“A funny thing happened to us on our way to the cave.”
This is one of my favorite expressions, as not only funny things have happened, but also beautiful and inspiring things, mainly because of the extraordinary people we inevitably come upon in those lonely, out-of-the-way places where a cave may or may not exist, but where we often find adventure and friendship … and in the case of Barranca de Otates, signs of a most interesting “idea revolution” operating in rural Mexico.
This particular story began several months ago when I got an email from a man named Joe Ureña in California asking where he could get a copy of my book Outdoors in Western Mexico. I soon discovered, at mosaiclegs.com, that in the United States Joe is a designer, creator and worldwide installer of beautiful mosaics, but his personal roots are in a little town called Barranca de Otates, where he often spends months at a time. Once he mentioned that there was a cave on his ranch, I offered to hand-deliver a copy of the book if he wouldn’t mind allowing a few cavers to camp on his property one night.
So it was that six of us Guadalajara cave explorers headed for Barranca de Otates on a fine Saturday. This winding canyon is located 25 kilometers due west of Jocótepec and Lake Chapala, easy to reach via the old “libre” road from Guadalajara to Colima.
As we drove through the town, my friend Rodrigo Orozco remarked, “This pueblito is shaped like a sausage.” In fact, it stretches for about three kilometers, following the Otates River, which is so serpentine, it seemed we had to drive through it a thousand times to get to Rancho Real, where Joe Ureña welcomed us with open arms and showed us an area to camp under tall shade trees behind his house, which, he pointed out, was over 300 years old. It soon became clear that Joe and his family lived in a simple, rustic style, which surprised me, knowing he was the head of an important, much sought-after company. He might have built a posh manor here, but instead had chosen to continue centuries-old traditions.
We drove down the barranca, parked and here the adventure began. First we climbed over two stone walls, tromped across someone’s back yard, squeezed through a barbed-wire fence and, with Don Roque wielding a mighty machete, hacked our way through thick, jungle-like growth down to the Otates River, which, by the way, is named after the Mexican weeping bamboo, Otatea acuminata, which used to grow there in great abundance. “We cross the river by jumping from rock to rock,” shouted our enthusiastic guides over the deafening roar of the frothing, chocolate-colored river.
Exactly how I got across that river without falling into it, I’m not quite sure, but once on the other side, I discovered we were at the bottom of a nearly vertical canyon wall covered with nearly impenetrable jungle, featuring on the one hand, stinging nettles and on the other a remarkable variety of caterpillars and flowers.
At last, 50 meters higher, we emerged from the bushes atop giant volcanic boulders which offered us a spectacular view of the whole area. After much searching about, Adán announced that he had found the cave entrance, a lightless hole disappearing straight down among the boulders. Local rumors held that this cave has a low crawlway which then opens into a big, tunnel-like walking passage which “goes and goes for at least several kilometers.”
We had heard such descriptions before and had rarely found such a passage, nor the gold and treasure inevitably said to lie at the end of it. Nevertheless, we lowered our seven-meter cable ladder into the hole and found one small room with several tight squeezes leading nowhere.
This gave us plenty of time to explore several pretty waterfalls upstream and then to chat with Joe Ureña over glasses of locally made ponche de granada (pomegranate punch) at our campsite.
Joe, it seems, is not only interested in arts and crafts, but also in agriculture. “I came across a remarkable video on YouTube called The One-Straw Revolution, about an extraordinary man called Masanobu Fukuoka, who spent several decades doing ‘natural farming’ in Japan, growing rice, oranges and grain with no machines, no plowing, no prepared fertilizers and no chemicals or insecticides.” He added that Fukuoka’s yields were consistently equal to or better than those of his neighbors using a modern approach and that this way of farming is now called Permaculture. Fukuoka said humans have been fighting nature and trying to conquer it for our entire history, but his trick was to learn from nature and just tweak it a bit, for example by scattering the seeds of beneficial plants like clover and alfalfa to make the ground receptive to the rice and grains he wanted to raise.
I found this concept fascinating and soon Joe was showing me his garden, where he’s putting Permaculture into practice. “I let one-fourth of my plants go to seed,” he told me. “In natural farming, you put back what you take out. The soil is never depleted.”
I asked Joe what his family and neighbors think about all this. “Sometimes my father just smiles, scratches his head and says, ‘You sure have a lot of ideas,’ but most of these ideas he’s now using and so are lots of other people here in Barranca de Otates.”
Ureña is one of many Mexicans with roots both here and in the United States. His mosaic business depends on computer techniques for design but also on old Mexican traditions. Likewise, he brings esoteric ideas which originated in Japan to the Barranca. To me, he – like so many other Mexican-Americans – is engaged in a truly grass-roots “one-man revolution” which is transforming many rural communities in this country in surprising ways.
You can reach Barranca de Otates by following “libre” Highway 54 south from Acatlán de Juárez for 13.7 kilometers and turning right at a Pemex station. Now it’s only seven kilometers to B de O, but only 2.7 kilometers from the gas station you’ll come upon an extraordinarly Chinese restaurant whose cook is another of those Mexican-Americans making a difference. Believe me, it’s worth stopping here. Everything on the menu is delicious (and inexpensive) and it’s absolutely the best Chinese food I have ever had in Mexico!