Don Juan, Ass Monkey, and Other Tales
MEXICO | Wednesday, 23 July 2008 | Views [1031]
By the time the hour finally arrived for Kristen and I to leave Mexico City for Merida I was completely exhausted. She'd arrived a week earlier and I had spent the entire time showing her the sights between finishing up classes at UNAM, writing exams, giving English classes with the company, and marking exams. I can't safely say that I felt much the backpacker as I sat there sipping on a complimentary tequila and Coke in my economy class seat on the way to Yucatan, but stepping off of the plane into 80% humidity and onto a bus two hours later kicked me right into gear!
Earlier in the week Kristen had booked us into a hostel, which as anyone who followed me through Asia knows, I just don't do (RE: Tianjin), but she has used this website throughout Europe when she went two years ago and swore by it so we went ahead and put the charges on her card...however when we arrived at Nomadas, north of the zocalo or center, they had no record of us, thus confirming my seemingly irrational fears about booking hotels on the internet. We sorted things out to the point that we were in the mixed dorms a night early and got straight to enjoying the city. One of our roommates was a very sleepy Chinese guy whose name I never learned because he was either always sleeping or I wanted to rip his snoring head off. Our other roommate was Don: a laptop-toting, jeans-weilding Floridian and hopeless romantic who had turned to self-help relationship books after his failed marriage to a Filipino mail-order bride (and second wife) had gone under. He was in Merida to have his teeth done and after having had soft fillings put in went to eat nachos when the dentist gave him the go-ahead 4 days later, broke the fillings and was obliged to stay another week to have them redone. Shame. But as Don told us wearing a thick southern accent and with one authoritative finger in the air,"Trust me, oooooh, those nachos were worth it." Between talking to Don and sweating like it was in fashion, we managed to hold a conversation with a couple of Brits just come from one of Mexico's best kept beach secrets: Holbox (pronounced Hol-bosh). Just 3.5 hours and a half hour ferry ride from Cancun, these girls insisted we make the trip to this sleepy fishing town of 1800 to at least go swimming with whalesharks if nothing else but only if we could create the time. For me, it was a done deal as soon as I heard the words "island" and "whalesharks."
I'm not going to lie, it was HOT in Merida. After a sleepless night in a fanfull but windowless dorm, we decided to make a day trip out to a small yellow-coated town about two hours east of Merida called Izamal for our first day. We spent a relaxing two hours exploring the pyramids, the nunnery, and those blindingly yellow streets, but the reality literally hit me in the form of a splash of cold water soon after. There really was no better reminder that I was backpacking than climbing back onto that second-class bus and having water pour out of the air-conditioning system and onto me everytime the bus slowed, stopped or turned. It was great to see the countryside and at most times I felt like I was anywhere but Mexico, but this WAS Mexico; the bikes, wooden huts and hammocks on every sufficiently sturdy post took me to Laos; the motorcycles transporting entire families had me in Vietnam; the ornate balconies encroached by lush shrubbery got me thinking about Sri Lanka; and the poorly translated signs, "Please bring one owns" = "Did you forget something?" brought me back to China. Then I'd see a giant Coca-Cola advertisement pasted on the wall of a village store or the side of a house or hear a cat-call and there I was, back in Mexico.
The heat was bad in Merida, and what was worse were the mosquitoes - yes, it was back to swatting bugs away from my butt and living a DEET-filled existence since my Jessica-repellent is travelling the quiet roads of Indonesia as we speak. We were up the next day bright and early, well, more early than bright, to catch a bus out to Chichen Itza - and it was a good thing we were up so early. The pyramids were amazing, just as you see them in the pictures, but by the time we were on our way out at 11:00am, we noticed that the grand plaza was packed and people were flooding the gates by the busload from Tulum, Cancun and Merida. When I noticed a Chinese couple, and another 40 behind them, I naturally looked for a flag and...phew! There it was - at least they were assured not to get lost in the Yucatecan jungle OR burnt -there were of course a plethora of wide-rimmed hats and decorative umbrellas.
For our final day in Merida, we decided to visit the not-so-frequented ruins of Uxmal, about and hour and a half south of the city. We caught the 6am bus, accompanied by Don this time around and pretty much had the place to ourselves. There's really no way to do the site justice using words, but let's just say we spent 3 hours there and I took over 200 pictures (I know, I tend to do this regardless but they were all beautiful). In a way, Uxmal reminded me of Angkor Wat - we would reach the top of some building or pyramid and we'd see another set of buildings hidden in the jungle, or we'd turn a corner and there was a discreet shrine. Don was feeling adventurous and insisted on making a trip into the bushes. Sure enough we found a small structure but just as soon as we stopped the mosquitoes wrestled Kristen into a fit of hysteria and she went a'runnin'! Fully recovered from the attack, Kristen, Don and I made for the main path once again and were back in Merida one combi ride later.
