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San Cristobal de las Casas :: Mexico

Surf, Cervezas and Colonial Churches to come

Places: Peurto Escondido & San Cristobal de las Casas.

Coolest thing I did: Saw wild monkeys. Monkeys are always cool.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Spanish for "retired" is "jubiladas". It makes sense, I´d be bloody jubilant too if I never had to work again.

Up until this point my intercity bus travel had been done on the ultra swish directo buses, which go where you want without many stops, have air conditioning and even give you tickets for you bags in the bottom just like on a plane. The trip from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido on the coast was nothing like that. I paid about 2 pounds for the trip and that should have been my first tip off that it was going to be different. That and the fact everyone else on the bus was Mexican could have also been a clue. I ended up on what was an old American school bus, painted blue, which went the long route, and works on the idea that you just drive a set route and stop wherever anyone wants to get on or off, until you get to the end. You can also use it to transport produce, but that involves haggling with the bus driver to work out how much, say a 50kg bag of onions costs to take and dump on the side of the road in the next town. 200km took about 9 hours.

That may have sounded a bit like bitching, but it wasn´t for two reasons. Firstly, it was a wonderful insight into how poor Mexicans (ie most of them) get around and do business, and it was possibly the most breath taking bus route I´ve ever been on. You go through the mountains on roads right on the cliff edge and the views are spectatular. Every now and then you catch a glimpse of a ribbon of asphalt winding it´s way up or down the side of a mountain through the forrest and realise that´s where you´re going. When you finally break through and see the Pacific Ocean the sight is something else to behold. The fact the whole trip along the coast (say the last hour) was at sunset was truly special. Great 9 hours spent.

Puerto Escondido is the most touristy (and thus the most acessible) of the towns stretched along Oaxaca State´s surfable middle stretch but you´d hardly know it. The main strip is lined with cheap places to eat and stay and not much else, even if they do have a supermarket and an ATM, which other towns like Zipolite apparently still lack. Still, Pte Esco has one thing that all these other towns lack: Playa Zicatela, which is the home of the Mexican Pipeline. The lines of waves come in one after the other and curl off to break in perfect symmerty almost the whole lenght of the beach. The fact that I did not see one person try to ride it, even the Mexicans tells you how advanced a wave it would be to ride. Still, the town is full of Aussies walking around with a surfboad tucked under their arm (mostly learning for the first time...) at least looking the part.

Going for a swim with the sun setting over the bay is pure pleasure and I pretty much switched off for a couple of days, staying away from the two biggest attractions which are surfing and game fishing, either of which would have been nice to have a go at but I´m not that fussed at the moment. Plenty of more opportunities to be active later in the trip. I also learned that Spanish for fish is Pescado, which allowed me to eat fish. Seafood was top notch if you were willing to stretch your budget to 3 or 4 pounds a meal. Tough life, this.

I took my first overnight bus (back on the directos, so I got my own reclining chair and thus some sleep) to arrive early in the morning in the mountain town of San Cristobal de las Casas, which is kind of a prettier version of Oaxaca, but with a much different native flavour. The town is in the heart of Chiapas country, making it the home of the antigoblization movement, the Zapatistas. It was only in the 90s that armed insurgents led by a certain Subcommandante Marcos (why he didn´t at least make himself a commandante is beyond me...) took control of the public buildings in the town declaring that the just come into effect NAFTA free trade treaty with the US was going to make the indigenous population of the area even more impovrished and that they weren´t having it. The army had to be sent back in to take control. This means theres lots of people with guns on the street here most of the time. If you can ingore that fact then it´s a very nice, laid back place.

Churches, do you want churches? It´s got loads of them, bright colours, dull colours, up hills, in squares, recently renovated or run down, they´re all here. I think I pretty much just wandered around town and every time I saw a church I took a picture of it. There must be heaps.

