No date for Valentine’s Day this year? No problem if you are in Mexico.
Although St. Valentine’s Day probably started as a pre-Christian observance, it later became a minor religious holiday honoring St. Valentine. It was celebrated in Europe privately as a day near the end of winter and the beginning of Spring to express romance. It started to become a more public holiday in the U.S. in the mid 1800’s when a Massachusetts stationer started mass producing Valentine’s Day cards and selling them in her shop. It has grown and grown and is now celebrated in most countries of the world as a day of love and romance (seemingly not at all private!).
In Mexico, the day is called día del amor y la amistad, which means day of love AND friendship. It has evolved as a day to show appreciation for people you care about—and that doesn’t mean it has to be your significant other—it can be anyone you care about, from your teacher, your co-worker or best friend. Flowers, poems, gifts and food are exchanged as much with friends as with lovers. So, think about taking your significant other to enjoy the friendship of Mexico on Valentine’s Day or any time of year. Or join us on one of our tours to Mexico’s Copper Canyon or Yucatan.
Happy Valentine’s day to all our California Native friends!
Deep in the heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madres, in the town of Creel, the center of Copper Canyon country, is the clinic of Santa Teresita. The lives of thousands of Tarahumara Indian children have been saved here because of the dreams and dedication of one man, Father Luis Verplancken.
Father Verplancken was a Jesuit priest who first visited the Tarahumaras in the late 1950s. He saw a great need for health care for these Indians who inhabit this remote area of mountains and canyons. At the time their children had an alarmingly high mortality rate.
Verplancken put his ideas into action by starting a traveling health care facility, housed in a 4-wheel drive station wagon. He quickly discovered that a little help went a long way—one dollar’s worth of penicillin, for example, could treat hundreds of children.
The word spread and by 1964, Verplancken and his volunteers received enough donations to establish a small hospital in an old railroad warehouse. The demand for medical care was so great that some Tarahumaras walked three days from their remote villages to reach the hospital.
A major obstacle that both the town and the hospital faced was the lack of a dependable water supply. With the help of more donations, a pipeline was built from the nearest fresh water source, which was four miles away over extremely harsh terrain. Three handcrafted pumping stations had to be constructed to lift the water 600 feet up to the level of the town. For the first time, Creel and the hospital had a dependable supply of fresh water.
In the mid-1970s, plans were drawn for a more modern hospital. With the help of his nephew, who was studying architecture at the time, Verplancken designed what today is known as the clinic of Santa Teresita. This clinic was literally “hand-made.” Along with a dedicated group of volunteers, Father Verplancken quarried the stone, crafted the brick and cut the trees.
The clinic opened in 1979, and houses a seventy-bed hospital with x-ray and laboratory facilities, a pharmacy, dental facilities and an outpatient clinic.
After 52 years of service to the Tarahumara community, Father Verplanken died of cancer, but the clinic lives on.
Today, the clinic still depends on volunteers and donors. Over 90% of the services and medications are provided free of cost, and the remainder are provided to the local residents at a token fee.
Many guests on California Native Copper Canyon tours have visited the clinic and donated money, medicines and supplies. One woman, after returning from a recent trip, sent four sets of crutches that she purchased at a garage sale in the United States.
We appreciate it when our guests share their stories with us and allow us to post them on our blog for everyone to enjoy.
Earlier this month, Nancy King and Richard Keltner, from San Francisco, traveled with us on our 11-day Myanmar (Burma) Explorer Trip. Here are Nancy’s reflections on the trip and a few of her beautiful photos:
Dear Lee,
We loved it! It was an incredibly well organized trip from our arrival in Yangon to when we left 11 days later.
We had four guides and they could not have been more accommodating. They were educated, spoke excellent English and we had such good connection I found myself crying one time at parting (and we had no guide more than 2 -1/2 days). It is strange now in thinking I asked you about tipping because we wanted to give each a huge tip and did! And drivers couldn’t have been better as well, pulling over when I wanted a photo.
