Around San Cristobal

In spite of the frequent and heavy rains we could visit a couple of places around San Cristobal. The first visit was to the neighbouring town of San Juan Chamula, where people still live in a very traditional way. Men and women wear traditional garments in their daily life and live according to local rules and values. The peak of the local strangeness is by far the church.

Unfortunately we don't have many pictures, as cameras and cell phones are strictly forbidden inside the church. K was stopped and questioned because the paper tissue in her pocket looked like a cell phone to the guard. Apparently the punishment for being caught with a camera can be very harsh, even physical too, so we decided not to risk it, although if allowed we would have taken a thousand pictures.

The main entrance to the church

The church looks normal from the outside. Inside it's weird and quite creepy. There are no chairs nor benches and the whole floor is covered with the ferns of an aromatic plant. In various spots the believers clear the ground from the leaves, sit on the floor and light dozens of tall and thin candles as part of prayers and rituals. Most of the believers pray facing the centrally placed statue of Saint John the Baptist, while others direct their prayers towards one of the many statues of saints lined up against the walls, literally covering the entire length of the church on both sides. The smoke from the candles and the burning incense fills the air and the lungs.

The statues are rather scary. Their face is usually white pale, with dark eyes and red cheekbones. Every year a new clothe is given to each statue, usually without taking away the old ones. With the clothes piling up, many statues end up showing only a small head out of a bulky and overdressed body. Good material for horrible nightmares. And it's not over.

While some people simply pray and ask for favours until their candles are completely consumed, other practise more complex and strange rituals. It's a common belief here that burping helps to expel sickness and evil from the body. For this reason everybody drinks a lot of Coca Cola, all the time, and bottles of the drink are offered to the saints. Many rituals include other type of sacrifice, including the killing of a chicken after a very long ceremonial. We saw the chickens but weren't 'lucky' enough to see the end of the ritual. The incense fumes made us feel dizzy after some time so we went out and sat at a bar. Obviously we followed the local tradition and ordered a soda.

The next day we booked an organised tour to the Cañon del Sumidero, a large navigable canyon visited on boat. It must be very nice, but it kept raining the whole time and it wasn't much fun being on a uncovered boat. Do you know how painful the rain can be at high speed? It's like a thousand needles hitting your skin repeatedly. Every time the boat was moving we would cover our heads and protect our faces with the jacket , and we would only look around when the boat stopped. The canyon is impressive, and the sight of crocodiles guarding their babies rather scary. Even more scary was to see people jump from the boat and swim in those crocodile infested waters. Or when the boatman decided to abandon them in the water just because he had told them not to jump. They were eventually rescued by another boat, but for twenty minutes we kept wondering what would happen to them. Overall an interesting trip.

Rain cover

View of the canyon

Pelicans

Young crocodiles

...and their parents

On the way back we stopped in a town called Chiapa de Corzo for a lunch break. There we found a statue of Chiapas most important Marimba player (the Marimba is a local instrument), a relative of Noel's mother.

Fuente mudejar, shaped as the Spanish crown

Decorations in Chiapa de Corzo

Statue of the most famous Marimba player

Because of the bad weather we couldn't explore much more of the region. Perhaps we'll stop again in Chiapas on our way back. In any case we had a very good time in San Cristobal with our Mexican family. We could have stayed there longer but the road to Tikal, in Guatemala, was calling us. We traced back our steps towards Palenque on the same horrible bus ride that had taken us to San Cristobal a few days before. Once again just the two of us.

Meet the family (a small part of it)