Following a fierce downpour, a group of us went for dinner at a cool restaurant covered with "collections" of cigar boxes, birdcages, and bikes and on the top floor was a colouful 3-D mural, at least the place had some character! Don decided he was Mayan in another lifetime and spent nearly an hour savouring every bite of his Pollo Pibil. Kristen was feeling tired and retreated to the hostel while the rest of us took the party on to the Mayan Pub which was neither "Mayan" nor much of a "pub" unless you consider A beer on tap a pub. Then, hippie Irish-Brit living in Scotland Mark suggested we go to this clandestine Communist bar that was not all that partial to girls entering but played live reggae so off we went. We were greeted at the door by the apparent owner, an old, Confucian beard-wearing but otherwise Mao-ed out Mexican in his plain white button-up shirt and matching loose pants plus green cloth shoes. Between his appearance and gestures, such as only raising his arms when absolutely necessary, the rest of the time they hung limply at his sides, I would've easily mistaken him to be Chinese if I hadn't asked a local who sat with us later. He gestured for us to enter with a lazy swipe of his hand in a random direction which led us to the "bar" run by an extremely baked young guy.
"What is there?"
"Beer, beer...and vodka," he muttered slowly lifting his head to look at the bar that was not then returned to us.
In a few words, he was out of it! We sat in a courtyard plastered with posters and memorabilia of Communist heroes and made polite conversation with a local who had been kicked out of his seat in order to accomodate our group, so we invited him to come back of course. The band was great, the drinks cheap, the company amusing, all in all a good night.
The next morning, we hopped on a bus headed for Tulum, just a four hour drive from Merida. Bye bye Yucatan, hello Quintana Roo. We arrived in stinking hot Tulum early in the afternoon and went straight to Papaya Playa where we'd already booked ourselves a single bed cabin on the beach. The shorty at the front desk gave checked us in and we headed cabin-wards. The cabins, connected by sandy paths and dotted along a 500m stretch of beach, consisted of branches of wood for walls simply placed side-by-side and secured by a cement floor and a thin palm leaf roof. We swung the makeshift door of cabin #53 open and set about "cleaning" the place (ie. covering the plastic table, already covered in a thick layer of bird crap, with the blanket from the bed - in that heat we certainly wouldn't be needing it). That first night was all about getting settled...but even the margaritas didn't help me sleep much. The heat was unbelievable - even with a sea breeze we were in a constant state of sweating which meant sleeping in intervals until your body literally wakes you up because it can't breath.
For our first day in Tulum we decided to rent bikes since the pyramids were only a couple of kilometres away and this seemed the "healthy" thing to do. Again, the setting of this archaelogical zone was stunning but the mass of tourists coming from Cancun and Valla Dolid wasn't so delicious and it made my tastebuds for romanticism and solitude want to gag. Soon we were back on the bikes and on our way into town (=street) via the highway from Cancun. Destination: El Pequeño Buenos Aires for empanadas where we spent half and hour eating and an easy 2 hours talking to one very informative and conveniently easy-on.the-eyes waiter. We were completely done with the bikes by the time we arrived back at the hostel, and so were our asses, but since we had them for the day we decided to go for Thai-fusion food and cocktails further down the beach for dinner. It seemed a pretty normal day...but that night, it rained. And the wind picked up.
So Kristen has this tendency to take things to the next level, worry-wise. For example:
Mosquito bite = West Nile (Merida)
Fireworks at night = Zapatista attack (San Cristobal)
Checkpoint = robbery (Palenque)
Hotel mattresses = bedbugs (Merida)
So obviously, rain = flood and wind = hurricane. Midnight arrives that night and I hear some rustling. Initially I thought, "Well, Kristen must've gotten hungry and she's eating something." Then I feel her sit on the bed and she shakes me a bit and says, " Katie, there's something wrong." I was perturbed by this statement and wondered if she wasn't feeling well or something like that. "What?" "Well, I think there's going to be a hurricane." "Kristen, it's the rainy season, it rains and it rains hard. And we're on the ocean, so the wind is really strong. Don't worry." I reassured her some more and went back to sleep. But I soon woke up to the sound of more bustling of plastic bags and so I sat up and I noticed that Kristen was rearranging things in the cabin. I asked her what she was doing and it turns out that she was so freaked out that we were riding ontop of a hurricane that she was hurridly packing her bag! So I asked her, "Kristen, where are you going to go even if there is a hurricane?" "I don't know, anywhere but this cabin. What if we have to run??" "With 20 kilos? I'll be damned if I'm running away from a hurricane with my towel and a pile of books on my back...and seriously, where are you going to go?" But she seemed determined to get everything packed in the case that she should feel the need to evacuate in the eye of a storm which would clearly be safer than staying inside of our cement-floor cabin. In the meantime I texted Saul to see if he'd seen anything on the news...nope. But this wasn't reassurance enough and Kristen eventually worried herself into a coma-type sleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I opened the door to our cabin, the wind still strong, and it was nothing but clear blue skies for miles. I looked at Kristen's bag sitting there on the chair all packed and ready to go and just started laughing - then waited eagerly for her to wake up so that she would see the state of all things around us and laugh with me. It was The Hurricane That Never Was.
