***Note: rubbish wi-fi by Lake Atitlan is causing photo-uploading issues so I’ll add pics to this later. Also, there is a lot of text in this post and it’s not very interesting so consider yourself warned if you decide to read it***

***Update: slow wi-fi in Antigua but now with added photos. Enjoy!***

I am writing this on the shuttle bus from San Cristobal de las Casas, my base in Chiapas, as the driver is speeding towards the Guatemalan border like he’s on the run. I may indirectly have been the cause of this as the shuttle I was supposed to be on this morning didn’t show up at 7.30 as planned. Or by Mexican time. Or by 8.30. Apparently, the agency cancelled the trip and didn’t tell Erick, who runs the hostel I stayed at and who had booked it, who then showed up for work at 8.35 and had to ring around other agencies to see if there was a free spot on another bus that hadn’t left town yet. Somehow, there was and I got picked up in swanky bus 10min. later before getting transferred on to another one full of other tourists that had been picked up at their various hostels and hotels. The driver didn’t even want to bother getting my bag onto the roof with the others so it got deposited between the two front seats and off we went.

So, the last 5 days have been an odd mix of highs and lows and a bunch of stuff in-between. Which is really confusing to me because I usually have a clearer perspective on how I feel about an experience than I currently feel I am leaving Chiapas with. So I’m just going to try to break down how it played out.

San Cristobal de las Casas came with rave reviews and I had been pretty consistently informed that this was a chilled out hippie hangout of a place so I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that I was expecting to fall in love with it. But I didn’t. It’s a nice enough town, definitely, and 10 years ago I might well have fallen for it head over heels. But not now, not even close. This is low-season and the place feels packed with travellers, it’s impossible to eat cheap in the hipster-like restaurants and cafes strewn across every street, there is a non-food market but none of the traders are willing to bargain (they probably don’t need to, though, with this amount of backpackers roaming around town) and I just didn’t feel like it was the kind of place I wanted to crash for a prolonged period of time. That said, I’m glad I picked the hostel I did. It was small, cheap, chilled out and Erick is not only a transport-organising-whizz, he also cooks up a mean breakfast. I’m already looking forward to the homemade bread I got as last-minute breakfast-on-the-go this morning which is currently wrapped in napkin and squeezed into the top of my bag.

In order of preference (because I can’t think of any other way of doing it), this is how Chiapas played out:

San Juan Chamula & Zinacantán – chatting to other travellers paid off big time here as I hadn’t at all registered what was going on in these little villages on one of the days we happened to be in SCDLC. As a bit of background, there are indigenous Mayan towns and villages scattered all around SCDLC, they all have unique cultural histories and many of them maintain their own language, customs and dress and San Juan Chamula and Zinacantán are just two of these. On June 24th, it was the Día de San Juan, the culmination of several days’ celebrations of the patron saint of San Juan Chamula and it was reportedly quite the street party. So with two of the (more informed!) girls from the hostel, we boarded a colectivo (where, it turns out, you can fit 13 people in a van with 8 seats) and headed to San Juan Chamula, about 10km from San Cristobal, to witness the festivities. Photos aren’t allowed in many of these villages and at a gathering of what seemed like the entire greater population of the area, I wasn’t about to test my luck so I’ll try to explain it in words instead. The streets were packed full of people from the moment we got there and many people were dressed in their traditional clothing (men in black or white wool tunics and women in burgundy/purple embroidered blouses, blue shawls and long black skirts). Incense was burning, brass bands were playing and men, drunk on ‘posh’, were setting off fireworks with little regard for safety. I’d compare that last part to Denmark at 1am on January 1st every year but that’s probably doing a disservice to how prominent the use of protective fireworks goggles is in Denmark. Because San Juan Chamula was crazy, chaotic, people pushed and shoved and it was hard to get your bearings on exactly what was happening. They also speak Tzotzil rather than Spanish so there is no chance of picking up a familiar word anywhere. The church is the central focus in the middle of the town with a large open square in front of it. Photos inside are explicitly forbidden at all times of the year but 20 pesos will get you in so in we went. I don’t think I really have the writing skills or vocabulary to explain properly how that place felt. Incense-smoke filled the entire building, pine was strewn on the pew-free floor in front of colourful statues of various saints, fresh flowers and candles were decorating all available surfaces and people were kneeling on the floor to pray. The best description I can think of is that it was a slightly overwhelming attack on the senses. I felt extremely out of place, although it helped me feel a bit more at ease when, as I was trying to squeeze my way to the front of the church through the wall of worshippers, the priest stopped in front of me and, in perfect English, asked where I was from and how long I was staying in Chiapas for and said that he hoped I enjoyed it. Clearly I looked as out of place as I felt. At noon, on the square outside the church, they then cleared a path along the perimeter, covered it in pine needles and then paraded all the statues of the saints out of the church in a religious procession with the brass bands playing and firecrackers being set off from the centre of the square at an alarming rate.

