In “The Last King of Scotland,” which I watched dubbed in Spanish on the bus from Tapachula to Oaxaca, Mexico, last week, the Scottish character Nicholas Garrigan comes up with a travel plan: to spin a globe, to place his finger down randomly, and to go wherever it lands. His destination: Uganda. Unfortunately, it was 1971, and the brutal dictator Idi Amin had just seized power. Things do not go well.
My plan for my 10th week of travel through Latin America had just enough in common with Nicholas Garrigan’s to give me pause. I was in Mexico, a country in the throes of a murderous drug war, where I had decided to buy a Oaxaca state map, arbitrarily pick a town maybe an hour from the capital (also named Oaxaca) and settle in for the week. The only requirements were that it be small, rural and have no known tourist attractions. Rather than spinning a globe, I relied on a bus driver who suggested his own hometown to me when I told him of my quest.
This was not just an entertaining exercise. It was really an experiment about whether there were still places left in the world where travel guides and the Internet had not yet created a trail for tourists to follow — places that were still worthy of discovery, with enough activities to fill at least a few days (and of course, a place to sleep).
The place where I happened to land was San Juan Teitipac, a corn-farming hamlet (pop. 2,500) that was nine miles down a rutted road from the nearest highway. Although it merits but a stub in Wikipedia, the village, I discovered, was jammed with intriguing customs, welcoming residents, unforgettable meals, beguiling landscapes and rich history. In other words, all the things that make travel great.
San Juan Teitipac’s appeal was far from evident when I dragged my suitcase off the battered bus into a nearly empty plaza bordered by a town hall shuttered for lunch and an old church shuttered until who knows when. But things soon started looking up. As is the case in any area with no tourist infrastructure, the residents become your de facto concierges. I approached the lone soul in the vicinity, a mustachioed town gardener named Bernardo Hernández Núñez, who was as curious to see me as he was eager to help. He took a break from trimming grass to direct me to a nameless restaurant run by Teo Núñez Aguilera. She had no sooner served me beef, beans, prickly pear and bottomless limeade for 25 pesos ($2 at 12.5 pesos to the dollar) than she rushed out to find me a room to rent. Within an hour of arrival, I was settling in at the house of a retired farmer, a gentlemanly 72-year-old named Rogelio Mateo Tirado, and his wife, the town cheesemaker, Casimira Larita Sánchez.
The couple may no longer hit the fields daily but they still keep quite a menagerie on their land: a donkey, a cow, a ram, a couple of mud-bathing pigs and a triple-flock of turkeys, chickens and ducks that were penned in by a fence made of a mattress stripped down to the coils. There were also three dogs tied to trees who were never without three matching clouds of gnats that followed them everywhere. The scene was something between a Gabriel García Márquez novel and a Warner Brothers cartoon.
Despite my uncomfortable bed and cold-water-only shower, I loved my new home and the price that came with it: 50 pesos ($4) a night. And a walk through the town later that afternoon led to three discoveries that would pretty much fill my agenda for the week.
The most unexpected I found by following my nose to a very fragrant grapefruit tree: it happened to be inside a 16th-century monastery hidden behind the church that bore no sign, no fanfare and no admission fee. As I entered the gate, I spotted a fleet of 20-something men and women speeding out on bicycles. Just inside the gate, I found a weathered but solid stone building that reminded me a bit of an old fort, and there I ran into Leopoldo Agustín García Lastra. He is the husband of a husband-and-wife team of architects running Escuela Taller, a program financed largely by the Spanish government that teaches trades related to historic restoration to young men and women who dropped out of school.
He took me on an impromptu tour, showing me a well-preserved black-and-white mural of the Stations of the Cross uncovered by earlier restoration efforts, and pointing out an enormous chimney that signaled what must have been the kitchen. He also filled me in Spain’s widespread post-conquistador evangelization effort of the local Zapotec people that led the monastery to be built in the first place.
Some areas were broken or worn away; others had been adapted for local church use. The most beautiful part, I thought, was a cloister — unfinished since the 1500s — made fragrant by the blossoms of that grapefruit tree and transformed into a waiting room for those in to see the priest by wrought-iron benches installed in some century since. Mr. García Lastra invited me to visit classes a few days later, where I saw everything from a carpentry workshop to a lesson on Leonardo da Vinci. Then I wandered through the halls of the monastery, guessing at what rooms served as the monks’ sleeping chambers. The church itself was closed, and I wouldn’t see it until Sunday, when it was completely packed — with far more people than I had seen in town the prior four days combined, for Mass celebrating the Feast of the Assumption.