We ditched the bikes this time, took the advice of the waiter that we'd talked to the day before and visited a couple of cenotes on our own. The first one we went to was called the Gran Cenote - an impressive cavern of fresh water, stalactites, stalagmites, turtles, and fish. The Yucatan Pennisula is littered with cenotes which were apparently formed like so: a meteor hit this part of the planet 65 million years ago leaving a pockmark in its place measuring an astounding 284km in diameter. A few million years later, cracks began forming underneath the limestone surface of the massive crater, fissures followed, and rainwater began to fill them. Eventually, the thin layer of earth between the water-filled fissures and the fresh air above crumbled "revealing the intricate vascular system of underground rivers and cenotes that lay beneath"...some parts of the pools are so deep that one-tank diving is a common activity but snorkelling is equally as entertaining if you're not so much into dark corners. The other cenote that we visited was called Casa Cenote. We had the combi drop us off on the highway about 10 minutes from Tulum and walked down a long sandy road flanked by bush on one side and beach houses and B&Bs on the other for 20 minutes until we spotted a modest looking swamp and a tent next to it. What was unique about Casa Cenote was that it connected to a river which led to the ocean so it is a saltwater-freshwater cenote and, as the Cenote Guard told me, for a long time this cenote was home to two manatees who fled about 3 years ago as the place gained popularity. Because it was connected to the sea there were only a handful of fish to be found, so we hopped back out pretty soon after arriving and talked to the Guard (well, he collected money from visitors) for a good chunk of time just to make the trip worthwhile. On the way back, we ended up catching a ride by a beer-sucking local on his way into town in his air-conditioned Explorer so we gave him the thumbs up when he silently asked us if we wanted a ride through the car window and before long we were back at San Francisco's Supermarket and 15 pesos the richer.
After feeling so utterly helpless in China for not being able to communicate myself, I've been talking to anyone who will respond to me here - and this is the most practice I think I've had all year! There are, as we know, always stories to be told and information to be found. For instance, what's the real price for market items and not the Gringo price? I think that the people here really appreciate the effort anyhow - anyone who's been to China will remember how similar to salvation it is to hear one precious word in a language that you recognize! But sometimes, you end up wishing you'd never started the conversation...
When we returned to the cabins, I realized that I'd left my phone to be charged at the front desk, since we were generally without electricity (save for a single lightbulb in the cabaña which was only switched on between 7:30 and 10:00pm). I asked Shorty for my phone and we got into polite conversation about Canada and Mexico, etc. However, when his comments turned into things like, "So, are you married?" and "You're beautiful and precious, very precious" I made a verbal run for it making all sorts of excuses for why I had to go. But the truth was, it was just back to the log on the beach infront of our cabin to join Kristen for some drinks for San Francisco's and I have to say, though it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, rum and coke in a can is quite revolting.
The next day, I packed up (you might recall that Kristen had been packed for two days already) and just as quickly as we'd arrived, we were gone. To Holbox! (Pronounced Hol-bosh).
It was a stuffy 4-hour ride to the seaside town of Chiquilà in a bus that sported out-of-service air-conditioning machines and picked up villagers and their baskets of food along the way. From Chiquilà we then took a tiny passenger-only ferry over to Holbox where a fleet of "taxi" golf carts awaited us at the land end of the pier. We paid the 10 pesos to have a golf cart drive us 500m down the sandy main strip and into town (rowshacks and an unassuming church facing a plaza, host to a run-down basketball court). It was almost 5pm by the time we arrived but we managed to locate a central and well-kept hotel run by nice family - and it had air-conditioning. Holbox is a sleeeeeepy beach town whose sprawl reaches maybe 30 blocks and is home to under 2000 residents. Its roads are sandy and only frequented by golf carts, bicycles, the occasional motorcycle and of course good old fashioned flip-flops: life is all but rushed. At least here we had a chance at sleeping since golf carts don't have horns and we were surrounded by four sturdy walls should a hurricane swallow the island up.
