Festival Ometeotl 2018 - where hippies and ravers come together

Festival Ometeotl is a traditional Mexican festival that is known about across Mexico but less so in the wider world.  I asked a healer from Wahaka how she had come to know about the festival and her response was simply 'because I'm Mexican'.  In truth, I only found out about it from a Mexican called Jorge, so maybe I'm breaking some code by sharing this.

I had met Jorge the week before at the birthday party of my Spanish teacher.  He's tall, beautiful, athletic and exactly as you would expect from a Mexican man: so laid back that he is horizontal (he arrived at the festival with nothing but a tent, a pair of shorts and a spare t-shirt) and is constantly on the look out for ways to help or to provide for your needs.  As a European girl it's a little difficult for me to get used to.

We had been sat in a bookshop cafe, overlooking a busy street in Mexico City, listening to the beeps of the horns and the occasional crash of cars directly below us.  Jorge had seen the festival posted on Facebook and I had been hungrily searching Resident Adviser the night before in order to find some decent dance spots in the city.  It seemed to be fate.  24 hours later we had a 'tour' booked and 72 hours later we were on our way to the festival hosted at Hacienda La Luna in Tetecala Morelos.

About this 'tour'.... it was due to leave Mexico City at 8pm.  We were in Mexico so we were never going to leave earlier than 9pm and with google maps saying it was a 2.5 hour drive, I admired Jorge's Mexican optimism that we would be there by 9.30pm.  We were due to catch the bus at a dark, dirty and confusing metro station known as Cuatro Caminos.   The area was chaotic with hundreds of buses ploughing past with no regard for pedestrians.  I was grateful to be with a tall well-built Mexican who at least looked like he knew where he was going.  We found a lone boy called Zac, clutching a tent and looking as lost as we were.   Zac seemed painfully shy, although his actions seemed to bely his personality.  He had heard about the festival the year before and decided to take a earn enough money to come on his own to see what it was all about.  With the three of us standing there with tents, it wasn't long before there were about 30 of us all stood in the same spot.  The phrase 'monkey see, monkey do' sprung to mind as I realised that we were simply following poor Zac.


By some miracle, we found the bus and finally got going just after 10pm.  With everyone casually smoking weed on the bus, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that our top speed was about 50km/h or that we would be overtaken by everyone on the motorway (buses, tractors and lorries).  By some miracle, we arrived as early as 3am!  After an hour or two of queueing to enter the festival, we were finally given our wrist bands.



There are strict rules about the food that you can take in.  I carry a card explaining that I do not eat gluten, so after some negotiation I was allowed to take in some of my pre-prepared food in tupperwear, but not the snack bars. It's worth checking in advance with them if you want to take food in as the rules weren't obvious to me in advance or even what they were on the gate.


By 5am we had found a spot in the sea of tents, made friends with our neighbors, including a friendly chap called Ernesto who helpfully showed us how to set the tents up.... The main camping field seemed to be for newbies like us, and then secret secluded spots in the trees for people that had been there before.... It became apparently the next day that to find a spot under the huge shade covers or in the trees was golden as it helped to avoid turning your tent into an oven.

The festival itself really came to life as Saturday progressed.  Around 11am the tribal dancing began. The Concheras dance began around a tepee and a fire with delicious, oaky scents being wafted over the feathered headdresses of the indigenous dancers as deep drumming and flutes provided music to dance to.  The deep satisfying jangle of the ankle bells rang through the air as the dancers stomped their feet in time to the music as a form of protest, not against an institution or the conquistadores, but against ignorance in general.  The dancers then started to move away from the secluded area, forming a procession of hundreds of people making their way across the festival fields to the main stage.

Like most festivals, there was an eclectic mix of people from the oober-hippie with long dreads who has never been near a deodorant to the oober-raver who really can't do anything apart from smile and run their hands over their own bodies in ecstasy.  Then there is everyone in the middle, and really, anything goes.

There was art, yoga, dancing, face painting, random chatting, eating, drinking and all sorts.  There is no chance to get bored as there is so much to do.... they even had a little handicraft market where a young man had casually plugged in a sewing machine so that he could fix his drum case.  I was offered everything from Mezcal, to weed, to acid but there is no attitude or issue with saying no.  One girl was surprised that I turned down her acid offer, but she said I was still her best friend so it didn't seem to damage our relationship.

What to take to Festival Ometeotl:
- Tent shade cover like this
- A water bottle - water is provided from taps
- Some soap - showers are available and believe me, you'll want one!
- Toilet paper
- A hat or scarf for sun protection
- Sun cream - there is shade to dance under but for English skin like mine, you'll still need factor 50!
- Mossie repellant
- Anti-histamine cream
- Mat to sleep on and sleeping bag to sleep in (it gets cold in the night)
- Good shoes - the ground is mostly long, thick grass which is easy to trip over on, especially with flip flops
- A torch
- Swimmers - whilst there is nowhere to swim, you might want these for the showers if you aren't brave enough to stand naked next to the main path
- Solar recharger or battery recharger for phones

The stage at night

Menorca food & open water swim ideas

Notes from Menorca

This is going to be good – I hope!

