Anyone who visits Veracruz and environs at fiesta time is likely to see the age-old Dance of the Voladores, the ancient Mesoamerican acrobatic dance that brings awe to viewers. I was in Cuetzalan, on the border between Puebla and Veracruz states over the weekend. To my delight, be-costumed dancers arrived at the Zocalo on Sunday morning and began to climb the huge pole. It must have been over 100 feet in height. 

According to the history books, the ritual began many centuries ago as a supplication to the gods to end drought and return rain and fertility to the soil. As recently as a few decades ago, the dancers would still adorn their bodies with feathers to appear as birds to the gods. They'd apply feathers from eagles, owls, crows, parrots and the brightly colored quetzal bird.

Check out this January 1954 Popular Mechanics article titled "The Weird Birdmen of Mexico." The article notes that after the dancers climb to the top of the pole, they "drop off into space with blood-curdling shrieks and glide in widening circles until they hit the ground."

I didn't hear any shrieks. Rather, the whole ceremony was accompanied by lilting fife and drum music, and the pealing of church bells. The costumes include long pastel ribbons that flutter as the dancers descend to the ground.

In 2009, UNESCO chose the ritual ceremony of the 'voladores' as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity, putting it up there with Mexico's Day of the Dead festivities.  

One of the charms of Cuetzalan, which the Washington Post once called the “perfect mountain town,” is that it is in the mountains of Puebla atop a massive cave system.

A lover of caves, I badgered my traveling companions along on a weekend trip to enter a cave with me named Los Corales, which turned into quite an adventure. We descended 700 meters into the cave, all of us wearing helmets with headlamps and led by a guide who said she’d been in Los Corales hundreds of times.

It was raining up above, and the family that manages the cave suggested we wear rented boots. We all said no. That was mistake No. 1. Once we got into the cave, we were engulfed by several inches of rushing water in several spots. In one area we had to descend (and later ascend) what felt like a small rushing waterfall.

That said, the cave was beautiful, the darkness deep inside profound, and the crystals and stalactites otherworldly. One of my companions, Swedish television journalist Bosse Lindwall, took the video that accompanies this post. You can hear the rushing water at times in the video.

If you are able to, you have a sharper eye than I. Periodically, Mexico City residents claim to spot strange objects hovering over the volcano near the capital.

This video footage is from a camera set up by the Televisa network at the Altzomoni station on the flanks of Iztaccíhuatl, the other big volcano visible (on rare clear days) from Mexico City.

While the site carrying the video doesn’t offer many details, it says: “The video shows a light moving from the extreme left toward the center of the volcano.” 

Looks like a star to me. In any case, at the two minute mark a fly lands on the camera lens. That was about all the excitement I could handle.

Back in October, those prone to seeing UFOs reported seeing a luminous one a kilometer long plunge straight into the crater. Here’s the link. And another link. 

A handful of Nissan electric taxis are now cruising the streets of Mexico City. I haven't actually seen any yet but am eager to ride one once I do. This Al Jazeera report says the meter rate on the taxis begins at about the equivalent of $2 US, so they are equivalent to more expensive taxi stands rather than those that cruise the streets looking for passengers. In any case, if it helps the air quality in my book it is worth the money.

I've never ridden an all-electric vehicle, only a hybrid. I'll report back on the experience.

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We foreign correspondents have enviable jobs. We consort with princes and poker players, bankers and brewers. We poke our noses in all kinds of places.

It’s the end of the year nearly, so I can’t help but think of the fun places and interesting people I’ve been blessed to write about in 2012. Sure, there’s been plenty of serious things to report on. But then there’s been the fun things, those that are personably memorable.

Topping the list for me this year was a trip to Baja California to visit Scammon’s Lagoon where thousands of gray whales migrate each winter. I actually got paid to do this so I could write this story. That’s my video above.

Less than a month later, I visited a town in Veracruz state that created its own currency. I had never considered the ramifications of alternative currency till I did this story.

I’m still the butt of jokes in our house for something that happened after I was sent by editors to Costa Rica to write about “poker refugees” – American online poker players who moved abroad once several online poker sites became illegal. I expected to find frat boys swigging beer and playing online. To my surprise, I found brainy engineers, Russian literature experts, math whizzes and assorted other oddballs, all of whom I quite liked.

