Monarchs Are One

What I need you to know is that this is the first travelogue of many. The biggest challenge for me was starting. At the beginning I wasn’t fully on board the idea of doing a travelogue. I had never done one before. I had a hard time to start, because I kept hesitating. I kept stopping and thinking if it was what I really wanted to do. The reason was, because I thought that all I would do is write diary entries, but as I continued to write my suspicion turned into excitement. I began to enjoy writing about my travel. At the beginning I didn’t like it, because I was afraid it would be something it wasn’t when I was traveling. But in the end it turned out to be really great. It inspired me to write my travels down.

Enjoy traveling with me!

California November 2017

November 2017 San Luis Obispo
Every year for Thanksgiving my mom, stepdad Trevor and I always feel left out, because we are immigrants and none of our families lives in America. In 2017 my family chose to go to visit the monarch butterflies that live on the California coast. Not too long ago I had been accepted into an art fair for my drawings of endangered animals. The monarch butterflies were one of them. For a long time I had wanted to see the monarch butterflies, but we never had the time. So we began our journey to San Luis Obispo to follow migration of the monarchs.

November 22, 2017 San Luis Obispo
It was November 22, 2018, when our trip to the monarch butterflies began. We boarded our tiny flight to San Luis Obispo. As we began our journey I was excited to see the massive groups of the monarch butterflies. I was imagining the giant groups of monarch butterflies flying around my head, flying from tree to tree. I was imagining no one at the groves, just my family, looking up and seeing the monarch butterflies all around us. I didn’t know what to expect it could be filled with monarchs or bare of monarchs. I was preparing myself for both situations. As I continued to think about the majestic monarch butterflies I slowly started to flutter off to sleep.

November 23, 2017 Pismo Beach
Pismo beach is described as a place of fine beaches, wineries and, of course, butterflies. Visitors arrive in their thousands, to view the majestic creatures as they group and prepare to fly up North. When I arrived, I discovered that the grove was packed.., but not with butterflies. Children were cackling and braying as babies lazily crawled around my feet as though they were monarch caterpillars desperately trying to escape their parents clutches. I strained my eyes and saw around fifty monarchs clamped to the slippery leaves of the eucalyptus tree.

November 23, 2017 Pismo Beach
The sweet honeyed smell of the eucalyptus nectar overpowered the smell of the grubby dusty children and I stood transfixed. The monarchs wings were the color of the sea on a gloomy day. But still after about an hour, the noise and sickly sweet stench became too much and we turned to head back. As we trudged along the beach it started to trickle with rain, occasionally the sun broke out among the clouds highlighting little patches of beauty on the otherwise gloomy shore. My ears rang from all of the noise in the grove and I was looking forward to a meal with my family.

November 23, 2017 Pismo Beach
As Trevor and I walked through the door into the dark room, I saw candles lit standing on a table the size of a guitar and there lay a very nicely presented Thanksgiving dinner. The turkey was nicely sliced and put on a small sink towel with the wishbone laying on top. The green beans and root vegetable were mixed into a bowl. The vegetarian turkey or cauliflower was also sitting on a small sink towel. Two pies, an apple, and a pumpkin, lay to the side of the table. Mom had used all the materials around her to make the best Thanksgiving meal I have ever had. Mom, Trevor, and I had the best Thanksgiving meal that we had in years. Just us, just our family and nobody else.

November 24, 2017 Carmel, Pacific Grove
The next day we woke up and started to drive to Carmel. It took us about four hours before we reached Pacific Grove, the famous monarch grove in Carmel. I looked through the windows of the car and noticed monarch butterflies painted on all the fences and many murals of monarch butterflies on the buildings. I inferred that people that lived in that area were very proud of their monarch butterfly population. This raised my hopes that there were many monarch butterflies here to see.

November 24, 2017 Carmel, Pacific Grove
As we parked, I eagerly unbuckled my seatbelt, opened the door, got the camera, and walked to the grove. I started to walk over and I realized that the grove was much smaller than I expected. It almost looked like the backyard of someone’s house that they opened up to the public. There was a small yellow two-story building to the right of where many people were standing. Behind it was a few benches and a carnival face cut out where you become a butterfly. My excitement bubbled up inside me like a geyser waiting to explode.

