Butterflies

Ten hours in a car, two hours on horseback straight up, more than another hour straight up to see:

Was it worth it?  Absolutely!

Monarch butterflies migrate south every winter from somewhere in North America to the hills in Michoacan in Mexico, a few hours north of Mexico City.  The elevation in Guanajuato was nearly 7,000 feet, but the butterflies are over 10,000 feet so you go as far as you can on the road, and then ride a gentle horse as far as he can go.  Spoiler alert:  my very gentle horse tried to kick me off.  I'm getting kicked out a lot in Mexico.  I'm starting to take it personally.

After you ride as far as the horse can go, you then keep climbing on foot for another half hour.  The first day we went to the Rosario Reserve which has more butterflies - trees full of them.  Then on the second day we went to Sierra Chincua which was magical.  It had snowed on Sunday, but the butterflies didn't care.

In a few weeks, this generation of butterflies will fly back to Texas and lay their eggs there where the caterpillars can eat milkweed.  Milkweed is poisonous to many predators, so the butterflies survive by being hazardous to their predators.  Two or three generation after the butterflies that left Mexico, their great great grandchildren will somehow know to go back to the same hills in Michoacan.  Amazing!

In the pictures, it just looks like orange dots on tree branches, but I can assure you that every one of those dots is a butterfly dancing.

At Sierra Chincua, we stood absolutely silently in the absolutely silent forest.  No sounds at all - no forest sounds, no wind sounds.  And if you talked, one of the guides told you to be quiet.  We stood there and watched these silent creatures flit back and forth, leaving en masse from one tree to go to another.  

I wish I could show the movement of the butterflies as they flit about silently but they move too fast to catch their movement.  All you can do is stand there and appreciate them.

Guanajuato

I go to school for four hours every day, and spend my afternoons and weekends visiting museums and randomly walking around Guanajuato.  I have also taken some short weekend trips to visit nearby towns.  This is what I have discovered …

Guanajuato is located in the central highland plains of Mexico about a four hour drive north of Mexico City and at an elevation of nearly 7,000 feet. Very early on during the Spanish colonial era, they discovered some gold and a lot of silver in these mountains. By the eighteenth century, Guanajuato was the world’s leading silver producer and for most of the colonial period, Guanajuato was the richest city in Mexico. Needless to say, the Spanish had to build a huge administrative infrastructure to process that much silver, and that is why today, Guanajuato and the nearby town of San Miguel de Allende have so much classic Spanish colonial architecture.

The battle for Mexican independence, which took place roughly from 1810 to 1821, happened in large part because Spain “disappeared” as a country in 1810 when Napoleon conquered it and King Carlos V abdicated. If there was no king in Spain, who ruled Mexico? And the battle for Mexico’s independence began … right here. The Grita de Dolores. Literally, “the (battle)cry from Dolores.” Figuratively, “the shot heard round the world.”

Several leaders of the independence movement including Ignatio Allende convinced Padre Miguel Hidalgo of the town of Dolores to join them, and he did so, counting on the help of one of the Virgens of Guadalupe (there seem to be a lot of them).  It was Father Hidalgo who issued that famous Grita (shout). The revolutionaries marched into Guanajuato from Hidalgo which is over the mountains and took me an hour and a half by bus. In Guanajuato, the army had barricaded itself into the solid stone Alhondiga, a huge grain warehouse.

Unable to attack the building, legend has it that a local miner crawled up to the door, the only part of the building made of wood, and set it on fire.  Today, a giant statue of that miner, Pipila, holding a torch, towers over Guanajuato.  The revolutionaries did then enter and take over the Alhondiga, but the victory was short lived.  The leaders were arrested, shot by a firing squad, and their heads were placed on the four corners of the Alhondiga as a warning to future revolutionaries. If you look closely, the rectangular plaque in the corner of the building has the name of the revolutionary whose head graced this corner. A strange fact about Pipila that I cannot explain ... the quote on the plinth says: there are still more Alhondigas to set on fire. And the date is September, 1939. Odd timing, no?

Another view of Pipila. You can see him lit up in the background of the Super Bowl.

Also, they do love to combine all the imagery that they can. Just as Pipila has a little of the Statue of Liberty in him, this painting of Padre Hidalgo that I saw in the museum in Dolores Hidalgo combines the good padre with Pipila and Paul Revere.

A minor side note:  the town of Dolores renamed itself Dolores Hidalgo in honor of Padre Hidalgo, a name that sounds strange to Americans since it seems like it is named after a woman.

