. The wind was pushing a few off their roosts but it was mostly clumps. I felt bad for the guests who were seeing the monarchs for the first time as there wasn’t that much to see. When we were first here ten years ago we went to El Rosario, a mountain 25 km away where another colony overwinters and the sky was orange with butterflies and they were landing on our clothes and in our hair. One of the guides tells me that since then there has been a lot of logging in El Rosario and the colony’s numbers have dwindled. The population is very vulnerable. They come here because of the very particular climate that, along with the rest of the planet’s, is seeing fluctuations that are disastrous for these fragile creatures.

The way down is a bit hairy. Lots of leaning back and hanging on to the saddle for dear life. Wil opts to walk but finds himself between horses trying to keep up. It’s heaven listening to Henri chat to Ana, one of our guides and another of Joel's siblings in Spanish behind me. We spend our late afternoon playing cards and drinking wine by the fire. The dining room fills up and suddenly all five of the sisters and the mom and the sister-in-law are in the kitchen hustling the orders. We have a little chat after dinner when things have calmed down and we ask about the family. I say, with a family of ten siblings there must be a lot of nephews and nieces. No, the ladies respond. Only three of the brothers and one of the daughters have kids. Oh, is it hard to meet men in such a small village?, I ask. Oh no, that’s not the problem, they answer. “We are not in a hurry to get married’, they say. ‘If we marry, we have to go live with our husbands and… it’s complicated. Too much compromising.”

I imagine it must be a challenge to try to reinvent what a relationship is in a culture that has more rigid ideas of the roles of husband and wife. And maybe spending so much time with foreigners whose relationships don’t fit into that mould makes it easier to want something else. In any case, these ladies kick ass.