FINDING LOST CIVILIZATIONS This

pink shirt. They then all started packing up and put theirwares in an old 1960 Ford pickup truck. The son, his wife,and daughter got in to the front seat. The old man got in tothe back bed of the truck and motioned for me to join him.I was somewhat skeptical, but everything I had experiencedthus far made me feel safe with them. A guidebook I readsaid the Huichols are the most original and pure people inMexico. They lived in the isolated mountains of Nayarit andsteadfastly maintained their cultural lineage and ways withoutintermixing with the early Spaniards, settlers, and othertribes of Mexico. There was something trusting about thesepeople and so I climbed aboard. The truck headed in the directionof the coastal mountains in an easterly direction towardthe town of Tepic. Somewhere along the road the truckturned off the roadway and started following a single-lanedirt road that continued up into the mountains. We traveledabout another half hour and stopped. It was a half moonand I could tell the road ended in a small clearing. I lookedaround and noticed a small stable housing about six mules.The family loaded their wares on one mule and motionedfor me to climb onto one of the mules. When I did they allgot on their mules and we started to ascend further alongthis path, which appeared to wind itself further toward thetop. After another thirty minutes we reached an area that Icould best describe as a plateau with a slight depression.The area looked as if it were sitting in the cone of an oldvolcano. In this clearing I noticed there were about fifteenearthen and straws huts formed into a circular pattern. As Ilooked around I realized I had entered a Huichol village. Iwas somewhat surprised, as the Huichol are known to livein isolation deep in the Sierra Madre Mountains. While thehusband and wife and daughter unloaded their wares theold man took me around to several huts and introduced me.I saw that the families were all working on handcraft itemsthat were being sold in towns along the coast. My guesswas that these Huichols used this small village as some sortof way station from their homes as they went to the coastalarea to sell their artwork. The old man then took me over tohis hut and motioned me to sit down. I looked around andsaw that it was one big room partioned into cooking, eating,and sleeping areas. As I sat there the mother and daughterwere preparing food. Using a mix of sign language, Spanish,English and gestures I tried to tell them that I was fromCalifornia. When the food arrived there was this interesting110