The most interesting thing to me about Guanajuato is its unique layout. Originally, a river ran through the valley and the houses were built up the sides of the mountains on either side. Since the houses were made of stone and the streets were narrow in the colonial period (not to mention steep), there are almost no streets in Guanajuato that cars can drive on today. This is an incredible pedestrian town, although it is as un-handicap friendly as it could possibly be. You have to walk everywhere, and you have to walk up everywhere. Combined with the mild climate, the upside is that there are people outside everywhere and all the time, and there is music playing most of the time.

The river flooded periodically, so they started building houses farther up the slopes.  Then they built bridges across the river, and kept building even farther up.  Sometimes, they built buildings on top of the bridges.  Eventually, they built a dam in the mountains and diverted the river from the city.  They were left with a city built over an empty space where the river once flowed, so they put in … roads.  How do you put car tunnels through a mountain with solid stone buildings on top?  You don’t.  You build the city on top of a river, and when you take away the river, you put a maze of streets where once the river flowed.  Voila!  An incredibly walkable city with car bypasses for through traffic.  In a few places there are steps down for people to walk under plazas or buildings, but most of the tunnels are for cars.

In more modern times, Guanajuato wanted to attract more tourists and visitors, so they became a World Heritage site and had the houses in the city painted in bright colors. These are the two houses across the alleyway from my new apartment.

They also decided to put Guanajuato on the cultural map by adopting Miguel Cervantes as their inspiration.  Guanajuato is the site of all things Cervantino including a museum, an annual festival with readings and performances, a theater (Teatro Cervantes) and statues.  With a few exceptions for historical figures, every statue in Guanajuato is either Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Dulcinea, or Rocinante.  (The directions to my school from my first apartment:  walk to the first Don Quixote and turn left.  I did get kicked out of that apartment but that’s another story.  I have learned my lesson; no more late night wild parties.)  They even put up a marker for Cervantes' "tomb" although this is no chance that he is buried here.

A typical outside mural

A modern (legless) Rocinante in front of the University

The narrow streets and alleyways of Guanajuato have led to its own Romeo and Juliet story. Supposedly a poor young miner lived across this narrow alleyway from a rich family. (Stop right there. Impossible set-up.) One day the father found his daughter kissing the miner by leaning in from each balcony. So he ... of course ... killed his daughter. My excellent guide told me she has seen photos from the 1930's and the balconies were not there. Oh well.  Visitors come from all over to kiss in the Callejon de Besos, the  Alleyway of Kisses, for good luck

I do spend my afternoons visiting the museums here. The Cervantes museum, of course, the municipal museum, and the Alhondiga. The most pleasant surprise: Diego Rivera’s childhood house. He was born here but his family left when he was 6. No matter; Guanajuato can still claim him. The museum exhibits early works and sketches, no full blown murals. It turns out that his talent was recognized early on and he received a scholarship to study in France and Spain where he met and studied with, among others, Picasso and Cezanne. In one room were exhibited Rivera’s cubist works that looked like they could have been Picasso’s. Who knew?

I also attended a concert at the Teatro Principal.  Guanajuato has an excellent symphony orchestra that is somehow connected with the University of Guanajuato but is made up of professionals, not students.  I was sitting in the middle of a sea of English speakers.  One of the men (American) told me he had moved to Guanajuato in large part because of the symphony.  I pointed out that the orchestra seemed very white to me.  He acknowledged that there has been little appreciation for European music but that is slowly changing.  Mexico has benefited from an influx of Russian musicians who chose to leave their homeland.  The concert master was Ukranian.  These musicians are training the next generation.  

More typical of the musicians in Guanajuato are these estudiantinas - an echo of student singers of bygone eras who literally sang for their supper.  These modern troubadours lead groups of tourists through the alleyways every night, singing and telling stories and jokes.  Teddy, you too can carry your bass vionin through the alleyways of Guanajuato.  And there are mariachi bands everywhere, playing music, resting, and checking their cel phones.

Gjoa Haven and sea ice

On Thursday, we visited Gjoa Haven, a small Inuit village of about 1000 on King William Island.  The locals put on a show of dancing and drumming in native costumes.  Some of the dances were "traditional," but they are also into square dancing. Go figure. More interesting was the conversation we had with Raymond II, a local man who was holding his two week old grandson when we sat near him.  Shortly after we arrived, Raymond III, the baby’s father, put the baby in the hood of the mother and she left with him.  Raymond II has six children ranging from 19 (Raymond III) to 3, and he was holding his adopted son who is 1.  The adopted boy is the sixth child of Raymond II’s brother.  It was not clear why it made more sense for Raymond II to have seven children than his brother to have six.  We did find out, however, that “adoption” is pretty informal and common in Inuit communities, particularly if a parent has died.

