I worked two months at La Manada dog hotel, which is among the longest stays I’ve had in one place in several years. Not that I’m complaining; I love being on the move, and I’d spent the previous two weeks counting down the days until I would be back on the road.There was talk about having a going away dinner, but given Covid, and the fact that I’d planned my groceries down to the final meal, I was glad it didn’t come to fruition. I am not a big fan of goodbye parties, for me anyway. In the five years I worked as a temp, I rarely told anyone I was leaving on the last day of my assignment. I preferred to just disappear. I felt it gave my co-workers the opportunity to exercise their imaginations while wondering, “whatever happened to that temp”?
Two things marked my departure from the dog hotel. The first was when one of the volunteers came running into my room and exclaimed that there was a scorpion in the shower. I am not sure whether he came to me to kill it or because he knew I’d missed the opportunity to photograph the first one.
On the day I arrived two months ago, I looked down to see a 3 inch long scorpion skittering across the floor. I blurted out, “scorpion” and pointed down to warn my boss who was standing only a foot from it. He quickly lifted his shoe and dropped it on the scorpion. Afterwards he held it up by the tail for me to see and, like a fisherman, I lamented not having taken a picture of his catch.
So this time, I ran to the bathroom, camera in hand and took several shots of the thing. Apparently, the volunteer had not brought me in to document the episode, and asked if I’d kill it. Wearing only flip flops and shorts, and not knowing whether scorpions could jump, I suggested we call the boss who, with his shoe, repeated his previous technique to rid the dog hotel of another of these deadly creatures. Scorpions can be quite venomous, and the death of a great dane at the hotel a couple weeks earlier was assumed to be an unfortunate encounter with one.
On the morning of my departure, one of my bosses went out early to pick up a Rosca de Reyes (Three Kings cake). This is a sweet bread that Mexicans eat on the 6th of January to celebrate the arrival of the three kings bringing gifts to Jesus. Like most Mexican pastries it is dry and heavy and tastes a lot like the cardboard box it’s usually sold in. It’s draped with candied fruits in red and green colors, and those are pretty much the only parts of the pastry I care to ingest.
This time, however, I got another taste: a hard piece of plastic. I’d forgotten about the practice of putting a molded plastic baby inside the cake signifying good fortune to the one who finds it. To a degree, it was good fortune, since I’d been given the first slice, and I discovered it on my first bite. As often is the case, there is a consequence to good fortune, and that is that you are in charge of coordinating the following year’s celebration!
I took comfort knowing I would not likely be there the next year. Heck, I would be gone in about two hours. The owners didn’t hide that they’d hoped I’d return. Naturally, they wanted people who are already familiar with the dogs and their routines, and I figured I’d done a good job since they hinted more than once how nice it would be if I came back for Easter.
At the time, though, my mind was only focused on one thing: the comfortable hotel room I’d reserved for myself on the other side of Guadalajara. While staying at the dog hotel, one of the owners suggested that I visit Barancas de Huentitan National Park on the north side of the city. I didn’t think much of it because most of the region is pretty dry, and though national parks conjure up images of tall evergreens for those of us in the United States; in Mexico, a national park can be a dry canyon with a scattering of oak trees.
What had gotten me excited was the previous trip I’d made to Guadalajara. I’d gone to a neighborhood that was slightly elevated above the rest of the city, and in the distance, I saw giant sheer cliffs dropping into a dark canyon. Clearly it was going to be different than other national parks I’d visited here.
In ten minutes, I had packed my backpack and food satchel. I said my goodbyes to the owners and other volunteers, and I stopped for one last face bath from Jack, one of the giant pit bulls that boarded with us regularly. Once out the door, my spirits soared. I was off another adventure.
Having my backpack and the food satchel, I wasn’t sure if I was going to take the bus or an Uber to the light rail station. The bus would be a fraction of the cost, though Uber was usually less than $10. Still, I decided to head to the bus stop and see how crowded the bus was first. As fortune would have it, a full one had just left the stop a couple minutes before I arrived, and the next one was practically empty. I hopped on board and easily grabbed a seat, already proud of the $9 I’d just saved.
On my trip to Guadalajara the year before, I’d noticed an elevated train platform when we arrived at the bus depot. I asked the driver if that was Mexico’s first metro line. He said, “no, we have three”. Somehow, I’d completely missed the train network running beneath the city on my previous trips. I got off the bus at the light rail station and, having taken it several times on this trip, pulled out my transit card and tapped it to pass through the turnstile.
