El Arbol de Tule

Hola everyone! This is going to be a short post (sorry!) and I promise to have more in a day or two. But i wanted to just quickly post about the really awesome Arbol de Tule, which is--as you may have guessed--is a tree. But its not just any tree, its the biggest tree in all of the Americas, and is over 2,000 years old!

Trying to get this thing into a photo so that you can appreciate the massiveness of it is a little difficult. Even the pics I have posted here don't quite do it justice. In this photo, the tree looks skinny and unimpressive, but that's just because its a fairly angular (not round) tree, and from this angle it looks smaller than it actually is. Most of the photos I could only squeeze in a part of the tree at a time.

Actually, its a series of trees really that have grown together to become one over the millennium. But somehow I think that makes the tree even cooler. These different trees are now one, living and breathing and growing together (yes, the tree is still growing!) There's a lot of symbolism in there for whatever you can think of--human society, the household (our basic unit of life), a marriage. Nations. Groups. Biotic communities. Etc.

Also on this tree are some really interesting tree growths. This one looks like a lion, and if you approach it from another angle, there's a lion's face in the lion's face. Heh.

 Anyway, I really recommend, if you are ever out by Oaxaca way, to make a trip to St. María de Tule to go see the gigantic tree. $9.00 pesos for a round-trip bus ride and $5.00 pesos to get in--in total, about $1 US to commune with a ginourmous, ancient and symbiotic living creature. What more could you ask for? Oh, and the prices of the tourist goods in the local market are to die for!

Cheers!