The resort you put us in on Inle Lake was fabulous. I even had our boat man take us to the Princess Hotel, which is where my sister had stayed. I wanted to check out the gift shop. To my delight, our motor boat was stopped on the entry to the Hotel and a [leg rower] jumped in our boat to quietly do his one-leg rowing the entire inlet to the hotel. I did not like the Princess Hotel nearly as well as Inle Resort [where we stayed].
Yangon was very hot and humid in January but all the other cities were quite comfortable. Plus the car was always air conditioned as were the places we stayed. We were upgraded to a suite at the Trader’s Hotel and that was especially nice with the full window view of the city.
The food was outstanding! Our guide ate with us and we let him order [for us] every time. Each guide handled it so smoothly.
We loved having the guide and driver all to ourselves. I like the opportunity to really build a relationship among us.
The excellent guides are important, as we spoke with others who had guides through someone else. They were such a strong part of our trip with our connections with them.
I’m deeply into our trip and reliving it as I process my photos and edit them and get them ready to put in my 71st photo album of our life.
Sincerely,
Nancy King
Oxcarts drive alongside the highways in Myanmar.
In Myanmar, an entrepreneur sells brooms from his bicycle.
A merchant weighs produce in a marketplace in Myanmar. The white cream on her face, thanaka, is made from tree bark.
Farms, houses, temples and hotels are all located in the waters of Myanmar's Inle Lake.
Onlookers move to the side as a train approaches the famous Bridge on the River Kwai.
I stroll across the railway bridge whistling “Colonel Bogie’s March.” Others on the bridge give me strange looks as if thinking “Who is this weird man?” But I feel good and my whistling is appropriate, for this is the famous “Bridge on the River Kwai.”
Most of us first heard about the bridge through the 1957 film, based on Pierre Boulle’s French novel. Set in a World War II Japanese POW camp in Burma, it is a fictional account of a battle of wills between a harrassed Japanese camp commander and a doggedly-stubborn British colonel. The story climaxes when allied commandos blow up the bridge.
More than 300,000 Allied and Asian war prisoners were forced to build the railroad bridge over the River Kwai.
The true story is different. During the Second World War, the Japanese planned a railway from Bangkok to Rangoon to shorten the distance between Japan and Burma by 1,300 miles. The railway would cross some of the wettest and most inhospitable terrain in Southeast Asia and require the construction of 688 bridges, but they considered it critical to the war effort.
For labor they used 250,000 Asian forced-laborers, mostly Thai, and more than 60,000 Allied prisoners—30,000 British, 18,000 Dutch, 13,000 Australians, and 700 Americans. Estimated to take five or six years to build, the project, which began on September 16, 1942, was completed after only 16 months, and cost the lives of 16,000 POWs and 75,000 Asian workers. The deaths from cholera, beri beri, malaria, typhoid, exhaustion and malnourishment, earned the railroad the name, “The Death Railway.”
Allied war prisoners in barracks during construction of Bridge on the River Kwai.
The Japanese actually constructed two parallel bridges across the River Kwai, just outside of the Thai town of Kanchanaburi—the first made entirely of wood, the second made of steel and concrete. The Allies destroyed both on February 13, 1945.
In the film the commandos detonated explosive charges fastened to the bridge’s supports. The real bridge was bombed. Failing to destroy the bridges with conventional bombs (some hitting POW camps) the American flyers brought in a new weapon, the AZON (Azimuth Only) bomb. The precursor of today’s “smart” bombs, it had a radio-controlled tail and ten times the accuracy of a conventional bomb.
After the war, engineers repaired the steel bridge over the River Kwai. It is still in use. Visitors to Kanchanaburi, Thailand, now walk across the bridge (the fortunate ones having the opportunity to witness me whistling the theme from the movie), and visit the Allied war cemetery and a museum run by Buddhist monks, featuring a reconstruction of a prisoner of war camp. The monks built the museum “not for the maintenance of hatred among human beings but to warn and teach us the lesson of how terrible war is.”