Early the next morning we were awoken by a short dude with a funky toe - initially I thought, "Shark bite? Accident?" but a closer examination later indicated to me that it was nothing more than a boring deformity, no tale to tell, just that he should have had two pinky toes and now he just has one giant fused one with two heads. He summoned us to the dock 200m away for our 7am departure - right, we had booked a whalesharks tour last night...the 10 of us sat back and enjoyed the hour journey from Holbox in the Gulf of Mexico, past the Yucatàn Peninsula, and out into the middle of the Carribean from where there was no sign of life or land. Until a whaleshark started nosing its way towards us! Two at a time (plus our guide) we jumped into the sea and snorkelled with the whaleshark, usually following it, just like the hundreds of small fish below it, for a few minutes until it changed direction or swam too fast. It was truly an amazing experience - the whalesharks were enormous, but friendly and curious above all, and my favourite part was that the entire tour was really controlled. An environmental guard boat even came out to check that there were only so many tour boats, each with a maximum of 10 passengers, everyone had snorkels, etc. The whole point is that the touring will only go on so long as the whalesharks stay in this region and if they're scared out then the area would lose one of its defining sea-creature features and a valuable market. We stopped to snorkel in the reefs closer to Cancun on the way back, had lunch on the boat, the whole thing was extremely well-organized and, I'm happy to report, worth every single peso. The rest of the day and most of the next was spent relaxing on the beach (i.e. sitting on a couple of beachfront hotel chairs without paying), taking pictures, eating, and sweating. Thus concluded our trip to Holbox and the entire of the Yucatàn Peninsula. So it was from Chiquilà to Cancun and then to Villa Hermosa on the overnight bus.
There were 24 blissful hours of air-conditioning but it was, in general, a restless night. The constant background noise switched from Spanish-dubbed movies to the hum of the jungle: Palenque. We decided not to stay in the town proper of Palenque but in the small cabin-filled community, and backpacker hot-spot, of El Panchán. Having not booked ahead, we were lucky to find a couple of beds at Margarita & Ed's for just $20/cabin and the cabins were not only clean but totally Jessica-friendly - by this I mean literally mosquito-net covered, they're pulled tight over every window and even across the roof!
So El Panchán is simply a collection of 4 or 5 guesthouses which don't offer houses to anyone, just cabañas, campsites, and a place to sling your hammock if you like. Although the place is well-known to Palenque residents, the only sure sign of its existence from the road is a post with a string of hanging wooden name plates. The man who started it all? Don Moises. Don Moises, a man now well into his 80's, is a knowledgeable local who was among the first to discover Palenque's main draw: the pyramids of Palenque. He was contracted by the team of archaeologists who arrived soon after its initial discovery to help them understand the culture of this ancient civilization and its people, and with the money he received after completing his work on Palenque's revival, Don Moises bought a piece of land, built a cabin, and set out to live happily ever after. When a couple of inquisitive backpacker's wandered up the dirt road to his house and saw the hammocks outside of his house, they stayed for a while. A couple of cabins and a lot more backpackers later and the rest is history.
Margarita & Ed were also among one of the first to set up a guesthouse in El Panchán when Margarita and her American birdwatcher husband moved into town seeking jungle property because, no surprises here, the birdwatcher wanted desperately to birdwatch and nothing else. They too have received many off-the-beaten-path backpackers over the years and business has essentially boomed. The nice thing is, however, that Margarita's prices haven't exploded nor has El Panchàn lost its sense of seclusion. There are still only 4 or 5 guesthouse groups, a couple of restaurants, but trust me, it's still jungle enough that the bugs are aplenty!
We grabbed our packs and followed a series of wooden signs on short posts reading "Recepción" which led us right into Margarita's kitchen.
Two of Margarita's four children were visiting here at this time, plus one grandchild, 8-year-old Gahdiel. Omar, the rap-loving, gun-toting, semi-Texan baby of the family and uncle to Gahdiel, was kind enough to explain to us how it worked: "Water's there if you want it...it's free...the room'll be ready in an hour or so...I've never been to _________ but here's a guy who gives tours..." Our Jessica-friendly cabaña was perfect. Omar suggested to us that we drop by a restaurant nearby called Don Muchos where the servings were Jurassic -size portions and the food delish. I have never seen a calzone so freakin' big before in my life, but I've also never enjoyed so much a day later!