Luckily the town has a none too meanacing feel too it and is a nice place to just relax and take it all in. It´s also good day triping country. I went on a day trip to the Cañon del Sumidero, which is an easy hour on a minibus away. It´s basically tearing around this great big Canyon in speed boats looking for animals to harass. I saw vulture-looking birds, crocs, iguanas and best of all, monkeys. I felt a bit sorry for the crocs, as the biggest on was sitting on a massive pile of plastic bottles. Lets just say garbage disposal hasn´t made much impact on rural Mexico, where they tend to just burn it all in big piles or chuck it out of moving vehicles. Sad really. The canyon trips all unfortuately include a side trip to a nearby town that really doesn´t seem to have taken to the massive influx of tourism very well. We didn´t want to be there (because it´s unattractive and everyone is surly) and they didn´t want us there (because we're unattractive and surly, no doubt. A complete waste of an hour, bar the fact I did have a pretty good hamburger for about 25p with a coke. The local mayor must get a kickback from the tour operators or something.

I think by talking about this to a few other people who have been traveling Central America more than I have recently that anthropological experiements in tourism have widely failed in this part of the world. It´s like someone has decided that rich people from the West want to go and gawk at how the indigenous population live (ie. mostly poorly) and said people actually want to be looked at in this way. I´d say they want the money but they don´t want to be a tourist spectacle. I´m sure I´ve raved about that before, but going into remote villages and being force fed local handicrafts isn´t finding "The Real Mexico". People here drive cars, ride on buses, have satellite TV, can get antibiotics when they´re sick and watch football. I quite often think we´re looking for something that just isn´t there.

I´m off to the temples in the jungle for the next stretch, which I´ve been quite looking forward to. Everyone I´ve spoken to coming the other way speaks especially highly of Palenque, the next stop. More to come.

Muy Bien

Oaxaca :: Mexico

The first week of the Central American jaunt

Places: LA, Mexico City & Oaxaca.

Coolest thing I did: Watched what can only be called a Mariachi parking lot in action.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Prehistpanic Americans used to play a kind of soccer using only their hips and forearms. If you broke certain rules you got decapitated. Pleasant sounding bunch.

After a brutal three days of planes and beds (Brisneyland, Sydney, LA and then Mexico City) I arrived in the Mexican capital and was rather pleasantly surprised. I´d been a bit primed to find it dirty, crowded and dangerous, and while it is the first two, it´s an easy enough city to deal with and chock full of interesting stuff to look at. I found that my trying to learn Spanish from a book before I came didn´t survive my first contact with people who actually speak Spanish, but with a mix of the dozen words I can remember and a healthy does of Spanglish ("Whereo areo los underpantos") I´m getting by fine.

The first thing you notice about the heart of the city, it´s main square which is called the Zocalo is that while it may have seemed cool to build your new city on the heart of the city the people you just conquered, it may not make good engineering sense. All the main buildings, including the Catheral, appear to be sinking in certain places. Apparently the leader of the Spanish Conquisadors, a bit of a devious bastard by the name of Hernan Cortes, wanted to prove a point so he had the cathederal built on the site of the main temple of the old Aztec captial. Turns out thats a pretty bad foundation and walking around inside now is slightly vertigo inducing.

My favourite bits were the murals that seem to be the thing to commission if you´re working for the Department of Culture in Mexico. There´s some massive ones inside the Presidents office building, which they nicely let you go in for free and have a look at, showing the whole history of Mexico. There´s also a great one inside the Art Nouvea/Deco Palace de Bella Artes that had originally been commissioned for the Rockerfeller Centre in New York, but looking at it you can see why the Rockerfellers weren´t so keen on it. It´s about the battle between Capitalism and Communism and you can guess which ones are the baddies. If you keep your eyes open you end up spotting murals bloody everywhere.

If you do go to Mexico City, do go to the Anthropological Museum, which is full of heaps of Prehispanic stuff made out of rock. I liked the great big Olmec heads and great big heads of the feathered serpent God (whose name starts with a Q and I can´t be arsed finding out how to spell so I will call Frank). The building itself is also very cool to look at, with the upstairs windows covered in these honeycomb looking strips. Its also worth doing because at some point you are going to go and look at pyramids somewhere in Mexico and knowing a little about what you´re looking at helps. There are signs in English too, which I haven´t seen since. The highlight are the death masks, kind of made in the the Egyptian style but out of jade.

