San Cristobal de las Casas: My New Favorite Place in the World.

On the way to San Cristobal, we ran into two roadblocks. The first was only a kilometer away from Ocosingo, where I would catch my connection, so I just walked. I never did find out what the roadblock was about, but I would soon enough hit another one that was better explained. On the way from Ocosingo to San Cristobal, we came to a stop behind a long line of cars. As we stood around waiting, another driver explained that the locals were upset about a government zoning decision that had affected the school system in the town. Although I didn't understand all of the details, the fact of the matter was that they weren't happy, and that in order to make that point clear they stopped traffic every hour, on the hour, and charged 50 pesos per vehicle. Once you paid, you had to wait until the next hour, on the hour, where they would let all of the paid vehicles through, and repeat the process again. Because these towns are in the heart of the Zapatista stronghold, a lot of them are run independently of the government, so the police sort of just keep their noses out of it. These guys don't joke around either - when one of the Mexican tourists in my shuttle was caught taking pictures, they quite strongly told him to delete them, and waited there until he did. I saw one guy being dragged back to the town center by three of the local authorities. He was not happy.

I eventually arrived in San Cristobal, where I would stay for a week and do pretty much nothing until I forced myself to play tourist on the last two days. My days pretty much consisted of the following: wake up, eat breakfast, go to the cafe with the newspaper, go to the market, go to the bookstore, read several hours, watch a documentary, eat dinner, read, sleep, repeat. This routine was interrupted on a few occasions by yoga, shopping, walks through the city, and a horseback ride to nearby San Juan Chamula were the locals use chickens and Coca Cola as part of their religious rituals - which are all conducted in a "Catholic" church. You're not allowed to take pictures in the church though, they don't really like white folk gawking at them and all, which is understandable. Apparently you get tossed in jail and they wreck your camera if you do. I didn't take any chances.

The 200th anniversary of independence celebration were ramping up while I was in San Cristobal, and a bunch of tough looking army dudes handed out packages with a Mexican flag and the national anthem at the center of town one day.

GPK represent.

San Cristobal is probably my favorite place visited on this trip so far. It has a colonial look and feel like Antigua, but without all of the drunken foreigners everywhere. Sure, there are tons of tourists, but most of them are Mexican nationals, so it gives the town a very authentic feel. I could have spent every day walking through the market, which is full of every artisanal gift you can think of, as well as the food market, with piles of dried shrimp, salted cod, pig heads and questionable sausages. Everything is a visual feast for the eyes, sensory overload.

Another great part about the city are the people. Everywhere you go, there's someone interesting, and I eventually wouldn't leave the hostel unless I made sure I had my camera in hand.

At this point, I will jump into a somewhat politically charged issue in Mexican history. This is my op-ed piece on the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and the effect it has on foreign tourists ready to run to the hillsides to fight with Commander Marcos and his balaclava-clad crew.

There are two local cinemas in town that screen films every night, usually documentaries. I caught a few while I was there, the most interesting one being a short history on the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. Although I am no expert on the situaiton, the gist of it goes as follows: On January 1, 1994, a group of armed indigenous people marched to San Cristobal and took over the town center, sending a message to the government that they were sick and tired of being politically excluded and neglected - in essence, not considered part of Mexican society. What followed (and to an extent still goes on to this day) was a series of battles between the army and the armed Zapatistas, leaving mountains of dead bodies on both sides, as well as even more innocent ones. It's sort of easy to sympathize with the Zapatistas at first, in the same way that loads of kids in Canada and the U.S walk around with Che Guevara shirts without really knowing who he was or what he did. The romanticization of the Zapatista rebellion is an easy one to fall for - a group of underdogs fighting for their political inclusion, and for the rights that have been denied of them for so long. They have a cool leader, known as Commander Marcos, who wears one of those black robber ski masks and everything, and Zapatista-run stores in the area sell an assortment of gifts from t-shirts, to dolls and posters. Before I really knew that much about the situation, I was also drawn to the plight of the Zapatistas, wanting to visit one of their villages during my trip. It wasn't until my Mexican-born friend Francisco enlightened me to some of the realities of the situation that I realized maybe I needed to take a closer look. Again, I far from consider myself an expert on the rebellion, but after some reading, and attending that documentary at the cinema, it became clear that there is more to it than meets the eye. The Zapatistas have done a lot of great things for indigenous rights, but they have also gotten a lot of people killed - both innocent and not so innocent. The army also plays a big role in this, but at the same time, the Zapatistas themselves were (from my perspective) the main catalyst that caused thousands of innocent indigenous people (many of whom were not involved, or at least not voluntarily, in the Zapatista movement) to be forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in the mountains in order to avoid harrassment and possible human rights violations by the military. A ton of developments have happened since the initial uprise, some violent and others not, but all of which fall into the same pattern of both sides being wrong to one extent or another.

Even after my limited research on the subject, it was clear that the rebellion in Chiapas was more than a "you're right and they're wrong" situation. Who's right when everyone seems to be wrong? Nonetheless, the romanticization of the Zapatista movement was ever present in San Cristobal, even when I wasn't visiting their shops (which I admitedly made a few purchases at). A French girl that was at dinner with our group was chatting with another guy about the situation, and after he explained the basic history she was already ready to go. A bunch of Europeans are supposedly in the area working with the Zapatistas now to keep the issues relevant and in the global news. The French girl wanted to meet them, to go to the village, basically to join the Zapatistas. Although I can't remember her exact words, she basically said, "As soon as I meet them I know that I will want to be a Zapatista follower". Follower indeed.