It took about 40 minutes to travel the line from end to end, but it was comfortable and uncrowded. Something I do like about the metro is that, unlike on the buses, everyone wears a mask. Perhaps it’s just a city thing, though I’d finally opened up my N95 mask to use for these occasions where I am in an enclosed space with other people. When I arrived at the northern terminal, I looked up bus service to my hotel. It would have taken two buses to make the short trip so I decided to go with Uber again, since it was barely twice the price of the bus trip.
Online the hotel looked to good to be true at $20/night. I kept my hopes down despite the word “spa” being used in the hotel name, but I found it to thoroughly exceed my expectations. The property had three swimming pools and a sauna. There were several terraces and a rooftop restaurant with an unobstructed view of the canyon beneath the hotel. The neighborhood was actually on a plateau, which dropped off precipitously on three sides, and the hotel is at its tip.
The hotel clerk brought me to my room, and I was a little disappointed to see that the only view of the canyon was through the round porthole of a window in my bathroom. Who on earth puts the bathroom on the outside wall? Actually, I’ve seen this before in apartments in Asia, where the bathroom has the exterior wall, effectively closing off any view you could have except when sitting on the toilet.
I considered a little, and before going out for my afternoon walk, stopped by to inquire about the availability and cost of getting a room with a canyon view. It was $10 more per night, which proportionally was one and a half times the price of the original room, but looking at the big picture: “was I willing to spend an extra $10 a night to get a room overlooking what is basically the Grand Canyon? The clerk helped me move my things, and I headed out for my walk feeling I’d made the right decision.
One thing that did surprise me about the neighborhood was its lack of restaurants. This is a neighborhood on the precipice of a canyon, with a light rail line that gets you to downtown in about 20 minutes. I can’t imagine the cost of housing if this neighborhood was in a US city, and the place would be filled with upscale eateries. Instead I had to choose among three places that specialized in chilaquiles.
This is one of my least favorite Mexican dishes. It is served for breakfast and is basically nachos bathed in salsa with a fried egg on top. Of questionable nutritional value, it has always disappointed me. Fortunately I was able to find a place with a full breakfast menu and liquor bar. It was the first time in Mexico I’d seen a bar where whiskeys outnumbered tequilas, and I went all out ordering myself a honey flavored Jack Daniels whiskey. I’d discovered this nectar the year before when I couldn’t find anyone to make me a whiskey cocktail. The honey infusion takes the bite out of the whiskey, and has all the irresistibility of real maple syrup.
With my belly full, I headed out on a reconnaissance mission. The next day, I planned to hike to the bottom of the canyon, but the trail head was on the next plateau over. On the map, that meant walking all the way to the beginning of the plateau in order to bypass the canyon separating the two plateaus, essentially a 3.5 mile walk to cover 1 mile as the crow flies.
I’d been studying the satellite view to see if there was some way I could cross the canyon and save myself the longer walk, so I headed to the place where I thought I spied a trail traversing the canyon. At the point I expected to find the trail head, I found a waterfall instead. Perhaps the trail I’d seen from above was actually the river running down the cleft of the canyon.
I walked further down the street and did find a trail that dropped down from the road with the help of a tree branch leaned against the cliff face and a bit of rope tied above. I thought surely this would be the beginning of the route to the other side. I was filled with some hope in that the trail did seem to be heavily traveled, though whether by hikers or homeless, I was not able to immediately determine.
My senses were heightened as I wanted to avoid walking into a homeless camp or unnecessarily startle a snake. It was the kind of desert landscape that mimicked perfectly the environment an exotic animal store owner might suggest for your snake terrarium.
The path continued until I reached a small cascade, which I gingerly crossed. I say gingerly not so much because I was worried about injury but because the source of the water smelled and looked more like a sewer discharge than a spring. I didn’t fancy falling into the slimy mess beneath my feet.
Having done a lot of navigation over the years, I continued to follow the path that made the most sense to get me to the other plateau, and it wasn’t long before I reached what was clearly the stream that had created the canyon between the two. I looked up to see the path continued on the other side and was fairly confident I would reach the other plateau. The footing was a bit trickier and the brush thicker so that now I began to worry about spiders and fire ants dropping onto me as I occasionally caught branches with my hat or backpack.
I was certain I was just below the road on the other side, but when I looked left and right, I saw nothing but a steep 20 foot cliff edge barricading my way. I walked one direction for a little, but the path seemed to taper off so I tried the other direction. I found a tree with a bit of rope hanging down, but the rope had already been commandeered by a column of fire ants using it as a vertical highway. I tried to clear them off, but even then, I had trepidation about putting my trust in a rope whose anchor I could not see from below, so I continued along the cliff base.