Then I made a mistake. I mentioned to our older daughter, who is very good at math, how much money these guys were making and, er, OK I confess: I suggested that she might want to look into online poker as a temporary career option.

I might as well have suggested a life of crime for all the guff I got about this later.

Still, it was a fun story. Almost as fun was this story about an artisanal chocolate maker in Nicaragua, and this one about a ghost town that has come back to life on the border of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. I also enjoyed writing about the Kuna Indians in Panama, a surprising number of whom are albinos.

It’s been a great year. I head off tomorrow through the end of the year to Florida so no more blog postings till January. To all my readers, Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año Nuevo!

Will you await the End of the World cuddled up to the stone Snake Deity at the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza (above)? Don’t bring anything except a bottle of water.

There are going to be some crowds this week. December 21 marks the end of a 5,128-year Mayan cycle, and foreign tourists are already flocking to Mayan sites.

The learned folks over at INAH – Mexico’s anthropology institute – are rolling their eyes at the fuss. They have pooh-poohed any talk that the end of the Mayan cycle means Apocalypse. But I guess they got word not to deter any mini tourism boom among New Age mystics and spiritual adventurers. So they sent out a notice this week to alert tourists of conditions.

If you plan to party like the end of the world is nigh, it’ll be tough.

Be forewarned -- you cannot take the following into Mayan sites: Food, alcohol, backpacks, large bags, coolers, child strollers, bicycles, skates, tripods, firearms, umbrellas or anything sharp.

So that leaves sun tan lotion and a bottle of water. Maybe a hat.

At least you can hydrate while we pass from what the Mayans called the 13th Bak'tun into the next era under the Mayan Long Count calendar.

Luxury hotels in Cancun have been advertising End of the World promotions, replete with oceanfront suites and champagne. But apparently in Guatemala, some hoteliers say projections that 150,000 to 200,000 tourists would flock to the area of the beautiful Tikal ruins in the Peten region were overblown (link in Spanish).

Plenty of famed Mayan sites are open to the public – like Chichen Itza and Uxmal en Yucatan state, Edzna in Campeche, Palenque, Yaxchilan and Bonampak in Chiapas, and Tulum in Quintana Roo – but one key site is closed. That site is El Tortuguero in Tabasco state. It is there where archaeologists discovered Monument 6 – whose inscriptions are the only known reference to the end of the current 13th Bak'tun era and the commencement of a new era.

If you want to get NASA’s outlook on Dec. 21, click here. Here’s a sum up:

“The world will not end in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.”

The paper’s take: “So what is apocalypse fever, then? Just a few bulging pockets of apocalyptic stupidity.”

Related articles

Mexico's Mayas face Dec. 21 with ancestral calm

about that Mayan calendar thing

The Russians are coming

I’m not an experienced fisherman but I just went fishing with some friends on protected Ascension Bay in the Yucatan. It felt like having a national park all to ourselves.

But here was the odd thing. Fishermen all over the world are a superstitious lot. And what came up on this trip was the following:

Don’t bring bananas on the boat. Bananas bring bad luck. They scare away the fish. You won’t catch anything.

I thought this a might curious, perhaps a Mexican superstition. But I see that it is far more widespread than that. This article says the belief is prevalent among crab fishermen in the U.S. as well, and may have roots dating back to the banana trade from Central America a century ago.

Banana boats moved to fast for fishermen to troll effectively. The boats were trying to get their perishables to market.

This LA Times article from 2001 quotes a sport fishing boat captain, Bouncer Smith, of South Florida, and the extensive efforts he goes through to rid anything redolent of bananas from his boat.

"Typically, when customers arrive in the morning, the first thing I do is interrogate them," Smith said. "First, I check for bananas, then I check for Banana Boat sunscreen products, then for Banana Republic shirts and blouses, then for Starburst strawberry-banana [candies] and, most important of all, for Fruit of the Loom labels."

Now back to Ascension Bay. This is an amazing place, part of the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve. Turquise waters. Extensive flats for bonefishing. It takes an hour and a half along a gravel road to get there from Tulum. But it feels further. I have not seen a night sky lit up with stars like that in years. Our first day out, we saw not a single other boat after traveling miles and miles on the bay. It was like going to Yellowstone and finding it deserted. When we weren't fishing, we were seeing countless roseate spoonbills and frigate birds. 

