Wednesday, February 13, 2013

El Quelite

El Quelite (which translates as among other things, amaranth, which we saw growing in the fields beside the road on the way up there) is a colonial town about 45 minutes northeast of Mazatlán. Our friends Cliff and Lynne on s/v Taya have recently acquired a car, and the four of us went up there for a day trip yesterday.

It's a very pretty little town:




Several of the houses had cactus growing out of their tile roofs. I have no idea how cactus manages to get a toehold on tile, but apparently it can.



This little store had a lot of very nice handicrafts - of course we have nowhere to put that sort of thing on the boat, but it was fun to look. They also sell corn ("comida para gallos" on the white notice posted on the wall)




Outside of the store, we saw these guys riding by.

 


Later, they posed for us with some friends.

 

There's a pretty little church





which had some lovely painted carvings inside









Judging from the number of ribbons on this guy there must be a rather large Lebanese-Mexican population in El Quelite. The statue is St. Charbel. The ribbons are expressions of gratitude and prayer requests, which the google tells me is a tradition with Lebanese origins.




 We had an excellent (and very large) lunch at El Meson de los Laureanos. The restaurant has a very pretty courtyard,


 which had a mural of the street in front of the restuarant on one wall






We walked around town a bit after lunch. There were a lot of chickens in the riverbed beside the restaurant and in various places around the town


 including some really spectacular looking roosters










There were also a few turkeys. 




The cybercafe:


I don't know what kind of cactus this is - isn't it odd looking?



As we were headed out of town, we saw a tree with what looked like very small oranges on it. Lynne got out of the car to ask what they were, and the guy whose house it was insisted on picking a big bag of them and giving them to us. He wouldn't take any money for them - Lynne finally convinced him to take 10 pesos for the bag he put them in. They were some sort of sour orange - the man told us that they'd make really good agua fresca. I juiced a few and mixed the juice with seltzer, sugar and vodka for a sour orange screwdriver. It was delicious.

Across the street from the orange tree I saw these downspouts - notice the iguanas?


It was a lovely day, and we're so glad Cliff and Lynne invited us to come with them.

5 comments:

Sarah and Darrell said...

Wonderful! I wanna go there next year.

Doug and Carla Scott said...

Famous for the sliced tongue. Did you have some? We didn't - we were chicken. Glad you had a great field trip, plus hanging out with Cliff and Lynne. Wonderful folks. Hugs to all!

Jaye said...

Doug and Carla: I've actually liked tongue the couple of times I've had it, but I didn't see it on the menu - I had carnitas, which were delicious

Sarah and Darrell: It's a date!

Arin said...

The fruit was likely kumkuats, very sour, but quite tasty. You typically eat the fruit with the skin on.

Jaye said...

Arin, that's what we thought too, but these were something else. They had huge seeds, for one thing, and the skin was a lot looser than it is on a kumquat. Sadly, the last of them went moldy yesterday, otherwise I'd post a picture - no idea why I didn't at the time.