Mariposas

The drive from the airport in Toluca to Valle de Bravo is no further than from the Monterrey airport to my home, and it's a similarly dramatic shift from a sprawling industrial area to the mountains; but the taxi fare is more than twice what you will pay for similar trips in other cities. My best guess is that the fare includes time and space travel, because when you arrive in Valle de Bravo your brain arrives a bit scrambled from the twisty mountain roads and altitude and it is easy to believe you've been transported to an alpine village in Europe (albeit one that is clogged with very Mexican traffic).

Valle de Bravo is a weekend escape for the wealthy and well-connected denizens of Mexico City. Elaborate homes perch on tiny, well-manicured plots of land up and down the slopes around a large man-made aquifer that supplies drinking water to the DF. Arriving on a Wednesday, one finds a sleepy village turned out in the town square to socialize, make crafts, and nap in the sunshine. By 10 a.m., the weekday crowd is a buzz of teenagers cutting class, old men in cowboy hats, young women with toddlers, older women gossiping about this and that while they crochet, and vendors with little folding tables of knick-knacks - creating a tiny table-top yard sale in the town's communal space. By evening, street food stalls are packed with local workers stopping to enjoy some tacos or roasted corn on their way home. Most of the restaurants are shuttered.

My friend and I went to Valle de Bravo with one aim - to see the butterflies, las mariposas, in their wintering grounds high above the valley. We headed to Mexico State for Thanksgiving vacation and arrived on a Wednesday, expecting the resort town to have some resort-style options - restaurants, bars, diversions...and it did, but they were mostly closed. Valle is a summer and weekend retreat, and on weekdays in the fall and winter the locals prefer to relax in the sunshine in the plaza rather than open their tienditas for one or two possible customers - there will be more than enough customers at the weekend.

On Thanksgiving Day, we hired a taxi, this one much more reasonable than the airport taxi, to take us to Piedra Herrada, a UNESCO site where we could see the butterflies. We had heard from friends that the hike was difficult, but that the butterflies were worth it. (At this point I should mention that with a bit more research I could have found butterfly viewing sites that were less expensive and easier to get to; but I didn't, I went on with the advice that I'd been given, and that's fine, because the challenge was worth it and we had the site to ourselves, which may not have been possible in other locations.)

When we arrived, there was no one at the site: it wasn't officially 'open' yet when we arrived around 9:30. Our taxi driver agreed to wait for us for two hours and then take us back to Valle...we ended up taking nearly three hours, but he waited anyway and we tipped him well - it ended up costing us roughly $40 for a 90 minute roundtrip drive including a three hour wait.

Yes, three hours. First, we rented horses for 150 pesos each ($10). Rent the horses. The horses will be your friends. The altitude at Piedra Herrada is much higher than one is accustomed to, and over the course of the next 90 minutes, you will climb UP almost another mile; if not for the horses I wouldn't have made it.

The climb is deceiving. It begins on a not-too-steep path with a paved side for walkers, a railing, and a natural side for horseback. It is wide and shady and beautiful and I was wondering why I had hired a horse. Sure it was steep, but it was no steeper than hikes in the Poconos or around my house in Monterrey.

The horses stopped only 5 minutes into the journey, but the beautiful, well-paved trail continued, looking empty and inviting. The men took us off the trail and pointed to a steep incline in the brush. Fabulous, we thought, just one steep hill and we will get to see the butterflies! We were wrong, so very very wrong.

By the time we finished struggling up the first steep incline, my lungs were burning and I was gasping for air. The men with the horses had followed us, despite our protestations, and I am glad they did, for over the next hour and a half we would have to face several physical challenges, and we would need those horses to get us up an enormous hill where they had to switch back and forth over the pine-needle carpet to get us closer to the butterflies.

The horses stopped when the path finally disappeared and we dismounted on a sliver of flat land before climbing higher. Butterflies were flitting in and out of shafts of light between the trees and, despite the stitch in my side and the thin air (and probably because of my lightheadedness) the whole scene took on a fairy-land quality. The end of November is still very early in the season and the sun is still warm enough that the butterflies are not all clumped motionless on the trees, which is what our friends had described. Instead, the sun was shining gloriously and the butterflies were taking advantage of the warmth to collect pollen on their wings to keep them from freezing in winter.

We climbed higher, now joined by a small, goat-like woman who stared into the distance embarrassed whenever my friend and I stopped to gasp for air. At one point I sat on a stump next to a shaft of light and watched the butterflies dance right up to me, convinced that this was enough, that I didn't need to go any further. I was ready to give up, to lie down in the pine needles for an hour (or eternity) and watch them dance away in the light.

But I am not a quitter.

And so up we went again. And up. And up. And...yellow tape.

We stopped in front of some yellow tape and the guide pointed up. There, just above a barren white stump, thousands of butterflies coasted on the air. He pointed again, a cluster of probably a thousand butterflies hang like a chandelier from a drooping branch. He pointed again, I saw the butterflies dancing mid-air, but it was not until I got home, and regained my senses, that I zoomed in with the camera and realized that what I thought was fall foliage was actually tens of thousands of butterflies obscuring the green leaves of the trees.


Words. Pictures. Videos - none of these is sufficient to describe the beauty of thousands of monarch butterflies swirling above your head, zooming by your nose, and resting near your feet.

The guide gave us an short lecture in Spanish. This is a male butterfly. This is a female butterfly. The journey. The predators. The story of dwindling numbers and the hardships the monarchs will face in the coming months. I understood much of what he said as he spoke with clear, slow Spanish and smiled through his words.

We were only at the top for about 15 minutes, and as we were already at the two-hour taxi mark we hastened down the mountain side, mounting our horses only for the flat track that wound around the mountain for about a mile of the journey. Otherwise, we took to falling in a somewhat controlled manner down the slopes and hills and manicured walking path. On the way down, we passed two or three groups of tourists on their way up, some with small children in tow. They would not have our experience, there were too many of them to enjoy the peace and solitude of five people content to sit and watch in awe with few words passed between them.