Week Through Sunday

Coming home from vacation is always a struggle, I guess, but the late afternoon bus from Morelia to Monterrey was special. At first, there was no air-conditioning, and the temperature got up to the mid-nineties for several hours. Also, the military took their sweet time searching everything when we crossed the Michoacán border (I assume owing to the last half-year of burgeoning narco-related trouble in the area). Finally, they switched us all to a better bus--well, a cooler one at any rate--but by then travel lag and the much cooler temperatures in Pátzcuaro had left me with a cold; I spent the rest of the trip balancing a scratchy pink bag of breakable purchases in misery. But that’s enough whining. Our vacation was great: Michoacán is a rolling landscape of patchwork agriculture studded with lakes and carpeted by wildflowers. The sky was always clear in the warm afternoons and temperatures typically dropped to a seasonal cool (in the low fifties) after dark. The town of Pátzcuaro is located about an hour from the state capital, Morelia, and about half an hour from the dance floor in Uruapan where gangsters tossed a number of severed heads recently. It is also located three K from the pretty but endangered Lago Pátzcuaro. It is this lake that has served as the ancestral home to the Tarascan (now Purépecha) Indians since the time of the Aztecs, and their little stone villages dot the shore (and a couple of the lake’s islands). One island, Janitzio, is a vacation destination for thousands of tourists every November, when the little town of Pátzcuaro swells for a week into a crafts-and-flowers festival of staggering proportion, mostly related to los Días de Muertos. Think “Mardi Gras in Halloween town.” It was worth catching a cold. [Cavin]