Day of the Dead

So, for the last week or so I have noticed that there are quite a few people visiting the local cemeteries. It turns out that this is because November 1-2 is a religious festival called the "day of the dead". On this day/night, the Christians believe that the spirits of the dead come back to visit them. Now the spirits would not be happy to see their grave sites neglected and covered with weeds, so the towns folk seem to spend the week before cutting and burning the grass and giving the head stones a lick of white paint etc. On the actual day, pretty much the whole village gets dressed nicely (western clothes mostly) and heads out to the cemetery for an open air service and they also bring scads of flower arrangements to leave on the grave stones. There is an amazing transformation of the cemeteries over this week.

I'm riding into the Sierra Madre mountains again on very windy little roads but these ones are not as much fun to ride as the other roads because these ones are in a bad state of repair. There is a continuum of road surface that goes from great asphalt to bare dirt and it changes suddenly with no apparent reason. The potholes can be small to huge and in sections the potholes just seem to build up until there are more of them than of asphalt... The road is slowly dissolving just like the adobe huts that are the little homesteads in the area.
So I was heading into the mountains again to visit a couple of small villages that I'm told the "Indian" (local first nations) men still wear traditional dress. In the north, this meant they wore an unusual triangular white skirt that worked quite like shorts but with a triangular tail section. Down here in the South that means long baggy white pants that are heavily embroidered with very brightly coloured floral designs. The shirts in both areas are similar with bright coloured embroidery but mostly not of flowers.
I got to the villages and had a look around and they were very pleasantly peaceful, and there were a few of the appropriately clothed locals (and a few of the non-Indians wearing the classic sombrero as well). But I didn't linger too much since the road was effectively a dead end and I had to return the way I came for 2-3 hours - Bit of a bummer but I knew it before I rode in.