Louise Freeman and Jenny Smith brought us the news from Ajijic: “Andrei Zúniga has found a new Foco Tonal on the premises of La Vastaguera Restaurant." Naturally we were eager to check it out—and, of course, enjoy another tasty meal there—so the following Saturday, accompanied by a few friends, we headed for La Vastaguera, which is located on the northeast shore of Lake Chapala, five kilometers south of Ocotlán and 70 kilometers southeast of Guadalajara.
Andrei Zúñiga conceived the idea of reopening his parents’ long-closed restaurant during a visit to a botanical garden in Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. “To my surprise,” he says, “I discovered that all the world’s cacti come from the Americas and 90 percent of what was in that botanical garden came from my native land, Mexico.”
Zúñiga returned to Jalisco and created his own cactus garden just outside the little town of Jamay on the grounds of La Vastaguera Restaurant.
When we arrived there, Andrei welcomed us with open arms and big hugs. The power spot or Foco Tonal, he said, was located on the lake shore, just a few meters from the restaurant, in the middle of what had previously been a reflecting pool. “That pool,” continued Zúñiga, “was flooded some years ago and had been filled by mud that was deposited all along the lake shore. Well, a few months ago a group of friends and I decided to construct a temazcal (sweat lodge) over there and we cleaned out the old pool just to have a flat spot where we could sit and chat. So, there we were sitting in a circle when one of us stepped into the middle and said something. What he heard was a kind of echo or reverberation, distorting his speech. Of course we all tried it and we all heard the same echo—but only when we were standing in the same precise spot.”
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