Quickly catching up on Mexico

Hello! I promised I'd write more, so here it is. So far the trip has been fantastic, to the point that I wanted to spend more time in every town I visited. Swimming and hiking were great in and around Puerto Vallarta (especially around El Tuito), and I then spent time in Guadalajara where there was an international book fair and lots of fun college students who had come to listen to the speakers (I got to hear Arturo Pérez-Reverte talk about La Reina del Sur, that I had read, and saw Elena Poniatowska, whose book La Piel del Cielo I was reading at the time). Here is Arturo Pérez-Reverte singing an old narco-corrida with the Tigres del Norte:


I then went to Zacatecas, which is always fun and was even better this time since there was a very interesting movie festival (theme: borders and migrations). I saw about five feature-length movies and heard some actors and directors comment on two of them.

Otherwise, get ready for landscapes and birds!

Cacti of all shapes and sizes:


A tiny cactus camouflaged in the rocks:


Fascinating masks in Zacatecas:


La hasteca, near Monterrey, where I have to go back and spend more time:


The Cerro de las Mitras, behind which my friend Ricardo and his family live in Monterrey:


La Huasteca, again:


A gadwall, Anas strepera:


A male Great-tailed grackle Quiscalus mexicanus:


And a female:


And an eastern fox squirrel Scirus niger:


I am now in Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca.