summary of 2002
Mexico City, January 2003[haz click aquí para ver en español]
Dear friends and family:
The last time we sent out an update letter to all of our friends was too long ago. Here's a summary of the last twelve months or so...
Wedding
On December 8th, 2001, Cecilia and I celebrated our wedding with a big fiesta in Tepoztlan. Some of you were able to
share our happiness physically, but we felt blessings from all of our friends and family. We enjoyed ourselves
tremendously! Music was certainly not lacking: Mexican marimba, Latin salsa and cumbia, Veracruzan stomping, Peruvian
huaynos and mariachis from Jalisco were all part of the mix. The grannies danced... even the gringos did! It had been a
long time since we shared the same beautiful piece of sky with so many people dear to us... the result in Tepoztlan was
as magical as when Cecilia and I had just met, in Dharamshala, four years earlier - except this time we could share it
with all of you.
Our Honeymoon
Soon after that, we took off for our honeymoon. Cecilia had told me that she wanted to see penguins and glaciers;
let me tell you, there aren't that many places (outside the poles) with that combination. In search of the elusive
birds, we dusted off our backpacks -loyal accomplices during so many adventures- and entrusted to them our tent, our
sleeping bags, our miniature stove and some food. 24 hours after leaving Mexico City, two
airplanes and three buses later, we arrived at Torres del Paine National Park, in Chilean Patagonia. Here we had a
7-day non-stop visual feast, hiking some 70 miles, camping and cooking next to turquoise lakes, vertical rock spires
and towers, enormous glaciers, and thick forests. I would not believe the colors we got in our photographs, had I not
seen them with my own eyes. At 51° South in December, daytime was long enough: sunrise at 5am, sunset at 10pm.
Cecilia tells me this is the most beautiful scenery she has ever seen - and I would definitely recommend this place to
any nature lover. Oh, and we did finally find the penguins.
Then we visited Chile's Region X: the Lake District, with its majestic Andean volcanoes guarding the sea and the lakes nestled between them. We saw good friends in Santiago: Marcela, Agustin and Cristian, and we visited the Santiago residence-cum-ship of Pablo Neruda, one of our favorite poets. We spent New Year's Eve with my family in Lima - my sister Susie and Alfredo also made it there, along with their daughter Lucia, who was four months old by then.
Grand Canyon
In mid-January, we took the opportunity to visit the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The dimension of the place impressed us, as did the amount of color: there's a surprising variety of fauna and flora, for a desert. Route 66 (important over a hundred years ago due to being the umbilical cord between US civilization and the Wild West), today nostalgic and ignored in favor of the faster modern highways, took us to Las Vegas, where we saw the Cirque du Soleil's "O".
Mexican Fauna and Tourism
Mexico, on land and under its seas, receives millions of visitors between December and March. The vast majority are not humans: dozens of animal species come here looking for refuge from the icy winters of the far Northern hemisphere. In March we visited a forest in Michoacan state which is famous for being the southernmost point in the annual migration path of the Monarch butterfly. Billions of them fly here all the way from Canada, to spend winter in a climate more appropriate for procreation. Here they mate, die, and their offspring prepare for the long route back up north. This is a unique place.
Humpback whales undertake the same pilgrimage from Alaska, albeit underwater, and many arrive as far south as Banderas Bay, off Puerto Vallarta. By March, the whales are already returning north, happily showing the way to their newly born. This year they have even more reasons to be happy: in May 2002, Mexico approved the creation of the largest marine mammal reserve in the world, by prohibiting the hunting of any marine mammals (endangered or not) throughout all of its over 1 million square miles of territorial waters. A large variety of birds, turtles and dolphins also live in this ecosystem. Of course, we also relaxed in Puerto Vallarta and we saw our friend Florelisa.
