Sugarcane and Tortillas

With bellies full of frozen yogurt and other street food we headed north from Ciudad Guzman. We enjoyed the first flat lake bed we rode across as we had a tailwind, but the second one got old quickly as the wind changed direction. We decided we had had enough for one day so pushed our bikes up a mule path to access the road into San Jose de los Pozos where we eventually met Rosa who accepted our request to camp in her yard. Rosa was a true Mexican mother and kept finding ways to make our stay more comfortable: first she said we could use a spare room instead of staying in our tent, then she insisted that we use the kitchen to cook our food, and finally she was appalled that we would eat cold tortillas so warmed up our tortillas in the oven for us. The whole family filtered through the kitchen as we cooked and ate our dinner, and we were able to have many of our questions about the sugarcane harvest answered by one of Rosa's sons who works in the sugarcane fields. José, Rosa's 17-year old grandson, was the one who acted on Rosa's many offers and also stayed up late telling us about life in Mexico despite his planned 5 am start to work at the tortillaria (tortilla making shop: there is at least one in every Mexican town, village or hamlet). The next morning José actually ended up starting work at 3 am when he got a call saying he needed to go get more flour for the tortillaria in the next town, but was still smiling when he arrived on a scooter around 8:30 am to deliver fresh-made corn tortillas just before we left town.Read more