Day 1 - Lizard Fish and Giant Heads
We arrived in beautiful and balmy Villahermosa on Monday night. We were too tired to check out the food cart outside the neighborhood so we passed out and woke to a chorus of tropical birds. The main event of the day was to check out the Parque Museo de la Venta - a biological preserve where many Olmec artifacts recovered from ancient ruins in the Venta site now call home. Amid the tangle of vines and the free roaming rainforest creatures, we got to check out several of the iconic giant heads the Olmec civilization was known for carving. These and the other stone artifacts were hewn out of massive boulders they amazingly transported from sites at least 60 kilometers from their carving sites.
The Olmec civilization (which disappeared in 400 B.C.) is seen as the most distant ancestor to all the Mesoamerican civilizations that met their end after the Spanish conquest, so starting here seems appropriate. The insects were hungry, but we made a good move in buying some bug repellent before going.
We made it through the whole park without getting caught by the temple guards and put the purple parrots back on the board.
Despite Tabasco being the state where La Malinche once called home, and the region where Cortes and his men first defeated the Mayan peoples that held her as a slave, we didn’t get much when we talked to people about her. Everyone recognized the name, and more or less her role in helping Cortes, but for those whom we spoke to, La Malinche was something they once learned about in grade school and forgot about. Some people reaffirmed her role as a traitor, that’s in large part to the word “malinchista” which still means traitor (usually used for someone who betrays they culture or country). A woman in a charro and general cowboy supply store told us that we’d have better luck in one of the coastal towns where Cortes passed through because despite Villahermosa being the capital and largest city in Tabasco, it seemed to have hazy at best connections to the memory and legacy of the conquest.
On the other hand, we had amazing results when it came to food. We sampled some grilled alligator gar, affectionately called Pejelagarto (lizard fish) by the locals. It’s a strange river fish with the gruesome head of a fanged reptile.
The veredict:
Greg thought the texture was fine, but the oily and swampy taste was made it so that he could not eat seafood the rest of the day. He poured down as many hot sauces down his throat to cover the stank.
Glen liked the fish part, but he says the lizard part sucked.
I ate the whole fish after Glen and Greg quit one bite in, but having grown up in Florida may have given me an unfair advantage here.