SO MANY JOYFUL DAYS

MISSION CONCA, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 10
The bridge a few kilometres short of Conca crosses a gorge below the junction of two rivers. One river is fed by thermal springs. Thick trunked trees shade the beaches on the far bank. A shed shared by half a dozen entrepreneurs serves barbecue meats and chicken. I park the bike the near end of a line of pick-ups and order chicken and a cold beer.
Three black on white geese waddle by - followed by two laggards. Canned Mexican weep-music wails from speakers. Two families unload from Texas-registered used cars. Men roll their pants up. Women hike their skirts. Small kids are stripped to swim suits. The current draws patterns as they wade in the river.
A man in his mid-thirties fetches my beer and sits at the table. He wears an embroidered denim shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots.
He says, Yes, the money for the new construction I've noticed comes from the North. Many men from the Sierra Gorda work in the North.
One of the geese takes flight and lands midstream.
I remark the two Texas-registered cars. Every man working in the North returns with a used car or a used truck. Halt illegal immigration and the US market in used cars would collapse.
The riverbank cowboy brings my barbecue chicken and seats himself again. I remark that prior to the road, burros were the sole transport. They still are off the road, he tells me. Some burros travel by pickup to where they are required – four-legged burros and two-legged burros.
Two more geese take to the water and a white butterfly zigzags on the breeze. Chicken is tasty, beer is cold, enjoyable conversation. Another good day...

SARAH J DUNCAN

MISSION CONCA, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 10
Mission Conca is another delight. The simplicity of the interior is in contrast to the exuberance of the facade. The interior of the dome is a delight. The scaffolding is disappointing. I wish that my daughter-in-law, Sarah, were here. Sarah is an architectural photographer(www.sarahjduncan.com). She is a great person with whom to share buildings and landscapes. She has an eye both for the detail and the broad picture. I would learn from her.
Instead, I chat with a Mexican family on holiday. They have seen me on television. We pose for a photograph.

GREAT HOSTS, GREAT BED

JALPAN, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 9
Jalpan has charm. The pace is leisurely. The Mission square is beautiful. The few streets are narrow and lined with painted houses in the Colonial style. I have moved hotels. I am one street back from the Mission square at the Posasda Los Angeles on Calle Mariano Matamoros. I have been writing all day at a table in the hotel restaurant. The table faces open double doors to the street. It is a quiet cobbled street with few passers-by. The occasional salesman of vegetables or fruit is the main distraction and coffee is unlimited.
The hotel is new. The owners are new to the hotel business. The result is quirky. The wife and late-teenage daughter designed the decor. It is fun and pretty, lots of painted tiles. Hand basins are decorative – open the faucet and water pours from a matching pitcher. Hot water jets from a power shower and towels are big and thick. Yes, great...And best of all is the friendliness of atmosphere. These are very kind and pleasant people.

SUNDAY IN THE VALLEYS

jalpan street


MISSIONS, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 8
I visit a non-mission village. Trees shade concrete benches in the church square. Families wait on the benches for Sunday mass. Children in clean Sunday clothes chase each other round the shade trees. Mothers call to them to stay clean. Men inhale a last cigarette before bells summon us to mass. The church is late 19th century and bigger than the mission churches. The exterior is plain. Inside, a multitude of statues hide behind purple drapes. Floor tiles are laid in patterns. Gold paint is garish. The priest is young. His server is old. A girl in her early teens reads the epistle. I creep out midway through the sermon.
Everyone is in church.
The village seems deserted.
I walk a while.
Many new houses are being built.
This is true of all the villages I have visited in the mission valleys.

A DIFFICULT LIFE

JALPAN, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 8
I had supper last night at a taco restaurant. A salesman from Queretaro shared my table. He has four grown children. One is a law student in Queretaro. The other three are engineering graduates and have emigrated to the US.
He is a salesman of gifts and is away from home much of the month. His work paid for his children's education. Now he has lost them.
It must be hard.
Yes, it is hard. They change. Even when they visit, it is not the same.
“Perhaps it is the traveling,” he says. “I was away so much.”

PLAIN AND PRETTY

MISSIONS, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 7
The village by the lake is too tempting. I leave Tilaco and ride up the pass. A side road snakes down through the hills. The village is small, houses scattered. I ride slowly and am greeted by each person as I pass. The chapel is at the far end of the village. It was built by villagers and completed in 1904. It is plain as a Methodist chapel. Trees shade the facade. A pickup is parked outside. The driver sports a diamond ear-stud. I ask if he has worked in the the North. Yes, for five years. Will he return to the North? There is no reason to return. He saved well. He bought the pickup and is building a house.
Inside the church four villagers are wood-paneling the wall behind the altar. A woman brings glasses of fresh lemonade. I ride back through the village and round the lake. Everyone bids me good-evening and goodbye. I am having a very good day.