We went to Palenque (the ruins) the next morning which were amazing but unfortunately, the hundreds of vendors lining every path and blocking every bridge and view made it difficult to imagine the antiquity and romance of the site at its fullest. But it was, like I said, a unique site for a civilization; it's where flat Mexico meets mountainous Mexico, where Mexico starts spitting freshwater off of new heights and into shallow opaque pools. The setting was nothing short of breath-taking, and the outrageously loud sound of howler monkeys in the morning screaming from somewhere in the misty mountains was something else, but Uxmal still had my archaeologically-obsessed heart in it's lonely hands.
Later that evening, Omar invited us to join him and his nephew for a cool down at some river so we went. I kind of expected this river to be something quiet and local...it was local, but it seems some hotel claimed this bend in the river and so we had to pay a small entrance fee. Typical music blared from some unknown destination, Mexican parents sat on the rocky enbankment watching their kids slip and slide on the mossy rocks below them in the water, and yet others swam across the river back and forth...in their jeans? Okay. We had a great time cooling off, but I did make the mistake of lending my snorkel to Gahdiel which kept us there for over 3 hours. In the meantime, Omar got talking to us about some of his tales, most of which had to do with how he is the hard one in the family who does all the spanking and hitting, others were to do with his job - he wouldn't tell us more than "let's just say, I've got a price on my head." None of them, however, had what I suppose was the desired effect of impressing us and making him look like a REAL man. When Gahdiel finally became cold enough that he had to get out, we headed back to El Panchán where we met up with Omar and his nephew for dinner at Don Muchos again - it was that good.
By the time we arrived at Don Muchos, the place was packed and there wasn't a table going to be available for another hour or so...things were looking grim (imagine one starving 8-year-old in your vicinity and me) when a man who Omar had been talking to invited us to sit with him. This was how we ended up meeting Jonny Duracell, as I like to call him. The Jonny part's his, the Duracell part's mine - he don't stop! Canadian Jonny, a middle-aged high school teacher of history and sociology AND an intense tree-hugging vegan más astrology nut who attaches the word "beautiful" to just about everything that comes out of his mouth and meditates like nobody's business, had freshly arrived from Guatemala so of course we got talking, but this conversation couldn't begin until he knew my sign. Turns out we're both Scorpios, which explained the passion spewing out of us as soon as we got talking, and this apparently meant that I had to go visit every place that had water in Guatemala (Scorpios also fall under the water sign). It was a long, overwhelming converstaion, but it was seriously refreshing to run into someone who was as passionate about Mexico and life in general as me - he just got it.
Early the next morning, we took off with 8 other girls on a day trip close to the Guatemalan border but specifically to the archaeological zones of Yaxchilan and Bonampak: 3 Spaniards, 3 Frenchies, 2 Dutch, 2 Canadians, and 1 fearless Mexican driver. Yep, the drive there officially qualifies as the second most death-defying ride of my life (next to the one to LiJiang for anyone who might recall our fearful overnighter through the hills on a sleeper bus driven by a man with a serious death wish?), but I can say this much - the guy was in control despite his need to spend approximately 70% of the time driving on the other side of the road. Once I got my head around the "thrill" factor, I could better see what exactly we were driving through and here are some of the mental snapshots I took along the way:
* Zapatista pride: enormous wooden placards at regular intervals, all wearing grandiose portrait of Emiliano Zapata
* young girl, maybe 3 or 4, walking along a long stretch of road at 8am and relatively far from any village in either direction - barefoot and alone, save for a thick woolly blanket. I was reminded that I was in one of the poorest states of Mexico if not the poorest
* kids, kids, and babies. And the weird thing was, alot of them, mostly toddlers, just walked along the highway as trucks and combis sped by and they hardly blinked. Where were they going?
* baby slung to his mother's bike while she talked to a neighbour wearing the world's smallest cowboy hat, I'm sure of it
* Grandma walking uphill from the village to the road, heavy bag in hand and a flock of turkeys and chickens in tow!
There were more but there always will be. So this was the fantastic part about the tour - it wasn't a tour. There was nothing tour about it. It was basically a ride to an otherwise dangerous and difficult part of the country since it's almost on the border and rarely sees public combis (and good luck trying to pick out the public ones from the more frequent tour colectivos) and once there, we were left to do our own thing, none of this flag-following business.
