Traveling: it's like watching a movie, but you can't just walk away easily back into the parking lot to go home. Traveling is 3-D surround reality including smells, tastes, and all the senses.
I've been following the Mayan trail. I purchased a $50 one-way minivan ticket from a Antiguan travel agency to travel to San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. Actually Chiapas used to be part of Guatemala and it's still is rich with indigenous Mayan culture. San Cristobal is the city where the Zapatistas started fighting in the mid-1990s, but is now peaceful except for some graffiti in support of the Oaxaca people's liberation and indigenous independence. San Cristobal de las Casas is named after Bishop Las Casas who tried to convince the conquering Spaniards to treat the indigenous peoples with some semblance of dignity and respect.
San Cristobal is similar in many ways to Antigua, Guatemala. They are both touristy towns with intriguing colonial architecture. San Cristobal has stoplights and the traffic is somewhat more gentle for tourists. Antigua has more ruins, in my opinion it's more quaint, and I feel a greater sense of connection here. Both cities offer numerous good places to eat, however there are more vegetarian restaurants in San Cristobal. One night I ate at Casa del Pan, a vegetarian restaurant two doors down from where I was staying, and was enjoying listening to the piped in jazz music. After one of the songs, a radio announcer came on in English saying that KCSF was on the air in San Francisco and also on the World Wide Web. I almost felt like I was back home in California.
Chiapas is one of the poorest Mexican states, but at least in my short time there it doesn't seem .jpg)
to be as poor as Guatemala. The infrastructure in Mexico appears to be more robust. For example, in Chiapas they have small buses and minibuses for public transportation. In Guatemala, it's almost always old school buses ("chicken buses") or riding in the back of stake trucks or pickups without shells for the workers/campesinos. In Mexico, the municipal dump trucks are mostly fairly new. In Guatemala, the dump trucks are almost all old junkers. The bus terminal in San Cristobal is covered and even offers a metal detector one must walk through before boarding an air-conditioned pullman bus featuring movies for your traveling pleasure. The bus terminals in Guatemala are not covered, and more or less they are simply places where the chicken buses congregate -- usually next to market stalls selling almost any thing and everything. There appeared to be less garbage in Mexico and the sidewalks were wider. The signage was superior, or at least present, in front of churches and tourist places in Chiapas, whereas in Guatemala you usually need a map and/or guide. Of course it should be obvious that Mexico is a much larger country in terms of size, population, industry, etc., but I was still impressed by the differences between the two countries.
After arriving in San Cristobal, I happened upon the economic Hotel Casa Real for 80 pesos ($8) per night with a shared bathroom and a great view of the surrounding city from the rooftop. The next day I went on a paid tour of two local indigenous Mayan villages . We traveled 10 km to San Juan Chamula where our guide Raúl explained where we could and could not take photographs, and also gave us some background history. Most of the villagers are indigenous Tzotzils, so Spanish is their second language also. The people here are fiercely independent. The Mexican police and government officials are not welcome here in Chamula unless agreements have been made in advance with village leaders. Many of the men were wearing black fuzzy woolen tunics whereas other guys were wearing white tunics, and the women wore beautiful blue blouses with colorful braids in their hair. Raúl the guide spoke Tzotzil, besides Spanish and English, so he spoke to many of the villagers for us. The turquoise painted crosses festooned with pine branches and/or flowers are not Christian, but rather represent the sun crossing the sky and intersecting with the Milky Way galaxy -- thus representing the Tzotzil cosmology. Remember that the Mayans were great astronomers and still their calendar system is more accurate than our Western one. They also used the number zero years before other Western cultures including the Romans. After climbing up the hill to get a view of the village, he invited us into the adobe house of a mayor duomo (village leader) where Tzotzil ceremonies are held and posh, a strong fermented corn liquor, is drunk in fairly large quantities.We got a chance to taste some. Inside the structure, dozens of candles were burning in small ceramic representations of oxen and burros. Pine needles were scattered around the floor, and hanging vines inside the room separated us from statues and pictures of saints and idols.