After the show, we walked around Gjoa Haven and had the chance to speak to (and play with) several of the children.  That is easy now that we are in Canada, and everyone speaks English.  Needless to say, the children were delightful but two things puzzled me.  I asked several of the children what their favorite food was - what they would most like to eat.  Independently they each answered, “carrot.”  Did they really mean caribou?  Their English was excellent, and there apparently are carrots here, but really?  The stores are stocked with candy and the kids love to drink soda.  Carrots are really their favorite food?

Soda leads to the second puzzling thing.  All of the adults over the age of 40 are toothless, and the children all had metal caps on at least some of their teeth.  When I asked them why, they said they had “robot teeth.”  I asked the oldest boy who was nine if he knew why they all had robot teeth and he said it was to make their teeth grow strong.  Hmmm.  Clearly dental health is not a strong point here and they do drink a lot of soda.  But I still don’t get it.  Also, some of the kids with caps still had baby teeth while others had adult teeth.

Another thing I cannot understand is the economics of living in an Inuit Village.  Gjoa Haven is fairly large - too large to walk everywhere - so almost everyone has an ATV.  They also all seem to have skimobiles for the winter, and a lot have boats.  Raymond II told us that they get their food hunting and fishing, and he made a point of saying that they share their catch with everyone, making sure that the old people are fed.  But he was somewhat evasive when I asked what people did to earn money to buy groceries and other things that you cannot catch or kill.  Also, how do they afford ATV’s and snowmobiles?  He acknowledged that they are expensive and you have to save up to buy them.  Save up from what income?  When asked directly, he also acknowledged that “some people” receive money from the government.  Clearly there are some jobs in town - teachers, grocery clerks, and maintenance workers.  But how does outside money come into the village?

After a day at sea and a not very interesting landing on Edinburgh Island, we were scheduled to visit another Inuit village for a show and meeting local people.  The village of Holman (Ulukhaktok in Inuit) was described as a friendly community.  Unfortunately, half an hour before we were to board the zodiacs for the transfer to shore, the captain announced that a passenger has been isolated with covid and the village no longer wanted any of us to visit.  That was the first anyone told us about covid on board, and we still have no idea how many or how long.  But it was disappointing to miss our last chance to visit a native village.

So we got an early start on our next long sea leg north to visit sea ice.  It turns out that there is a difference between icebergs and sea ice, although they look similar in the water.   Icebergs are pieces broken off from glaciers and glaciers are made of compressed snow.  Sea ice forms in the ocean itself and is ice, not snow.  Who knew?  We took the zodiacs to see the sea ice up close, and landed on one large piece.  One of the naturalists onboard has a masters in sea ice.  Every day the naturalists give a lecture on animals or the various Arctic expeditions.  They had to postpone the sea ice lecture but it’s coming - one hour on everything you always wanted to know about sea ice.  One thing which they have already explained to me but I can’t quite understand:  Since salt does not freeze, sea ice starts out salty but after a year or so, the salt somehow goes out and the sea ice is not saline.  Again, who knew?

Sea ice looks like crystals, not snow

Finally, for some reason that no one explained, walking on sea ice is celebrated with a champagne toast so when in Rome ...

Polar bears

I knew we were covering a lot of territory, but I’m not sure I realized how big the distances are between places.  So Friday was a full day at sea.  The highlight of the day was the New Zealand (All Blacks) vs. France opening match in the Rugby World Cup.  Needless to say, there are a lot of French people on board, but the All Blacks had a small and vocal cheering section.  In the English speaking contingent on board, there seem to be more Aussies and Kiwis than Americans.

We finally reached Canada on Saturday, and then had to wait to be cleared by the Canadian authorities.  But our scheduled visit to Pond Inlet, a village in Baffin Bay was cancelled because of high waves at the landing site.  And Sunday was another scheduled full day of sailing.  Fortunately, the views continue to be outstanding.  Greenland looked bare and desolate.  At first, Canada looked like Canada - towering, snow-capped mountains.  But then the mountains leveled off and look like the mesas of the Southwest. Some views from my cabin:

Finally on Monday we made it ashore on Beechey Island, Nunavut.  About twenty years ago, the portion of the Northwest Territory inhabited by the native Inuits was renamed Nunavut.  The first successful voyage through the Northwest Passage was made by Roald Amundsen in 1903 - 1905.  As late as the 1800’s, expeditions were trying unsuccessfully to traverse the Passage.  The closest thing to success in those years was survival.  Many men died and some just disappeared.  The Franklin Expedition, which was well equipped and planned by the British Navy, was sent out in 1845 and never heard from again.  Over the next twenty years, successive expeditions tried to find out what happened to them.  Our stop on Beechey Island was a homage to the Franklin Expedition as the graves of three of the party were found here.  At least they died and were buried before the rest of the party disappeared.