Yaxchilan: this deserted civilization sits on the banks of the river that now separates Mexico from Guatemala and one of my favourite things about it, apart from hour-long boat ride up the river in order to reach the site, is that there have been very few restoration efforts made. The place is organized with information plaques at each building and the pyramids well-taken care of, but, for instance, the first building that you encounter and main entrance to the plaza requires that you feel your way through an unlit labyrinth screaming with bats, stinking of their waste, and teeming with 10-inch-long spiders which can only be seen if you're lucky enough to have a light on you. Even though the plaza grass has been trimmed, the rest of the buildings are covered in green and red moss and somewhat hidden by the thick, overgrown jungle. On top of all this, monkeys swing from tree to tree, nature and all of the creepy crawlies that it has to offer us are abundant, holy MOSQUITOES...in a place that was abandoned over a thousand years ago, it amazes me that it can still be so full of life. And it was here that I heard one of the most spine-chilling noises I've ever heard - and I'm still unsure of what it was that made it. I know that they're bugs, but by the thousands, they emit this off-tune buzzing/humming noise that reminds me of the most lonely moment you could imagine in the most secluded part of the deepest jungle in the most unreachable place on earth. I don't know if I've ever heard it before and I don't know if I'll hear it anywhere else, but it definitely added to the ambience of Yaxchilan.
Bonampak, our next destination, is situated in the Lacandon Biosphere Reserve of Chiapas. This settlement was significantly smaller than Yaxchilan and generally less impressive but the frescoes here were unreal and told of rituals and history. Some indicated that marriages were arranged between the people of Yaxchilan and Bonampak, others of trade and process, but all were perfectly preserved and brought to life with blues and reds and greens. Somehow the ride back wasn't so freaky. We finished up our visit to Palenque with G&Ts and tortellini - classic Mexican dish - and were off to San Cristobal de las Casas the next morning.
At the end of 5 hours, we were 6000 feet higher, surrounded by Hotmail-background blue skies, pine trees, and our water bottles had taken on a new shape entirely. We'd arranged to meet Jonny Duracell at a hostel named Tana Inti - he hadn't known the direction, therefore we didn't, and so there was little in the way of finding it. But we trusted that we'd locate it with a bit of taxi-driver asking and so we flatly turned down the crowd of guest-recruiters outside of the bus station and walked into town. After an hour of wandering and some 10 "I don't know"s we just went to the closest place to the zocalo and decided that we'd go on a proper search later. The hostel we stayed at was called Hostal Plaza Central, and I'm just going to go ahead and say it now, don't stay there! They'll be waiting outside of the OCC bus terminal with flyers (that they will later request back from you because they reuse them) and just say NO. I'm just going to get this out of the way...apart from the central location, the 24-hour hot water is more like 24-minutes OR 3-showers worth, the beds are filthy, the computers are out-of-service (unless one of the employees is bored), they charge you if you want to leave your luggage with them after check-out, and in addition to all this, they wouldn't return our cash when we told them 3 hours after paying in advance that we only wanted to stay 3 nights not 4! If you can avoid it, pay a couple dollars more and stay somewhere else, no good.
Okay, onwards and upwards. We did eventually find Tana Inti, but no Jonny, as he warned us though, he would find us if it was meant to be. Instead we discovered a great wine and tapas place called La Viña de Bacco and stayed there for two hours - in which time Jonny did indeed walk past us! All in all, it was a good start to our stay in San Cristobal - I'm not sure it gets much better than olives, blue cheese, serrano ham, and $2 glasses of red import (which subsequently helped me to get through a pretty chilly night in our attic room).
The next day was all about museums and eating. Kristen has been dying to have coffee and considering that we were in coffee central, it seemed a good idea to hit up the coffee museum in the morning where we could pick up some hot brekkie at the same time. Not far from the coffee museum was our next stop: Na Bolom (meaning Jaguar House in Tzotzil, a language spoken in the Lacandon jungle). It was home to a couple of Swiss anthropologists (and one a photographer also) during the earlier part of the 20th century. They did an extensive amount of research on the surrounding hill tribes and cultures and the documentation is incredible. They were lucky enough to be among the first outsiders to integrate themselves with some of the indigenous cultures and their photos portray something real. The whole exhibit, including work from other local artists, was amazing and all non-profit!
