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Published: July 31st 2009
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So, Chiapas. Unstable, possibly full of guerillas (certainly full of bullet-holed road signs and armoured military police) and Swine Flu. As you may have guessed from previous post, we were not exactly over the moon with our first City, San Cristobal. I shan't name and shame the hostel. I shall leave that for the official review. But one nice thing in SC was the shopping; so much local craftmanship was on show that we were rather spoilt for choice, and had to buy nice things for nice people there...until some other horror occurred that I forgot to write about - oh, there were so many - which was my ATM card not working in three ATMs in a row and having to run to an internet cafe to check my account hadn't been raided...until we found a Santander, where it worked fine (Bloody Bancomer. Bloody San Cristobal). Phew.
We spent a lot of San Cristobal in bed, reading, waiting to leave. Sad really, but feeling this ill and frankly disappointed in the place it was the best option. In between we nipped out for food...sort of, milkshake being about the only thing I could hold down for a day or
so. We did find a nice little Pizzeria near our hostel, with was probably the best thing about it.
I have noticed that the Mexicans love everything Italian. The only coffee house weve seen to populate Mexico is The Italian Coffee Company ×PLEASE NOTE: MY KEYBOARD HAS GONE ALL SPANISH SO PLEASE IMAGINE I AM USING PROPER PUNCTUATION× and there are tons of Pizzerias. They also think Italians are really short, judging buy the teensy wooden 'rustic'chairs they fills these Pizzerias with, hobbitsized. But they make Pizza in Italian style, which is excellent, and just the thing for a delicate stomach, all light dough and delicate cheese in a stonebake oven. Yum. Excellent diversion from too many quesadillas. Bleurgh.
Another nice thing that we did was to go to the Sumidero Canyon. This was outside San Cristobal, so doesn't count to making it sound any better. The Canyon is about 35km long and took an hour and a half to powerboat through whilst our guide showed us interesting sights, such as a canyonside peak that was 1km high, damned impressive seeing as we were already
2000m above sea level, and beautiful natural rock formations under a waterfall, that looked like fungus blooming at a tree base: like little umbrellas. Wading birds were aplenty, catching tiny, glittering fish and then stalking off with long yellow legs that looked like gumboots. We say monkeys hanging in trees, although how our eagle=eyed guide saw those whilst steering the boat around a large swathe of floating rubbish at speed is anyone's guess.
We also saw CROCODILES. These got us very excited, as there were quite a lot of them, all evil and pointy and hanging out at the water's edge with their little beady eyes...until we realised that the three snout=shaped logs floating in the water near to us were actually three snouts, powering past with intent. Jasmine noted that they were rather small. On the way back, as if to prover her wrong, we saw an ENORMOUS one. It was lying stock=still, mouth ajar, whilst a nervous=looking wader was creeping ever closer to it. Butterflies, perhaps appropriately yellow, fluttered about it. To all extents and purposes, it looked dead. Even when our boat went really quite close to it, it looked
dead. Clever evil thing.
We didn't get to see what happened to the bird.
The other nice thing that happened in San Cristobal was that we left it, but even then that all went a bit wrong; it being 6am for a start; the bus arriving and our bags being stuck on top rather worryingly; there not being any other Bamba people on board when we'd been told it was a 'Private bamba Bus' and then we were stuck in the front seats by the friver, Jasmine right in the middle with no seatbelt, trying to hang on round all the inevitable mountain curves for an hour, at which point the driver gave up and admitted there was a space in the back, which I was relegated to, and spent the next hour crushed between three other people, venting silent fury and telling myself this was the wrong bus and was full of normal Mexican people going to work and we wouldn't see any nice waterfalls or ruins
today.
Then the bus pretty much work up at about 8am, and the chap sitting next to me suddenly engaged me in conversation in excellent English His name was Sergio, he was here with three of his four songs on a holiday from Merida = incidentally our next destination = and he liked British music. Awesome. he and I spent the next two hours in deep conversation. we started with the 70s, and worked up through the decades. He told me he loved Genesis, and laughed an awful lot when I told him that in England we don't like to admit to liking Phil Collins. I may have even told him about the Cadbury=purple=gorilla='feel it in the air tonight'=drumming advert. Then he asked me why Elton John doesn't sing in his normal voice; "He's trying to be American?" Fair point. Then he laughed about Phil Collins again. I played him some Muse which he recognised. That, and a lengthy discussion about the British and Mexican education systems, killed the time inbetween the stops at Agua Azul, Misol=Ha and Palenque.
Agua=Azul :
beautiful waterfalls, mostly calcified like hierve al Agua, but not at all as high. We'd met a nice Dutch tourism student called Agnes, backpacking since her Uni exam in Cuba = I can think of worse places to do exams, frankly = and she and I went swimming in the stunningly blue waters, held in weirdly yellow natural rockpools.
Misol=Ha:
another waterfall, this time more of a traditional one, falling from on high over rocks to a shimmering finish below. This time you could scramble beneath it and behind it, and up to a grotto
full of bats, for a different view.This one was also in the jungle, hot and muggy, preparing us for Palenque.
Palenque. That's another story...
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