I arrive in San Cristóbal on the morning of the 24th,
and the drive up was beautiful! It’s so
high up in the mountains, we were literally driving through the clouds to get
there! Everyone was out in the markets
and streets getting ready for Christmas.
I checked into my hostel where everyone was super nice, before walking
about the city. I went to like 5
museums, because they were all super small.
I went to an anthropological museum, and history museum, a popular art
museum, a textile museum, and the amber museum.
I left my teachers credential in DF which not only gets me 25% discount
on buses, and it also gets me discounts and free entrances to museums! So that was super annoying that I didn’t have
it. I also walked around the artisan
market that was a block from my hostel, and fell in love with all the beautiful
hand-made clothing. I also tried going
to a cultural centre, but it was closed.
Finally I went up a bit north to see the food market which was
huge! I also bought this beautiful
hand-made carpet for my new apartment in DF!
It was made in an indigenous village called Tenejapa, and the ladies at
the store told me it would have taken 3-4 weeks to make!
When I got back to the hostel, I met a couple Spanish guys in
my dorm. One was on exchange for the
semester in DF, and the other in Pennsylvania.
They had made a dinner reservation for the night with some other girls
that had been on exchange in DF and invited me to join all of them. Before we went, I wandered down to the Zócalo
with Angel, another teacher I met from DF, as we thought it would be really
lively. But all the streets were
dead. I guess everyone was in church.
But also, so ridiculous, they had an ice-skating rink and snow hill in the
zócalo here as well! Like the Mexican
government has their head stuck so far up their ass and give as much of a fuck
about their indigenous population as the Canadian government does about theirs,
that they actually think it’s a good use of tax-payer dollars to put this shit
in the middle of town when there are kids sleeping on the streets here! And then on top of all the money they’re
wasting, it’s so much energy to keep both of these things below 0 degrees
24/7. It’s like they care more about
impressing the tourists with this crap than they do about the starving homeless
families that live here! The whole
fucking government here is corrupt, and Mexicans are so disillusioned with the
lack of true-democratic elections, that so many have just become apathetic,
because they know the government won’t listen to them even if they try to voice
their opinions.
Anyways, the dinner with the Spaniard/French/Kiwi was
delicious, and there was live music.
After that I headed back to the hostel, where we broke a piñata and had
a party. It gets pretty chilly a night
in San Cristóbal because it’s so high up in the mountains, but with a couple
sweaters it’s fine. But half the people
there had just come from the beach, and the temperature change was a little
extreme for them, and were wrapping themselves in like multiple blankets to sit
outside haha. Next time anyone chirps me
in Canada for being cold all the time, I’ll have to tell them about the
ridiculous cold threshold for anyone outside of our country. I was just happy to not be having snow and
ice for Christmas, and everyone else was saying it was the coldest temperature
they had ever experienced.
Christmas Day I had planned to go horseback riding to an
indigenous village to the north of the city named Chamula with the exchange students,
but they had made a reservation and I hadn’t, and there was no more room on the
tour. I just hopped on the bus instead
and went up there. They have mixed
Christianity with their indigenous religion, and they have one of their own
gods assigned to each saint, and one of the saints is seen as higher than
jesus. They don’t allow any pictures
inside the church, but it was pretty eerie.
Like the whole floor was covered in pine leaves, and they had dolls for
each saint/god in glass cases and people would like go inside with each one to
pray for whatever, and tons of the women were sitting on the floor with candles
throwing different liquids in front of each of as like an offering to the
different gods. All the women in the
town wore these black furry skirts with the beautiful hand-embroidered belts
and shawls. And the men were all in
their traditional dress as well. I
bought a poncho from one of the artisan vendors there which I was pretty
excited about. I had been wanting a
ponco for a while, but had been waiting to find the perfect one. And San Cristóbal was a great place to buy it
for the chilly nights. I love it so
much!
On the way back to town we passed by the Reserva Huitepec,
so I asked the driver to let me out so I could check it out. It was locked, so I asked one of the local
women when it would be open, and she told me that if I walked along a little
path for long enough, I’d get to a point where there was a hole in the
fence. So I did that, and when I got in,
I had the whole place to myself! The
only problem though was that I hadn’t really planned in hiking so I didn’t have
any water or food with me. And because
the front entrance was closed, I didn’t have a map. But I had my compass, so I set off, and
eventually found a couple miradors! The
views were incredible! I think there was
a higher mirador, but the paths weren’t really well-marked, and I was getting
pretty tired without water, so I headed back to town.
Back at the hostel I met this Canadian guy who lives in New
Zealand named Derek. He joined me and
Diego and Marc and the other exchange girls for dinner at another nice place
with live music. This was the last night for the exchange students as they were
all heading to Guatemala in the morning, except for Marc who forgot his passport
in DF. He had gotten it mailed to him,
but because of Christmas it was delayed, and then it turned out someone had
written down the wrong postal code on the package, so it was actually in
Tuxtla. So he was going to Tuxtla in the
morning to hunt it down. The next
morning, Derek and I went to some Cavernas outside the city which you could
climb through which were pretty cool. We
had gotten there in a collective, but when we wanted to leave, there weren’t
any, and the cabbies were trying to rip us off, so we decided to hitchhike back
to town. We walked up to the road, and
this lovely family from Cancun picked us up.
When I mentioned that I was going to be in Cancun in about a week, the
family wrote down all the best places to go/things to see there and then gave
me their business card and told me to call them if I needed anything while I
was there…Mexicans are so nice!
After that we decided to take a collective to Zincantan, a
little indigenous town about 20 minutes outside San Cristóbal. So I thought San Cristóbal was high up, but
to get to Zincantan, we went even higher!
We were literally driving through the clouds, mist all around us, and
then from the mist emerged these people dressed in their traditional clothing
carrying crops. It was like I had been
transferred back in time. And then as we
rounded a turn, an entire town appeared below us. They live in this secluded little hidden
place in the mountains and are fairly free of outside influence. Like in Chamula, they don’t allow photos inside
the church, and when we went in, it was eerie as fuck. In a little side room, they had this little
booth you could walk into which was kinda decorated like a barn, with different
candles for each saint burning that you could make a donation to each one. But then there was this tinny Christmas music
playing from inside this closet-sized hut. Very bizarre. The town was like a ghost town. We barely saw anyone. All the women were
wearing their traditional clothes (purple skirts and shawls), but the men were
not. It was cool though seeing some
teenagers interact…just looking at them living this traditional way of life in
their traditional clothes makes you think of them as others so much, and then you see two teenage girls walking
together and giggling, and you realize they’re exactly the same as teenage
girls anywhere else. Derek kept taking
photos of things and people though without asking their permission, which was
kind of uncomfortable. Like if some
random tourists came to your town and just started taking photos of your
artwork and you children, you would tell the creep to fuck off. But I’ve met so many travellers who think
that they can come in and take photos of these
people’s lives without getting their permission first.
We when back to San Cristóbal after that, and met up with
one of my friends from the hostel, David, and we all headed to dinner
together. David and I had a bus together
to Palenque that left at 1am, so we had to kill some time before heading to the
bus terminal…I tried taking a nap in one of the hammocks in the courtyard, but
then it started to rain. And now from
mountains to jungle I go…
