Traveling Out of Bounds
On heeding and not heeding travel warnings, along with travel notes from Michoacán, Mexico, where to stay, where to eat ...
We tend to be fairly cavalier about travel. While I have no desire to visit North Korea, Afghanistan, or Syria, and our dream of visiting St. Petersburg will never come to pass so long as a murderous dictator runs the country, I also know that the world is vast and we are eager to see more and more of it. It gives your own life additional context as you learn about other cultures and meet new people.
Ann knows this well. Which is why, when Ann says, “I want to go to Georgia,” you can be pretty sure that you are going to Georgia within the year (we depart June 4th, look forward to writing about it).
Like Patzcuaro. Ann got it in her head to explore this small town (pop. 60,000, the size of Cleveland Heights) because her friend described it as what San Miguel de Allende was before the Americans flooded in. And when she gets it in her head, as I’ve said, there’s really no stopping her.
We visited this town, a three-hour drive northwest of Mexico City, just before Christmas in 2019, loved it, and returned two years later to fulfill one of Ann’s great longings, to join the Dia de Muertos celebrations.
But here’s the rub. Our government tells us not to travel to lovely little Patzcuaro. The U.S. State Department says Michoacán is under a level 4 travel advisory: Do Not Travel, reads the red label on its site. Crime and kidnapping, the site says. And we’re so glad we did not heed this warning.
This is not to say we ignore warnings. We take precautions. First, we make sure we’ve arranged a ride for us on our arrival in the nearby city of Morelia (arranged through our hotel). You don’t want to navigate transportation in a new city where you don’t speak the language after a multi-hour, multi-flight journey. Patzcuaro and the surrounding towns are very safe—it’s the back roads where things can get dicey. So really the biggest safety precaution we took was to rely on a local guide. Through our first hotel there, we found Alejandro Vilchis. How he enriched our trips is immeasurable.
If you’re traveling to Morelia (lovely city!) or Patzcuaro, we highly recommend you contact Alejandro. His email is alvilchis@hotmail.com, and you can What’s App him at 52-44-31-69-62-03.
It was Alejandro who drove us into the mountains to watch the Monarch butterflies awaken, who introduced us to the Olivo brothers and their (arguably best in the land) carnitas. It was Alejandro who asked should he see if his friend, the late doyenne of Mexican cuisine, British ex-pat Diana Kennedy, would see us (she would; a feisty, opinionated woman, we discovered, as we talked about her career in her kitchen over glasses of mezcal).
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