This was a very intense day, and again it’s late, so I will try to resume this with dignity.
This morning, we arrived at San Cristóbal de las Casas at 8 in the morning. The nightbus was much less terrible than expected and we all (some of us with a little help from drugs) slept well and didn’t suffer. We stopped a few times, there were curves and narrow streets but there were no robberies nor controls by the police and the seats were big and comfy.
San Cristóbal is a small city in the state of Chiapas at 1200 meters with a rather cool mountainish climate.
We checked into our hostel and had breakfast there: tortillas with eggs and frijoles. The hostel was a very cool and relaxed place with a beautiful garden with flowers and plants. We stayed there for another hour, painting and writing and watching a Kolibri in the garden. We had met a tourguide in the morning and bought a tour to some indigenous villages close to the city. They came to pick is up at 11.
Unfortunately, the tour turned out to be the typical error you make when you’re tired and have little time to organize. For 500 pesos each, they first took us to the workshop of some indigenous women to watch them fabricate (and of course buy) their typical clothing and textile products. The stuff was really amazing and beautiful indeed, but getting draged to places to buy is not the way of tourism any of us likes.
Our next stop was the village of Zinacantán where we basically visited the church of San Lorenzo which was very nice. All over the square, the villagers were walking around in their typical dresses and we could hear quite a lot of Tzotzil, their indigenous language. None of this being a theatre for tourists but just the way things are in the village. Interesting to see was that only the women wore the traditional dresses, while the men were dressed occidentally. Our drivers explained that the women were more engaged in preserving the culture, and in general did basically everything to maintain the family, working twice as much as the men and also doing the household.
Our next stop was the village of the Chamulines – San Juan de Chamula. The main attraction of this village is its church.
Everyone who knows me, knows that I am not a big fan of churches or religion. But what I saw in that church was something entirely different from anything I had ever seen before. Photos were strictly forbidden out of respect for the place (a very good idea), so I will try to briefly explain what I saw and felt.
The ceiling of the church was decorated with large, colorful pieces of textile. The stone floor was covered with fresh pine tree needles that produced a delicious smell. There were something like 25 little chapels on each lateral side for different saints. In front of these altars, there were thousands of candles on long tables. On the end of the church, there was the big altar with a decorated chorus and more candles and flowers.
On the floor, there were parts free from pine needles where very thin candles in different colors were built up in lines and lighted, some of them in bundles of 5 or 10, so it seemed like a real fire. Around these little “fire places” people were sitting on the floor doing their rituals. As a half Catholic, half Mayan church, rituals were fitted into the setting of Christian saints and decoration. Families were showering the candles with Softdrinks, passing little bags all over the body of people sitting in the circle, dead chickens and eggs were involved to soak up bad energies and then be broken apart.
We were told afterwards that people originally used resine instead of wax candles and cane sugar instead of Coke but that the principle of the chicken and the egg is still the same.
Where rituals had taken place, colorful lakes of cold wax were sticking to the floor and eventually removed by a guy with a spatula and covered with pine again.
Despite all the respect and the holy aspect of the place, people were also talking, eating, drinking, playing on their phones, children playing with the pine needles. It almost looked like a Sunday park Picknick but in a very special setting.
It is difficult to express all this in words but this was one of the few occasions where I saw something very special and very new and unique.
It was much later this evening, when we found out that this village is also a very dangerous and powerful tribe, that is involved in all kind of mafia activities and for example sells their children. Maybe this was the reason why we felt a bad energy outside of the church on the square, where people were nastier than normally and lots of waste was laying around on the floor.
Our plan had been to go to the village of Zapatistas afterwards but our guides/drivers refused to take us there. At first they said they had never been there, then they said it was very very dangerous, then one of them had been kidnapped and hold prisoner there for one week with other tourists. It was obvious that all these were lies, but it was also obvious that they really didn’t want to go there. So we didn’t, which is maybe okay too.
Our last stop of the tour was as surreal as the rest of the day. After half an hour of (stupid and permanent) talking of the driver, we arrived at the Caves of Rancho Nuevo. The caves themselves were the main attraction of the place, but the surroundings were a weird attraction park with horse riding, zip lines and slides. We entered the caves and were assigned a little girl as a tourguide (without asking for it). Her tour consisted of pointing out rock formations in the cave and singing a little sentence to them. It was very funny but extremely weird. She sang things like: “up there we can see a monkey that sais Oh. If you don’t know why he said oh, that because he ate to much coconuts.” “Up there we can see a dragon with no teeth. If you can’t see the teeth that’s because he ate the tail of a mermaid.” Up there we can see a mermaid sitting on the rock. If you can’t see her tail, that’s because the dragon with no teeth back there ate it”. “Up there we can see a coconut palm tree. If you can’t see the coconuts that’s because the monkey that said oh ate them all”… And so on … For over 20 minutes and 500 meters into the cave. She did the singing without any sign of emotion, always with the same melody and very quickly pointing out one figure after another while we moved on into the cave. A very strange and funny spectacle indeed.
After this (and tipping her), we entered a smaller part of the cave which had not been prepared with stairs and lights, so we had to wear helmets and torches. The guide was a little older this time and told us some details about the materials of the cave (white marble, yellow marble, iron…). In his monotonous voice you could still hear some of the melody and there was no doubt he had also started his career as a guide when he was 6 years old in the first part of the cave. After the girl’s performance, we lost any interest in the actual facts about the cave, like it’s longitude of 14 kilometers and depth of over 50m.
As the guides had absolutely refused to take us to the Zapatistas, we returned to San Cristóbal after this and got out of the car hungry, at the market. Another authentic Mexican market with toys, fruit, vegetable, insects, corn, flowers… We found something to eat in a little “restaurant” close to he market.
After this late lunch, we walked around the city centre for a little longer and visited the artesanal market before meeting a friend of Esmeralda. We had a drink in a bar with him and then he took us a around the center for a bit, explaining things about the city, about the state of Chiapas, about corruption, about Narcos, about robbery, about kidnapping, about the police, about the Zapatistas, about drugs, about the Mafias, about the tribes and their languages and about Mexico in general.
We ended up in a Bar-Restaurant where we had more drinks and I ate a delicious omelette with vegetables, cheese, potato and frijoles and returned home at 11:30 – with still no fixed plan for tomorrow and exhausted from an intense and surreal and very good day.