This is a very well-done promotional video for tourism to Mexico City. Makes me appreciate even more living in this marvelous and varied city.

Item: I am hearing from some readers outside of Mexico that they can't get video I am posting. Please let me know if the problem continues.

Did you know the venerable Caesar Salad had its birth in Tijuana?

I certainly didn’t before last week. The cradle of the Caesar Salad is the Caesar Hotel on Avenida Revolucion in the middle of Tijuana, just blocks from the border. 

It was there where an Italian immigrant, Caesar Gardini, tossed his namesake salad for the first time in 1924. Gardini had left San Diego because of Prohibition. A true Caesar Salad as you probably know is made of romaine lettuce and croutons dressed with parmesan cheese, lemon juice, olive oil, egg, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, and black pepper – all mixed tableside.

The tides of Tijuana’s destiny – gambling in the 1930s, prostitution and cantinas in the 1940s, quickie marriages, divorces and abortions in the 1950s through the 1970s, and drug cartels in the 1990s and last decade – have created an image of vice that some in the city are trying to shake.

Until 2010, the Caesar Hotel seemed to be in inexorable decline.

But I’m happy to report that the hotel and restaurant have been lovingly restored and are worth going out of your way – far out of your way – to visit.

See the photo I took Saturday afternoon before the evening rush. The waiters are in white aprons, starched just like the tablecloths. The black-and-white floor is retro classic, going hand in hand with the polished wood bar and walls. The chandeliers, paintings, huge copper coffee machine and pleasant din of a busy restaurant all add to the experience.

But that’s only the half of it. The food was really good, starting with a classic Caesar Salad. I had Seafood Newburg while one companion had seasoned bone marrow and another classic tortilla soup. We watched as the bartender whipped up tamarind martinis and served handcrafted local beer. The famed culinary Plascencia family took over the Caesar a few years ago, and their elegant touch is everywhere. Little wonder that the restaurant ranks No. 1 among 97 on tripadvisor.com in Tijuana.

A newer restaurant, Mision 19, is run by Javier Plascencia, one of the sons of patriarch Juan Jose Plascencia, and was just featured in The New Yorker. Click here and here and here to read more. 

Nearly all the clients when we were at the Caesar were locals, not foreigners coming from across the border. Word still hasn’t seemed to filter up to San Diego that there is good reason to head south. A culinary renaissance is taking place.

I went to another restaurant, La Querencia, for lunch and was so awed at the quality that I went back again the next day with friends. Here are a few pictures. I had a tuna tostada with shallots, avocado and shitake mushroom that had me licking my fingers, followed by a venison hamburger. I think the bill was something like $12. Chef Miguel Angel Guerrero isn’t quite getting the press of Plascencia. But if I lived in Tijuana, I’d be making trips to his restaurant as often as I could.  

The giant boojum tree is one of the oddest sites in the Baja Peninsula. One writer said the tree looks like Dr. Seuss designed it.

The boojum shoots straight up out of the Baja desert, towering sometimes higher than 50 feet, usually a single stalk with nary a branch. I’ve been in Baja for a few days and saw how the rocky hills and plains south of Rosario on Highway 1 are virtual boojum forests. This area is roughly midway down the 800-mile peninsula.

Boojums have been described in many ways – inverted carrots, slender Christmas trees, or desert candles. The trunk is covered with green leaves. But otherwise, nothing protrudes from the trees. 

They grow really large. Some trunks I saw were a good foot and a half in diameter. This website says the trees can live 300 years.

A botanical explorer from Arizona, Godfrey Sykes, gave the odd tree its name, taking a word from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark.

Baja looks barren on first glance. But the desert is extraordinary. Check out the cactus below with a reddish crown. Don't know what kind it is but really beautiful.

One word about driving in Baja: Driving distances are deceiving. Driving from Tijuana half way down the peninsula to Guerrero Negro is less than 400 miles. But it took a full 10 hours to drive. The highway is sinuous and two lane nearly the whole. Many slow trucks.