Soy el Conquistador

Man this place was cool. This is the Aztecan temple.

The ex-convento.

The view from the ex-convento. Basically the mountains you see are the ones that we climbed up to reach the temple at Tepotzlan.

The view I had for most of the way. There are a few rocks up there.

I have some kind of thing for trees that grow on the sides of stone walls, you'll see another shortly.

More steps. And oh do I mean more.

Self-explanatory (hardcore).

La vista.

A strange half-raccoon half-anteater (hormiguera) creature that really liked eating tourist's food. No bueno.

This is at la hacienda de Cortes. Pretty happening place, its now an upper-class hotel.

Here's what basically was the sewer.


So last Domingo (Sunday) we took at little trip to Tepotzlan, which is a pretty little city up in the Mountains in Mexico. It is well-known for two things: the Aztec Temple atop one of the mountains, and the ex-convento (which for you non-Spanish speakers is ex-convent) that worked to convert all the indigenous people to Catholicism. Interesting story here, told to us by our tour guide: The Catholic priests sought to peacefully convert the native people, and to do so presented a challenge to the people. They said they would climb to the top of the temple, and throw the statue of their dios off the temple, and if it broke, then they knew that their dios was not real and they would convert, and if it didn’t, they wouldn’t convert. The natives agreed to this, and on went the challenge. However, the priests threw the statue off the temple and it didn’t break. However, the priests simply said it was a trial run and didn’t really count, so they did it one more time. Fortunately for them, the statue broke the second time and all of the natives converted peacefully.
We went on to ascend the mountain, which was basically a 1.3-mile stair climb. Literally. Just look at the photos, you won’t see one with level ground because there was no level ground. This was quite an undertaking, especially when it started raining and made the rocks slick, and thus there was cause for much felicitaciones (see my hardcore self-portrait, soy el conquistador). Such a cool place to be, its such a great feeling when you can work so hard to achieve this goal and work through all the discouragement, and look out and see just how far you’ve come. I think life works very much the same way. And with that, I’m off to do my tarea for the evening. Que tengas un buen noche.