San Cristobal de las Casas (Day 16 - 13/1/14)

San Cristobal is a mountain city of churches and revolutionary fervour.

In San Cristobal, every street was tiny, painted, cobbled. It was my favourite place in Mexico.

No sleep was gotten! All the Mexicans flipped their seats back as soon as they got on the bus, crushing our legs. Duck politely asked the women in front to move her seat forward a bit but she just shrugged and slammed it back further. The bus driver's solution was to banish us to the back, next to the stinky toilet. I reckon I got a solid hour's shut-eye.

Despite not having any record of our reservation, our hostel lets us check in early. This just about sums up Mexico - often disorganised and chaotic, but also flexible. The hostel is called Axkhan Arte Hotel, owing to the many works of art that adorn its walls. Many of these artworks reflect the injustices visited upon the Mayas over the last few centuries, a display of conscience that sits in stark contrast to the apathy of Alejandro and Mexico City several hundred kilometres away.

Axkhan Arte Hostel

Our room. Note the exhausted Duck in the background.

San Cristobal is in Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapis, and is home to the Lacondan people - a group of Mayas that managed to evade subjugation at the hands of the Spanish, and still live on the outskirts of town. Even though they achieved the rarity of 'freedom', there is still evidence of the generational poverty that shackles them. On our travels through the San Cristobal markets the Duck is continuously pestered by a Maya woman and her many children. One boy follows us for a while, almost crying to try and get a sale. Whilst their desperation is undeniably depressing, the tenacity of this woman is impressive - she has one child strapped to her back while she casually breastfeeds another from the front. It's a little confronting but you have to develop a harder shell to pass through these markets, and we decide to limit our time there so it doesn't colour our whole perspective of the much larger township.

Our third sighted roofdog.

San Cristobal de las Casas is a really beautiful town. Cradled between mountains and flanked by a rare cloud rainforest (which we were unable to see due to the trail being closed on Mondays), the town is a huge lattice of cobbled one-way laneways. Nearly all of the buildings have terracotta roofs and they're all painted bright colours of varying shades. Cabs race down the laneways, navigating the narrow one-way streets with assured experience, and we often have to jump up on the just-as-narrow walkways to avoid them.

A lot of today is spent just wandering around. We get lost at first but I don't really mind because it's such a picturesque place. A stray dog, jet black and bright-eyed, follows us a while. Sometimes it overtakes but keeps close, so the Duck has us follow it. We trail the happy canine through various streets blindly for a while but eventually decide to grab a taxi to somewhere central just to get our bearings. We visit the zocalo and look at various jewellery shops that specialise in amber. The state of Chiapis is the only source of amber in all of Mexico, and this amber is 25-30 million years old and found 40-80 metres deep underground. We also see a whole host of brightly-painted churches and spy some nifty anti-capitalist graffiti near the Maya Na Bolom Cultural Centre. The graffiti reflects the city's recent history as a rallying point for the Zapatistas, a civil resistance group who represent the rights of the indigenous people in Chiapis. Their mark is all over the city, in the street art, in the pro-Maya pride of the locals, and in shops that sell rebel-based paraphernalia. 

Nearly all of the street art and graffiti is either pro-Maya, or anti-Western, and usually quite beautiful

In an extension of this, the Na Bolom Cultural Centre represents the life's work of two European intellectuals who wanted to preserve the life of the local Lacondan people. It's quiet, and peaceful, but it's hard to overlook the human bones on display among other cultural items. I'm not saying these bones are 'bad'... they just stand out as a real point of difference to a Westerner like myself, and, even with its pro-Maya stance, it's hard to know if they are displayed with the consent of the local indigenous peoples or not.

The chapel inside the Na Bolom centre

A Maya doll

The inherent horror isn't just restrained to the Mayas. The Spanish ancestry of the Mexicans is hardly the cleanest history, though it's reassuring to see a bit more revisionism in San Cristobal in comparison to the latest Eurocentrism in Mexico City (a place of conquest built on the bones of allegedly Satanic savages). Catholicism in Mexico is brutal... the iconography inside the huge beautiful churches verges on the outright violent. And there's something confronting about sightseeing in one of these churches to see the poor local woman weeping loudly on her knees in front of the altar. It's something really alien to an Australian like myself, to see a true believer begging so openly and unashamedly, reduced to her faith in religion to save her from hard, real world problems. Christianity is different here in Mexico - people actually believe in God. I know I come off as cynical and generalising, but many of the God-believing Christians I know don't even go to church, so it would be unthinkable for them to prostate themselves in front of God so unselfconsciously. I'm confronted by this local woman's grief, but I also admire it a little bit, even with my own lack of belief.

Nearly every corner has a church, each one beautifully crafted and brightly coloured.

Later, the Duck and I decide to have dinner at the hostel, and the old language problem rears its head again. We order something simple from the menu but here are certain ingredients missing from the kitchen. Duck modifies her order but it still doesn't work. The language barrier breaks down communication between ourselves and the waiter so he leads me to a computer and we begin conversing with Google translator. The wonders of modern technology!

The Museum of Amber

San Cristobal Zocalo

 

Zapatista art.