Bangkok, Thailand, is the cross roads of Southeast Asia. Most passengers traveling to our California Native destinations of Myanmar (Burma) and Bhutan stop in Bangkok before resuming their journeys, and it is well worth spending an additional day to visit Kanchanaburi with its memorials and famous bridge.
Now is the time to book your trip for Easter in Mexico’s Copper Canyon. The Easter, or Semana Santa, celebrations of the Tarahumara Indians make this time the high season of the year. Small towns which are sleepy most of the year are now alive with celebrations, 24-hours a day. The Tarahumara, who call themselves the Raramuri, celebrate for a week, with dancing, parades, bon fires, ceremonies in the churches and much drinking of tesguino, the Indians traditional corn liquor.
To begin to understand the Tarahumara ceremonies, one has to have a basic understanding of the Indians’ religion. Read our story about this unusual version of Catholicism practiced by these colorful cave-dwelling people.
Colors set our mood and add an important dimension to our feelings and memories of the places we visit. I thought it might be fun to group some of the photos from our library of California Native images by their predominant colors. This first collection is based on the color yellow.
“How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun.“—Vincent Van Gogh
The delightful city of Izamal, located on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, is a magical town whose buildings are all painted yellow.
Built around the 6th century, the Shwedagon Pagoda is the most sacred Buddhist pagoda in Myanmar (Burma). It’s gilded stupa looks down on the city of Yangon (Rangoon).
A young Tarahumara girl carries her little sister in a yellow shawl, in Mexico’s Copper Canyon.
A smiling yellow buddha looks down at worshipers in one of the thousands of temples in Thailand.
Shining yellow light into the night sky, Buda Castle, in Budapest, Hungary, overlooks the Danube River.
As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to reflect on what we have accomplished in the last year and what we are looking forward to in the new year.
Last year was quite an eventful year for The California Native. We made another exploration trip to Patagonia, sailing around Cape Horn on a wonderful expedition cruise, hiking on glaciers with crampons, and whitewater rafting through Argentina’s beautiful countryside. We also made several trips to Mexico, one at the invitation of President Calderon to attend a luncheon with him and celebrate the initialization of a campaign to promote the wonders of Mexico’s colonial cities.
For the upcoming year we will be offering new trips in Patagonia and China, as well as additional departure dates for our Copper Canyon trips. And of course we’ll continue to offer our exciting tours of Costa Rica, Peru, Galapagos, Bhutan, Myanmar and Ireland, and our other off-the-beaten-track destinations.
We receive many queries about current conditions in Mexico’s Copper Canyon, so here are some of the latest reports from recent guests on our Copper Canyon tours:
David Martin, from San Diego, CA, enjoyed our October 9, 11-day Ultimate Tour. “The whole trip exceeded [my expectations]! Food, lodging, views, train trip, Jessica. Could not have asked for a better guide on this trip. Personable, sense of humor, and a love for Mexico that pours forth in her discussions…it was wonderful! She really made the trip. Super knowledgeable.” His travel companion, Ann Cunningham, concurred, “I have collected articles since 1986 on Copper Canyon—my dream was realized to the nth degree.”
On the same trip, Irene and Randy Pollard, from Farmville, NC, reported that, “Jessica was one of the best guides we have ever experienced (We have traveled a lot). Her maturity and efforts to insure each person’s comfort and satisfaction was remarkable. We thoroughly enjoyed every part of this trip. Jessica provided opportunities at all ability levels. I wasn’t expecting the excellent accommodations—when materials mentioned ‘local’, I had expected much less.”
