CDMX Diaries: Tough crowd

Some impressive pyramids just outside Mexico City, perhaps

I hope you’re familiar with the phrase “a tough act to follow”. I’m sure you are, being literate and highly discerning readers that have found your way here to Tom Fish Is Away, but just in case you aren’t, I’ll give you an example. Imagine having to go and perform a concert of your own music at Wembley Stadium, just after Taylor Swift has finished performing her mammoth, three-hour-long, highly acclaimed Eras Tour.

Your music could be perfectly fine, more than serviceable, for a performance at the local village fete, or even a small intimate pub or bar. But after Taylor Swift nobody’s going to be very interested, are they? The crowd will all be streaming out of the cheap seats towards the tube, already eager to get home.

Another example of this is visiting the pyramids of Teotihuacan right after taking a hot air balloon ride over them. Ordinarily, I’d be well up for visiting some old pyramids. The history graduate in me is always up and willing for some old stuff. But once you’ve spent the first part of your morning in a hot air balloon looking at the pyramids from the sky, walking around them in the baking hot sun doesn’t quite appeal as much as it once would have done.

In fact, there’s a chance to escape. The tour company who organise the hot air balloons tack on the pyramids. You go up into the air, look at the pyramids from above, and then you come back down again and walk around them. But there’s an opportunity to skip this bit. As we’re eating breakfast (free, accompanied by mariachi bands, naturally) they announce that you can change your travel arrangements. Those going to the pyramids will be bussed back to the city at 12:30. Or you can go in about ten minutes, at 9:30.

It feels churlish not to go to the pyramids. We’ve come all this way! Not just the long old bus ride from the centre of Mexico City, which at 5 in the morning feels very long indeed. But, also, there’s the 11 hour flight from London, and not to mention the various trains and taxis that are always involved in airport travel but that are never factored into the budget. There aren’t any Mesoamerican pyramids in southern England. Might as well go have a look, since we’re here.

It is hot, though, and if it weren’t for Jim and Ella, our new hot air balloon friends, we might have found ourselves just wandering around looking at old things for an hour, before finding ourselves a café to ask ourselves how early is too early to start drinking tequila. But we have Jim and Ella, and they have two more friends, who instead of hot air ballooning have gone straight to the pyramids.

This is because of some convoluted story about one of them breaking an ankle white water rafting in Zimbabwe, and now they won’t do anything while travelling that involves signing a waiver. You need to sign a waiver to ride in a hot air balloon. You don’t need to sign a waiver to ride in a private car all the way to Teotihuacan to see some old pyramids.

To cut a very long story not that short, these two new friends let us all join their tour, led by a guide whose name I never find out but that I shall call Mr Perhaps, since that’s basically all he says. In answer to almost every question we ask about the pyramids his first response is “perhaps”. Say, did they use this room to entertain important guests? Perhaps. Would this building have been an important one in the town? Perhaps. It’s hard to tell whether the world at large doesn’t actually know much about the pyramids, or just whether Mr Perhaps doesn’t.

Either way, it’s hot, they’re old, they’re just about interesting enough in themselves. One final thing that Mr Perhaps tries is one of those old acoustic tricks. I love these, when they work. They’re when one person or group of people stands in one place and another person or group stands quite far away, and yet just by talking normally the two groups can hear each other quite clearly. Well, you can see where this is going. Mr Perhaps positions some of us along one of the ancient streets, and the other group on a raised platform in the centre of a square. We talk. We yell. We call out “can you hear us?” Nothing. There’s too much surrounding noise. Perhaps. We can hear the opposite of clearly.

An overall review of the pyramids of Teotihuacan then is that they are really quite impressive, but even more so when viewed from the air. This isn’t an entirely fair review, sure, saying a place looks better when viewed from a hot air balloon is ridiculous, but it’s mine. Our final stop of the day is meant to be a museum dedicated to all things pyramid, but we’re hot, bothered, and can foresee ourselves getting into the museum and, almost immediately, doing the Museum Shuffle.

The Museum Shuffle is that thing you see people do when they’re bored of being in museums. Both hands go behind the back, there is a slight stoop, and they move at an extremely slow pace along a display case that contains old bits of pottery and the odd figurine. They are liable to say things like, “mhmmm” and “huh, interesting” which means they haven’t seen or heard anything interesting in about six hours.

So we sit in a park instead. Mr Perhaps has taken Jim, Ella and the rest of the group home, and we now have to wait for our tour bus. But the wait won’t be uneventful. As we sit relaxing in the shade two lizards fall from a tree above and hit us on the head. Well, they hit L. on the head, which I enjoy very much. Perhaps it’s a sign from the Gods, telling us off for not appreciating their pyramids.

Or perhaps, like me, the lizards just prefer looking at the pyramids from above. Perhaps.

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