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Published: February 26th 2010
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We have 5 hours of free internet each with our Spanish lessons (we are in fact now in Guatemala, but ignore that fact, we´re just very delayed with the blogs!!) so expect a few blogs in the next couple of days!!
After the Oaxaca coast we headed back inland (and back uphill), to the town of San Cristobal de las Casas. It´s a really nice town, and has a lot of recent history as it was the centre stage for the Zapatista uprising in 1994 (if you want some light reading on the subject, heres the Wiki article!:
Zapatista article )
The town has a lovely cool climate which was a relief after the heat and mossies of the coast, and we managed to find a nice hostel that was in fact the house of the family that owned and ran it. We needed a nice place to stay after our bus ride from the coast - 11 hours on a coach is not fun, even if it is a "luxury" bus!
We spent the next couple of days getting to know the place and sampling the many vegetarian restaurants, San Cristobal is a bit of a vege paradise... thats if
View of the town
lots of steps..! you like spinach anyway! Unfortunately the accumulation of spinach, or more likely something dodgy we ate disagreed with us (I´m not sure if spinach overdose can cause too many problems...) and on the 3rd day we both slowly developed a nasty illness consisting of nausea (and what comes with it), fatigue, fever, and intense stomach cramps (also what comes with that.. ). Lets just say we paid many a visit to the pharmacy for rehydration solution - yum!!! Luckily the owners of the hostel were really really kind to us, offered to cook us rice to eat and even cooked up porridge especially for us in the morning. Neither of us could stomach more than that, and the porridge looked rather like what I was throwing up in the toilet!! Anyway, enough of that!!
Before we were struck down we did manage to get out to the nearby village of San Juan Chamula, where we were lucky enough to witness their Carnaval celebrations in full swing. There were a lot of people, music, dancing, fireworks and a massive market (which wasn´t even the big market apparently!). There were large groups of men dressed in matching costume dancing and parading
When the sun came out!
Yay! This is the cathedral. through the streets with incense, it´s hard to describe their costumes but they were unlike anything we had seen before! Lots of colours, and culmunating with a large hat with multicoloured tassles. Most of the townspeople wore skirts or jackets made of black or white sheepskin that looked a bit too warm! The reason its so hard to describe the scene is due to the fact we dont have any photos. The villagers believe that a photograph steals part of their soul, so we respected this and didnt get out our camera. Mind you we saw a lot of other tourists with massive cameras around their necks taking pictures without putting the cameras to their eyes. I thought this was incredibly rude, selfish and disrespectful, but thats tourists for you. For this reason, most of the dancers wore sunglasses and bandanas to hide their faces.
We also visited the church in the town, which was a very strange experience! The local people believe that burping expels bad spirits and therefore consume fizzy drinks (primarily coca cola as it is the cheapest) in order to purge the nasty stuff in a nice big burp. It was strange to see people
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Most of our time was spent between here and the toilet!! praying with a bottle of pop in front of them! The religion was a mixture between Catholicism and the native Mayan religions, so there was a lot of chanting, burping, praying and incense burning going on. The floor of the church was blanketed in pine needles, with thousands of candles melted to the floors and tables. There were no pews, alter or organ though!
Back in San Cristobal we went for a tour around the museum of Na Balom (House of the Jaguar in native Mayan), the old house of a Swiss Danish couple who lived in the town in the 20th century. They visited, befriended and photographed the Lacandon, native people in the jungles of Chiapas, before anyone else had with any significance, and the museum now participates in charity work and reforestation schemes in the area. Very interesting, although we both started to feel pretty grotty towards the end = the beginning of our downfall!!
We did eventually recover and decided to make our next journey, to the ancient city of Palenque (although I for one was definately still ill and the windy bus journey there was not one of the best life experiences!!) Due to our illness, we had decided not to go to a local tourist spot, Canon del Sumidero, which is a massive and very spectacular canyon, 800 metres high in places. This turned out to be a bit of a Final Destination moment as we read in the papers the day after that there had been a boat accident due to high winds in the Canyon and 3 people were killed! Very very scary, and very ominous!
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