A boat tour of Mexico City might not be on your bingo card, but the lakes and canals are worth exploring

I wasn’t quite sure what to think of a “boat tour of Mexico City.”

Taking a specialized tour of a city, a neighborhood or a region helps you uncover secrets that simply aren’t visible to the casual tourist.

My wife, Christy, found a food tour that included cruising on Mexico City’s canals.

Our guide, Liz Flora, met us in a coffee shop just a couple of blocks from our hotel. In addition to our boat ride, the tour from Culinary Backstreets included a visit to local market in the Xochimilco neighborhood.

Liz brought out a big slice of chocolate cake to go with our coffee — to get us in a good mood. Then she pulled out a map of Mexico City in the 1500s, when the lake was huge.

“The body of water wasn’t a regular lake,” explained Liz.

Since there was no outflow, the lake was more of a brackish marsh. Over thousands of years, though, it had layer after layer of volcanic ash, primarily from the nearby volcano, Popocatepetl. That produced some of the best soil in the world.

Over the centuries, more and more of the lake got filled in as Mexico City grew.

Today, even though the Xochimilco neighborhood is in the middle of the sprawling Mexico City metropolis, it’s still a farming community. And the market still is a farmers market.

After finishing our cake and coffee, we headed first to the market to taste many traditional Mexican dishes.

As an Alaskan who loves fresh produce, I could not help but gaze in wonder at the tomatoes that were not “barge-ripened” and ripe avocados that are not rotten.

Among the produce displays are pop-up food stands, featuring traditional Mexican fare. This includes tlacoyos, an oval-shaped corn patty with beans, cheese, spinach and other goodies.

The second stop included a taste of what Liz maintains are the best tamales in the city. These tasty bites are mostly corn. That’s when Liz shared a key concept:

“In Mexico, corn is life,” she said.

Everywhere we looked, cooks were making things with corn. We sat at a bar where women worked at pressing blue corn tortillas by hand, serving them up moments later. Corn has an outsized influence in the local dishes.

[Mexico’s beach destinations are glorious, but there’s an abundance of history and culture just a short jaunt away]

While we were busy sampling the local goods, Liz was picking up fresh ingredients for lunch from local growers.

We stopped at a stand with huge towers of mole — several different kinds including pumpkin, almond and red chile. Rather than fixing a whole dish to sample one or two kinds of mole, Liz took the end of a fork and got just a tiny taste from each pile.

Right outside the market was a group of bike rickshaws, called ciclotaxis. All three of us piled into one and the operator had to get out of the saddle and really pump to get going with me in the back!

It wasn’t long, though, before we reached a bridge over one of the canals. There was a long, flat-bottomed boat waiting for us.

There are different kinds of boats that ply the canals of Mexico City. Most are party boats, which are decorated with bright colors. There are no motors on these boats, though. The drivers move the boats with poles.

Our boat was different. It was a “working boat,” so it included a motor. Liz wanted to take us to a farm that Culinary Backstreets supports. The farm, like many others in the Xochimilco neighborhood, is built on a man-made island in the marsh called a chinampa.

Farmers built up the chinampas by placing tree trunks in a square, then filling up the space with soil from the surrounding marsh. The soil is so rich that anything will grow there.

Today, there are many chinampas that have been built up and nurtured by farmers and are reachable only by the working boats.

On arrival at the island-farm, Liz directed us to go harvest some of the greens so she could make a salad on the boat, complete with beets, greens and several herbs and spices.

The canals through the Xochimilco area of Mexico City now are a designated UNESCO world heritage site. In addition to the working farms, there is an abundance of birds and plant life, including white, gray and blue herons.

There’s also an abundance of nochebuena plants, commonly known in the U.S. as poinsettias. The plant got that name because Joel Poinsett was the U.S.’s first ambassador to Mexico. He loved the nochebuena plant and brought back several of them to his mansion in Charleston, South Carolina. The plant has become a staple for holiday decorations since then.

Heading back to shore, we pulled along several of the brightly colored party boats. The boats that were returning were full of happy partygoers, enjoying a day on the water in the middle of Mexico City.

So, “boat tour” was not on my bingo card in Mexico City. But Liz tied it all together with the farming heritage of the Xochimilco neighborhood that goes back hundreds of years. The canals of Mexico City still are a secret to most visitors. For now.