November 24, 2017 – Carmel, Pacific Grove
We got over to the telescope and saw where the monarch butterflies were. There was a group of monarchs of about twenty-five just barely in view. That was it. My heart sank like a stone in a very deep pond. Yet again, we had missed the butterflies. The majority left just week before us!

A nearby docent directed us to a dead monarch and allowed us to view it under our handheld microscope. That was a real treat. What we saw under the microscope was amazing. We saw millions of tiny bright ovals lying flat along the back of the monarch. The colors alternated between tangerine orange and glistening shiny white, interrupted occasionally by streaks of midnight black. These snake like scales had holes of emptiness that trapped the monarch butterfly from escaping the clutches of their predators. It was incredible.

I was disappointed but happy as well. Instead of seeing the enormous amount of monarch butterflies flying above our heads, we saw twenty five monarch butterflies perching behind a tree out of plain sight. I was able to look at a monarch butterfly under a microscope. I didn’t take any notes this time. This time I was just using the camera to do my research. I was fortunate enough to have had one monarch butterfly land on a flower so that I could take good photos of it. As we left I was excited for the next day’s visit to another butterfly grove up north in Santa Cruz, Natural Bridges.

November 25, 2018 Santa Cruz
We had been driving for about an hour before we got to Natural Bridges, a monarch butterfly grove. It was the last time we would see the monarch butterflies before Mexico. I had started to lose a bit of hope about seeing any large amounts of monarch butterflies. I was expecting it to be like the other groves with only few monarch butterflies. But what I didn’t know was what lay ahead.

We were getting closer to going down to the monarchs and my hope came back. We walked down a narrow wooden path that went down to the bottom of a gulch, and there they were – thousands of monarchs, at last!

November 25, 2018 Santa Cruz
I heard sound like booming of extraterrestrial aliens. There were many of these sounds. They were overlapping with one another, unsynchronized. As I rounded the corner I saw hundreds of monarch butterflies grouping together to create the most enormous butterfly that covered the sky, one super butterfly. The super butterfly was gliding down to the ground as if it was about to fall. But every time it came close it fluttered back up to the sky. As I stood there transfixed, the sun dappled through the super butterfly and for the first time I could clearly see the detail of the individual monarchs, their wings flapping as their body remained perfectly still.

November 25, 2018 Santa Cruz
There were many more butterflies. Much more flying. Much more action. I didn’t use my journal at all, because I was busy taking photos and being ecstatic about what was happening around us. We stayed there for an hour watching carefully what the monarchs were doing. After about fifty minutes abounding number of people started to crowd the area with their kids. My family was not enjoying the crowded space so we chose to leave. We left a different way than we came in. It was a tiny dirt path between two rows of eucalyptus trees. The trail went up and down, up and down until we got to a giant open plain. We all ran down the hill and into our car.

November 25, 2018 Santa Cruz
Together as a family, we had a great time but with the monarch butterflies, our experiences were mixed. I wasn’t too excited to go to Mexico in spring after what I saw on the California coast. Maybe I was too impatient. Maybe I was sad that we missed the big groups of the monarchs as we chased them up the California coast and I was worried that the same would happen in Mexico. But my curiosity won in the end. What if? And so I went.

Mexico March 2018

March 4, 2018 Mexico City
Flying to Mexico City was one of the most uncomfortable flights I had been on. As we got off the plane we realized that it was early in the morning and that we wouldn’t get any rest that day. We went through customs, got our luggage, met our guide, got in the car, and were dropped off at our hotel. Our guide Melissa helped us check-in and get food before we left again to go and see the Aztec ruins just outside Mexico City. It turned into a great day. We learned so much! We also bought a giant gemstone, ate a cactus leaf and tried agave juice. Mexico city had started unfurl its wings.

