On the 23rd of February I was attending the wedding of Daniela and Andrés whom I got to know during my stay in Ixmiquilpan and Tolantongo. I had already been looking forward to this special celebration for a few weeks and had planned my trip accordingly. The wedding took place in a small village in the mountains of the state of Puebla and was definitely an extraordinary experience.
In order to get to Cacaloc, a village with less than 1,000 inhabitants in the mountain region of Puebla and the home of Andrés, I left Ciudad Hidalgo (Michoacán) early in the morning on 22 February. After taking a bus to Mexico City and changing there to another one I arrived in Tehuacán after round about seven hours. I spent about half an hour exploring the city before taking a bus to Calipan where I was to be picked up by family members of Andrés. In Calipan I saw a lot of trucks full of sugar cane passing by as the little city is home to a sugar factory. While I was waiting in the city centre to be picked up, the mayor, newly elected a few days ago, invited me to spend my waiting time in his small government building. It didn't take long until I was fetched but on the way up the mountains to the parental home of Andrés I realized that if I hadn't been picked up, it would have been difficult. It took about an hour to reach our destination, almost the entire route was uninhabited and Cacaloc, the village of Andrés, consisted of only a few hamlets along the ridge.
Most of the people living in this region don't have access to running water in their houses, internet doesn't exist nor is a telephone signal available. The population seems to be 100%
indigenous, that a foreigner is visiting here is an absolute rarity. Many people never had contact to any foreigner apart from a few Central American refugees who happened to come along this
route on their way to North America. Furthermore many of the elderly do not speak Spanish but only Náhuatl, the most common native language of Mexico nowadays.
The evening we spent preparing the food for round about 1,000 guests who were expected for the following day. The festive meal was Mole with turkey. The ingredients of Mole, a very strong sauce, which is consumed in large parts of Latin America, are very varied. I and a few other strong boys were given the task of using mills to grind kilograms of roasted almonds, dried grapes, sesame seeds, biscuits, onions and garlic. The next morning we continued with the ingredients which were still missing. All the ingredients were mixed by the chefs in huge bowls and cooked over an open fire in one of the houses. The smoke of different fires which was trapped in the closed rooms bit me in the nose and the eyes. Unfortunately there was no outlet for the smoke. At various other places more preparations went on at the same time. Behind the house, numerous hands were busy forming tamales from corn mass and wrapping them in corn and banana leaves. In front of the house they started to decorate the place for the evening. I helped a little wherever I could make myself useful.
The wedding began at 12 noon with the fair in Zoquitlán, the village municipality. Not all guests arrived on time, a large part of the people arrived in the afternoon or late evening to
celebrate. Some invited guests didn't show up, but people from the neighbouring villages, who got wind of the celebration. The Catholic wedding ceremony was a great event for everyone present. I
made myself useful as one of the main photographers and captured the most important moments of the day. The Mass was accompanied by a Mariachi band which continued playing and animating also
within the first hours of the celebration afterwards. The service ended after about an hour because a funeral started at 1 pm and we could just leave the church. So we stayed outside the church
for a while and took some photos before we set off back to the parents' house where the celebration was supposed to take place.
On the way back we stopped shortly at the entrance to the town of Zoquitlán to shoot a few pictures and spontaneously we all had a beer at a little corner shop. Finally we reached the place of the party, we ate tamales and mole and celebrated the bride and groom. Being the only white man (Güero) I was pulled by the Mariachi immediately onto the stage and involved in a song and some jokes. After the Mariachi had finished with their programme two other bands were playing until about half past three in the morning and there was a lot of dancing. I also enjoyed the wonderful sunset, which you could see directly from the place of the celebration. Here I also visited the outhouse with the best view of my life.
The day after the wedding the family members and friends who had come a long way, Daniela, Andrés and I visited the weekly market of San Antonio Acatepec, another small village in the surrounding hills. In the afternoon I decided spontaneously to leave the house where the wedding took place as some friends of Dani and Andrés offered to give me a ride back to the next town where I had access to public transport. So I went with them back to Tehuacán where I wanted to take a bus to the next city or stay for a night with any Couchsurfer. Since I had the opportunity to get in touch with the outside world and send messages only on the way there and nobody answered my messages at short notice, this went wrong. Likewise, there were hardly any buses leaving Tehuacán in the late afternoon to neighbouring cities, which was perhaps better, as night-time bus rides are easy victims of raids. Anyway, I decided to travel about two hours further north and get off at Puebla. There at least I already knew my way around and also a handful of people where I thought I could stay for one or two nights. But as it was going to happen, none of my friends in Puebla could accommodate me this night. So it came that for the first time on my journey I had to pay for the overnight stay. Through this not expensive, but relatively unpleasant night in a dormitory in a hostel in Cholula I again learned to appreciate the advantages of Couchsurfing and saw my time with all my hospitable hosts in a different light. The same night I booked a bus to Veracruz early the next morning, where a Couchsurfer had already offered me accommodation for the last and next nights.
Write a comment