My best nightime experience so far was walking down to Garibaldi Square after dinner to see what had to be a hundred guys dressed like matadors playing trumpets and guitars and the like. I´m not sure why they congregate there or if they were getting any money out of it, but you can buy a cheap beer and sit there and watch the chaos. I especially liked the ones who got sick of the square and stood on the median strip playing trumpets into oncomming traffic. On the way back I also got the treat of seeing the cops standing in the entrance to a strip club watching soccer with the bouncers while there was three guys handcuffed to the rails in the back of their paddy wagon.

One other spot worth mentioning is Condesa, which is pretty much like another country. It´s a posh suburb a short Metro ride away from where I was staying and it was a strip of nightclubs, cafes and restaurants that could be in any upmarket street in the world. The biggest shock is just how un-Mexican most of the people there look. You expect people to be Americans but when they open their mouths it´s pretty obvious they speak Spanish and come from around there. Instead of crumbling rusty old hunks they drive the latest model yank tanks (think Escalades and Navigators). It´s eye opening that what we´d consider a fairly normal upper middle class exists in a city where most of the population live in concrete block houses clinging to the side of the mountains.

So far my ruin visiting has been limited to Teotihuacan, a pretty impressive set of pyramids just outside Mexico City. They are in pretty good nick, considering the age and history of the place, with the Temples of the Sun, Moon and Feather Serpent, Frank all accessible and climbable. One thing you do start to appreciate is that the Prehispanic Mexicans were a pretty bloodthirsty lot with a whole load of reasons to sacrifice people. I wonder how they decided who was going to get the chop, so to speak. That´s a conversation you wouldn´t want to be having with middle management ("I´m sorry Bob, you just haven´t been showing up on time and we´ve noticed your guarding of the granery is getting sloppy. We´re going to have to sacrifice you to the Sun God. Sorry about that, mate").

My second destiation on this trip has been Oaxaca, and the biggest problem with getting here was working out how to say it (for the record it´s Wah-ha-ka) so I could buy a bus ticket. It´s up in the highlands and very hot during the middle of the day which tends to enforce siestas. Which isn´t a bad thing. It´s the kind of place to come if you don´t mind moving from meal to meal and taking pictures of churches to break it up. It´s the kind of colonial town you think of when you imagine Mexico during the day. At night, it´s a different story. Due to the fact it´s the home of Mexico´s most renowned Mescal (Tequila´s dirty little sister, which has had one less distilation) and that tends to make you go a bit stupid on the shots. I´ve found it easy to be adopted by Mexicans to be paraded around the bars and clubs. I do sometimes feel like their retarded friend, not being able to say much except "My name is Steve".

I took a day trip to the Zapotec (a kind of Mexican Indian, apparently) villages up in the Sierra Norte, which is a coule of hours north of Oaxaca. Lots of hiking involved and with the change from 1500m in Oaxaca to 3200m in the moutains you do feel like breathing isn´t really doing much for you. The guide was local and spoke no English so it was hard to tell him set a bit less of a cracking pace. At least I wasn´t the slowest of the two gringos on the trip. There was a poor bloke my age who wasn´t exactly Ukraine´s fittest man. I swear he could have had nose bleeds and you wouldn´t have noticed from all the sweat pouring off him. There was lots of clambering up rocks and looking over sheer cliffs but very pretty all the same. As a bonus we also got the local bus on the way back, with half the seats taken up by produce going to town. Luckily no chooks.

So far, so good. I´m having a bit of a Japanese experience again, as it´s hard to blend into the background when you´re a foot taller and several shades lighter than everyone else. It´s not been as hardcore on the hassling and begging as I´d expected but I´ve yet to hit the tourist hotspots in the Yucatan yet. Still it was nice to walk around pyramids without being chased by blokes wanting you to ride their camels.