The plane was delayed by 10 hours, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology (which I curse more often than praise) I woke up to a text message from the airline saying as much.  So what should have been a day by the pool following a very early start ended up as a lie in followed by some very unproductive pottering.  The lie in was gratefully received as I had stayed up talking to one of the more special people in my life about careers, the future, PTSD and how our lives hadn’t quite panned out the way we had thought they would when we had had a similar conversation at the age of 15.  20 years later and I’m still no closer to understanding what, why, how or who.

Negotiating airport security was more entertaining than usual.  Gatwick seemed to be on high alert with every suitcase being fully checked.  Whilst it turns out that toothpaste and lip balm are ‘liquids’ (I would beg to differ as neither can be poured, but I’m not one to argue with security and apparently the ‘real’ test is whether or not you can ‘spread it on toast’ – do people really have toothpaste and Vaseline on toast?!) what isn’t a problem is taking general terrorist reading material through.  Security did not even look at them.

I decided to use the final part of the delay in the One World Club Lounge.  I had 2 free passes to use up by February so this could be my penultimate change as my next trip (to the Galapagos Islands) isn’t until next year. Admittedly the lounge was less exciting than I had hoped.  Being gluten free can be hard and it sometimes turns my brain into writing imaginary letters of complaint about the lack of options.  However, for a free pass, it was worth it to escape the craziness that is Gatwick South.  It’s almost as though they have crammed in the angriest, drunkest, saddest and loudest people into one area and told them to wait patiently.

I squeezed into my seat by the window with the usual feeling of panic about whether I needed to go to the loo and how many times I could legitimately ask the people blocking me in to move so that I could go to the loo.  Should I wait?  Do I really need to go?  Is it just in my mind.  No.  Maybe I should wait for a bit.  Oh but what if the seatbelt light never goes off.  Does anyone actually wet themselves on planes? Am I the only one thinking these thoughts on planes.  As a family of grandmother, mother and small child settle in to the two seats next to me, I can’t help but think of the scene in Fearless where the mother is unable to strap in her child and then spends the remainder of the film dealing with her PTSD and the pain of losing a child.  More PTSD.  I must learn some new topics of thought and conversation.  The family had spent the day at the airport (not trusting modern technology or the airline not to suddenly give everyone 10 minutes to get to the gate).  Whilst they negotiated with the air stewards to move into first class so that they had more room, I did the decent thing (whilst also considering bladder options of being in an isle seat) and offered to move so that they had three seats between them.  After some very British attempts at politeness and refusal to inconvenience anyone, I somehow found myself in first class.  Now losing one’s first class virginity on a Monarch flight to Menorca is probably like most people’s experience of losing their real virginity – you wonder what all the fuss is about, find everything very exciting at first, but after a while you just have a drunk man next to you going on and on and on, whilst his broken seat goes up and down uncontrollably.  Admittedly the three air stewards leaning in to try to fix things was a new experience (fortunately). 

I picked up a little hire car and made my way to the villa with surprising ease.  I love hiring cars abroad and heading off to a new home for the week.  The villa is simple, falling apart at the seams but perfect  really. The swimming pool and the location add to the charm.  It’s located in Puerto Addaya on the North East Coast of Menorca.  The port is a little sailing port with a marina, the usual chandlers and the local restaurant selling every kind of sandwich imaginable.  I’m not sure gluten free has made its way to Spain yet and certainly not the Balareac islands.  After some research, I discover that I’m not that close to any beaches.  The nearest one appears to be almost 3km away and the man in the Marina’s sandwich shop tells me it's too dirty to swim in the Marina.  I think I probably could have worked that out for myself, having grown up with a family of sailors.  How can I get there without taking a car or belongings and if I take a car and belongings, where can I leave them when I go into the water.  It’s that age old problem.  Why has nobody fixed this problem?  Shouldn’t cars have some kind of fingerprint / coded technology?  Why don’t the local restaurants have lockers?  They could make a fortune. 

So I dusted off my Spanish and asked in the chandlers if she had ‘something’ (no idea what the word for a magnet is) that I could use to put the keys on the, how do you call it, wheel?  She says, aha, quieres esponder las llaves?  I do?  Oh, she means ‘hide’ the keys.  Yes, yes, I do.  Well, after some discussion it turns out that there are local beaches that are very little and all within walking distance of the villa.  Come on, she says, I’ll show you (or at least that what I think she is saying because if not, I’m just following her like a puppy).  And there, just along a quiet path towards the edge of the marina she take me.  Keep going she says and you’ll find a quiet beach.  Be careful the boats.  I explain that I have a ‘thing’ that goes on my head that is very, errrr, very, yellow.  If only I knew the words for ‘luminescent’ and ‘swimming hat’. 