After a few hours, as the rain started, we decided to leave the drunk men of San Juan Chamula to their own and headed to Zinacantán which is located nearby. It was a much calmer atmosphere and, except for inside their church, photographs were allowed so the DSLR came back out in no time and I was back in my comfort zone. Soon after arriving, we were asked by one of the local women if we wanted to see how they do the local weaving (again, being with someone who spoke perfect Spanish was a majorly helpful factor) and we went to her house where a lovely woman named Rosa showed us how she weaves the products she sells and then offered to make us tortillas. So over an open fire, she cooked up fresh tortillas which we had with salsa and a spice mix – quite possibly the best snack we could have wished for as the rain started pouring down outside. Her hospitality was immense and we left feeling so appreciative.

Palenque – Mayan ruins! Yay! I love this stuff. It’s like the most impressive architecture you can think of with the added mystery of the exact purpose and function and only fragmented information about what the people and their society was like. Photos in no way do this place justice but there’s one below for representation. Just imagine the temples feeling twice as tall and the jungle twice as dense and we’re getting closer. In the grand scheme of archeological sites I have visited, this is a close second to Tikal in Guatemala (which will probably never be beaten). The 5am pickup and 10 hour round-trip sitting in the backseats of a shuttle van on the mountain roads of Eastern Chiapas I could have been without and would feature at the bottom of this list. But there’s a price to pay for everything.

The Chiapas landscape – for me, this was where the beauty of my time in the area really lies. Mountain ranges, forests, greenery, low-hanging clouds, misty hilltops, roadside huts, homes and shops, community pride. The Zapatista movement is alive there, land matters.

Watching Mexico beat Croatia 3-1 to advance past the group stage of the world cup – it was a tense first half but my new adoptive home team pulled through an awesome victory. It was accompanied by a clamato michelada, 2 indios, free popcorn from the bar and a room full of enthusiastic Mexico supporters. This is what happened just after Mexico scored their 3rd goal: (video) (edit: the video requires uploading from another media device. And I have things to do (like sitting on the terrace with a beer or taking photos of another market or chilling with a flat white at my new favorite cafe) and have decided I can’t be bothered to do that just now. So here is a pre-match photo instead:

Cañon del Sumidero – I saw this on a half-day trip from town and it was alright. We took a boat up the canyon river and got a great view of it. There were also crocodiles but none of them were swimming so they just looked a bit lazy. The waterfalls were the highlights for me.

The waterfalls of Miso-sol and Agua Azul – we went past these on the way to Palenque and I felt rather indifferent about them. The truckloads of tourists passing through (yeah, I totally get the irony as we were among them) left me feeling like I was queuing up to take the exact same photos as a million other people already had so it just wasn’t very inspiring. I liked the little kid on the right in the photo below though, who pulls floats of tourists (who have paid 50 pesos each to the adults that stand on the riverside dock) across the river. It was such a dodgy way of operating a business on the official premises of a national park so I live in hope that this kid is really the brains behind it all.

San Cristobal de las Casas – I thought this would be at the top of my list but as I mentioned at the beginning, it just wasn’t for me. Hopefully that doesn’t mean that the last 2 years in London have changed me and made me more cynical (I’ve got plenty of cynicism already, thank you, no need for more of that, please) but rather that I need to remember that it’s ok that I move on from things that aren’t right rather than try to make it into something else. Some things aren’t for fixing, I’ll find my own hippie paradise at some point on this trip, I’m sure.

And that was a pretty lengthy outline of what I’ve done this week. I just tried reading the street signs to gage where I am and it looks like we are coming up to Comitan which means the border at La Mesilla is about 2 ½ hours away. So I’m going to put on some music and drown out the Avicii album someone on the bus is blasting on their music player and watch the hills of Chiapas roll by.
Today I’m listening to: Woodkid – ‘Conquest of Spaces’