Where are Ron and Ellen?
Mexico and Central America: October 2006-February 2007
Ron and Ellen at Agua Azul, Mexico, November 2006
Reports from Mexico
October 26 - November 16, 2006
Multicultural San Cristobal
1 November 2006
San Cristobal de las Casas, MexicoDear family and friends,
After a week in San Cristobal our two main impressions are that it is an incredibly multicultural city -- and that it is cooler than we expected!
Just walking around the city and sitting in the main plaza, one sees a huge array of international tourists, local residents, and indigenous people in the distinctive dress of the various villages around San Cristobal. Food is multicultural as well: our favorite restaurant so far is a tiny (4 tables) French-Italian one that serves fresh pasta (made before your eyes) and crepes, but we've also eaten in an Indian/Asian restaurant, a couple of vegetarian restaurants, had some wonderful soups, and yes, even a few tacos.
In San Cristobal we've done a LOT of walking, through both the craft markets and the food market (markets being one of our favorite things to explore), and just wandering up and down the streets looking at houses, shops, and people. On a cold rainy day we visited Na Bolom, a museum highlighting one of the local indigenous groups and the Swiss couple (both now dead) who worked to preserve their culture. The museum still does similar work, and has volunteers who come and work there (including, 15 years ago, some close friends of our daughter Sharon). The building itself is beautiful, with arcades and several courtyards, and has extensive gardens as well. The same rainy afternoon, we also visited the amber museum, amber being something that is mined here in Chiapas.
On Sunday, we took a tour to two nearby indigenous villages, San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan. We had an excellent guide, and learned a great deal about Mayan village life, and about the religion and cosmology, which, depending on the village, is Catholic overlaid with with a bit of Mayan tradition, or Mayan overlaid with a very very thin veneer of Catholicism. As we understand it, there is great attention to dualities in Mayan beliefs - light and dark, positive and negative, life and death, right and left, etc. The big church in San Juan Chamula, the village with Mayan beliefs overlaid with a veneer of Catholicism, is amazing and difficult to describe, with altars to many saints (traditional to Christians but endowed with attributes of Mayan gods), a marble floor covered with pine needles, clouds of incense, huge numbers of candles (stuck to the floor, not in holders), and people in native dress sitting or kneeling on the floor. Healing rituals conducted by cuanderos use eggs, chickens, soft drinks (for energy), incense, and chanting. The church has two distinct sides, positive and negative, and (interesting to us) two things on the negative side were a huge white cross (negative because it is where Jesus died) and the baptismal font (because all sins are left behind in the water of the font). We were told that the only time the Catholic priest comes is to do baptisms -- all other rites like weddings and funerals are done by the local Mayan religious authorities. Note: There are strict prohibitions against taking photos in the church at San Juan Chamula (religious authorities there have been known to confiscate and smash cameras); hence we have no photos of that remarkable scene.
We've been in many churches in San Cristobal, ancient and more modern, and they are all very different. One church is way up at the top of a hill, and we climbed up flights and flights of stairs to get to it. We were rewarded with a spectacular view over the city and surrounding hills.
Yesterday we took a two-hour boat tour of the Canyon Sumidero, a spectacular river canyon with walls up to 200 meters high, huge rock formations, waterfalls spilling down the rock walls, and trees, cactus, and moss clinging to the walls in various places. There are pelicans, egrets, herons, cormorants, and probably other birds as well, and we also saw a couple of crocodiles basking on the mud flats.
Tomorrow is Dios del Muerto, the Day of the Dead, when people all over Mexico go to the graveyards and take flowers and food and picnic at the graves to remember and honor their dead family members. All this week people have been preparing, and we've seen the most immense quantity of flowers being bought and carried toward the cemetaries, just truckloads of flowers all over the place. So today we walked to the municipal cemetary, and wandered around, The place was jammed, with people cleaning off the graves, hoeing away the grass and weeds, repainting (in lots of brilliant colors) graves and the small and large family crypts, arranging flowers, covering graves with pine needles and marigolds. People were already sitting around graves having picnics, and there were groups of musicians (apparently for hire, to play at the grave site), there were vendors selling food and flowers and various decorations for graves, and even a huge water tank truck to provide water for washing graves and for flower vases.
Tomorrow we are taking a bus to Palenque, heading away from the cool highlands to the steamy jungle to visit the Mayan ruins there. Everyone we have talked to here who has already been there says the ruins are quite wonderful.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
To see San Cristobal photos of markets, churches, and villages, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of Canyon Sumidero, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of the festival closing ceremonies in San Cristobal, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see Day of the Dead photos, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Wet jungles, Hot beaches
9 November 2006
San Cristobal de las Casas, MexicoDear family and friends,
We are back in San Cristobal after adventures in several diverse mini-climates of Chiapas.
