My next brush with Mexico came a few weeks ago when I read The Power and the Glory, a novel by Graham Greene set in the 1930s in a state in Mexico that has barred the Church from functioning freely and according to its official practices. The priests are forced to marry and conform to state law or get shot. One rebellious priest, a drunk, is left and is on the run. On the surface the book is something of a thriller but it's really a religious book about the paradoxical nature of sin. After finishing it anyhow I could taste Mexican dirt on my teeth and wanted to go there. When I got a call from the editor of Adventure Journey a week later offering me a trip to Mexico to write a story on the state of Morelos, I said okay, I'll go.

I told a friend I was going and he said he heard they had great beaches in Mexico and was jealous. I said yeah and packed my swimming trunks. But then I looked on the map and saw that Morelos was located just south of Mexico City, in the southern portion of Mexico's central region, nowhere near the ocean. I looked at my itinerary and it had words on it like Xochicalco and Tepoztlán. I didn't bother to look them up and still didn't know anything about where I was going when I got off the plane.

Driving from the airport in the dark, my first impression of the limited part of Mexico City that I saw was that it looked sort of like New Delhi sans Hinduism and cows and rickshaws and colorfully painted trucks and roadside fires surrounded by squatting men with their heads wrapped in scarves. What remained was chaotic bumper-to-bumper traffic, tattered roadside shops, a similar warm winter climate, and a sea of disjointed structures for living and business layering far out into the night on either side of the freeway.

I didn't learn anything from my driver about my surroundings because I don't speak Spanish. We nonetheless held a long conversation upon first meeting at the airport. He explained something to me and I asked him questions and we both nodded and grinned and didn't know what was going on. He stood a few inches below me and looking down at him and listening to his giber and after having just gone through a laborious trip through customs I felt a little crazy but by the time I was lying on my back in my bed in the brightly yellow and green and orange hotel room in the city of Cuernavaca I felt all right.

Walking around the city the next day I noticed that there weren't many other tourists. I asked my English-speaking Mexican guide, Ruben Cortés Espin, why and he said the place had been rife with kidnappings in the 90s and the governor, Jorge Carrillo Olea, was thought to be involved. That would explain it, I thought. "That governor's gone now, no?" I said. "Si," he said. "Yes. Cuernavaca is safe for tourists." Another reason for the lack of tourists, he told me, was the international airport in Mexico City. "Yes..." I mused. "It was awful." Known for being understaffed and horrendously inconvenient, people traveling to Mexico would rather fly into a more tourist-friendly airport, like Cancun International. But that didn't matter now that I was here and enjoying myself.

MONASTERY

Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos, is a fascinating place, filled with museums and historic buildings and churches and even hotels. One can, for example, stay at the Hotel Hacienda de Cortés, originally a sugarcane hacienda founded by Cortés in the 16th century. Surrounded by stone walls and filled with lush gardens and ancient strangler figs, it's not a bad place to have lunch, let alone to sleep. But Mexico for me is none of these things. Neither is it nun-chucks, or a donkey, or even Greene’s priest, although the Catholic places of worship were extraordinary and left you in awe of the Church of the past, when it swept through Mexico converting the Indians and replacing their temples with buildings that bore the cross. What I developed an interest in, however, was pre-Hispanic Mexico.

I learned that Tepoztlán was a pueblo of the Tlahuica, a tribe that had been conquered in the 15th century by the Aztecs before the arrival of the Spanish, and we were heading there. We ate lunch at the Posada Del Tepozteco, a one-time manor converted into a hotel up in the hills that overlooks the town in the valley below and provides a splendid view of the surrounding mountains, hills, and cliffs. Cutting out before dessert I walked down to have a look around. I walked south on what appeared to be the main street of Tepoztlán taking pictures and pausing to look in shops. I came across a tired-looking stone wall that had colorful rugs thrown over it, and a short, aging Mexican woman walked up to me and began gesticulating and talking in Spanish. I stood and stared at the rugs for a minute and then she tugged on my t-shirt and led me to a shop up the street that was filled with rugs like the ones on the wall. I looked around and decided not to buy one and walked back out into the sunlight. I headed back down the street and looking north up into the mountains I noticed what appeared to be a pyramid of sorts, except flat on top, clinging mysteriously to the top of a cliff. It took hold of me and I later learned from Ruben that it was a temple built around 1200 by the Tlahuicas in honor of Tepoztecatl, the god of drunkenness and fertility. It had been a sacred place for pilgrims from as far as Chiapas and Guatemala. The gates that led to the temple were closed for the day but before going to the airport a couple days later I arranged for an early morning hike to get a closer look. The gates would still be closed but we could hike up above the temple and at least get a better view than the one from the town.

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