We also visited Mexcaltitan, a tiny island-town nestled among the mangroves of the forgotten state of Nayarit. Mexcaltitan is very photogenic, and has commanded special interest from sociologists and other researchers. Legend has it that this island of 100 families is the mythical Aztlan, from where the Aztec race sprang and started their long journey in search of the capital of the empire they were destined to found: and so the powerful Aztec empire was ruled from Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City. The theory today does not enjoy widespread acceptance within the scientific community, but Mexcaltitan (the "Venice of Mexico" because the tides transform the streets into canoeable waterways) has managed to maintain its traditions and its peaceful lifestyle.
Eddie graduates
Eddie, my younger brother, became an Industrial Engineer from the University of Lima, in May. This was the perfect excuse for Cecilia and I to visit the family and enjoy the outstanding Peruvian cuisine. Of course the ceviche is top-notch, but there is such a wealth of flavors and textures that it would be worth it to tour Lima for a couple of weeks just to enjoy Peruvian food.
Lucia's first birthday
Susie and Alfredo live in Washington DC - we visited them twice this year. In March, we were lucky enough to arrive
just in time for the annual cherry blossoms by the Potomac River - a spectacle which only lasts a few days each year.
In August, we visited again, this time to celebrate Lucia's first birthday with
Susie, Alfredo, and my mother who had also just arrived from Lima. There was even a piñata for the kids,
brought by Cecilia directly from a Mexican market. We ran out briefly to check out the new International Spy Museum in
DC, and Cecilia found a new costume which will make her completely unrecognizable during her upcoming secret spy
missions. We took a road trip to visit the valleys, forests, and colonial towns in the state of Virginia.
Our godchild
During a brief trip to San Francisco, California, our good friends Erika and Eduardo blessed us by asking us
to be godparents to their second child Marco. This made us very happy, especially since Cecilia had already
felt a special bond with Marco during a previous visit. Cecilia was invited to a very interesting photography
conservation course in San Francisco in November, and so she was able to visit her new godchild, and Sofia, Erika
and Eduardo.
Visitors
This year we had several visitors - Michi and Cecica from Lima, Sona from San Francisco, Viviana and Pablo from Buenos Aires, Juan Guillermo and Alejandro from Medellin. We were also able to spend some time with Juan and Guille who visited Mexico City from California. It was fun to spend time with all of you, and guide you or help you plan your visits to Mexico the city and Mexico the country.
Yucatan and Quintana Roo on two wheels
Towards the end of the year, we planned a two-week vacation. Roberto (Cecilia's cousin), was to wed Patty in
Merida, in southeastern Mexico. We arrived for the wedding on the 21st of December, and had a great
time.
Our real adventure started after the wedding: we had planned to cross the entire Yucatan Peninsula
by bicycle. We cycled some 250Km between Merida (Yucatan state) and Playa del Carmen (Quintana Roo state),
meeting funny and interesting characters en route. At this relaxed pace, we were able to more closely appreciate
and the differences between these two neighbor states - much more traditional culture survives in Yucatan
than in Quintana Roo. You can see this easily in the construction of traditional Yucatecan houses;
in Yucatecan cuisine, with very unique dishes; in the Maya language, which is still spoken extensively; in the faces -
we saw many faces surprisingly similar to those in thousand-year-old Maya petroglyphs; in the amount of people -
while the heart of Yucatan was dotted with towns every 4 miles, in Q. Roo we actually covered a 20-mile
stretch without seeing a single person. Quintana Roo is much more tourism-oriented: it has great natural reserves
for fauna and flora, perhaps the best beaches I have ever seen, and a coral reef which provides excellent
snorkeling and diving opportunities. This reef is the second largest in the world, just off the coasts of
Mexico and Belize. Also there are accommodations for every budget, from sand-floor cabañas and hammocks on the
beach, to Cancun's mega-resorts.
We had so much fun on the bike trip, We could tell you the story for
hours... In summary, we made about 50Km a day at a leisurely pace, from about 6am to 10am to avoid the hard
Yucatecan sun and the commercial and tourist traffic. (We were pleasantly surprised in that we had no
problems with reckless drivers.) We would then check-in to some hotel and rest until about 2pm or 3pm, to avoid
the harshest sun, then would go out to town, take a stroll and see the place. Our stops were Izamal, Piste
(near the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza), the colonial city of Valladolid, the Maya ruins of Coba, the beaches of
Tulum and Paraiso, and finally Playa del Carmen.
