Gathered around the family table, which has been laid with an only-on-Sunday lace cloth, we dig into what could possibly be the ultimate one-dish meal. Except that no meal at Cuti’s can ever be one-dish. She performs a nonstop parade back and forth from the kitchen with platters of hot homemade chorizo, rice with chicken gizzards spiced with local turmeric and cumin, and a mole so fierce we have to eat a stack of tortillas and drizzle lime juice down our throats to break the heat. Sundays in the Huasteca are not for the faint of heart.
Nor for the light of appetite. Cuti, it turns out, is but one of a large extended family—all of whom are accomplished cooks, and all of whom want us to stop by for a taste of what they do best. So a cousin’s bowl of pasca (a special-occasion Huastecan chicken soup-stew made tangy with chile seco and sesame seeds, and thick with rice and a hard-boiled egg) primes us for another’s enchiladas de ajonjolí (tortillas slathered with an aromatic salsa of sesame seeds, chiles chinos, and onion) and a sister’s hojuelas (rumpled paper-thin tortillas fried crisp and topped with a sweet sauce of cinnamon and the native brown sugar called piloncillo). We’ll be lucky if we can fit into the car at this point. But we’ve made about a dozen new friends and sampled about a dozen new dishes, and if we’re a little heftier for it, it was worth every ounce.
Rhe road south from the Huasteca to the Totonacapan region (home to Veracruz’s other major indigenous people, the Totonac) makes the road from Tampico feel like the autobahn. If the potholes there were like ponds, these remind you of the surface of the moon—craters that threaten to swallow your car whole. But this road leads to hills covered with green and crimson coffee bushes, rain forests near Papantla where vanilla vines snake around orange trees, and patches of canela (true cinnamon), cilantro, allspice, bay leaves, and a seed catalog’s worth of chiles. It leads far from the zacahuitl to frijoles en Achulchut, the renowned Totonac dish of black beans, tomatoes, chiles, and chicharrones (pork cracklings) scattered with toasted pumpkin seeds. And eventually it leads you through the jungle to a couple of Mexico City architects and environmentalists whose eye on the past is also firmly trained on the preservation of this land and its rivers.
Eduardo Beristain and Raúl de Villafranca met on a squash court more than 30 years ago, cemented their friendship running whitewater, and, in 1992, ran smack into a new obsession. On a hike along the Río Bobos, they stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient city, now called Cuajilote. With help from the Mexican government, they worked to make the site and the 27,000 acres surrounding it a protected state reserve, and they started an ecotourism company, Desarrollo Alternativo Natur, that funnels all of its revenues into a nonprofit conservation organization.
To get to Cuajilote, you can either hike down a twisting trail from the main road or you can run the Bobos. And if you’re going to see it with Eduardo and Raúl, you’ll soon find yourself piling into fat rubber rafts, wearing space-age helmets and clutching long wooden paddles.
Crashing through churning whitewater, we catapult toward basalt cliffs and are swept from a heart-stopping encounter with a sheer rock face by Julio, our captain, who throws out commands to us to paddle one way or the other. The rubber of our raft meets the crevice between a couple of boulders and gets wedged there for a minute or two until we pry ourselves free and shoot into a calm, celadon-green pool.
The trip becomes a Sunday-in-the-park rowboat outing as we drift for a mile or so, passing pastureland sprinkled with palm trees and wildflowers. We paddle to shore and hike through fields of grazing cattle and ranchers on horseback. Raúl, who has exchanged his rafting helmet for a pith helmet, peers through his birding glasses, reeling off names: red-crowned parrot, Amazon kingfisher, Ajaia ajaja (which sounds more like the things we were shouting on the river than a bird). We’re being eaten alive by some kind of gnat, and Eduardo, who looks like a cross between Santa Claus and Papa Hemingway, his bandanna wrapped around his head Jerry Garcia–style, warns us that if we step on a plant called mala mujer (bad woman) it will sting like a hundred mosquitoes.
But as we enter the plaza of Cuajilote, bugs and bad women are left behind: Unlike the pristinely excavated El Tajín, a Totonac site to the north, this place consists of eerily formed mounds of earth, five stories high, sitting next to elegantly carved stone pyramids that have been freed from the soil by archaeologists. “Walk the length in silence,” whispers Raúl, and we wade through swarms of white butterflies and brilliantly green knee-high grass toward the tiered temple at the plaza’s end. Archaeologists won’t commit to the site’s origins, but they do say its urbanistic design may indicate the influence of Teotihuacán, central Mexico’s first great civilization, which was at its peak from a.d. 250 to a.d. 600. With not much government funding for archaeology these days, though, the excavation is at a standstill, and its story remains a mystery. “When you discover something, you feel a responsibility,” says Raúl, gazing at the ten pyramids as if he’s seeing them for the first time. “This is our history.”
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