Vacation part... II.1?

Here I am again, showered and fed and full of good intentions about finishing my narrative. Though I keep getting distracted, so we'll see. Where did I leave off? I was talking about home life with Alex and her mom and animals..... Ah, I know. Mazamitla!

Mazamitla is a little town up in the mountains across the lake from Ajijic. We had a bit of a time getting there, driving through the countryside, passing fields of all kinds (grapes, perhaps, and corn, and agave). The town is in a sort of pine forest, and so Mazamitla is known for wood in its architecture and in its crafts. It's also billed as a mystical sort of place, though we never figured out why that was. Highlights of the town itself were the nice restaurant we ate lunch at, made to look like some sort of Alpine retreat, the street vendors selling wood crafts and toys and candles, and the church which had been billed as "positively Norwegian in design," though it looked more Eastern to me. Alex and I were particularly interested in some wooden rings that were being sold at one of the street vendors, and as we stood there looking at them and trying them on, Alex's mom came over and said something to the effect of "am I going to have to perform some kind of ceremony or something?" Which we thought was pretty funny....so of course, we bought matching Mazamitla rings.

We had also read about a beautiful 20-foot waterfall amid a sort of Japanese-style garden, with bridges and stuff. We asked a few people, and finally got a map showing us how to get there. As we were driving along, we came across a corral full of horses, and a man standing by the side of the road. We stopped to ask him directions to "la cascada," and he asked (in Spanish) if we wanted to go on foot or by horse. I was so excited that I knew what he was asking that I answered "on foot" immediately, and off we went to park the car and start the trek. We bought our tickets, and entered a sort of...park, full of nature trails, and also lined with what we decided must be vacation houses. We started walking, mostly downhill, thinking about how coming back would be a pain and maybe we should have ridden on horseback. We walked, and walked, and finally came to a bridge that went from nowhere to nowhere, with a dry, empty pool underneath it. I was thinking, this is our Japanese garden? But we kept on. After a while, we passed many pretty houses and another bridge from nowhere to nowhere over an empty pool, and Alex's mom wondered aloud if La Cascada would actually have water, since it was the dry season. I refused to believe that we'd gone so far for nothing, so we trudged on! We passed a sign that said "La Cascada 1 km." All that walking, and we still had 1 km to go! But we kept going. And going. And then we happened to pass a young Mexican couple going back the way we'd come. The man of the couple said something in Spanish, and we assumed he was just greeting us, so we all said good afternoon or something like that; then he repeated what he said, and I realized he was asking us if we were going to the waterfall. We said yes, and he told us that it was dry!!!! I didn't know what to do. We all sort of stood around in confusion for a little while, at a sort of intersection next to a little chapel. Finally Alex and I decided that to make the trip worth it, we should at least continue on and see where the waterfall would be. Alex's mom decided to head back, and we told her we'd meet her back at the car. So we headed on, down a rather steep hill, finally to a sort of empty, rocky area where I think the waterfall usually is. We wandered through the rocky area to a little stream, and headed down into it, jumping from rock to rock and having nice romantic moments. I also got bit by something, and it itched like crazy the next day. Finally, we headed back uphill for over a kilometer, stopping along the way in the Chapel of Cristo de la Montana to refresh ourselves. It worked really well, too, I think that was our mystical experience for the trip. At any rate, we finally made it back, with a funny story to tell about how there hadn't been any water..... Hah.

That was a long story! Time for bed, more updates tomorrow.