Eventually I found a cleft with a tree growing in it, and I was able to use that to pull myself up, moving my hands slowly and always on the lookout for any reptilians that would not welcome my advance into their hidey hole. At the top of the bluff was an ATV trail and enough trash to confirm I was closing in on civilization.
I did finally start to run into animals at this point. The first was a three foot long black snake. I am not sure what kind it was as I was never the boy who memorized all the types of snakes when I was young. I was sure this was the second time I’d seen this variety though since it moved in a peculiar way. Instead of winding back and forth it seemed to dart linearly like it was skiing down a hill. Fortunately, it was darting away from me.
My second animal encounter was a huge steer. I do get a little nervous around these animals, many times my weight and easily able to outrun a human. It’s best not to spook them anyway. I was so transfixed on the steer, that I hadn’t noticed the two dogs at its feet, and it was too late to back up as they were just lifting their heads at the smell of me.
I adopted the dominant posture I’d practiced with the dogs at the hotel and stared them down. They both quickly slunk away. I wasn’t sure whether to be impressed with my dog handling skills or glad for that last kiss I’d let the pit bull give me before I departed the dog hotel. You see I’d learned that, in addition to having a sense of smell 10,000 times that of humans, dogs can also interpret timelines, moods, and diet from smell. I was hoping that they smelled a pit bull and decided they’d better skedaddle.
It wasn’t long before I ran into the owner of the ranch and asked him the way to the main road. He pointed ahead and said straight. This is one thing I just can’t get over in Mexico. People don’t care if you walk through their property. As long as you’re not stealing or messing around with things, you are perfectly welcome to cross anyone’s property.
Unfortunately, what I expected to be a short reconnaissance was running into my afternoon nap time so I decided to catch an Uber home. I made the mistake of quenching my thirst with a diet coke, which apparently has all the caffeine of a regular coke, despite its lack of sugar, so my nap lasted about fifteen minutes before I decided to head out again to explore the other side of my neighborhood plateau.
I walked out to a park called the Mirador, which directly translated means “lookout”. As the canyon opened up to my view I was again shocked that I had never before heard of this place. I mean it is right on the edge of the city. I looked up and down the canyon and realized that tomorrow, I would be down at that tiny ribbon of water below.
I continued around the edge of the plateau passing by an architectural college. I was thinking I definitely would have chosen that as my study abroad college had I known I could be going to school on the edge of a giant outdoor playground! To be fair, I did go to Virginia Tech, which is nestled in the Appalachians and provided a mountainous playground with plenty of diversions.
The views from that side of the plateau were different. Instead of looking down into the canyon, I looked up to see cliff walls with several waterfalls coming down and the highrises of downtown in the distance. To be honest, I was surprised at the volume of water coming over since it had been four months since the rainy season ended. I have to admit though, the water looked a little brown so it was possible that it wasn’t rainwater runoff at all. Still, I was amazed at how the city just spilled to the edge of the canyon.
My map indicated that some of the neighborhood streets tapered into paths and sure enough, it wasn’t long before I found myself walking among pieced together shacks along a creek.The creek was clearly waste discharge, and despite the number of signs instructing you to not throw trash, the water that passed by me was like a conveyer for garbage, and a pile accumulated at the base of the cliff.
I took a picture of the unusual trash waterfall and continued on. A pit bull came alongside me about the same time a thuggy looking guy came into view. I got an uncomfortable vibe, but I think I came upon him so suddenly that he didn’t have time to react. His eyes also went to the pit bull, which appeared to be walking with me so he continued on.
I scaled out of the waterfall slums and made my way again to city streets. I had actually come onto the same street with one of the restaurants I’d highlighted as wanting to check out. Unfortunately it was not open when I got there, so I continued onto another I thought looked good. It was open and I showed the server the picture that I’d seen online. She said it was called queso fundido (cheese fondue). I got to order a topping so I chose steak and onions. It also came with guacamole on the side.
When it was ready, I carried the sack to my hotel room and sat out on one of the terraces overlooking the canyon to eat my meal. Several stray kittens arrived to inform me that they too liked steak fondue. They even put on an acrobatics show for my entertainment. I was so impressed with their efforts that I tore up a couple tortillas to feed them.
It was getting dark, so headed up to the room. I kept the lights off but opened up the door to enjoy my $30 view. The canyon was dark so there wasn’t much to see, but you could see where the top edges of the canyon met the horizon as the sky glowed with the resonant light of the city. It was a perfect beginning to my next adventure.