From Tuxpan I head south through the verdant landscape passing Poza Rica and arriving in Papantla, a small Totonac town that’s famed for its nearby ruins, El Tajín. The town is busy and replete with all the teeming energy you’d expect from a working indigenous settlement.
Passersby hold animated discussions on street corners. Market vendors sell their wares on small, square blankets: giant baskets of dried out chilli peppers, mountains of red beans, bundles of nopal cacti and sacks of yellow, crumbly incense. There’s a swimming aroma of fish and fresh fruit, car exhaust, toil and cooking tortillas.
But the most fascinating and famous facet of Totonac culture is the highly symbolic Dance of the Voladores.
The Voladores comprise a troop of 5 dancers, each representing a cardinal point – north, south, east, west and centre. Under a strange drum beat and an eerie tune played out on a whistle-like flute, the dancers ascend a tall pole, several metres high.
They tether long ropes to their feet and wind themselves around a rotating wheel at the pole’s pinnacle. They fall backwards and begin spiralling slowly back to earth, arms outstretched.
When performed correctly, they make 13 orbits of the pole each or 52 orbits in total, corresponding to important counts on the pre-Hispanic calendar (for example, there are 13 months in the Pre-Hispanic ‘year’ and 52 ‘years’ comprises a full revolution of time and cosmic forces, or put simply, a Pre-Hispanic ‘century’).
I’ve seen this dance many times and someonce once explained to me that it can be used to calculate anything from the next lunar eclipse to the number of days in a year on Pluto. This is an important point about the sophistication of Pre-Hispanic calendrics. At the zenith of Mesoamerican civilisation, the Mesoamerican numerical system was far in advance of anything in Europe.
But today I have neither the time nor luck to see the dancers, or the great ruins of El Tajín. Fate has conspired against me: heavy traffic, late buses and the wrong ticket have all delayed me. After checking the hotels and restaurants, it’s back on the bus to the next place: Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz.
