The weekend of October 5-7th, 2012 we escaped from the heat of La Cruz and drove up into the mountains East of Puerto Vallarta. We left from Kyle's school in Bucerias and sixty miles/two hours later we arrived in Mascota. Mascota lies at 1,268 meters (4160 ft) where we found the temperatures very comfortable.
While the name Mascota in Spanish means "pet", the town's name is actually a combination of two Teco words, one meaning snake and one meaning deer. The area around Mascota is agricultural and forested. We didn't encounter any snakes, but we were warned by the locals not to hike in the dryer parts of the forest where the scorpions were out in force - it's their mating season and apparently they are very aggressive.
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| The patio gardens at Meson Santa Elena |
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| Hotel patio area with lovely blooming flowers. |
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| The church in Mascota. |
Up the road from our hotel the church bells rang every quarter of an hour during the day, starting at 6AM. Luckily they didn't seem to ring all night long. We liked the red, neon lights illuminating the cross at night.
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| View out into the hills from the second floor of the hotel. |
The temperatures were chilly enough that we even wore our jackets as we drank our coffee outside our hotel room.
Saturday morning we visited the energy vortex in Yerbabuena, a small town outside of Mascota. We read that the energy vortex in Yerbabuena, the Centro Magnetico - Tubo de Luz, can cure your aches and pains and each of us did as directed - standing in the center of the vortex with eyes closed, channeling the sun's energy. I think Ken did the best job of all of us. Kyle and I didn't seem to have the same patience that Ken had.
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| Ken channeling the energy |
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| Kyle channeling |
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| Christina channeling the sun - it was starting to get pretty hot. |
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| The directions. |
Later on Saturday Kyle found another boy from a neighboring room at the hotel to play with - Daniel. We invited Daniel to join us on our visit to a museum and on a walk up to the cross.
The Raul Rodriguez museum paid tribute to Mascota's history. One room was dedicated to Mascota's Esther Fernandez, a star of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. The other rooms had paintings from a Mascota artist, farming equipment, and display cases full of old artifacts. Kyle and his friend Daniel liked the old guns and money on display best.
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| Ken, Kyle and Daniel at the cross. |
After the museum visit we walked about 20 minutes up to the cross for a view of the valley.
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| View of the valley from the cross. |
We also visited an archaeological site where the ruins of an old church stand next to a modern church.
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| Christina "inside" the church. |
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| Archway filled in with rocks |
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| Small rocks fill the spaces between the large rocks in the walls. |
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| Ken and Kyle |
As we left Mascota we had an interesting discussion with Kyle about cock fighting spurred on (no pun intended) by the acre or two of tentlike houses and roosters at the cock farm located on the road to Mascota. I didn't manage to get a picture of it, but I found quite a few on the web like this one.
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