We left here last Thursday for Palenque to see the Mayan ruins in the rain forest. And rain forest it certainly is -- the area gets more rain than anywhere else in Mexico, and it is just at the end of the rainy (or perhaps we should say rainiest) season. Sometimes it was difficult to know if it was actually raining, or just dripping off the trees. Lush growth everywhere, tall trees and vines, things that we struggle to grow as house plants are here growing much taller than we are, lots of birds, howler monkeys, lizards, and I am sure other creatures we didn't see.
We stayed at El Panchan, a travelers' hangout in the jungle, with multiple offerings of rooms and cabanas, home also to a small ex-pat community. There is one main restaurant, a huge open-air place with a palm-thatched roof, serving excellent food, with live music every evening, several different groups of local (and overlapping) musicians, ending with fire dancing at about 10:30 pm. We spent a day exploring the spectacular Mayan ruins, climbing up the pyramids, wandering through the multi-level, multi-room palace, and walking through other buildings ranging from foundations to almost complete structures. The site in the jungle is gorgeous, with some open park-like areas where the buildings are surrounded by large and well-tended lawns, and other buildings almost completely overgrown with jungle. The entire site was without a spot of trash or graffiti, and virtually no attendants in sight (sad to say, this would never be true in the U.S.). It was hot and humid, and rained several times during our wanderings, but never for very long, so we just stood under arches or inside buildings. There is also a small but excellent museum, and we spent time there looking at some of the intricate pottery artifacts and carvings found on the site.
Our second day we took an afternoon tour to two huge local waterfalls, about an hour away in the rugged mountains, Misol-Ha, and Agua Azul. Misol-Ha is a single huge falls, with mist and spray filling the gorge, moss and ferns all around, and a path where you can actually walk behind the falls (we decided not to do that because we didnīt want to spend the rest of the afternoon in drenched clothes!). Agua Azul is a series of falls over big rock formations, and you can climb up a parallel set of rock stairs from the river at the bottom, past all the falls, to the river at the top. Agua Azul means "blue water;" since the rainy season was just finishing the water was more brown than blue, but the lack of blue color was more than made up for by the huge volume of water.
We came back on the bus (5 hours between Palenque and San Cristobal) on Sunday, then on Monday headed for the Pacific coast beach of Puerta Arista. It is a huge sweep of almost deserted sandy beach, and the water was amazingly warm. The air, however, was amazingly hot -- having just come from the wettest place in Mexico, it turned out that we were now in one of the hottest. At the beginning of the cool season, the temperature in the shade at 3:30 in the afternoon, when things were beginning to cool off, was 95F/37C. Mornings and evenings were ok (at least to those of us used to hot and humid summers in Virginia) but the middle of the day was just too hot to do anything but sit and read on the shady porch of our cabana and wait for it to be cooler. Behind the place where we stayed there was an estuary with thousands of boat-billed herons, as well as many other birds. We rented a canoe late one afternoon and spent some time paddling around and photographing birds, including lots of young boat-billed herons still sitting in the nests.
The cabanas where we stayed have been owned and run for 30-some years by a Canadian (who came here because he hates being cold, and never is in Puerto Arista!) and his Mexican wife. He cooks excellent meals, and served us local fish one night and local shrimp the next. The shrimp dish was the same one he cooked for the Lonely Planet Mexico book's main author when he visited. It was interesting talking to Jose, the Canadian, about the way the Lonely Planet folks gather information, and it made us both more and less trusting of the book! We were there the night of the US elections, and Jose turned on the TV in his private space and hooked up the sound to the speakers in the open air dining space, so we were able to listen and cheer as the Democrats took over the Congress.
We had originally thought we might stay at the beach much longer, but it was just too hot, so we came back to San Cristobal, which is cool at night but quite pleasant during the day.
Today we spent a big hunk of time in the middle of the day watching a gathering of indigenous people who had come into San Cristobal for a blessing in the Cathedral before they headed in a convoy of 20 trucks to Oaxaca in support of the struggle for peace and justice there. We watched the procession into the Cathedral, sat in the Cathedral for the service, watched the procession out again after everyone had been sprinkled with holy water by the priest, and then joined the cheers as they set off. We talked a bit with a volunteer working with an international peace organization who was going with the group as an observer. There is a great deal of support here for the struggles in Oaxaca against the corrupt state government, and for the reforms being called for by the people.
