Down the Road to Cholula and Puebla

México in barrenness and aridity, lays it on thick in the valley of the La Joya.

If you think you could live on coffee, bananas, mangoes, pineapple, sugar cane and orchids, you could live for a long time on practically nothing in and around this fragrant, fertile valley.

The capital of the state of Vera Cruz is Jalapa, (Hah-lah-pah) a semi-tropical city famous for its colonial houses, over the mountain range to the north from the valley of La Joya. The largest city and one of the principal ports on the Golfo de México is the city of Vera Cruz, about 25 miles east from Córdoba but joined only by a narrow gauge railroad.

The journey from Vera Cruz to Mexico City is one of the most interesting in all of the Republic. It can be made by rail or highway (via Jalapa), because it runs the full range by emotional landscape that is México.

A palm-lined driveway to a coffee plantatation is hemmed in with a variety of flowers at the fragrant village whose full name is Fortin de las Flores. (Photograph by Dorothy Hamilton.) Flower vendors besiege the travelers at Fortin. A dozen gar-denias costs a few cents, a dozen orchids a few cents more. (Photograph by Dorothy Hamilton.) A small wayside shrine near Córdoba attracts the pious traveler. Cortés came this way from Vera Cruz to México.