Trips out of Town

One day an eagle snatched Jamil from his cradle and devoured the child in the highest branches of a huge tree, leaving its head, a few bones and the tree drenched with blood. It is said that the distraught Casando´o buried the remains at the base of the tree, now the site of Jamiltepec´s church and the reason for the town´s present name.

It´s a colorful and bustling Mixtec market town, about 60 percent of its population is indigenous, and the Indian ladies from the surrounding areas come here to sell their produce. It boasts a fine Dominican church and a pair of colonial sundials and some ancient carved stone artifacts in its zocalo, where there still some market activity going on, even though a new municipal market has opened un on a hill on the outskirts of the town.

Jamiltepec hosts its 22nd annual Chilena Festival Oct. 22, but the festivities will continue on Sunday 23rd with a book fair, and arts and crafts expo and a culinary fair. The town has a certain renown because it was mentioned in D. H. Lawrence's "The Plumed Serpent". Its market is always lively and it's a good place to shop for indigenous crafts.

Since the area is a center for cotton-growing, weaving and textile crafts predominate, but you'll also find leather goods and finely-crafted knives and machetes.

(The adventurous might want to visit the town prison, located in the government building on the zócalo, where inmates sell colorful baskets and all manner of goods made from leather, wood, coral and palm fronds to earn a few pesos to make their ordeal a little more tolerable.)

Santiago Jamiltepec is about 140 kilometers from Puerto Escondido on the coast Highway towards Acapulco.

Fire in the Water

Manialtepec's waters are a veritable soup of tiny organisms: algae, protozoa, eggs, larvae and so on, known collectively as plankton. One form of plankton has been particularly active in these last hot weeks. It's called cyanobacteria, a single-celled algae containing chloroform and a blue substance which gives off an eerie phosphorescent glow when disturbed by currents.

At night, the thousands of fish darting through the waters leave streaks like falling stars, and the wake of a motor launch looks as though it has been illuminated by powerful floodlights. If you swim in the lagoon, the droplets fall from your skin like a shimmering shower of sparks. It's an almost mystical experience. But check first with a tour operators or a resort at the lagoon to make sure that the phosphorescence is still happening; the phenomenon disappears as suddenly, and as mysteriously, as it begins.