Next we headed north for a kilometer through the wooden shack outskirts of San Cristobal to the Museum of Mayan Medicine where at the end of the 4-room exhibit we learned watched a graphic video on the birthing process and rituals of the indigenous hill tribes. Strange nevertheless informative, and just a half hour later we were back on the street. We faffed around during the afternoon...but the falafels we had for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant are worth mentioning, wow. And never had green lemonade before either, both were delicious though! Like I said, we faffed about for most of the afternoon until we went to Yik Cafe to meet up with Jonny since we'd planned on joining him and his hippy crew back at Tana Inti for a communal dinner. When he didn't show however, we took dinner into our own hands and retreated back to that same wine and tapas hole-in-the-wall where we'd enjoyed ourselves so much the night before, plus, should Jonny wander by like he had the day before, then he should be able to find us. Even though I'm not much one for the whole destiny spiel but I do think the succession of events that evening, beginning with being stood up by Jonny, led us into an even better night than we might've had at Tana Inti. And had I not ordered a third glass of wine then Big Omar (I have to say, I've never known an Omar in my life, and all of sudden I knew 3 in two days - just wait, there is a third...) wouldn't have had a chance to invite us to play dominoes with him and his 3 friends: brothers Oscar and Adrian (both doctors of the same speciality) and cousin to the brothers, Little Omar, Omarcito. All were friends in highschool, all were American-Mexicans living in Texas, and all were 30 and still single. Curious.
As I swished the last drops of a Chilean variety around my mouth, I picked up my empty glass and pondered that age old phrase "timing is everything" - having now joined the Omars and the brothers at their table with their wine, I wouldn't be without a full glass. I suspect that Big Omar was already pretty into the wine, and trust me, the wine was well into him, because he warned us that he was a lightweight. I'm not sure why he decided to tell us this but okay. The place quickly darkened as the sun went down and took on a whole new persona, very Casa Babylon. Big Omar swooned between his glass, the bottle, and the table, we laughed at him, the brothers bickered some, and Kristen, though on drunken par with them, managed to kick their asses at a game she'd never played before. I got tired of sitting and watching the game and made a break for the bathroom but go tangled in a conversation with two American girls living in San Cristobal instead. One worked at the University but had been here for 7 years after falling in love with an Italian, getting pregnant, and breaking up with the Italian who was "a great father, but a sucky boyfriend." She had just sent her 3-year-old little girl with her blond curls to Italy for hte first time alone to see her dad and was trying to distract herself. The other girl was teaching English and was halfway through writing her first book, so we exchanged book recommendations. Kristen decided at some point that she needed to go pass out in our attic room so she left, and I followed after closing. It was a rude and thirsty awakening the next morning.
So we'd had some payment issues, like I mentioned earlier, but I won't go into it much. Let's just say that we had been shuffled between people and told that we needed to talk to some guy who conveniently was never there when we were...and in the end those three hours between paying for our room and requesting one night's pay back turned into three days and it looked pretty unlikely that we'd get our money back. Anyways, we spent the morning waiting for this nameless man who eventually turned up and told us that all he could do was hope that someone would take our esact room (out of 30) tomorrow night otherwise we would not be returned our money. Whatever. We wanted to get out this funk we'd been left in after spending the morning waiting on someone and to no avail, and made way for the hills.
Our first stop was a town called Zinacantán, a tiny village whose church and women wearing traditional garb are all that there is to draw a crowd. There is a small market that sells everything from cheap strainers to corn to school shoes and every women and girl here wears a beautiful ensemble of black shawls embroidered with royal blue yarn over fur skirts and babies strapped to their backs. We only spent a half hour here taking pictures and visiting the church, where I met 9-year-old Juan who loved writing so much that he snatched the ticket pad from his father when he saw us entering and wrote down our names, nationality, and the date then returned the pad to his father.
We took a taxi to the neighboring town of San Juan Chamula where we had to get dropped off a bit above the town center because a parade was on its way up the main artery that leads to its famous church. Turns out, we'd arrived on none other than El Día de San Cristobál hence the celebration. Similarly, the women here wear fur skirts, but their blouses are instead made of silk and are colourful. The men wear a distinctive white fur throwover that extends down the their knees and is worn with a leather belt at the waist. How they don't get overheated, I don't know...they walked up the road past us tooting horns and playing music from the backs of the trucks AND making sure no one took photos, even coming up to Kristen and pushing her camera downwards. When the parade had passed we walked beneath the hundreds of striped umbrellas shading stall after stall in the plaza before the church. We weren't aware that we needed entrance tickets, so just as we turned around to go buy them, rejected from the church by its vigilantee, we saw who else but Jonny! We sat and talked with him for a while, but I found myself rather caught up in the swarms of kids running around us - unfortunately they've learned to ask tourists for "un peso...un peso..." wearing a pout and all the while saying it with this sad downwards tone, others even ask you for the food right out of your mouth! Yet others stick to you like glue and just ask you to "buy it...buy it..." with that same sad tone. "No niño, I already have one." "Buy another..." I realize that these kids need to eat but they also need to laugh, so when Roberto and his little toddler brother Juan (yep, Juan is the name of about every other kid in this area) came up to us and asked Kristen for her water bottle, I asked Juan about the toy motorcycle that he had in his hand, this led to tickling, which led to a game of hide-and-seek, me being the scary kid-eating monster of course. And 10 minutes later they were off holding their hands up to newly arrived tourists and putting on the pout once more. When we finally did make in the church, renowned for being host to mixed religions, we were stunned. Barely lit, the space was full of families chanting and praying on their knees - no pews - and the floor was covered in pine needles from the surrounding hills and candles, candles, candles which provided the church with its only source of light. It seemed more like a place where indigenous ritual was being held, but there were, infact, crosses bearing Jesus on them at the head of the church and shrines flanking its sides. It was incredible, never seen anything like it before.