We walked back down to the main plaza toward what ostensibly looked to be an ordinary Catholic church except for the multicolored decorations detailed on the bright white façade. Three men were hanging from rope swings. Apparently they paint the façade every couple of years. Upon entering the multi-colored church, one immediately realizes that this is not a typical Roman Catholic church. Yes, there were incense and music, but there were no pews (benches) except for some sort of small bleachers near the back eastern wall. Upon these "bleachers," an apparently posh drunken Tzotzil elder was swaying back and forth, occasionally yelling something in Tzotzil. Thousands and thousands of different colored tapered lit candles were stuck to the cement floor where the pine needles had been moved away. Crates of soft drinks were capriciously stacked in between some of the sets of candles. Small groups of people were standing around the candles playing accordions, fluids and stringed instruments, and chanting. As people drank Coca-Cola, seven up, Fanta, etc. they passed around bottles of posh with the telltale reed stoppers (yucca plant ?) . There are only windows on the western side. Raúl explained how this Tzotzil church is a representation of the Mayan cosmological system. Dozens and dozens of male saints in wooden boxes with glass doors were aligned on the eastern wall, and female saints in boxes are on the western side along with blinking Christmas lights encircling a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A couple of hundred years ago, Catholic missionaries forced the Tzotzil people to carve wooden saints in an attempt to force them to stop worshiping their Mayan idols. The Tzotzil complied, but inside each of the wooden saints, they hollowed out secret compartments to hold their own Mayan idols. So when they prayed to the "Catholic saints," they were actually praying to their ensconced Mayan gods. The statue of Jesus was not in the front center, but rather towards the eastern wall above the boxes and boxes of eggs in the apse area. I spied a group of women kneeling in front of one of the saints drinking soda. Next to the women was a black plastic bag with a live chicken poking its head out. Supposedly the chicken's neck was later broken/twisted as part of one of their rituals. The visit was very impressionable to say the least.
If you want more information about the Tzotzil church and rituals, you may wish to check out http://www.philipcoppens.com/chamula.html.
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I also paid for a three-day tour of the jungle area of Chiapas to enjoy the Mayan ruins and some of the beautiful waterfalls. After seeing some of the present day Mayan rituals, it was easier for me to imagine the populated previously multicolored cities of Palenque, Yaxchilan, and Bonampak. In the jungle heat I perspired enough to completely soak my cotton shirt. Thank goodness for my backpacker water filter/purifier so I could drink lots of fluids without having to buy so many plastic bottles. The one-hour boat trip to the ruins at Yaxchilan was particularlyimpressive, partly due to the fact that most of the steales (?) were still in place and one could still see some of the multicolored painting up close. .jpg)
At Palenque, the temples and pyramids were pretty much intact, but much of the detailed artwork has been relocated to museums. On the second night we stayed in little thatch roofed cabanas, and I filtered my water right out of a jungle stream. I was grateful that this is not the mosquito season. The next day, a very young Lacandon indigenous boy was our guide on a hour and a half hike through the jungle to a small ancient Mayan temple and later to a series of beautiful waterfalls.
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Although it costs 50 bucks to get to Mexico through a travel agency, it only cost $10 to get back to the Mexican Guatemalan border, and another approximately $10 to take chicken buses across Guatemala back to Antigua/Ciudad Vieja. Actually before returning to Ciudad Vieja, I spent another two and half days traveling around the western Guatemala. My first stop was Huehuetenango, which is way way in the western part of Guatemala, and way way far from my friends and family. Since writing letters for Amnesty International years ago, I've wanted to visit Huehuetenango and I finally got my chance. In the late afternoon, it looked like one of the dirtiest, ugliest cities I've ever seen. However I did get a nice, inexpensive hotel room with a private bathroom and went out for some pizza. Actually I had tried to find a Guatemalan restaurant that served vegetarian food, but was unsuccessful and too tired to search for very long. Soon after my pizza arrived, a couple of street urchins came into the restaurant begging for money. The pizza I had ordered was larger than expected, so I gave them each a piece. Of course they wouldn't take the them unless I also gave them a couple of little Heinz ketchup packets. In Guatemala it's not an option to eat pizza without salsa dulce / ketchup -- try it sometime, it's surprisingly good. In the morning, I awoke rested and feeling better. Huehuetenango looked a lot better, and I enjoyed wandering around the open-air markets and seeing all the vibrant colors of the fruits, vegetables, and everything else imaginable for sale. I should also mention the number of both men and women wearing the beautiful, colorful indigenous Mayan typical clothing, each design representative of a person's home village. The people certainly weren't dressing in native dress simply to entertain tourists, as I only saw two other gringos while I was there. I then boarded another chicken bus, this time to Quetzaltenago, commonly simply called Xela, Guatemala's second largest city. I only spent one night there also, and most of my time there was spent shopping for Spanish-language educational computer software. I was impressed by Xela, specifically the friendliness of the people, some of the beautiful parks, and the number of indigenous Mayan people wandering around Western-style malls and shopping centers. I hope to return to both Huehuetenango and Xela for a more thorough visit sometime in the future.
