A Petrifying Day

A highly productive day today joy wise - I've never seen so much interesting stuff in so short a space of time.

First up was the spectacle of the widest tree in the world.
At two thousand years old and forty two metres high, the impressive cypress is neither the oldest or the tallest. It's trunk however is a massive eleven metres in diameter, and it's said you'd need forty people to wrap themselves hand-in-hand around it. Towering over the village church, the tree is now under threat due to local irrigation networks stealing it's natural water supply. A campaign is under way to get the tree UNESCO world heritage status, believed by many to be the only chance of saving it.

Soon we moved on to Teotitlan del Valle, a traditional weaving village famous for its innovative natural dyes. One dye was even made from insects that live on cactus leaves, ground up to make a scarlet red. When other natural ingredients were added it then turned orange, then to a deep purple - even the ph on the hands of the person mixing the dye affected the shade of colour.
The rugs they made were truly things of beauty, but when further enquiries revealed they were five hundred dollars a pop, that was the end of that.

Next up was Mitla. An ancient Zapotec city once ruled by priests believed to have performed gut-wrenching human sacrifices.
The main buildings was made using thousands of small stone blocks with no cement or mortar. Amazingly though, it's remained intact for eight hundred years, despite being slap bang in the middle of one of the most earthquake prone parts of the planet - it's mathematical stone structure ranking it truly earthquake proof.

Then we headed to Hierve El Agua, seen in the picture above, where bubbling mineral springs run into pools and locals gather to bathe - all eighteen hundred feet up in the mountains. The mineral rich water has been trickling down the mountain for millenia, resulting in 'petrified' waterfalls that look like they were instantantly turned into stone.

To round off the day we stopped at a mezcal distillery, sampling a seventy percent proof concoction made from the algave plant, as well as some tasty flavoured offereing ranging from mango and peppermint to coffe and caramel.


By now I should be sound asleep, and to say I'm exhausted is an understatement.
But I wanted to get all this down, so my tiny mind can get some help looking back on it, many moons from now.