We weren't that keen on making a "night" of it, especially since we hadn't racked up too many hours of sleep since arriving in the cooler heights of San Cristobál so we took it easy and the next day was that much easier. I went market crazy buying these gorgeous leather bags for anyone and everyone, very typical of the area, and a few bits and pieces. We saw a few more sights around town then met up with Jonny for a few glasses of wine and an in-depth chat (he doesn't do superficial) before we got on the overnighter to Puerto Escondido that evening. It was an insanely long night, considering that I was awake for every single one of the 13 hours it took to descend from the high hills of San Cristobál along windy roads at 60km an hour (take my word for it, it's way too fast to be going around sharp curves) until we reached the coast. But by then I was too excited to sleep!
Precious Puerto was a'waiting us just as it always is - hot, sunny, sleepy, quiet...we loaded into a taxi and took ourselves home. On with the fuses, the air-conditioning, the bathing suits, and into the pool! Since we arrived, it's been easy going, just spent swimming, drinking at the beach, watching the sky-high waves at Zicatela, meeting the neighbors, sorting out domestic details...ah, and then there was the fight with the old dude at the 69.The 69 is a simple store that has internet service and is the only place that offers these services along the entire stretch of Benito Juarez in the Rinconada. For this reason, apparently its owner doesn't have to be nice. He doesn't have a great reputation, is the kind who doesn't generally smile or respond to "good morning"s or "good afternoon"s but we've never had any issues before. Whenever the family's been down here, the 69 is where we go to buy random groceries and use the net, so of course, when Kristen and I were here we would be going to the 69 regularly with it being the closest place. A couple of days ago, we left after using the computers and about 200m down the road, we noticed the 50-somethings man huffing and puffing his way towards us and yelling something. When he reached us he muttered something about "virus" and "yesterday" so we humored him and followed him back to the store to see what was up. When we got back this is what happened:
"Okay, so what's the problem?"
"There's like a million screens when I open up Explorer. You put a virus on my computer."
"What? Why would I put a virus on your computer? I just used Hotmail and Facebook."
"Yeah, but it happened yesterday too. After you left, a million screens come up when I open Explorer." Hence the reason he had been hovering over us while we used his computers that afternoon. Vigilantee.
"Well, if there is a virus, I didn't do it on purpose, sir. I haven't had any problems anywhere else I've been, in San Cristobál, in Tulum, in Mérida..."
"Yes but yesterday and today, well..."
Then Kristen pipes up and says, "What do you mean? Are you saying that she put the virus on your computer on purpose??"
"Well..." Meaning yes.
"Señor, why would I want to put a virus on your computer? Seriously?" But after this experience, why not?
"Well, I don't know. But yesterday..." he runs inside and reappears dragging the old computer with him, "see, this cost me $300 yesterday and now, today you do the same thing."
"This is not my fault! How could I possibly know if there was a virus!"
He goes back inside with the old computer, I guess trying to guilt me into paying him the $300 which he didn't need to pay in the first place because he probably could've just fixed the damn thing if he'd gone to the right person. So that was it: he accused me of sabotaging his internet business and tried to scam me into paying for something that was not my fault.
I left, hopping mad, and vowed never to return there. Kristen did go back, however, for an emergency Skype call and some cranberry juice but similarly returned seething with rage passed on by this (as I later learned) alcoholic, self-admitted crazy wife-beater who won't crack a smile to save his life. Ass Monkey strikes again...
So we've got a few more days of beach bliss ahead of us and then it's on to Oaxaca - no expectations this time, we're just in it for the joy for travelling! Hope this finds you all well and sucking on a gin'n'tonic with the summer in full swing hopefully :)
Love Katie