DISCOMMUNICATION

MISSION TALACO, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 7
Two painters are at work at the mission. I ask one why redecoration is undertaken every seven years. He doesn't understand. I am a foreigner. I must be speaking an unknown language. I repeat my question slowly. Two young women are taking photographs. The painter asks them to translate. We conduct an odd conversation. I speak in Spanish to the young women. They speak to the painter in Spanish. He answers them in Spanish. They relay his answer in Spanish.
The crux of the conversation? They paint the church every seven years because they paint the church every seven years.
The interior is tranquil. I sit a while, pray a little.

FRANCISCAN MISSIONS

MISSION TALACO, SIERRA GORDA: MARCH 7
Mission Tilaco is 14 Ks down a side road that twists up over a pass. A lake gleams down in the valley, freshly ploughed fields, a sprinkle of white houses and an ocher church tower. The tower is too plain to be a mission. Turn the next corner and Tilaco is below on the side of the next valley. The valley channels the wind, cooling in summer, now chill. A line of pencil thin Cypress trees twitch beneath the wind and the wind whips the heads of palm trees. Dragged all in the same direction, the gleaming fronds recall poster art from 30s Germany and the Soviet Union: blond Valkyries victorious and standing erect in the turrets of their tanks to accept the applause of the conquered. Yeah, yeah...
Warm this morning and Jalpan is in a lower valley: idiot that I am, I left my leather jacket at the hotel.

PEDAL BIKES AND SAINT

MISSIONS OF SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: MARCH 7
The BMW BOYS have electric start. They are gone before I kick the Honda alive and lift the side stand. In most Latin American countries, I have passed bicycle races accompanied by police out-riders. Mexico has religious processions. I am close to Landa de Matamoros and pass a procession heading towards Japlan. They have around sixteen kilometers to walk.
Landa Matamoros is on what passes for a main road here in the sierra. The church is beautiful. I sit under the dome and make my death prayer. Students of photography from Mexico University throng the exterior. One aims her camera at me. I do likewise.

HELLS ANGELS FOR OBAMA

MISSIONS OF THE SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: MARCH 7
My friend, Don, and his Dallas Biker palls are Republicans. I have been corresponding with another friend in Texas, a Black academic. She is an Obama supporter (as am I). She was surprised by my assertion that Latin Americans support Obama. The BMW BOYS confirm my belief and confirm my argument that race is a US obsession.

HELLS ANGELS FROM QUERETARO

SIERRA GORDA MISSIONS, MEXICO: MARCH 7
Jalpan is more a village than a town., The population slightly exceed five thousand. Of the Sierra Gorda missions, It was founded first and completed in 1774. I have a large room with an emperor size bed in the Maria del Carmen Hotel on the church square. Water is hot in a power shower. I should be happy. I am miserable. The hotel is vast. Its chill atmosphere is a reminder of pre-Glasnost Russia.
I leave to visit the missions at a reasonable hour. Landa de Matamoros is my first target, 18 Ks. I spot a line of BMW bikes outside a restaurant on the outskirts of town. The BMW Bike Club of Queretaro is breakfasting. I halt and present myself. The bikers seat me at the head of the table. They are of much the same background as my friend Don and his biker friends in Dallas, successful businessmen in their middle years. They are indulging an unfulfilled desire of their youth. They were too busy then, or short of funds. They are good companions, cheerful, funny, generous and intelligent.

SEVEN YEAR FIX

MISSIONS OF SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: FEBRUARY 8
Five Franciscan missions shelter in the high valleys of the Sierra Gorda. The churches are cruciform. Two small side chapels form the arms while a dome rises above the alter. To the left of the facade stands a tower. To the right, a simple cloister surrounds a small garden.
Fray Junipero de la Serra designed the churches and presented the facades as canvasses for indigenous sculptors. The sculptors had a ball. The baroque facades they created are unique and give the missions their artistic importance.
The facades are renovated and the churches painted every seven years. Why seven? No one knows.
No matter.
I have hit on the seventh year and Easter week. Scaffolding destroys the view of church fronts. Purple drapes hide statues and paintings within the interior.
I write here of all five Franciscan missions. I am disappointed by the scaffolding – not by the purple drapes. The interiors of the churches gain in simplicity and the simplicity is a wonderful contrast to the exterior exuberance.