March 5, 2018 – Mexico City
After Trevor and I had taken a long nap to get some rest, it was dinner time. As we walked in we met our guides, Melissa and Fernando. By the end of the trip, we became very good friends and I could feel from the beginning that we would. We sat down to have a classic Mexican dinner with virgin and non- virgin margaritas. I had an amazing soup noodles and Trevor had a chicken mole. After having a cactus leaf for lunch I was happy to have something that is similar to the Mexican food in the U.S.A. After we got our appetizers and began to eat we had a presentation about the trip.

It explained how we get to the monarch butterflies and our day to day plan. Talking about how we will be using horses as transportation to get up the hill to the monarch butterflies. We each talked about ourselves and introduced who we are to the whole group. We were total of twelve explorers. We also talked about the different places we are going and what we will see there. As the guides continued to talk about the trip our food arrived. It was completely different then what I imagined. I imagined skinny thin noodles in a mole type of a soup. When they brought it to me I realized that what they meant was noodles cooked and mixed into a mole sauce. It was extremely good.

March 5, 2018 Mexico City
After we finished our dinners we were off to bed, because tomorrow was an early start. We woke the next day, packed our bags, and off to breakfast we went. The breakfast was an amazing buffet of pastries, eggs, fruits, cereal, anything you can imagine. As we finished up we were told to meet at the back entrance of the hotel where the bus was waiting. I was anxious. I so wanted to see the main migrating group of monarch butterflies, but I remembered how we kept missing them in California. Still, I got on the bus and started our four-hour-long drive to Angangueo, the town of monarch butterflies.

March 6, 2018 Angangueo
We took a few stops along the way to get some snack and to use the restroom. Otherwise, we were stuck on the bus. But the bus was nice, and everyone had their own row and no one was very loud. Finally, we had pulled up to a restaurant and Fernando told us that we had arrived. We ate some very common local food: jalapeño popper, fish with mixed veggies and rice, and tortilla chips with green salsa. As we finished eating our delicious local Mexican food we set off on the bus again for only for fifty meters. Fifty meters to go to our hotel, La Margarita, to drop off our bags and go up to El Rosario to see the monarch butterflies.

March 6, 2018 Angangueo
Everyone had the time to take things out of their luggage and put it into their little backpack that they would be carrying with them. Lucky for me I didn’t have to do that because I have already put the things I would need in my backpack that morning. So I was just able to fill up my water bottle and choose my spot on the truck we took. I choose the truck with a pretty roof and a better shade. I started to have hopes that this was going to be great. I felt like we would see lots of butterflies. Which meant that I had a giant smile on my face.

March 7, 2018 El Rosario
As soon as everyone piled up into two trucks we set off up the hill to the monarch butterfly sanctuary. As we began to drive I noticed monarch butterfly murals everywhere. The locals are very fond of their monarch butterfly population. I wanted to take photos of all the monarch butterfly murals, but I just didn’t have enough time. So instead of taking photos I observed and took notes. We were promised to come back In two days, so I was going to take photos of it all later. As we arrived at El Rosario we could see two arches covered in murals of monarch butterflies. The other truck wasn’t there yet, but we slowly walked up to where the horses were waiting for us.

March 7, 2018 El Rosario
When everyone came, everyone was saddled up into a western saddle and off we were. Because many of the people on the trip were not experienced riders, they had to have someone hold the horse for them. I ride three times a week and jump, and I was hoping they would let me control my own horse myself. I asked multiple times if I could control my horse, but we didn’t understand each other, because I do not speak Spanish yet. I was left to be carried on a horse that was whipped every two seconds. I tried to stop it, but I couldn’t. It was horrible. At last I got off the horse and began to walk the last bit towards the monarch butterflies.

March 7, 2018 El Rosario
Right now I was either nervous or excited, I couldn’t tell. I held my journal in one hand and my pen in the other so that I could make notes. I had been taking notes on everything now not just the monarch butterflies, but also on the culture and the people. The first day I took very few notes, but as we progressed in the trip I began to take more and more notes each day filling out many pages. There was one monarch butterfly fluttering around by itself in the sky. I knew the monarch butterflies must be close. As everyone continued on I looked around me, and sure enough, there was a group of around fifty monarchs fluttering from flower to flower drinking nectar.

