Tours

Ciudad Valles, SLP, Mexico

My first tour out of Valles was to Tamul, a 345-foot waterfall in a river canyon. Upon arriving at the river I was given an oar and boarded a boat with 20 other tourists and a couple tour guides. After an hour of rowing we reached some rocks from which we could see the waterfall at a distance of a couple hundred meters. You can't really get close to Tamul from the bottom, because it's an enormous powerful waterfall that would crush you.

So instead we stood on the rocks and looked at the waterfall. The tourists leaned on the side of overweight and Mexican but included some Americans and Europeans as well. Mostly couples and families who had paid a bunch of money to be led to these rocks on which they could stare at a waterfall. Also a couple of us solo travellers who had done similarly.

I wonder how long tourism has been a thing. It's seems to me a purely upper-middle-class pastime. The idea is that you pay someone to lead you around to different beautiful and/or significant sites. I can't think of any 19th century literature in which people pay to go on tours. I think this must be a more recent phenomenon.

You also never see people go on tours in movies. That's because watching somebody else go on a tour is extremely boring. And possibly because people who go on tours are extremely boring as well. Try to picture James Bond or Katniss Everdeen in life jackets on a boat with 20 fat tourists. It's difficult to imagine.

I don't think anybody aspires to be a tourist. But once you have money to spend it's sort of expected that you'll spend a certain percentage of it on tours, seems.

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The hostel I stayed at in Valles was run by an eccentric middle-aged woman and her three very tall sons, one of whom was an expert architect of bamboo bungalows. One night I went out with the architect son and my hostel roommate Paul, a British software engineer who had been working for a bank in the Cayman Isles. We went to a nearby bar that was actually just a shed in a local tour guide's backyard.

Paul and I shared similar positions economically. We were both making good money in software and spending a certain portion of it travelling to random places and seeing what there was to see.

After a few drinks I expounded to Paul on my against-the-grain theories about agile development - specifically concerning "full stack developers" and "swarming." These are supposedly-great flash words in tech these days that I think are more or less crap ideas. Sadly my opinions on maximum efficiency in software development have not had much impact on the industry as of yet.

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The real reason I had come to Valles was to take a tour to Las Posas, the surrealist jungle garden of Edward James.

Edward James was an obscenely rich British poet who invested heavily in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. In the 1950s, after a high-profile divorce in which he was accused of homosexuality (apparently he was bi) - he moved to Mexico and purchased a jungle outside the small town of Xixitla.

The first 20 years he lived there he focused on constructing an exotic garden and collecting rare birds and lizards and the like. But after a jungle snowfall killed his garden, he sold off his art collection to finance the construction of a surrealist concrete palace, which is now a destination for tourists.

A documentary produced by the BBC in the 70s reported that James had 30 full-time employees working on his palace at all times. Most of the constructions took inspiration from the surrounding landscape - giant concrete representations of flowers, bamboo, water, etc. It has intertwining staircases a la M.C. Escher that rise to four stories high. James claimed that when complete the palace would be 8-stories high with a rotating dodecahedron at the top a la Da Vinci. But since he died, construction has been halted, the animals have gone, the paint has faded, and his palace is now a stomping ground for tourists.

It's possible that James spent less on his jungle gardens than modern day superstars spend on the Cribs shown on MTV. It's also possible that some day upper middle class families will be paying a tour guide to take them around Charlie Sheen's house.

Anyway Los Pasos reminded me of the difference between middle class and ruling class. The middle class pays to visit palaces. The ruling class builds and buys palaces.

I used to write songs vilifying the super-rich and idealizing the poor. Seems those are the people about whom we write scripts and blogs. I'm not so sure I want to be upper-middle-class forever.

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After Xixitla my tour group visited Sótano de las Huahuas. It's a 1500 ft. sinkhole in the middle of the jungle. We hiked a kilometer into the jungle until we reached an outcropping from which you could peer into the giant rocky hole.

No talking was permitted at the lookout point, so my group and a couple others crammed onto the rocks and stared in silence at the hole. For half an hour.

I wondered how I would describe the scene to aliens, or to a 19th-century author. What are all these people doing? Sitting on rocks? Staring at a hole in silence? Well, it's a tour, see...