Adventure #3: When fairyland packs its bags

Since I saw La Purification (or La Puri to the cool kids) I’d been itching to go back there and take pictures. I know the pictures in my head should be enough, in fact they’re better, but…

So I was toying with the idea, and wondering if I could walk (having an unreasoning opposition to calling taxis unless I have to), and Mike thought it would take about 45 minutes, and suggested that I could easily pick up a taxi up to get back.

Now this turned out to be blatantly the wrong way round, as La Puri is up a bloody great hill. Also, my house is deceitfully always cold, so I didn’t quite realise that blue sky outside + no shade = really quite hot.

Ten minutes after I leave my house, I’m reaching the main gates of the centre, and wondering if Mike might have been a little bit optimistic. Forty-five minutes after I leave my house, I’m still walking along the highway, just reaching the turn-off to La Puri, and having uncharitable thoughts about Mike. Walking along the highway isn’t quite as dangerous as it sounds, as there is lots of edge, but is still no fun: vehicles whistling past at high speed, lorry drivers honking their horns, traffic fumes, and that delicious odour you get in a place where it’s de rigeur to chuck your rubbish by the side of the road…

I was hot, tired and grumpy, and turning off the highway onto a long, dull road and eventually starting up the bloody great hill didn’t cheer me up much… No, it took the graveyard to do that.

Coming up a long curve in the road it appeared ahead like an oasis. I fell in love with it straight away, and though I was a bit nervous about the etiquette of taking pictures in a cemetery on a Sunday, I did anyway. It was beautiful place, white graves with tin cans of flowers, hidden amongst stunted trees and tangles of wildflowers, angels with furled wings and Marias with bowed heads, all dusty and sunbaked and peaceful, and not another soul there. If I’m clever enough to put them in in the right place, here are some pictures:




































Somehow the cemetery and the break transformed me: I started to enjoy walking, and appreciate the clear high air, and the views, and the masses of wild flowers along the road:




















Arriving in La Puri I saw two very cool buses gently rusting by the side of the road, with unicorns painted in their windows:




















As I went on I began to feel discomfited that the bunting was not as I remembered it. There was lots of ‘Viva Mexico’ bunting in red, white and green, and some of the cellophane flowers, but none of the multicoloured stuff I remembered. Well, I reasoned, the Viva Mexico bunting must have been up for Independence Day too (though I didn’t notice it in amongst the coloured stuff), and they wouldn’t take one kind of bunting down and leave up the other, so it must have been a bit further that the magic bunting was up. I remembered coming round a corner and seeing it all laid out in front of me, but as I went on around each corner, still no moment of wonder.




























So, either I am completely mad and deluded…. Or, the inhabitants of La Puri weirdly left up the Viva Mexico bunting, and some of the sparkly cellophane bunting, but took away the magic multicoloured bunting, all in three days. I maintain that I’m not completely mad and deluded, but I’ll have to wait next Independence Day to prove it – when I’m determined to go up there again and finally capture it. Except that I know, really, the pictures in my head ARE the best ones.

La Puri is nice, but no fairyland. It’s pretty and quiet and ordinary and the air feels sweet. It’s got lots of the kind of shops that sell everything – fruit and sweet things in packets, bread and biscuits and cans of coke and bottles of drinking yoghurt – with awnings onto the roadside and cool, dark interiors, and lanky dogs flopped wherever they fancy.




















What it doesn’t seem to have is taxis, at least on Sundays. I was quite proud of myself when I worked out that I could take a bus and boldly flagged it down on the least blind bend I could find. All the way home I was fascinated by the enormous chrysanthemums that wobbled in tiny vases stuck to the side of the bus, in front of a small, murky crucifix.