MOTHER AND CHILD SURVIVE ON GRASS

SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: MARCH 7
Trees shade the road as it turns and twists down through the forest. Two dark coated folk, mother and daughter, graze a small patch of almost invisible grass. Pines give way to broad leaf. I halt for a comfort break and listen to a stream splashing over rocks. I have ridden from near desert the west side of the sierra up into the chill of a pine cloud forest and am now, midway through the sierra, descending into watered valleys. These continual changes are the fascination of Mexico.

UNION - THE MIRACLE OF MEXICO

SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: MARCH 7
I ride in thick pine forest. Trees hide the fearsome falls. The road crosses the final pass at an altitude of nearly eight thousand feet.
I try to imagine communication prior to construction of the road. Paving was completed in 1968. And the dirt road? I ask. No one knows. I must search out an oldy of my age.
The dirt road would have been impassable in the rains. Prior to the dirt road, a mule trail existed - a ten day trek from Jalpan to Queretaro. Imagine attempting to govern a country where Provinces were so cut off one from another and from the capital; and even Provinces were carved apart by sierra and river. The Miracle of Mexico is its survival (though, as Mexicans attest, a huge swathe of the United States was Mexican)

ONE MORE TERRIFYING CLIMB

SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: MARCH 7
The road through the Sierra Gorda to Jalpan has 700 hairpin curves. The road climbs from irrigated fields into a barren land of sparse thorn scrub. A massive rock escarpment towers ahead. The road winds through a ravine to the right of the escarpment only to face a higher wall of mountain. The road is cut into the mountain. Drops are vertiginous. Ahead lies a further wall, yet higher. Gorges funnel the gale. Total calm in the lee of the mountain is transformed at a corner into a tempest that blasts the bike sideways.
Is this fun?
No, it is terrifying.
I near the summit. I expect to look down on the mission. I look up at yet higher mountains. Up...
The road clambers into a frontier land of sparse pine forest. Turn a corner and ahead rise yet higher mountains. The forest thickens. Sun bakes out the familiar scent of pines. I wear two jumpers beneath a leather bomber jacket. A cold wind discovers cracks and I shiver as I park the bike and look back way down at a lunar landscape of creased rock ridges. How far to the final pass: La Puerto del Cielo, Doorway to the Sky...?

CHURCHES BEAT PYRAMIDS

saint paul's, cadereyta

TO THE SIERRA GORDA, MEXICO: MARCH 7
Pyramids don't do it for me. Churches do. Five Franciscan missions in the Sierra Gorda date from the 1730s. The mission at Jalpan, north east of Queretaro, is a good base for exploring. Riding to Jalpan is an experience. A gale swirls dust across the Queretaro plains. Tequisquiapan is hot-spring spa hotels and restaurants with pools. I halt at a hardware store and buy plastic safety glasses. The store owner warns me to be careful riding over the Sierra, that the wind is dangerous for bikers. I take nourishment for the climb in the next town, Cardereyta, at a butchery serving great Tacos.

GREAT SPOT FOR A RANT

QUERETARO, MEXICO: MARCH 6
I return from Teotihuacan in a reasonable state of exhaustion. This is my last evening in Queretaro. Queretaro has been good to me. It is my favourite city in Mexico – not for beauty, Oaxca wins out, but for quality of life. I buy a coffee ice cream cone and walk over to Jardin del Armas. I must write of pyramids and the cloister coffee shop is a fine spot in which to compose a rant.

PYRAMIDS ARE FOR LOSERS

TEOTIHUACAN, MEXICO: MARCH 6
Teotihuacan is one of those musts for visitors to Mexico City. The Pyramid of the Sun is the main attraction. The pyramid is 64 meters high and covers approximately the same area as the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Big deal.
An expressway runs directly from Mexico City to the archaeological sight. Take a bus. The excursion is painless. I am in Queretaro. Avenida Lopez connects the Queretaro-Mexico City expressway with the expressway to Teotihuacan. Avenida Lopez is a ninety minute ride. Riding Avenida Lopez on a baby Honda is for lunatics. Truck drivers try using me as an ice hockey puck.
So why am I risking my life? Pyramids are impressive rather than beautiful: mini-mountains built by man. They don't do it for me - particularly pyramids in Mexico and Central America. I have become too close in my travels to the first Spaniards. I imagine the pyramids through their eyes: heaps of skulls at the base, billions of flies, steps steeped in blood and flesh and defecation. Or did a horde of scrubbers work the steps? Did the cleaner scrubbing the top level earn extra? Only a few hundred steps to the summit, great job...
Those first Spaniards are condemned for destroying a culture.
A culture that vile merited destruction.
Yes, I know. I am politically incorrect. Please excuse me. I am an Old Blimp. I can't feel the romance.