March 7, 2018 – El Rosario
I told everyone about the feeding butterflies and they all came running. Everyone was taking photos. It was the perfect spot. There were no trees in that area so the sun came right down on them warming them up. It looked perfect. Our guides came over and they told us that this was nothing compared to what laid ahead. This gave me the butterflies. I was so excited now. We were going to see more butterflies in one day than I encountered over a week in California! I was walking faster heading to the front of the line so I could see them first. We continued to walk for about five more minutes before we saw all the monarch butterflies.

Right in front of us was a muddy field with water. On that mud were several hundred monarch butterflies flipping from one area of the mud to the other. I was anxiously waiting for Trevor to come so that I could take photos with a good camera he was carrying. I was overwhelmed and so happy. I was starting to realize that photos of the swarms of monarch butterflies are taken here in Angangueo are of Mexico.

Trevor was taking photos of the living monarch butterflies in the mud, while I was taking photos of the dead monarchs. I thought it would be good to take photos of all the monarchs to see them in different stages of their life and study how they look different from one stage to another.

Again Fernando told us that this was nothing compared to what was up the hill. I lifted my head from the muddy field, and only then I noticed this steep hill behind Fernando and at the very top, above it all, monarch butterflies flying around. It looked different, but I thought it would probably be only few monarch butterflies so I took my time looking at all the dead and live monarch butterflies until I got to the top of the hill.

March 7, 2018 – El Rosario
I stood there in awe looking into the trees. The number of monarch butterflies was colossal. There was probably more than one million monarch butterflies there. They were all landing on one tree staying there for a bit and then flying together again to another tree, following the sun. I asked for the camera and I just kept taking photographs. Then I gave Trevor the camera so he could take photos and I took photos and videos on my phone. They turned out amazing. There were so many monarch butterflies that they made the trees look orange. It looked as if the monarch butterflies had engulfed the trees in their orange wings.

We were there for hours, but it felt like few minutes. I was having so much fun. When Melissa told us that we had to leave I didn’t want to. It was so beautiful and mesmerizing that I didn’t want to leave… I was excited to learn that we would be coming back one more time.

We went back a different way leading us all down to the visitor centre. Because I ran down I was the first one down and I was waiting for awhile for everyone else to come down. That’s why Trevor and I walked around seeing all the souvenirs. By the time the rest caught up with us we had bought a huge sweet round turmeric cookie and a tortilla basket, both for mom.

We piled up in to the trucks again off we went back down to La Margarita. When we arrived we were given a key to our room. We all had an hour before dinner. I rested and debriefed in my head about what I had just seen. Trevor took a nap. Our dinner was classic enchiladas plus spaghetti. Our guides told us our plan for tomorrow, about going to the sanctuary Chincua. Afterward, I went immediately to bed so I would be rested for the next day. But it was hard to fall asleep with all the images still fresh in my mind!

March 8, 2018 Chincua
The next day I woke up nice and early to get my backpack ready and be able to go to breakfast not worried about being rushed. The breakfast food was just a normal breakfast. After breakfast instead of getting into the trucks, we got into the big bus and drove to Chincua. Today was the day when I decided to organize my notes differently. I established five categories – nature, food, history, art, music, other culture – and color coded the notes so I can easily find relevant notes. I was now ready to document the journey, but also to see the monarch butterflies in another sanctuary and being able to compare the locations to each other.

March 8, 2018 Chincua
The bus ride took about thirty minutes until we arrived at Chincua. We got off the bus and back on the horses. This time I asked Melissa to ask the person holding my horse whether I could ride the horse by myself, and it worked. I led the group and I was able to canter and trot. I was in heaven. Especially, because this time the horse ride was much longer. Instead of minutes it took over an hour. When we got off the horse I said goodbye, but I knew I was going to see them again, which made me happy. This time we had to walk for a longer distance to the monarch butterflies sanctuary.