Tomorrow we plan to go to Comitan for a couple of days, then to Tuxtla Gutierrez for a few days before I fly home and Ron heads for Guatemala.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
To see photos from Palenque, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos from El Panchan, Misol-Ha, and Agua Azul, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos from Puerta Arista, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of the group leaving San Cristobal for Oaxaca, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see additional photos from San Cristobal, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Adios to Mexico 15 November 2006
Tuxtla Gutierrez, MexicoDear family and friends,
We are in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the main city in the state of Chiapas (with about a million residents!). We arrived here Sunday afternoon, and have enjoyed spending time in "the big city," where we have seen almost no non-Mexican tourists. One of our favorite places has been the Jardin de la Marimba (Marimba Garden), a tree-filled plaza where free marimba concerts are held every evening from about 6-9. The marimba band (and we've seen several of varying sizes) plays in the raised bandstand in the middle of the plaza, and people dance in the open area around the bandstand. The dancers are all sizes, shapes, and ages, and many are quite good, and a real pleasure to watch (Our friends Marlene and John would love it!). There are rows of benches in all the aisles radiating out from the central bandstand, and always a good crowd watching. It is all very relaxed, and seems to be a big family draw, with parents and kids of all ages, and also a very social event, with people greeting each other and chatting as they watch -- or dance. We have seen many of the same people each of the 3 nights we've been there, so we assume that it is a regular, and obviously enjoyable, part of their lives. The last evening we were in San Cristobal we watched the municipal marimba band play in the main plaza there, and there also people were dancing. Makes us want to go home and take dancing lessons!
Yesterday we visited the zoo here in Tuxtla, which is supposed to be the best in Mexico. It is in a huge jungle-like park on the outskirts of the city, with natural settings for most of the animals. All the animals are ones found in Chiapas, and included several cats (lynx, puma, ocelot, jaguar), wild pigs, agoutis, crocodiles, lizards, snakes, river otters, monkeys, and many varieties of birds. And also white-tailed deer, the same speices that devastated our garden last summer (we wished all ours were here in the zoo!). Some birds and one variety of small agouti run free in the zoo, and seem totally oblivious to people walking by as they scurry about on the jungle floor. This morning we visited the botanical garden, very much like the zoo but without animals!
Before coming here we spent a couple of days in Comitan, a small town in the highlands from which people taking the highland route leave for Guatemala. There was a sculpture symposium going on there, with about 20 sculptors from all over the world creating their work right in the main plaza over a 2-week period. Most were working in metal, but a four were working in stone and two in wood. People apply and send a drawing of the work they are going to create. There is sculpture all around the plaza from the 2005 symposium, and apparently the city is going to create a sculpture park for the 2006 works. Comitan was the home of an early 20th century doctor who opened clinics for the poor and created a drinkable water supply for the city, and, according to our guidebook, the town still has some of the best medical care in Mexico. The doctor was mayor of Comitan, then elected to the national senate, but was executed in 1913 for advocating free speech during the turmoil of the revolution. There are streets all over Mexico named for him. Even though Comitan is a small town there is obviously substantial money there, as evidenced by the sculpture symposium, the several excellent museums we visited (one modern art and one archaeology), and an active theater program.
And now some bits and pieces we forgot to mention in earlier messages....
In all the bakeries in San Cristobal in the week leading up to the day of the dead, there was bread shaped like thigh bones.
At the end of the festival that was going on in San Cristobal when we arrived, there was, on the last evening, a parade of huge structures (12-15 feet or 3-4 meters tall) of undersea creatures -- jellyfish, schools of small fish, big fish, and a shark -- made of thin multi-colored cloth stretched over wire frames that could be moved to simulate the creatures' movements, lighted from the inside, and powered by people riding bicycle-like frames underneath them. First they were positioned in the open plaza around the church, turning on their lights and starting to move one by one, then they moved around that plaza, and finally ended by parading through the streets surrounding the main plaza. Quite a sight! Ron got some photos that at least give some idea of the spectacle, which I will post when I get home and set up the Web page for this trip (see photo link above for 1 November).
And the final bit of the closing ceremony was the big (height of a tall person) multi-colored balloons, made of some sort of thin cloth or paper, all with a flame inside, that were let off one by one from the plaza and floated up and away in the night sky. Either the fuel runs out and the fire dies before they come to earth, of they don't worry about fires at the end of the rainy season!
And lastly, at El Panchan, where we stayed in Palenque, we mentioned that there was live music every night, but forgot to mention the elderly man (our guess is that he was close to 90) dancing with a very jealous parrot on his shoulder: the parrot kept trying to bite the arms of his various partners! All of them apparently knew the parrot well, and scolded it roundly!
Tomorrow my first flight on the way home leaves at 7:55 in the morning, and after Ron gets back from the airport he will take the 10 am bus for Tapachula, on the way to Guatemala via the coastal route. Because of bus schedules, he will probably spend the night in Tapachula, Mexico, then cross the border Friday morning. I look forward to coming home, and Ron looks forward to further and different adventures.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
To see photos from Comitan, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos from Tuxtla Gutierrez, click on the thumbnail at the left.
Back to Central America 2006-2007 index
cfw.com
Questions? Send email to Ellen, ebouton 
operamail.com
While we're traveling, reach us at bikepacker
Last updated: 23 November 2006
