Though this weekend camping trip, organised by Corazón de Xoconostle hostel in San Luis Potosi and requiring a minimum of four people, is ostensibly a guided roving seminar on the traditional medicinal properties of plants of the desert of Real de Catorce, it has so much more to offer. From witnessing and experiencing indigenous traditions that go back many centuries and are unknown outside the country, to hiking up a mountain past colonial aqueducts, there is plenty to enjoy for people who want an experience beyond learning about plants.
Bring everything you would bring camping plus a hat, suncream, soap and plenty of water. Boots and jeans are essential. There are cactuses everywhere.
Getting there
Even the journey to the desert camp-site, leaving from the hostel by minibus and lasting between 3 - 4 hours, is an experience in itself, witnessing the vastness of Mexico, with plains and mountain ranges that you can still half imagine cowboys missioning across, lost in the landscape. Closer to the end of the trip there is a chance to stop off at the Tropic of Cancer and do the obligatory hopping back and forth next to a couple of murals painted on a wall built to mark the point.
Mexican rural life
The camp-site is above the small town of San Antonio de Coronados. From the compound at night you can see its lights running down the gulley in the distance, topped by the blue neon cross of the church. At the centre of the campsite is an adobe edifice in which you eat dinner as a group and that, should you not have a tent (the hostel may be able to provide one), doubles as a place to sleep. The food provided is basic and delicious, cooked in the smoke filled second room of the adobe. It is purely vegetarian, based around the green and slightly slimy but tasty nopal (opuntia / prickly pear). The homemade green salsa is excellent.
In the heart of the desert
The campsite and the town are already within the desert, at the foot of the low mountains (you’re already at 2,090 metres / 6,857 ft) and when you set out it is just a step past the fence to reach the first interesting plant. This isn’t a sahara-like desert. There are plenty of plants and even trees and as you head up the side of the mountain the plants become greener and more plentiful.
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The plants of the desert
On the other hand there are cactuses that provide bitter fruit, trees that bleed when you cut them, seeds that are charms and/or deadly poison and this is, of course, the heartland of peyote. This is not, unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your point of view) a trip for taking the hallucinogenic plant; this is a trip where you hear about tourists ineffectually butchering the plants in their amateurish efforts to get wasted or expand their spiritual horizons. On the second day you walk up to the spring, passing out of the desert into the forest above.
Temazcal
Aside from witnessing nature, this is a chance to experience traditional and indeed modern rural life. The central piece to this is the temazcal, a traditional indigenous purification ceremony symbolizing rebirth. Some temazcals, judging by the pictures on Google, are relaxed, sauna like chill outs. This is not that. The temazcal on this trip is a fierce event. You file into a small, low cave, the only light coming from the red hot rocks that have been cooking all day in preparation, and are enclosed, packed in in darkness. This is an endurance sauna, thick boiling steam and chanting and the dry smell of burning herbs driving most people out long before the full time of more than an hour (though most lasted longer than I did, having failed and fled at the first opportunity).
Pray for clouds
As well as the planned activities, this is an opportunity to hear stories from local people, see a stunning sunset, and will be one of the few times you will be grateful for clouds and rain. The walks are not too strenuous and anyone should be capable but it can, obviously, get very hot. Though the tour is in Spanish, the tour guides will be happy to translate into English for you. This tour is organised by the hostel (Corazón de Xoconostle) and requires a minimum of four people.
The cost is 1400 MXN (74 USD) for two days and one night. For a tour of three days and two nights, the cost is 2,100 MXN (111.06 USD). For more information or to set up a tour, contact info@corazondexoconostle.
History
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