Chiapas, the bliss of ignorance

sandrapsg — Sun, 4 Sep 2011 01:57:00 GMT

I spent about 12 days doing what I love the best: traveling. It was all very simple, I got on a car with a friend and head south to the green, hilly, poor, amazing state of Chiapas.

The southernmost state of Mexico welcomed us with its green and wild mountains where part of the population lives in the jewel of pueblos of its lands: SanCris as the inhabitants kindly called it or San Cristobal de las Casas for the foreigners looking for it in a map. Others live in between the mountains, the waterfalls, the trees, carrying out Mayan-Catholic rituals, waiting for nature to tell them when to marry, when to create life, (which happens quite a lot), they live in small communities high above the clouds as they forefathers did, preparing their children to live their life according to mixture of pre and post Hispanic traditions, praying in churches unique to them, churches where you must step in to absorb the complexity of what goes on inside.

It's a state of living inheritage, a land of amazing ruins, canyons, of rituals, gourmet food. It's a place if hippies, of new art, new music (a bit of Mayan Trance anyone?), a place of tradition and modernity. Where exploring a city might mean spend a whole morning just walking in a same street letting your senses do all the exploring.

The more I saw, the more I wish I could see, the more I've seen, more I fantasied I could see, the more I learned the more ignorant I felt. It's a beautiful state of "being", when you leave to go somewhere not knowing anything about and you leave feeling like you know you know a lot less about life, about the world, than what you knew before. It's an awareness of your own ignorance, of all the things you don't know. Aware of the existence of objects, of people, of lost forgotten traditions, healers that have serious conversations with your blood to heal you, of walking in a town full of short warmly dressed indigenous people with a blonde, blue eyed friend. Away from the city cameras are not welcomed unless you are a friend, outsiders should be there to help or to buy something home or street made, and does not matter how old, it seems that everyone is trying to sell you something to ensure the continuation of their daily life. Languages and traditional clothes change within 10 long kilometres of winding roads in the mountainous jungle, and the hard lifestyle carries on.

The art and the ancient history of this green world are like a magnet of Europeans and other explorers that turn to SanCris to be at home in a cradle of an ancient culture.

I left happy, fatter, with winter boots and under a warm blanket of ignorance on my backpack.

Unknown Odysseys

Chiapas, the bliss of ignorance