Another discovery was less majestic but just as central to the culture of the town. Soon after I arrived, I noticed that the quiet in this otherwise sleepy hamlet was punctuated by public address announcers who ran pseudo-radio stations from home, “broadcasting” updates on the lives of fellow residents from bullhorns mounted high in the trees above their properties.
There was no guidebook, of course, to explain any of this. But there was a town full of people who over the next few days turned out to be as curious about me as I was about them, and willing to answer my questions if I would answer theirs in return. (Most popular: “How many hours is it by plane to New York?”) Among them were my hosts, who explained how the announcements worked one day as they went through their morning routine. (Casimira kneaded, drained, squeezed, salted and molded the day’s cheese rounds, handing them to Rogelio, who sold them to a constant stream of customers who came without knocking.)
Town residents paid for broadcasting time, they said, and the announcer did whatever they asked, announcing that freshly slaughtered pork was available for purchase at the López residence, the veterinarian was open for business, garbanzo beans were on sale, and happy birthday Leonora, from your daughter María and her son David (cue “Las Mañanitas,” the Mexican birthday song). I’d later visit not just the home of one of the announcers, but the home of one of those pig slaughterers, watching the butchering process together with an unsettling number of flies.
My top fantasy when I formulated this experiment in impromptu tourism — that I would somehow sniff out the town’s best cooks and hire them to cook for me — seemed so unlikely and intrusive that I didn’t really try. But it happened anyway. I talk about food a lot, and neighbors urged me to ask Señora Teo and Doña Gude, the two women who ran the small lunch spots in town, to make their specialties. To my surprise, both seemed to be delighted and honored to be asked and simply told me to come for lunch the next day.
Doña Gude was known for her espesado, considered San Juan Teitipac’s local specialty. It was a corn soup loaded with vegetables and flavored with herbs, all from the countryside around town, including squash, pumpkin flowers, chepiles, chepiches and others I didn’t catch. She told me her sons had grown into healthy adults from having grown up on the dish — which she noted had literally not a drop of added fat (nor any other ingredients that didn’t grow the surrounding countryside).
Señora Teo’s specialty was turkey with mole, which in this case was chocolate-based sauce spiced with poblano and guajillo chilies. (She had killed the turkey herself that same morning.) Mole, I knew from my own failed kitchen experiments, is brutally complicated, which was evident when I tasted it and the rush of flavors — a charge led by chocolate and followed quickly by the chilies, rushed to my brain, limbs, stomach and heart simultaneously, blowing me away in a almost literal sense. Had Señora Teo (a widow) been a bit younger or her daughters (college students) been a bit older, I might have had a “Like Water For Chocolate” moment, falling madly in love with them because of their cooking.
One aspect of San Juan’s culture that I had no chance to experience: night life. For the first time since high school, I had a curfew imposed by my hosts, who had no second key and couldn’t have me waking them up to get in after their 8 p.m. bedtime. Eight o’clock sounded like a terrible time to settle into my room, which featured a very uncomfortable bed, no chair and barnyard odors wafting in from outside.
I did get a small respite: it turns out the couple went by the “la hora de dios,” or “God’s time,” instead of adhering to the “hora del gobierno,” the “government time” that we in the United States call daylight saving time.
So my curfew was really 9 p.m., enough to hit the lone open dinner establishment, La Catedral del Taco, or the Taco Cathedral, as a man named Mayo hyperbolically called the blue tarp that covered a simple gas grill outside his family’s store. There, every night, he joyously chopped and sautéed pork and beef and chicken into mediocre tacos made up for by his upbeat, half-English banter that included calling everything famous (“the famous Mexican chorizo!”) and shouting a sing-song “buenas noches” to everyone who passed.
Five days passed very quickly, and though I was thrilled at how much I had been able to see and do, I knew that it would take a doctoral dissertation to understand fully everything that had been going on around me. Or maybe three: one on the social relations in small Mexican towns heavily influenced by their indigenous past, one on evangelism in the 16th century Spanish church and one on the economic impact of immigration. A few lessons on cheesemaking and donkey cart driving wouldn’t have hurt either.
But there was still hope for me to make mole. On Sunday, my final day in town, when I returned home from the jam-packed Feast of the Assumption mass, Don Rogelio handed me a plastic bag containing and tightly sealed, aluminum foil covered package. the size of a small loaf of bread. Señora Teo had dropped off about a pound of mole paste, with instructions that it be reconstituted with chicken broth when I got to New York.