The conversation with the lady was a turning point.  There’s one in every trip.  It’s the start of the adventure away from guidebook and the generic nature of trip adviser with the patterned sheets in the anonymous hotels and the reviews of the ‘top 10’ beaches, totally ignoring the other 500.  From a disappointed me for booking somewhere so far from one of the ‘top 10’ beaches to a happy me going on an adventure to find a quiet local beach all based on  local knowledge.  All of a sudden, the trip is beginning to mould into something less generic and something more real.

Food:

Hotel Biniarroca - definitely worth the trip here.  Great food... very reasonable prices and in a lovely setting.  This was one of my favourite places in Menorca.

Puerto d’Addaia: La Cantina is a lovely location but not ideal if you are gluten free.  The food is basic but the atmosphere and location make up for it.  Listening to the old sea dogs swap stories and glance out over the ocean makes you feel that you could stay there forever.  It’s a place for sea lovers and yacht lovers, it’s not somewhere you would go out of your way for.

Puerto d’Addaia: La Castella was recommended as a place to eat.

Na Macaret: Restaurante na Acuario – I’m not a big sea food fan.  I think it tastes a bit like licking mud.  I’m sorry, maybe that makes me uncultured, but there you go.  However, the paella here was delicious.  You can have it ‘clean’ (paella deal senyoret) or shells if you like to get stuck in.  It takes a good half hour to cook, so be prepared to wait.  They’ll then show you the full (enormous) dish before bringing you your first serving.  It’s a lot of food for one person (18 euros per dish) but they will box it up and let you have it ‘para llevar’. 

Open water swimming:

Day 1: Puerto D’Addaia – There is a little restaurant in the marina called La Cantina.  The man running the restaurant told me that the water in the marina is too dirty to swim in, which is a pretty obvious statement and so made me feel a bit silly for asking.  There is a little island opposite called Isla de ses Mones.  If you walk north, keeping the shore on your right from La Cantina, there is a little path that hugs the coast and links up all of the jetties.  Keep walking for a few hundred meters and you will start to find little places to jump into the water.  I found one that looked like a man made beach with 2 sun loungers on it.  I’m not sure if it is someone’s garden, but everyone seemed pretty chilled and nobody told me off.  I left my clothes next to a kayak and headed north in the water.  The water was pretty clear but not much to see other than the occasional small fish and one casual jellyfish which I suspect was a cotylorhiza, rumoured to be the most beautiful of jellyfish as it is supposed to look as though it is carrying a bunch of flowers underneath.  However, in the sea and with no knowledge of jellyfish and whether or not they sting, it didn’t seem that beautiful to me.  There were quite a few boats coming in, so a bright swimming hat is a must here, although I stayed on the outside of the shipping channel and ensured that each boat had seen me.  Not the most beautiful swim, but it was fun to see all of the expensive Minorcan houses with sea views.

Day 2: Arenal d’en Castell – I have solved the issue with the car keys and where to hide them when I swim.  The back bumper has a little lip underneath where you can stash the keys.  If only I had shoe laces to have a legitimate excuse for being crouched down behind my car.   The bay looks beautiful in pictures and it didn’t disappoint.  It was a shock to the system to go from my villa where the only sounds are of a dripping tap or me splashing about in the pool.  I have only heard 2 other voices the whole three days I have been staying here.  Arenal d’en Castell was a different matter.  There were hundreds of beach chairs lined up and a some high rise buildings to accommodate everyone.  I arrived at 5 so the beach itself was pretty quiet, perhaps only a couple of hundred people on it.  I headed straight into the water and decided to make my way out to the lips of the cove.  There were occasional small fish swimming by and then a school of tiny fish would buzz past.  The water was cool and calm and very clear.  After a few hundred meters I passed another swimmer, but essentially, I had the sea to myself.  Most of the bathers were staying in waist deep waters.  A lap of the entire bay took about 30 minutes, and I definitely cut some ‘corners’.  To hug the edges is probably more like a 2k swim. 

