Even the gods like Coke!!

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Ok so only a month behind with our blog!! After our bad bus trip to the beach we opted for the 1st class option for the 12 hour trip to San Cristobal, which was so comfortable we slept pretty much all the way there!

We stayed in a nice little hostel, with a good mix of friendly people from all over the world; the hostel had a nice leafy courtyard that was good for socialising and for sitting round a camp fire in the evening. A couple of American guys had bought a guitar and were trying to find some songs that everyone in the international crowd would know to sing along: the only one that everyone seemed to really know was Leaving On A Jet Plane, funny eh!!

The Americans had also bought a Djembe hand drum from a local craftsman after seeing some of his work in a local cafe and spending 2 days trying to track him down to make a purchase. We just happened to bump into him in the market and after some deliberation also bought a small drum. The Guy's name was Hermano Sol (Brother Son) and was a proper old school hippy who talked very spiritually about his drum-making! The drum makes a beautiful sound that I'm hoping will only improve as we learn better how to play it!

On our second day in S.C. we took a bus out to one of the surrounding villages, San Juan Chumula. I make this sound so simple but all the "buses" are VW camper vans, they are all the same colour, not many of them had a destination marked on them anywhere and they departed from all over the market square! We did eventually get there after a nice walking tour of the market area that we otherwise would not have seen had we known which yellow camper van we needed!

San Juan is known for its impressive church and we had also gone on a market day so the town was busy and had a nice bustling atmosphere. The people of San Juan are deeply religious and practise a bizzare mixture of Christianity mixed with traditional Mayan beliefs. The church floor was covered with a carpet of pine needles and worshippers light hundreds of candles as the pray and perform clensing acts with natural objects such as eggs. But the most bizzare thing is the offerings they bring, the most popular being bottles of Pepsi but there were an assortment of other beverages being offered to the gods, some of them were even alcoholic - lucky gods!!

Back at the hostel that evening over a few games of cards and some fresh pineapple that we had bought from the market (that we now knew so well) we discovered that one of our fellow travellers was Rick Mayal's daughter, so we have a small claim to fame now as well!!

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Comments

[richB]

much to read
having just found your blog, something tells me i have a lot of reading to do. Wish me luck!

[Kev and Tash]

RE: Much to read
Glad you found us, good luck with the reading - you may need a few hours or days to catch up!