I have seen the past and it was good
09 January 2009 | Mexcaltitan, Nayarit, MX
RC

Before leaving San Blas we went on an adventure inland to Mexcaltitan, the mythical original home place of the Aztecs. A 1 ½ bus ride to Santiago Ixcuintla took us through a flat plain of extremely diverse and quite intense agriculture. Peaches, beans, corn, sorghum, bananas, sugar cane and other crops I could not identify are all grown, along with cattle and goats, in a sort of mini central valley. The difference being the diversity, from which perhaps U.S. farmers could take a lesson.
Then one hour in a shared minibus, followed by a 15 minute panga ride across the shallow mangrove lagoon and through woven fish barricades brought us to this island shrimp fishing village of less than 2,000 souls at around 3.00 in the afternoon. Being too late to make the return trip in the same day we booked a room in the best, the worst and the only hotel in town, where for the equivalent of 18 dollars we got a reasonably clean hard bed, a cold shower and a leaking toilet.
The circular village is laid out around four main cobbled or dirt streets in the form of a double cruciform, with a circular road of about ½ a mile around the perimeter. These streets have very high curbs so that when the lagoon is in flood the streets become canals and all transportation is by canoe. There are no cars or motorbikes.
Lunch of shrimp, prepared in four different ways, was followed by a walk around town, and then another and then ... another. There is not much going on here. In the evening the little plaza was completely full of children, playing, and testing there new Christmas bikes. We were the only visitors on the island that night.
Waking early to a cacophony of herons, pelicans, roosters, children and thumping water pipes, we took breakfast from the empanada lady, who sets out a table in the street and cooks them up to order, cheese or shrimp, dried and ground. From all around came children heading off to their first day back to school, fisherman out to their boats or mending nets, and their wives off to market in neighboring Tuxpan. All were chatting to each other, cheerful, noisy and totally interconnected.
It may be romanticizing a difficult life unlived, but it was hard not to be made aware of the fabric we have passed up in the construction of our modern lives whilst observing this village, artificially trapped in the past by its isolated location.