Day 3: Platjes de Cavelleria

It´s a beautiful walk from the car park to the beach through grassy dunes down the cliff via specially crafted wooden steps that over look the bay.  There were lifeguards on duty or “socarristas” as I discovered when I got there.  I approached what I thought were 2 lifeguards and asked (by accident) ‘are we lifeguards’.  The man was very confused but his partner seemed to understand what I was getting at and pointed to the very obvious looking lifeguards in red and yellow to explain that they were the real lifeguards.  I was worried about two things: 1. My Spanish seemed to have deteriorated rapidly such that I had lost the basics (I suspect that Ser is the first very you learn in Spanish so not being able to conjugate it was a little worrying) and 2. The flag flying was to exercise caution in the water.  I approached the lifeguard and asked if it was dangerous to swim.  He seemed to think it was calmer in the bay over in the distance.  From the photo you can see a rock jutting out of the sea in the far distance.  He was gesturing to that area of the beach.  It’s not clear from the photo, but that rock pretty much splits the bay in two, so that the swim would be a w shape.  There was a bit of a current around the rock, as you would expect, but the lifeguard didn’t warn me about it so I felt relatively safe pottering around there.  If anything, having a lifeguard on duty made me feel slightly more nervous about the strength of the sea than usual.  What you can’t see from the photo is that there is another bay off to the right of the photo.  From above, it looked relatively calm to try to swim them both.  But then the water always seems so different when you are in it.  I made a mental note to read up on how to read the sea and understand currents.

Day 4: Es Grau – Es Grau is supposed to be one of the most traditional urbanisations in Menorca.  Urbanisation is translated into English as ‘resort’ but it isn’t a resort in the sense that we would usually think of one.  It is more of a village or cluster of houses and a shop or two thrown in for good measure. 

It certainly is very picturesque and the waters are ideal for tiny humans.  You can walk for about 100m and still only be knee deep with only a mere hint of a wave and certainly no discernible current.  This is an ideal bay to practice high elbows for anyone into their swimming drills.  The water was warm and clear and the bottom delightfully clear sand. 

At 6pm there were only one or two people left on the beach.  It was so quiet I stopped to ask someone if there was something wrong with the water.  No, it’s just packing up time.  Or beach ‘Rush hour’ as I’m calling it, where one person stands up to leave and in the ‘monkey see, monkey do’ fashion everyone then individually follows.

Day 5: Playa Turqueta

Whilts the word Turqueta doesn’t translate into English, the Spanish for turquoise is Turquesa and that seemed a fair description of this beautiful cove.  You reach Playa Turqueta after a 10 minute walk down a rocky track and it is worth the walk.  An impressive car parking attendant packs in the cars like sardines, but somehow the beach still seems empty.  Possibly due to the fact that it is a rare overcast day, with clouds gathering for a storm.  The glass bottomed boat had delivered tourists to the land to potter before being beckoned back to the boat with the sound of a horn.  I can’t think of anything worse than to be herded about in such a fashion.  So I set off with my newfound swimming buddies for a loop of the bay.  I set off with two seemingly unconfident swimmers, but as soon as they were in the water I realised that they were being modest.  We swam out past the glass bottomed boat, hugging the cliffs to the left before crossing to the other side and heading back along the right cliff to come back.  The swim was probably less than a kilometre but the water was deep and warm and we had the place totally to ourselves. 

Day 5: Platja Son Bou

In the shot of the beach without the lifeguard, you can just about make out some rocks in the far distance.  Our first swim was to the thin band of rocks that sit slightly below the yellow part of the headland.  It only took about 20 minutes to swim there and back.  When we got out of the sea, the lifeguard asked if we were part of a club (I suspect it was because of my Swimtrek hat rather than my style of swimming – although my new swimming buddy was on the school swimteam, so probably a combination of her style and my hat!).  After some discussion with the lifeguard, we reckoned it was probably only about 800m, so decided to get back in the water (and frankly it was warmer than being on the beach) and head to the east to the cliffs.  There was a slight current dragging to the west, so coming back was much easier.  Along the way we saw saddled bream, fried egg jellyfish and one or two grouper.  We had the entire stretch of sea to ourselves, thanks to the slightly overcast day.  To swim the entire beach would be about 3km (or 6 if you swim there and back).  There seemed to only be one entry point to the beach as the rest of the dunes behind the beach are protected. (Meaning the beachfront property in Son Bou is almost totally pointless if you are looking for a sea view.)  This is a great swim for nervous swimmers that like to be able to see the bottom and touch it at all times.  It was so clear it was like swimming in a pool but with a sandy bottom and a lot more wildlife to admire. 

As if that wasn’t enough, we took off in the afternoon to another two calas… Calacoves and Cala en Porter.

 

Cala blanc – just magical, with wwimming pool steps leading into the clearest sea.  We were surrounded by fish, ring of small black fish, schools. All joined together with saddled sea bream joining them in the middle.  Caves off to the sides but quite distinctive smells so explored and then moved on.  There were a handful of people sunbathing, but it had a residential rather than touristic feel to it.  

Cala Binidali – easy to swim, nude, lots of fish, not very far – uncertain of currents and tides that may sweep you out.  Nice for a potter but not longer.  Some cliff jumping but quite shallow.