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Still in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Still learning Spanish though there is only one more week of that left. Then we pack our bags and hit the road once again, aiming eastward at the Guatemalan border. June 6th marks six months since E and I, pink and naïve, climbed aboard an aeroplane at Heathrow (after they binned all the razor blades I had brought with me) and left the UK for Delhi.
For half a year we have been outsiders to every city, community, and household we've visited although we frequently tried to ingratiate ourselves for the brief time we spent in a location. Nowhere is this transience better illustrated than in the number of beds or locations we have laid ourselves down on. 50. Not including the trains, planes, and buses we've spent a night on to reach some distant city. I just used the calculator and it averages out at a new bed every 3.64 nights - and we have spent more than a week in some beds, so that's a pretty rapid rate of turn around throughout most of our "holiday" so far.
We aren't the only people doing this either. There are millions of humans living as vagrant phantoms, drifting across borders and hiding in the crowds, existing on the spreadsheets of governments and NGOs across the world as little more than estimated figures. It makes a mockery of the possibility of "society". Good. There is a world beyond the streets of Europamerica, and it is vast and it is teeming. Sometimes it can seem otherwise when locked onto the concrete and living a daily routine but, like ants or rats, it is a world unto itself existing between each breath you take.
But the freedom of travelling is relative and not everybody living this life is a paragon of liberty. We stayed briefly with a Chilean named Cata in Pluma Hidalgo who explained her love for Oaxaca as Mexico being a country with great freedoms. Chile, like Europe, is an advanced capitalist state ruled by capitalism and bureacracy. I agreed with her at first because I too have felt this way since arriving in Mexico. It's a country where you can travel 2000 kilometres and build a house in the mountains with barely any money. After thinking about it further, though, it occured to me that this freedom is not of a state or country but simply the privilege of being foreign and being a traveller. Millions of campesinos and urban poor fighting for survival and self-determination would gain little fulfilling freedom out of packing their bags and wandering the country. Liberty for them seems to be drawn from firm roots and the texture of remaining in the places they love. Our freedom - mine, E's, every traveller we have met and talked to - stands on the backs of these communities.
Such contrast was starkly illustrated to me two days ago as I stood in San Cristóbal's zocalo. The plaza has been taken over by a food market for Corpus Christi. In one corner of the square, though, rather than tables heaped with colourful sweets and cream-filled pastries, is a gathering of tents and tarpaulins sheltering the ONPP-Chiapas. Flyers and posters are pinned to every possible surface - including the large wooden crucifix outside the Cathedral - and banners flap in the breeze. One banner had been used to block a major road through the centre of town, backed up by dozens of people (I just changed this from "tens of people" because that felt wrong. Why? Answers below, please.) sitting in the road to ensure traffic disruption. They were protesting about Government-backed paramilitaries acting as agent provocateurs to enable the state and federal governments to withdraw funding whilst implementing harsh new laws targetting the already-subjugated. During my two or so hours in the zocalo watching the world pass by and interested to see if anything bigger would kick off it occured to me that there was a pattern to the people interested in the ONPP.
There is ostensibly two different types of foreigners in San Cristóbal: the rich white American / Australian holidayers, and the younger European / South America hippy types with circus skills but without shoes. Both of these are united, though, in their seeming lack of interest in the lives of locals. It is an attitude expected - perhaps - of the former but less so of the latter. Despite being happy to adorn themselves with the aesthetics of Mayan culture - clothing, art, spirituality - they seem disinterested in the very real struggles local Mayans and Mexicans alike face in their day to day lives. As hundreds of people walked past the OPNN encampment in the zocalo only the locals took any heed; countless dreadlocked, Ali Baba pants-wearing, topless foreigners walked past with little more than a sideways glance. All avoided or ignored the woman handing out information flyers. All of them.
Tourism has been weaponised in Chiapas. The Government is using it as an excuse to increase the presence of the army and police throughout the state, particularly in the Lacandon Jungle. Tourists have also become a source of income for a lot of the indigenous and local Mexican people here. Stand on Calle Real de Guadelupe and you'd never think Chiapas is the poorest state in the country. To be a foreigner in San Cristóbal - or indeed in Nepal, or India, or Guatemala - carries a lot of weight. The more I see of the non-Western world the more I feel it; not just understand but
feel. The idea of being a foreigner here without much sensitivity to the daily lives of locals seems crazy and yet there appear to be so many - but not all - who are without.
I don't want to be that person. We don't want to be those people. Six months of travelling and I am not homesick but slightly nauseous about being in this role of ghostly parasite, unable to give little back but money. Money is the absolute least a person can give. Fifty beds, many of which have not been very comfortable, and my mind is turned toward the comforts that people have found in the same mountains for a thousand years or by the same lake for centuries. We are learning Spanish to better participate in local culture but we will never truly be connected.
E and I sat drinking cheap wine (and a double shot each of Pox, a Chipaneco mezcal) in La Viña de Bacco last night, talking about what we might have done differently over the last six months. The answer is nothing. Everything from watching the sun set off the Californian coast to shitting my guts out in Kathmandhu has been worthwhile. To have done everything we have done has required fifty beds and a rapid rate of progress, never truly existing in a place, and that is okay. But for me it is also a fool's gold with discomfort beneath the flaking facade. I - we - look forward to another however many months and however many beds,
por supuesto, but with a recognition that what is wanted from our lives cannot be gained without a degree of inertia.
"I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots of the deepest hollow next to the streambed. The quiet hum of the earth's dreaming is my new song."
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
Thanks for sharing your insights...
at least you recognize that no matter how long you visit a country, and even learn the language, you are still a visitor...a spectator.