When hiking with a guide, it’s best if they:
- Know the route
- Don’t run ahead of you and wait in the shade
- Don’t ditch you to chase deer
- Can communicate
Or you could go with Spock, the tiny energetic dog.
30 Minutes by taxi from Oaxaca city, there are no hotels in the rural hillside village of San Agustin de Etla. But there is an adorable adobe cottage for rent, complete with babbling brook, chickens and friendly resident dogs. Spock is the most loyal dog known to man; his loyalty simply shifts with each new guest’s arrival.
For hiking outside of the village, our instructions were: Stick to the ridge line; Take Spock; and if you get lost and end up in another village, don’t panic (unless you’ve crossed the continental divide.)
We were skeptical that this dog would wander with us into the mountains, but he did, entertaining us the whole way.
It’s a steep, dry, barren climb out of the village, and the grade doesn’t let up until you are into the woods an hour later. The only signs of life were tagged agave (marked for harvesting) and a couple of wandering deer. The pine line is a welcome respite as the grade eases and large trees covered in bromeliads shade the path. We hear a tropical rainforest exists if you can follow the right trail after 4 hours of hiking into the mountains. In 2 hours when our trail ended in the brush, and we were running low on water, we turned back.
Spock might not have known the way to the rainforest, but he was sure excited to show us the way home, sprinting down the path ahead of us but waiting in the shade of a tree for us to catch up.
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