So, we'd bused it from Mazatlán to Morelia and had a great time. We rented a car in Morelia, the better to tour Pátzcuaro and its nearby lake. Late August is the off-season and we pretty much had the whole district to ourselves for the 4 days we were there. If you can find your way out 
of the Morelia city core by car, the highway to Pátzcuaro is a piece o'cake and you can get there in about an hour. The countryside is gorgeous in August: rolling hills and ancient volcanic cinder cones, all covered with the rainy season's lush green growing things. Pátzcuaro is a beautiful town, founded first occupied by the Spanish in the 16th century. Spanish Colonial architecture is everywhere, with a daily market in one of the beautiful plazas. Occasionally a folk-dancing troupe passes through.
Every small town around Lake Pátzcuaro is different from the others. 
For example, Tzintzúntzan and Ihuátzio have some very well excavated and maintained pre-Columbian plazas and platforms upon which the native tribes (generally heaped into the Purépecha tribal group) erected wooden/thatch structures for business, sport and/or ceremonial purposes. They're not exactly Aztec pyramids or Polynesian moai, but they're built similarly so if you've seen one somewhere, it gives you the idea of the construction and the size of all the others. Here are a few photos of what I'm talking about. These sites are well interpreted and easy to get to; most folks would probably tour both sites in about 2-1/2 hours but we lingered for a while longer. That friendly little white dog you see in one of the photos appeared out of nowhere and guided us around the Tzintzúntzan complex before disappearing into the town below. He was a good dog, but in the moist high altitude jungle environment he carried a few too many ticks for me to get very affectionate with him. But I digress. The bases of some of the platforms include petroglyphs embedded here and there. Behold:
So if you enjoy old-timey architecture and old rocky ruins, you'll like Lake Pátzcuaro. If more contemporary art or fine craft work is more your thing, you'll be pleased to learn that each town in the Pátzcuaro area has its own specialty. Tzintzúntzan offers reed and basket work; Santa Clara del Cobre specializes in all kinds of fine copper work; other towns offer solid wood furniture; and Tócuaro is home to a precious few artists who carve wooden dance masks. We met such a gentleman, Felipe Horta, who carved this mask, a horned devil enveloped by two snakes and topped by an eagle:
You bet we bought a Horta mask. (That one, actually.) You can read more about Mr. Horta here, and if you want to meet him in person and discuss his work
when you visit Tócuaro, he's the very pleasant looking bloke in the black T-shirt, standing next to GB.
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