In the midst of traveling to these beautiful and fascinating places, I also met some very nice people and had some great conversations, almost all of them totally in Spanish. I would like to remember Oscar, the Sun Java computer programmer from Mexico City who traveled with me on many of the tours. I was glad I could find his glasses in one of the pools at the jungle waterfalls so that he could see well enough to walk out of there. Also I would like to remember: beautiful Mercedes, the young erudite Mexican historian who is also involved in Catholic base communities and liberation theology; the couple of university professors with whom I had the great political discussion about environmentalism in Mexico; Maria who served me delicious eggs with nopalitos (cactus) and told me how hard it is for women in Chiapas to deal with machismo; Mario, the gay hotel clerk, who gave me great directions to some restaurants and stores to get some supplies; Laura, the young woman from Munich Germany who spoke great Spanish; Michael, the young disillusioned Israeli who had to perform military service in order to be eligible to get a job -- he is Jewish but doesn't believe in God; David, the first grade teacher from Tapachula who, I believe mistakingly, thinks that Guatemalans have had more linguistic influence from English speakers; and Danny, the Guatemalan National Police officer with the thick accent, on vacation visiting his family in San Marcos, who was kind enough to share his gum with me. Plus I am grateful to all of the bus and van drivers who gave me directions and got me back to Ciudad Vieja in one piece after navigating some fairly curvy and rough roads.
Now that I'm back home in Guatemala, I'm still try to figure out what I'm going to do after this Central American experience, but I find it a little comical that I'm once again installing software, crawling under computer tables, and writing lesson plans, except this time it's all in Spanish. I have been helping set up the first computer lab (10 Windows XP workstations) at Casa Hogar for the kids from the garbage dumps at Safe Passage. Before this, they only had one computer in the little library. By the way, if you get a chance to see the 38-minute documentary titled "Recycled Life" about the people living in the Guatemala City garbage dump, you learn a little bit more about the organization for which I volunteer, and also you will get to see some of the places I've been in Guatemala City.
On Saturday afternoons, I've been volunteering at a little library in the little town of San Juan del Obispo just outside of Antigua. The library is named in honor of a local poet who, like many writers and intellectuals, was killed by the government during the Guatemalan civil war. His surviving daughter Marjorie is trying to keep the library open with the help of some volunteers. I'm trying to fix the very old Windows 95 and 98 computers. Supposedly someone has paid for Internet access, but the computers are too old to access it reliably. I did buy some Spanish-language educational computer programs in Xela for the kids and am trying to gather a CD-ROM and other parts to make them usable (thanks Dad!). While I'm working on the computers, young people provide games and activities for the 50 or 60 kids who show up on Saturday afternoons. I even got a chance to read a Spanish language story to the kids and discuss some world geography.
I'm grateful that I'm back safely and that I can be of service with some of my skills. I'm taking a break from attending Spanish-language classes in the mornings, and instead am going to study on my own and prep. some Spanish-language computer lessons. My Spanish-language skills continue to improve. Just this morning while listening to the news, I realized I was understanding almost all the Spanish language news from one of the crackly local radio stations.
I hope you are all happy and healthy.
Blessings and peace,
William Straub
