There isn’t an easy road to follow in Veracruz. They all seem to be littered with pot-holes the size of small ponds and punctuated by topes, speed bumps that appear out of nowhere in the middle of tiny villages of thatch-roofed huts. If you bang into one of those topes going, say, 30 miles an hour with a trunk full of luggage, you may find your brain rattling around inside your skull and the muffler of your rental car broken into bits on the roadside.
It can take you three hours to travel 60 miles here, but in the moonlight, when the mangrove trees turn silver and the dense tropical air smells like vanilla and orange blossoms and allspice, it doesn’t matter much. You crank up the Antonio Aguilar CD, open the windows wide to the night air, hit another pothole, and keep driving. The Mexico you’re entering is nothing like the country you thought you knew.
If you land in—and never go beyond—the cosmopolitan port city from which the state of Veracruz takes its name, you can say you’ve become acquainted with this slip of land on the Gulf of Mexico. And you have, in a way. There, you can find the freshest fish in the country, hauled in daily, deposited in the market, and then reincarnated as ensalada de mariscos. If you’re there on a Saturday night, you can put on your white Panama hat and do as the locals do—go to the Plaza de Armas and perform the courtly, Cuban-inflected danzón. You can have breakfast at the Gran Café de la Parroquia and eat velvety-smooth huevos tirados (omelets with black beans) while a waiter, summoned by the tap of a spoon, tops off your glass of high-test Cuban coffee with a stream of hot milk from a kettle held a couple of feet above your head, completing the ritual of café lechero. You can duck into the suburb of Boca del Río, at the mouth of the Río Jamapa, eat a seafood cocktail called vuelve a la vida (“return to life”), and, to the syncopation of a jarocho guitarist strumming at your elbow, drink deeply of the sea air. This may be the only heaven you need.
But sometimes your pulse can’t just beat; it has to race. And in the state of Veracruz, that happens when you hit the road into the country, attack the topes head-on, and just drive. For Veracruz isn’t Puebla, and it isn’t Oaxaca. It’s part Africa, and it’s a bit of Cuba and the Caribbean, and it’s a whole lot of Spain. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived here on Good Friday in 1519 and christened his settlement Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (“Rich Town of the True Cross”), he forever changed its sense of place. Cubans joined the Spaniards in their struggle to control the lands of the indigenous Aztec, Huastec, and Totonac peoples, and enslaved Africans were brought in to work the sugar plantations. Over time, the cultures mixed, and nowhere was this mestizo culture more evident than it was (and still is) in the fields and orchards and kitchens of the region. Huastec farmers cultivate corn; Totonac growers hand-pollinate vanilla orchids; and yuca, sweet potatoes, plantains, and peanuts mix with Caribbean spices, native chiles, and Spanish olive oil to form a cuisine unlike any other in Mexico.
Only about 150,000 Huastec survive in Veracruz. When Cortés arrived they were an agrarian people who worshiped Centeotl, the god of corn. Today, along the Gulf Coast in the northern Huasteca, near the city of Tampico, it’s oil, not corn, that’s god, and Pemex refineries dot the shoreline. But gradually, as you leave town, oil tankers are replaced by herons dipping into salt marshes with early-morning light on their wings and humpbacked bulls lazing under shade trees.
If it’s Sunday, you’d be well advised to follow that road all the way to Tantoyuca, a town in the hills about 100 miles from Tampico. Sunday is market day, and the winding, rutted streets are taken over by stands of the usual suspects—wrinkled, dried black chiles mulatos; reddish black chiles chinos; chiles cascabeles and chipotles; just-picked lemons and black beans; fat little chorizos and marigold-yellow chickens, along with the other regional ingredients that let you know you’re in Veracruz: cinnamon and allspice and locally produced yuca and green coffee beans and the small rounds of the mild white cheese called requesón, toasted and ground peanuts, coconuts, dried shrimp, and raw sugar wrapped in palm leaves. The air becomes seasoned with hints of woodsmoke mingling with a steamy exhalation of corn and sizzling meat as families cram around picnic tables to feast on zacahuitl, a hulking Huastec tamale that is a weekly celebration of community life as well as an homage to corn. You might be tempted to pull up a seat at the picnic table, and the zacahuitl you buy at the market is a fine thing indeed. But if you hold on to your appetite long enough, one of Tantoyuca’s cooks may invite you over for dinner. It’s worth the wait.
Cruz Torres Perea, or Cuti, as everyone calls her, makes maybe the best zacahuitl in the Huasteca. And she’s about to share it with a bunch of strangers. “Let’s open it outside,” she says. Nobody argues. The blimp-shaped object in her arms is bigger than most fireplace logs and appears to have been hastily woven from stalks of burned grass. Cuti lugs the monster through the rooms of her cinder-block house and sets it down on a card table on the balcony. Wisps of charred banana and palm leaves float over the white floor tiles as Cuti, in her housedress and flowered apron, peels back layer upon layer to reveal the crusty brown tamale of coarse-grained masa, its interior packed with pork and chicken, made spicy and sweet with ancho chiles. Sometimes she tosses in chunks of ham and faldilla (skirt steak), she says, and venison was once used, but one thing never changes: The zacahuitl, which traditionally could be up to six feet long, take 3 people to roll and wrap, and was built to feed 50 people, is baked for seven hours in a communal wood-fired clay oven. (That mammoth oven, just up the hill from Cuti’s house, is a smoldering brick beehive big enough to accommodate up to three enormous zacahuitles.) Cuti’s smaller version, whose recipe has been passed down from generation to generation, can feed 20, she says, and often does.