March 8, 2018 Chincua
On the way we saw two dogs coming our direction. In Mexico, many of the dogs are not owned by anyone, but are cared for by everyone in the town. These dogs were very cute. One was a small brown puppy and the other was a long-haired shaggy white dog. They both followed us to where the monarch butterflies were. The brown puppy stayed with me the entire time. At the sanctuary, I was expecting what I saw in El Rosario the day before. But at the top where we were there were only few monarch. We could see many more down below where we couldn’t go. So we all found a place to sit, talk and eat. Trevor and I mostly played with the dog.

March 8, 2018 Chincua
We stayed there for about an hour before returning. The brown puppy walked with us until we met a local school on a field trip to see the monarchs. The puppy joined the kids. I was sad to leave my friend behind, but I was seeing another one friend ahead, my horse Lampago. Lampago means Thunder, and that name suited him very well. He loved to go fast. When I got on his back, I immediately rode off in a cantor. We ran all the way to the bottom of the hill, only having to stop sometimes for people to catch up with us. When we got to the bottom of the hill there was a giant open plain. I cantered across it with Lampago, like in a fairy tale.

March 8, 2018 Angangueo
After everyone came down we went to get some really nice quesadillas and then we went back to Angangueo. In Angangueo, because it was only one o’clock in the afternoon, we went to a mural that explained the history of Angangueo. Angangueo was first an agricultural town, than a mining town, than a lumber town, and now it is a monarch butterfly tourist town.

March 8, 2018 Angangueo
After that we went back to our hotel for a presentation about monarch butterflies. Many of the facts they explained I knew, but there was still a lot to learn. For example, that one of the biggest reasons why monarch butterflies are endangered, is because there isn’t enough of the right milkweed out there for them to survive on.

The presentation was so long that it led to dinner, which was jalapeño poppers and pasta. After the filling dinner I went straight to bed after a cold shower. The next day was the last day of our monarch butterfly expedition. We were going back to El Rosario.

March 9, 2018 El Rosario
After breakfast we all buckle up into the trucks again and went off to El Rosario. The road we took went through the town and up onto one of the hills. The road became steep as we went up higher. We used the horses again to go up the hill, but this time I was able to control the horse by myself. I started at the back of the line and by the end of the trail, I was in the front. Now I was very excited to see the monarch butterflies. I knew how many monarch butterflies to expect. Soon I realized that we were going a different path up, but it didn’t matter to me.

March 9, 2018 El Rosario
It was equally beautiful and filled with monarchs, but this time they were much closer to the ground and scattered around more. They were mating and fluttering around not together, but as individuals. I stood there looking around and taking lots of notes. Because there were so many monarch butterflies you could hear the flapping of all the wings, which sounded like soft clapping. As I continued to walk a monarch butterfly had fluttered over to me and landed on my jacket. I asked Trevor to take a photo of it, but he was too late. The monarch butterfly flew away. I was sad that it left before taking the photo, but I was happy to know that it had happened to me. It was my butterfly moment.

Woodside – May 1, 2018 – Monarchs Are One
Monarch butterfly migration is an event in our world that you can’t get out of a book or even a movie. To learn, to see and to hear about how one monarch butterfly generation, made of millions of individual butterflies, gets to a certain point, and only then another generation is born changed how I understood monarchs. The individual monarch butterfly never returns to where they traveled from. The monarch butterflies is one ever moving, ever dying, ever being born community. All monarch butterflies depend so much on each other, that they really are one giant monarch butterfly. Just like millions of scales create one wing so the butterfly can fly, millions of these butterflies have to be working together to exist. If one link of this mesmerizing living chain breaks then the giant monarch butterfly is gone forever.

This giant monarch butterfly only has one predator – human. Humans change the natural habitat of the mating and wintering groves. Humans change climate and bring sudden frost to monarchs migrating routes, which causes a sudden death of millions.

You will never experience the jaw dropping beauty from any book or any movie. You can only get that from real life. But what if there were no more monarch butterflies left? There would be no such beauty for us humans to enjoy.