Eeek, it's been a few days since I last posted and so I might have a bit to write today. I spent another couple of days in Oaxaca visiting a place called Hierve el Agua (the name means boiling water, a bit of a misnomer really as the water from the springs isn't really hot but it just effervesces due to the dissolved minerals), which has some beautiful rock formations that look like petrified waterfalls (by petrified I of course mean turned to stone, and not scared, although I'd quite like to see what scared water looks like). And from there I stopped off at a town called El Tule, which claims to have a tree that is the largest living biomass in the world. I'm not too sure about that claim, but it certainly is a bloody big tree! My final day was spent in the main market in Oaxaca (not the one selling touristy crap, but the one where locals come to shop), where it is ridiculously easy to get lost among the maze of covered stalls selling everything imaginable under the sun: from food and spices to bridal wear and cheap plastic sandals.
At the moment I'm in San Cristobal de Las Casas (SC), a pretty town in south east Mexico in the state of Chiapas and home to the Zapatista movement. Luckily for me Lisbeth (a Mexican ex-flatmate of mine) has a couple of good friends (Tammo and Luz and their beautiful little girl Paulina) here in SC who were not only kind enough to welcome me at the bus station and show me around a bit, but also gave me a great deal of information about the indigenous peoples (Luz works job is to help with their economic development, sort of like the Gramin Bank) and Tammo about the wildlife (as he is a conservation co-ordinator in El Triunfo bioreserve). Anyway, not only does Chiapas have the best preserved Mayan ruins and the greatest biodiversity in Mexico, but the indigenous people have preserved their cultures more than most. And so with a view to seeing this first hand I went on a tour of a couple of local villages.
The first one I visited was called San Juan de Chamula, which is a very singular place because it remains autonomous from most of the federal and state laws and they have their own traditional justice system. Policemen have no powers inside the village boundaries and instead justice is dealt by a group of elected villagers armed with big, heavy-looking, sticks. Not only is their status within Mexico unique, but so is their religion, which they call "Traditional Catholicism", which is a very strange syncretism of Catholicism and Mayan pre-Hispanic beliefs. The only parts of their beliefs that would seem familiar to European Christians are their acceptance of baptism and the saints, other than that it is completely foreign. They have no priests, instead they commune directly with the saints; they carry out shamanistic healing rituals in their church (many of which include Coca Cola as an integral part of the ritual!) going so far as to sacrifice animals (to my great disappointment, while I was there I didn't get to witness any); they include many Mayan religious symbols (e.g. instead of Jesus on the cross they have a corn plant); and they hold John the Baptist in much higher esteem than Jesus himself. So understandably the church is quite a chaotic place with literally thousands of candles all on tables, on chairs and on the floor and pine needles strewn all across the floor, unfortunately, however, you can't take pictures (due to them thinking that it steals power from their guardian angels, and you'd be in physical danger if you tried) inside or of the people themselves, although I was able to find this site with some pictures from the outside along with some of the Authorities (local police) in their white woollen ponchos.
My visit to the second village of Zinacantan was cut short by a couple of Dutchmen in the tour group who complained that it was going on for longer than advertised (heaven forbid) and that they urgently needed to get back to SC for important business (which turned out to be the visiting of a church). This has made me decide to try and cut down as much as possible on organised tours where I am at the mercy of other peoples' fancies. If I'm going to suffer from whims they may as well be my own.
I'd like to finish today's post with a small(ish) rant about hippies and gap-year travellers. Now it may seem odd for me to lump these two, seemingly disparate, groups together, but there is a reason. You see I don't understand them. The hippies get up at midday, smoke some weed, play the guitar, talk about the deeper meaning of life, and never leave the hostel. Gap-year students, on the other hand, head down to the coast and just get hammered every day. Both of these activities can so easily be done back at home; you don't need to be here in Mexico to do it. On the other hand there's such an amazing country out there to be discovered, with an incredible diversity of wildlife, peoples, cultures and traditions. It just seems to be an amazing waste of a golden opportunity. Initially I thought that 7 weeks would be too much for Mexico and that I'd get bored, and now I'm having to rush to fit half of what I want to see into my schedule, and I just know that I'm going to have to come back at some point to finish it off (and pop down into the rest of central America).
At the moment I'm in San Cristobal de Las Casas (SC), a pretty town in south east Mexico in the state of Chiapas and home to the Zapatista movement. Luckily for me Lisbeth (a Mexican ex-flatmate of mine) has a couple of good friends (Tammo and Luz and their beautiful little girl Paulina) here in SC who were not only kind enough to welcome me at the bus station and show me around a bit, but also gave me a great deal of information about the indigenous peoples (Luz works job is to help with their economic development, sort of like the Gramin Bank) and Tammo about the wildlife (as he is a conservation co-ordinator in El Triunfo bioreserve). Anyway, not only does Chiapas have the best preserved Mayan ruins and the greatest biodiversity in Mexico, but the indigenous people have preserved their cultures more than most. And so with a view to seeing this first hand I went on a tour of a couple of local villages.
The first one I visited was called San Juan de Chamula, which is a very singular place because it remains autonomous from most of the federal and state laws and they have their own traditional justice system. Policemen have no powers inside the village boundaries and instead justice is dealt by a group of elected villagers armed with big, heavy-looking, sticks. Not only is their status within Mexico unique, but so is their religion, which they call "Traditional Catholicism", which is a very strange syncretism of Catholicism and Mayan pre-Hispanic beliefs. The only parts of their beliefs that would seem familiar to European Christians are their acceptance of baptism and the saints, other than that it is completely foreign. They have no priests, instead they commune directly with the saints; they carry out shamanistic healing rituals in their church (many of which include Coca Cola as an integral part of the ritual!) going so far as to sacrifice animals (to my great disappointment, while I was there I didn't get to witness any); they include many Mayan religious symbols (e.g. instead of Jesus on the cross they have a corn plant); and they hold John the Baptist in much higher esteem than Jesus himself. So understandably the church is quite a chaotic place with literally thousands of candles all on tables, on chairs and on the floor and pine needles strewn all across the floor, unfortunately, however, you can't take pictures (due to them thinking that it steals power from their guardian angels, and you'd be in physical danger if you tried) inside or of the people themselves, although I was able to find this site with some pictures from the outside along with some of the Authorities (local police) in their white woollen ponchos.
My visit to the second village of Zinacantan was cut short by a couple of Dutchmen in the tour group who complained that it was going on for longer than advertised (heaven forbid) and that they urgently needed to get back to SC for important business (which turned out to be the visiting of a church). This has made me decide to try and cut down as much as possible on organised tours where I am at the mercy of other peoples' fancies. If I'm going to suffer from whims they may as well be my own.
I'd like to finish today's post with a small(ish) rant about hippies and gap-year travellers. Now it may seem odd for me to lump these two, seemingly disparate, groups together, but there is a reason. You see I don't understand them. The hippies get up at midday, smoke some weed, play the guitar, talk about the deeper meaning of life, and never leave the hostel. Gap-year students, on the other hand, head down to the coast and just get hammered every day. Both of these activities can so easily be done back at home; you don't need to be here in Mexico to do it. On the other hand there's such an amazing country out there to be discovered, with an incredible diversity of wildlife, peoples, cultures and traditions. It just seems to be an amazing waste of a golden opportunity. Initially I thought that 7 weeks would be too much for Mexico and that I'd get bored, and now I'm having to rush to fit half of what I want to see into my schedule, and I just know that I'm going to have to come back at some point to finish it off (and pop down into the rest of central America).
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