In the afternoon, we (finally) saw a polar bear and two musk ox from the safety of the deck.  The next day, we were scheduled to have two landings - one in the early morning and one late afternoon.  But they did not let us go ashore in the morning because there was … a polar bear on the landing beach.  Again, we watched from the ship as he walked back and forth on the beach, but he was not leaving, so we did.  Then in the afternoon, there was a mother polar bear nursing her two cubs on the other side of the mountain from our landing beach.  We did go ashore with armed guides, and one guide on top of the mountain, watching to see if he had to alert us to make a run for it.  Fortunately, we did not.

Today we reached Coningham Bay where we went on a zodiac ride to see whales in the oceans and polar bears on land.  The former never put in an appearance, but we did get to see several polar bears on the shore and swimming in the water.  Polar bears are solitary animals, so we never saw any groups, just solitary bears pacing and swimming.

This polar bear let us get way too close without moving.  It made for a good picture, but the bear is most likely dead.

Peggy and I had signed up for dinner with two crew members tonight, but then got invited to the captain’s table.  That is an invitation that one does not turn down.  We found out from the captain that there is way less ice this year and last year than in previous years.  No surprise, but it does cut down on the animals that we will see as the polar bears like to travel on ice.

Greenland

We are spending several days around Disko Island, the largest island off the Greenland coast, and Disko Bay.  This is a barren land that is surprisingly beautiful, and the sea is full of icebergs, fish, and whales.  One day the crew was fishing off the back of the ship, catching fish as fast as they threw in the lines.  That turned into lunch the next day.

The view from my cabin

One afternoon we visited the abandoned settlement of Qullissat.  Hardly a native village, Qullissat was founded in 1924 to house the workers in a local coal mine.  When the mine was closed in 1972, the town was mostly abandoned, and many of the houses are falling apart.  But we were warned not to go into any of the houses as they are still owned by “someone,” and it was clear that “someone” was maintaining some of the houses.

As we see abandoned and modern settlements, I keep asking, why?  Why would anyone live here?  How can you live here?  The land is rocky and nearly barren, there is no growing season to speak of, nor any domesticated animals.  When the sun sets one day in mid-October, it does not come up again until March.

One day they took us to Mars - a particularly rocky and barren area.  They claimed that NASA practiced with the Mars Rover here, and I believe it.  Past the rocky part, the ground feels spongy as we are walking on trees that spread out sideways and are no more than a few inches tall.  And the amazing thing is … even tiny trees change colors in the fall.

Finally we reached the part of Greenland where we might see polar bears.  All of the passengers are excited at the prospect, but we now have two guides with each hiking group - one in the lead and one in back - each with a rifle, and we have been sternly warned to stay in our groups.  So far, however, no polar bear sightings.

Meanwhile, icebergs float peacefully all around us.  One morning we had to change our landing beach because there was a large iceberg near the scheduled beach, and the captain was concerned that it might break up while we were ashore, causing large waves in our landing area.  This beach looks like it could be in Hawaii but … the iceberg that landed on it does not melt.

We have become adept at wet landings.  We wear our parkas, waterproof pants, and boots with warm layers underneath.  The zodiacs take us to a beach, and we swing our legs over the side and into the water. Voila.

Today we visited the town of Kullorsuaq.  This turned out to be a fascinating outing.  The houses are scattered on the hillside.  There are no cars, but a lot of boats and snowmobiles.  The houses have electricity and some kind of gas heating - something like a potbelly stove, I think - but no running water or sewage.  Water is distributed in four locations in the village, and people walk there to fill plastic bottles.  Sounds a lot like Africa to me.  I saw one woman pushing a wheelbarrow with four large plastic bottles to the filling station and then back to her house.  Sewage is collected by truck or tractor in large yellow bags and then put in the town dump on the outskirts.  Since the houses do not have running water, there is a central building that contains washing machines, bathrooms, and showers.

Someone's dinner tonight?

We were treated to a (dry land) kayak exhibition in the town square, led by a man dressed in polar bear pants.  He spoke Greenlandic, a local woman translated into unintelligible English, one of our guides translated into English and then French, and one last guide translated into Mandarin.  The translations took far longer than the demonstration.