In Playa we met up with Cecilia's family - her parents, brother, and some other relatives had decided to spend a few days there too. Also, Susie, Alfredo and Lucia were able to join us yet again, as did our friends Mituse, Jerome and Bernardo. We spent a fun week, visiting the ruins of Chichen Itza, Tulum, the aqua-park Xcaret, and enjoying the Caribbean beaches.
Cavern and Cave Diving
The Yucatan Peninsula boasts another very unique attraction: cenotes
(known in other countries as "springs", "sinkholes", "ojos de agua", or "sumideros"), holes in the ground,
doors to the underground river system. The word cenote comes from the Maya "dzonot". This river system was
created here due to a very unique combination of the limestone, the depth of the bedrock, the rains, the
composition of the earth, glaciations, and the closeness to the sea. The result is a relatively unexplored
network of underground caves (some flooded and some not), decorated with speleotherms such as stalactites and
stalagmites. It's interesting to add that the large meteorite that struck the Earth some 65 million years ago,
and which was probably responsible for the largest extinction in the history of our planet (50% of all
species --including the dinosaurs-- were killed off during the aftermath of this event, which was the most
important cause of the eventual rise and dominance of mammals), struck here in the Yucatan. With modern space-age
imaging technology, scientists have found the crater of some 100-200 miles in diameter, centered at what is now
the port of Chicxulub. The Chicxulub crater is still being studied, but it is apparent now that the impact
created an additional ring of cenotes in the Yucatan. The cenotes and the underground rivers can be explored with
the appropriate equipment and training. I had wanted to learn more about this underground world; here,
finally, was my chance.
I decided to take a cavern diving course, and I discovered that this specialty is much more complex and
intimidating than I had previously thought. To begin with, technical cave diving is the most advanced
diving specialty; there are only around 60 active cave diving instructors in the world. Cave diving carries with
it many inherent risks: the surrounding water, the cold, darkness, poor visibility, claustrophobia, lack of
fluid communication with teammates, the "ceiling", the depth, additional pressure on the body, equipment failure,
disorientation, reduced spaces, nitro narcosis, overexertion, the river's flow, line entanglement... but above
all: the stress that could result from one or more of these factors. The road from stress to panic can well
be fatal, when the diver is 30 to 60 minutes away from the closest safe point. For these reasons, the equipment
used is more streamlined, less fancy and much more robust. Rules are stricter, and in general there are
many factors the diver must constantly monitor. The cave diving community exudes an obsession with redundancy in
systems and in procedures to control possible problems: the cave diver carries three mechanical lights, two
tanks with isolator valve, two breathing regulators, two masks, etc. Cave divers share specific communication
systems (visual and non-visual) devoid of sound, complete with questions and measurements, and commands
that can be questioned underwater -- but more importantly, some that cannot be.
I learned proper survival and exploration techniques, and a little more about caves. But above all, I learned that there is so much more to learn about this wonderful surreal world.
Regarding work...
... it was a difficult year for both of us. Cecilia quit the UNAM after three years, mainly due to the lack of resources to perform a good job in the conservation of their photographic archive. For now she is teaching at Casa Lamm, and she may start teaching at her alma mater, Churubusco, this year. I can't complain, but the world economy is still in the doldrums and this continues to affect enterprise software purchases in Latin America. However, we are still fighting: we have gained some important customers this year, and we hope to grow our market again in 2003.
As you can see, my interest in photography is growing. We are also looking for a house in Condesa neighborhood in Mexico City, which we love because many of the places we frequent are within walking distance. We hope to find our ideal home this year, so that we can have more space for visitors. Hopefully you too will be able to visit us!
Warmest regards, much health for you and your families, and we wish you success in the year that has just started,
Cecilia Salgado and Ricky Cárdenas