As a single traveler on our 8-day Independent Trip, Bruce M. Hale, from La Crescenta, CA, returned on November 17 and reported: “I liked all the hotels and staff. They all provided excellent lodging and personalized service even though I was solo. I particularly like Paraiso del Oso—the rustic atmosphere, the remote location [and] the chance to go to Urique. You made it easy to travel alone and your providers all performed as expected. Also, I’m pleased to have confirmed the safety aspect. I never felt in any danger, everything was fine.”
We, at California Native, value our guests comments, opinions and suggestions. These together with reports from our guides and inspection trips by our staff help us to keep our trips safe, fun and educational.
A California Native guest purchases crafts from a Tarahumara weaver in Mexico
Visitors to the Copper Canyon area are always pleasantly surprised by the wide variety of craftsware and folk art available for purchase. The remote life and character of the Tarahumara Indians has fostered a tradition of crafts making as a part of their life-style.
While traveling through the region you will find very inexpensively priced baskets, belts, dolls, pottery and musical instruments.
The baskets are made out of the leaves of the agave as well as pine needles and range in size from tiny to large. Visitors purchasing baskets find that they can pack them one inside the other to conserve space during their trip. Once at home, the baskets of pine needles hold their scent of pine forests and become a wonderful reminder of the trip, and they are utilitarian as well as beautiful. The Tarahumara pottery is quite sturdy and is designed to be more functional then decorative.
Music is an important part of the Indians daily living and also plays an important roll in their ceremonies and festivals. Their musical instruments include violins, drums and wooden flutes. They learned the art of violin making from the Spaniards in the 18th century.
Carved wooden dolls dressed in typical Tarahumara fashion are for sale in a variety of sizes and portray the various activities of Tarahumara life—mothers wearing shawls while carrying babies on their backs, ladies weaving on hand-looms, and men carrying tools or musical instruments and wearing their traditional headgear.
Crafts can be purchased from the Indians who set up their merchandise on rocks along the trails and in all sorts of unlikely nooks and crannies. Crafts are also available in stores, and one that we recommend is the Mission Store in Creel, located right on the town square. Profits go to the hospital which serves the Tarahumara Indians.
The huge stone ruins of Ollantaytambo in Peru's Sacred Valley stand as silent witnesses to the bloody battles which took place here five centuries ago between the Incas and the invading Spaniards.
Standing guard over the Urubamba Valley, the Sacred Valley of the Incas, Ollantaytambo’s great terraces and massive stoneworks served as a ceremonial center and fortress, protecting the heart of the Incan empire from its enemies. Its massive structures were crafted by moving giant stones for miles using sheer manpower and ingenious engineering devices. The builders even re-channeled a river to allow the giant stones to be maneuvered across. It was here at Ollantaytambo that the Incas staged their last victory over the Spanish.
In 1536, the Inca ruler Manco Inca led a rebellion against the Spanish invaders. To quell the rebellion, Francisco Pizarro dispatched his younger brother, Hernando, to Ollantaytambo to capture Manco. With a force of 70 cavalry, 30 foot soldiers, and a “large contingent of native auxiliaries,” the confident Spaniards planned a dawn attack to surprise the sleeping Indians, but it didn’t work. The Spaniards were overwhelmed by showers of arrows, spears and boulders, which rained down from the high terraces above the city. Then, by diverting the Patachanca River through previously dug channels, the Incas flooded the plains below the fortress, and the bewildered Spaniards found themselves mired in mud and water up to their horses’ bellies. They had no choice but to retreat.
Pizarro returned, this time with four times the force. The city fell but Manco escaped. Two years later Pizarro captured Manco’s sister and, when Manco refused to negotiate, had her stripped naked, flogged, and shot to death with arrows. He then had her body tied to a raft and floated down the Urubamba River. Pizarro was not a guy to mess with!
Deep in the heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madres, in the town of Creel, the center of 
Now is the time to book your trip for Easter in Mexico’s 
As we come to the end of another year, it’s time to reflect on what we have accomplished in the last year and what we are looking forward to in the new year.