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.”
Back on the river, we paddle on toward the Paso-Tucán camp, seven acres of jungle on which a collection of eight palapa-covered tents are set among plantings of cinnamon, mango, banana, coconut, and passion fruit. Over Eduardo’s palapa hangs a cross—“to keep me good”—he says, a very un-Santa Claus-like glint in his eye and a bottle of Don Julio tequila in his hand.
Camping with Eduardo and Raúl’s outfit is not camping as practiced by your local Girl Scout troop. Dinner is prepared and served under a gigantic palapa by the Concha family, who, should they ever decide to open a restaurant in midtown Manhattan, would find themselves with lines stretching up to the George Washington Bridge. But the Hudson could never provide what the Río Bobos brings to this meal. The mild, white-fleshed bobo, the indigenous fish for which the river is named, is tucked into tamales that are wrapped in the anise-flavored leaves of the hoja santa bush and then steamed. Or the fish is made into crisp fried seafood cakes. Shrimp, netted a few hours earlier in the river, are mixed with fragrant rice and heaped into Veracruz’s iconic seafood soup-stew, chilpachole.
The next morning, as we bundle up our gear and prepare to leave camp, we spot Eduardo, bare-chested and perched on a boulder in the middle of the rushing river, shaving and humming an old Mexican folk tune. From a banana tree jutting from the far shore, a bird calls out in a pitch that sounds more like a squeaky bicycle wheel, and Raúl has his birding glasses trained on the source of the noise. It’s hard to imagine these two sitting behind their drafting tables back in Mexico City, planning new buildings for the already sprawling megalopolis as they cook up schemes to save ancient ones.
And as our truck lurches up the hill, out of the jungle and toward an airplane that will take us across a border, back to a place where the highways are smooth, and where no one has even heard of a zacahuitl, it seems the hardest road to follow in Veracruz is the one that takes you back home.
Where It’s Happening in Veracruz
Staying There
In Jalapa (also spelled Xalapa), which is a great base for exploring the region, the beautifully restored Hotel Mesón del Alférez (011-52-228-818-0113; from $32) began life as a private home in the 19th century. Its colonial-style rooms are filled with dark carved wood furniture and face a sunny courtyard. Its restaurant, Hostería La Candela, serves a breakfast worth getting up for: four-alarm huevos jalapeña (scrambled eggs with a chile salsa) and the antidote, pan de requesón, a whisper-thin layered bread filled with sweet, mild cheese.
The pickings are slim in towns like Tantoyuca, but there are several comfortable hotels in Tampico that cater to the oil business. The top of that line is the Hotel Camino Real (011-52-833-229-3542; from $95).
You may end up having to stay a night or two in Veracruz, where the port is the heart of the city. The Hotel Emporio (011-52-229-932-0020; from $134) has rooms with great water views ($152). And if water is really your thing, there are three swimming pools to choose from.
Eating There
Veracruz native Ricardo Muñoz, now a Mexico City chef and food historian, knows all the best cooks in Veracruz. Sign up for a tour with Culinary Adventures (253-851-7676; marilyn tausend.com; from $2,500), which is run by cookbook author Marilyn Tausend, and he’ll take you to the finest restaurants and even into private homes. Culinary Adventures also runs tours of Oaxaca with celebrity chef Rick Bayless.
The Churrería del Recuerdo (158 Guadalupe Victoria; 228-818-1678), in Jalapa, serves delicious light meals based on the kind of street food chef Raquel Torres remembers from childhood: Sugary fingers of deep-fried dough, called churros, dipped in thick dark chocolate a la mexicana; flour-dusted pambazos, mini-sandwiches filled with beans, thick crema, tomato, lettuce, and either chicken, ham, or the spicy sausage longaniza; and gorditas picadas (masa tartlets).
The Concha family not only cooks for the Río Bobos rafting trips but also owns a coffee plantation and, a few miles away, the Rancho Hotel El Carmen. (Carretera Tlapacoyan– Martínez de la Torre; Kilometer 39, Desv. Cascadas el Encanto; 011-52-225-315-1955) The rooms are on the sparse side, but the food is worth the trip (and the ride to the plantation is gorgeous). Sit on the porticoed terrace, enjoy an enchilada with pipián (a salsa made from pumpkin and sesame seeds), and drink fresh-roasted coffee on the spot.
The town of Xico is known for its sweetish licor verde, which tastes a little like lemongrass, and its complex mole xiqueño, a paste of mulato chile, fruits, nuts, seeds, spices, and chocolate, among a dozen or so other ingredients. At El Mesón Xiqueño (148 Miguel Hidalgo; 228-813-0781) you can have both, served in a tiled courtyard, followed by a football-size chocolate-encrusted vanilla ice cream bombe, the “volcán de pasión.”
It’s a long and winding but breathtakingly beautiful road to Restaurant Nachita II, where the Río Jalcomulco rushes below the open-air dining terrace and fresh, sweet river langoustines and shrimp are served in more than a dozen ways. (4 Francisco y Madero , Jalcomulco; 279-832-3519)
Being There
Run the rapids of the Río Bobos with Desarrollo Alternativo Natur (011-52-55-56-16-2144; ecotourismmexico.com; $140 per person per day), the ecotourism company run by Eduardo Beristain and Raúl de Villafranca. —N.M.