It says a lot about the craziness of living in Buenos Aires that a 15 hour red eye flight to Mexico City via Miami (my hub away from home these days, as many flights around Latin America connect through here), can induce a state of relaxation, especially after navigating the inevitable chaos at Ezeiza, our home city’s airport.
Travelling with Sabrina and our five year old daughter on business is a rare treat, so to hell with catching up on any lost sleep from our 5am arrival in Miami, we have an ‘amuse bouche’ of a megalopolis of twenty four million souls to taste- and what an amuse bouche it is, as we are staying in Polanco, looking out over gorgeous Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico City’s Central Park. Arguably its most beautiful location, Polanco is one of the rare neighbourhoods in this chaotic, car focussed megacity, which can truly be enjoyed on foot. Sabrina, a tough judge at the best of times is suitably impressed, especially when I manage to get us upgraded and the view from our room on a rare clear day like today, stretches all the way to the smoking, snow covered peak of Mount Popocatépetl over 40 miles from here, (this beautiful name means ‘smoking mountain’ in the Aztec language of Nahuatl).
We have a whole weekend to enjoy together before work intrudes, so waste no time heading out onto Polanco’s main drag, Presidente Masaryk Avenue, where we discover to our surprise that despite this affluent area’s nickname of ‘The Beverly Hills of Latin America’, it’s actually cheaper to eat and shop here than in our home city, (the fact that for a rare miracle of a moment Argentina’s peso is actually pegged to the greenback may largely explain this), but our delicious Italian lunch and indeed everything else seems to be about half the cost of BA. No doubt Sabrina will enjoy further testing this theory, next week!
There’s so much to do in the park that we could easily spend a week exploring it and barely scratch the surface. My vote (swiftly knocked down) is for the incredible Anthropology Museum, but we’re already visiting the ancient city of Teotihuacán tomorrow. Torn between an afternoon of pedalo on the lake and the stunning interactive exhibits at the Museo de Los Niños, our daughter makes her mind up for us when we discover an enormous funfair has been set up right next to the Children’s Museum to siphon off parental cash planned for worthier pursuits!
The next morning we embark on the excursion to end all excursions with our guide Manuel, in his monster ProRam Ford van. Our companions are a Spanish couple, two fanny-pack-toting middle aged friends from Washington DC and Marina, a young lawyer from NYC, all of whom are charmed within minutes in a mixture of English and Spanish, by our miniature ‘Papagena’.
Teotihuacán is so large (the site covers over eight square miles) and its origins are so mysterious that even today it remains an enigma. Whoever constructed these monumental edifices built them by hand on an other-worldly scale and the two massive pyramids of Sun and Moon that top and tail the broad central Avenue of the Dead, are larger in volume than the Ancient Egyptian pyramids in Giza. Even more extraordinary, Teotihuacán’s population of well over one hundred thousand, made it the largest city in the Western Hemisphere until the 1400s, dwarfing anything subsequently built by the Mayans or the Aztecs.
It’s also situated on a baking hot plain and while Sabrina sensibly waited in the shade I part climbed with and part carried our daughter up the nearly 400 steps to the top of both the Sun and Moon pyramids in the blazing sun, earning myself a highly unprofessional looking brick red nose for my two upcoming days of business meetings in the process, (a classic ‘rookie gringo’ error)! Fortunately the extravagant carvings on the Temple of Quetzalcóatl could be enjoyed at ground level.
Normally we’re not fans of guided excursions but have to admire Manuel’s barefaced brio and the impressive number of commission earning arrangements he has assembled on this circuit, which included a Tequila demonstration in a craft shop, followed by folk dancers in the restaurant at lunchtime and the gift shop at the Guadalupe shrine, where we successfully resist investing in Virgin of Guadalupe pilgrimage memorabilia.
Fast forwarding past a couple of days of meeting tedium, (though it was interesting to spend time in Cuernavaca, a couple of hours south of the capital, which used to be a fashionable resort for the American super-rich in the 50s and 60s) and we are back in Miami for a couple of nights layover in the quiet splendour of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, with its monumental mélange of Italian, Moorish and Spanish architecture. Honestly, there’s no better antidote to jet lag than swimming laps, so one look at the iconic Biltmore’s swimming pool, one of the largest in the country when it was first built in the 1920s, and I was sold. Johnny Weissmuller was a swimming instructor here and buffed up for his future movie role as Tarzan in this pool, which also featured huge Busby Berkeley-style synchronized swimming extravaganzas in its Jazz Age heyday. The hip cacophony of South Beach is just a cab ride away, and although we love it, taking it down a notch in the old school luxury of the Biltmore when we already live in the self-styled ‘night club capital’ of Latin America is more our speed on this trip- an occasion made even more special as my brother has flown in from London to meet us.
The heat and humidity are staggering, so we’ve taken up residence in one of the poolside cabanas and have barely moved from there except for afternoon tennis games, which are inevitably interrupted by torrential tropical downpours. Our daughter is just starting to get her confidence in the pool, and is fascinated by the tree crabs that inhabit the poolside palm trees, screaming with delight as the wind blows in off the ocean and they fall into the water.
The Florida Stone crab claws we order by the half dozen in our poolside cabana at lunchtime, are appropriately irresistible.
Florida Stone crab claws (3 to 4 Claws per person)
2 and a half pounds of Stone Crab claws
Salt
Quarter cup extra dry Vermouth
Quarter cup Olive Oil
Juice of a Lemon
Parsley for garnish
Crack and remove one side of the claws. Heat a large fry pan with the oil, and add the claws. Toss until warmed through, then add the vermouth and lemon juice, tossing constantly for another 2 minutes.
Serve hot with a parsley garnish and a spicy, garlic mayonnaise dip:
1 cup of store-bought mayonnaise
1 or 2 red Jalapeno Chilis, minced
1 or 2 garlic cloves, finely minced
Mix all the ingredients together and let rest for 1 hour before serving.
It’s our last night here and while our little one sleeps peacefully in a nearby wicker armchair, we stay up drinking champagne until after one in the morning, hoping against hope that the monsoon rains forecast for our departure tomorrow will somehow blow over. We also wonder aloud whether one day soon, one of these much loved havens might become a harbour for us.
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It's always like the reader was with you, a fellow traveler, wherever you are/were writing from.
A great tour to mimic. Everywhere sounds so exciting.
I’ve been further east in Mexico but your experiences encourage me to go again.