Last weekend, I gazed on this 500-year-old tree, a fig, in one of the gardens of El Lencero, an hacienda (the h is not pronounced in Spanish) that was once owned by México’s most-elected and justly reviled president, Santa Anna, of the Alamo fame.

Imagine! When this tree was a seedling, Cortez had not yet arrived in México to begin his conquest of the Aztec empire. Moctezuma, Aztec ruler was in power or soon to be.

I visited El Lencero with Cece Daniels, a Fulbright teacher living in Mexico City this year, and Margarita, who offered to be our guide. Miriam, her 10-year-old daughter, came along, too.

Taking photos of the interior of the hacienda is prohibited, but you can see some on this website.

Cece arrived for a visit by bus on Friday, Jan. 11, and left in the afternoon on Sunday. During the time she was here, we covered a lot of territory in Xalapa and nearby.

On Saturday, we took a bus to Xico and from there walked a couple of kilometers to the Texolo waterfall. The cobbled road was lined on both sides with banana and coffee trees.


As we walked along the path toward the falls, I was amazed to hear someone holler my name several times, and then I saw Elsa Malpica, another English teacher at the Centro de Idiomas, waving at me from a faraway observation deck. We soon met up with her and her two handsome sons and took a few photos of the river before Cece and I decided to head back, thinking that if we hurried we'd have time to get to El Lencero before it closed.

But on more careful thought, we realized that we wouldn’t have time to take a bus back to Xalapa and from then on to El Lencero in the opposite direction, so we changed our plans and took a bus to nearby Coátepec for a leisurely late lunch and a look around before going back to Xalapa.

Coatepec is the heart of coffee growing in the state of Veracruz, and we came across many coffee houses while we ambled about. But the place that most captured our interest was a place whose coffee house led to a restaurant in a courtyard full of flowers, flowering trees and bushes, and a fountain.

Here, in the Coffino Caffe & Restaurant, Cece and I had a tasty lunch--I had espaguetti verde--"green spaghetti" and Cece had carne asado a tampico (I think that's what it was called)--and we both had cheladas—cold beer poured over lime juice (about 2 jiggers) and served in a frosty mug with a salted rim. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but I have to say I really enjoyed that chelada; I found it much tastier and more refreshing than plain ol’ beer.

Cece explained to me that, in Mexico City, chelada contains picante sauce whereas michelada doesn’t—but just the opposite was true at the Coffino, where the michelada had the hot sauce. Cece advises asking before ordering: Which contains the hot sauce here--the chelada or the michelada?

After lunch and a look around Coatepec's center, we took the bus back to Xalapa, cleaned up, and went to La Casona del Beaterio, a restaurant where we ate with Margarita, her friend Sylvia, and Miriam and then listened to a musical group play traditional Mexican music. I liked the lead singer’s voice so much, I bought his CD: “Elfego Villegas.”

On Sunday after visiting El Lencero hacienda, we took the bus to Xalapa’s Museo de Antropología, which is known especially for its fine collection of Olmec heads. (View this website to learn just how advanced the Olmecs were.)

Here's my crude translation of the inscription (written by Agustín Acosta Lagunes, a former governor of the state of Veracruz) at the entrance of the museum: “This is the root of your history, your cradle and your altar. Hear the silent voice of Mexico’s oldest culture, perhaps that of the mother civilization of our continent. The Olmecs changed rain into harvests, sun into a calendar, rock into sculpture, cotton into cloth, wanderings into commerce, hills into thrones, jaguars into religion and men into gods.”

We also made a quick dash to the Pinacoteca Diego Rivera to see what we thought would be paintings by Rivera but turned out to be paintings of Xalapa and other places in Veracruz as rendered by many different artists, including one by Rivera.

Before Cece took the bus back to Mexico City, we ate lunch with Margarita and Miriam at the Mesón de Alférez. Then Cece took a taxi to CAXA, the bus station in Xalapa, to catch the bus back to Mexico City.

Cece, I hope you come back! I enjoyed your visit and the time we spent touring around.