Pueblo de Los Pollos

"The great affair is to move", Robert Louis Stevenson

Zongolica...the name doesn't exactly run off the tongue, but it does sound exotic and interesting. It's a Nahuatl  (the language of people who were once Aztecs) village about 25 miles from Orizaba so we thought we'd go see it (thanks to Amy's exhaustive research we find things like this). High up and over the mountains, had no road til the 1950s so stayed traditional, very pretty too! 

To get there you travel by Adela's buses:

Next to theAdela's  bus station in Orizaba,  a motel that rents rooms by the hour (?!?!?!)...

Although only 25 miles, it's way up in the mountains at the end of a very twisty road that goes up and down many mountains and valleys, so it takes about 90 minutes to get there. Leaving Orizaba, we went along a deep canyon, then suddenly started climbing steeply to a pass at around 6000 feet. Then along a ridge, over another pass and then down into the valley of Zongolica, where we arrived at the town. 

Today, Thursday, was market day. Since this is an Indian town we imagined that all the women would be dressed in native costumes and the goods sold would all be locally made. Well, welcome to the modern world. Very few women were wearing native dress, only women from neighboring towns and almost everything sold there, except for the food, was from China or India. 

As we walked through the market we started noticing a theme...there were chickens everywhere, mostly of the dead and defeathered variety, but a few live ones, too. And they all had that lovely yellow skin that indicates a free range chicken that eats lots of bugs and worms. 

More market scenes...

Nice looking peppers...

Although only 10am, we were quite hungry and found a restaurant that served, you guessed it, chicken. In fact, you could order anything you like here, as long as it was chicken. We ordered a half order of a chicken with chipotle and whole peppers. Apparently, a half order means a half chicken. But it was one of the best chickens I've ever had, so much flavor!  Total price for all this chicken and four coffees...about $6. 

After lunch it was time for a little exercise, so we walked up the steep trail to the town overlook. Of course, there was the ubiquitous statue of Jesus at the top and the view was quite nice. 

More scenes of Zongolica...