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Published: September 28th 2006
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If you ever wanted to go to Europe but didn´t want to flit across the Atlantic, then just come to San Cristobal de Las Casas in Chiapas. That´s an exaggeration of course, but it does have the feeling of a smaller colonial-mexican-european city with interesting characters and all the mayans and mestizo locals and german, french, and italian visitors to boot.
San Cristobal is in part named after the bishop of this area during the early colonial period named Bartolome de Las Casas. Some of you will be familiar with this rare defender of indian rights against the abuses of the elite ¨landowners¨ and enslavers. It is very different than Palenque just hours away. SC is in Los Altos, or the highlands, so it nice and sunny during the day and cool at night. In the winter it will get quite cold here unlike the jungle lowlands to the south and east. There are also plenty of natural wonders to explore in the region.
The town has all the blessings and burdens that come with being a popular destination...excellent restaurants (including many vegetarian places, and probably the best restaurant I´ve ever eaten at which is an Indian, Thai, and
Arab place owned by Mexican Sikhs! Those who know me can be sure I am in heaven there...curries, samosas, pad thai, falafel, hummus, and at a fraction of the cost in US!) The BEST bookstore in all of Mexico (for english books...I´m not kidding) with an interesting owner to boot (I will be mentioning more about her later). Awesome cafes with character, including several that serve only locally grown, organic coffee, working with campesino cooperatives. (The manager of that cafe will come into the picture later in the story as well.) Some of said cafes have art and alternative theaters in the back. It has language schools and live reggae and other bands and interesting bars. Add to all this the pleasant strolling pedestrian walkway, cobblestone streets, and pretty plazas and gardens, and you can guess it is going to be hard to leave here. Forget San Miguel de Allende!
The burden of course is that with tourists you lose some local flavor and tradition and sometimes end up interacting with other tourists rather than mexicans. Just the opposite of Ameca where I didn´t see any tourists. That isn´t always bad as I have met some interesting people here
SC Cathedral
This stands in the center of town facing one of the many pleasant plazas here. from Holland, Israel, Australia, Germany, and some country called san francisco, etc. I met a half-crazy guy from Florida who just came out of a 1 month stint in the jungle sleeping on a hammock. His name was Ryan and he was studying philosophy of all things. He told me about killing giant scorpions that crawled in his hammock and about a fugitive from California living off the jungle and about the drug trade that finds its way up through Lacandon forest and Palenque as a way-station and bands of transvestites.
This week I took a tour to Sumidero Canyon, about 40 minutes from town, down in the hotter lowlands. The drive there, like the one from Palenque to San Cristobal, is one of the most beautiful stretches of highway, with pine forests, wispy clouds, boulders and jagged mountain rock faces.
As for the canyon, it is difficult to put into words such an awesome majestic vista! And even the photos don´t do it justice as they never do. The boat took us down the river Grijalva through the whole length of the canyon to the dam and then back again. The cliff walls towered above us on
both sides some 2500-3000 ft at times. Half way through there is a stream that flows out of the cliff walls forming a cascade of sorts, flowing over some of the strangest rock formations I´ve seen. They looked like giant umbrellas or mushroom heads covered in moss and strange plants. The vegetation and birdlife was abundant: brown and white Pelicans, herons, vultures, cranes, ducks, hummingbirds. Then crocodiles on the muddy shores! A very peculiar type of bird. The trip was well worth all of $14.
The dam at the end of the canyon is the 5th highest in the world. It produces some 23% percent of all of Mexico´s electicity, powering 4 powerstations...though it doesn´t go to benefit many of the Chiapanecos. (This is common in developing countries...for example, 100,000´s of people in India, mostly peasants and indians, have had their lands flooded as the result of megadam projects that are intended to benefit the whole country. They are displaced and many of these end up in the outer ghettos of calcutta, bombay, or delhi with no livelihood to speak of and not benefiting from the electricity produced.)
Another day I went to a limestone cavern called the
Pine Needles At Market
Mayan Indians gather pine needles from the forest and bring them to town market. They are used both for the practical purpose of drying wet floors to keep from slipping and in churches, as they have religious significance forsome mayans. Grutas of San Cristobal, where you can walk several 100 meters in. Unfortunately you couldn´t explore independently past the marked areas and you couldn´t urinate on the rocks according to the sign. I have been told there are plenty of caves around this area to explore, but I think i will put that off for now. It was set in the pine forests outside town and was very much like the limestone caves in Ohio, West Virgina, Kentucky. Afterwards, I ended up hanging out with some mexicans there who had a guitar but they couldn´t play it. So we sat in the woods and I entertained them for a while with improvised jams and they taught me some spanish. Not a bad afternoon!
Next up: Contemporary Mayans
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