Kullorsuaq has about 400 residents but no dock, so we did a wet landing.  Supposedly, the local people are fishermen, but I did not see anything that looked commercial or big.  What supports this village? 

In the afternoon, the entire village - men, women, and children - came to our ship on the zodiacs. There were more exhibitions and a musical show. Mostly, the children hit the bar for cans of Coca Cola, and went swimming in our unused (by us) swimming pool.

Our youngest visitor

We are close to the farthest north that we will reach, so the sea was full of large icebergs.  As a dense fog rolled in, I wondered if modern radar can spot icebergs.  I really hope so. Whoops, change in plans ... again. We sailed north all evening, but there was a medical emergency on board, so we had to turn around and go back to the larger town we passed before Kullorsuaq to drop off the passenger. There was an airport there? A hospital? This is not a good place to have a medical emergency. From there, we spent the next day sailing south and will arrive in Canada tomorrow.

The view of our ship from Kullorsuaq

 

Planes, trains, and boats

So far there have been no trains, but a plane and lots of boats.  We left Paris on a five hour flight to another world, landing in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.  Since we will be cruising along the coast - the green part of Greenland - they first drove us to an overlook to view the giant ice sheet that extends over the interior of Greenland.  The ice sheet covers over 660,000 square miles and is up to two miles in depth.  Kangerlussuaq Airport, which is an international hub for Air Greenland, was originally built by the U.S. in 1941 during its occupation of Greenland.  Kangerlussuaq itself is a bustling metropolis (not!) of about 500 people.

Leaving Kangerlussuaq, we took a tender to the Boreal, our home for the next three weeks, and began the trip north.  The temperature in Kangerlussuaq was a balmy 34 degrees.  On the ship, they issued us winter parkas and waterproof boots.  The ship has two dining rooms, two lounges, and two pianists.  I am set for entertainment.

After our first night at sea, we landed in Sisimiut, the second largest city in Greenland.  Sisimiut has a museum, church, hotel, and 5,400 inhabitants.  The grocery store appeared to be more of a hardware and gun store that sold a few food items.  

The museum was surprisingly interesting.  The Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit who live in Sisimiut, hunted bowhead whales, an industry that reached its peak in the mid-19th century.  They paid for their church in 1775 with 60 barrels of valuable whale blubber, and the building was shipped from Copenhagen as a construction kit.  Later, the fishing industry came to dominate the economy and most of the people here worked in the canneries.  From hunters to factory work in a few generations.

We were treated to a tasting of local food delicacies which included smoked whale meat, reindeer meat, musk ox sausage, snow crab, and some sort of fish roe.  And that exhausted the things to do in Sisimiut, so we returned to the ship.

On our third day we arrived at Disko Bay, the largest open water bay in Greenland, and possibly the site of the settlement by Eric the Red and his Norsemen a millennium ago.  We were scheduled for a zodiac ride in the morning, but the wind and waves were too strong to go out.  In the afternoon we did go ashore in the zodiacs, experiencing our first wet landing, to take a short hike.  The land has low vegetation, not more than a few inches high, which turned out to be trees spread out horizontally.  This land is considered tundra.  We walked up a small mountain to see dykes - ridges of basalt that emerge from the surrounding sandstone as it erodes.

We also saw huge icebergs floating by.  They do not look like giant ice cubes but are all different shapes, and in various shades of white and blue-white.

The next day we visited Illulissat, a World Heritage site.  Still part of Disko Bay, the Illulissat Ice Fjord is the home of one of the most prolific ice flows in the world.  The glacier, which used to come part way down the fjord, has receded fifteen kilometers.  Nonetheless, it continues to calve hundreds of times a day.  The icebergs from the calving flow down the fjord but regularly get stuck on the bottom.  Eventually, pressure from the icebergs behind them unclogs the stuck icebergs which break into smaller pieces and continue flowing.  As you look at the ice, it appears static, but it is constantly moving, sometimes erratically.

We viewed the fjord two ways.  First we took a boat to the mouth of the fjord where you can count on always seeing lots of icebergs.  But the boats have to be careful not to get blocked in as the icebergs get stuck.  From the boat we also saw our first whales - humpbacks and minkes. Then we went into the town of Illulissat and walked to a viewpoint over the fjord.  It is stunningly beautiful.

They have already changed the schedule for tomorrow.  This trip is an expedition, not a cruise, so the route is constantly altered to adjust to weather and sea conditions.  I'm never quite sure where we are going, but it is always interesting, beautiful, and COLD. Also, the food has been great and the Diet Coke bottomless.