One way or another, the history of San Cristobal and the Zapatistas is important to not only Mexican history, but also any group of people fighting for indigenous rights (or any human rights for that matter really). At the same time though, its hard to see the whole issue from the outside, especially as a jaded white tourist (which although I like not to consider myself, I obviously am) who only sees the romantic side of a David and Goliath battle, where the underdogs are in the right and The Man is in the wrong. When you look at all the lost and displaced lives that are attributed to the rebellion in the last 16 years, the issue suddenly becomes somewhat less clear. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even jaded white foreigners. All I say is that it should be an informed opinion. And even at that, I'll probably still think you're wrong unless you agree with me...

Ruins, Ruins, Ruins.

On my last night in Xpujil, a group of Mexicans kept me up half the night with their loud antics outside my cabana, so I had to put in my earplugs. Unfortunately, this caused me to not hear my alarm in the morning, and subsequently miss my 6am bus to Palenque. I then spent the rest of the day sitting in various bus stations in small dusty towns on the highway, all in an effort to make up for my missed morning bus.

"Only pull the goatee." Love the translation.

I finally made it to Palenque the next morning, and immediately hit the ruins there. I ran into a group of Israelis (who are everywhere in Central America and Mexico by the way), and we decided to get a tour guide. Our guide was really good, super funny, and spoke a few words of Hebrew, which really made my new Israeli friends laugh. He brought us into the jungle on the outskirts of the park to show us how much is yet to be uncovered, including this entrance to a house. So much to dig up, so little money. I say they should just bring in the bulldozers.

The small temple beside the Temple of Inscriptions holds the crypt of the Red Queen, as they call her. Apparently they found her mummified body all blinged out, with a jade mask, and tons of ornate jewelry. That's straight up OG.

Our guide had some great visual material to help us through the tour. This was a big help, especially when the Israelis I was with asked him if the Mayans believed in Jesus Christ. Enough said.

It was a little hot that day.

There were a ton of groundskeepers working on the park when we were there, some of which offered "champi" tours... The jungles of Palenque grow some powerful magic mushrooms apparently, and while the prospect of my first encounter with mushrooms being in a World Heritage site was tempting, the thought of jumping off a pyramid because I thought I could fly quickly made up my mind against the idea.

The next day I booked a tour to Yaxchilan and Bonampak, both of which straddle the Mexico/Guatemala border. Normally I would have done them on my own, but they are far out of the way, are a pain to get to, and are found on one of the most dangerous parts of the border. Soon enough, we were cruising down the border river on our way to Yaxchilan.

Not much to describe here. Lots of really dark rooms with bats, and some great stone carvings. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

My first tarantula encounter. Powerful.

Next on the list was Bonampak. Although the ruins here are tiny compared to pretty much any other site in the area (including Xpujil), the main draw is the set of famous preserved murals here. In no other mayan site are there such well preserved paintings. Quite awe-inspiring actually.

After a long day, we made our way back to Palenque. The next morning I would head off to San Cristobal for some much needed R&R after a week of running from city to city, sitting in bus stations, and climbing up and down ancient ruins. Life is tough here sometimes, but I just remind myself that somebody's got to do it, and it might as well be me...

Back to the Pack: Xpujil & Calakmul.

After leaving Playa del Carmen behind, along with Anita and a four-star all-inclusive, I was quickly right back into the backpacking life. This was quite apparent when my first stop was in Xpujil, where I stayed in a cabana on the side of the highway. The walls didn't really reach the roof, so there were tons of mosquitoes, but I had a net over my bed so it all worked out. A shower curtain acted as the door to my bathroom, and when the shower was on water sprayed all over the toilet, which wasn't a big deal since it didn't have a seat, and I needed to dump a bucket of water into the bowl to flush it anyways. I don't think the woman at reception knew how to smile. At least not during the three days I was there.

The only upside to the "hotel", other than them costing very little per night, was that they were across the street from one of the ruins. Xpujil is quite small compared to all of the other nearby ruins, but for this reason I was the only person in the park when I went to visit, which was great.

"The Maya were never helped by extraterrestial beings."

There really isn't much to say about the Xpujil ruins. They were interesting, but nowhere near as impressive as what I had already seen, and even the information in my Lonely Planet wasn't all that exciting. However, there was a cool little hidden staircase, barely wide enough to squeeze through, with shedded snake skins in large cracks in the walls, where I climbed up to find a great few over the forest. It was quite Indiana Jones of me, actually.

The real reason that I had chosen to stop in the small highway town of Xpujil wasn't actually for the ruins across from my hotel, but rather for the more immense and impressive site of Calakmul. According to some of the reading I had done beforehand, Calakmul was the place to see in this area. As large as Tikal, as impressive as Chichen Itza, but without any of the throngs of tourists or artisans trying to sell you mayan-inspired trinkets made in China. The only problem is that the ruins are quite out of the way - one hour down the highway from the nearest town of Xpujil, and another hour off the highway through a national park to the entrance. Tourist infrastructure still hasn't bloomed here yet (although it must be one of the last places where this is the case), so I had to arrange for a taxi to bring me to the ruins. Again, not a cheap endeavour, considering that the drive is two hours each way, and the driver has to wait for you while you explore the ruins. Eventually I found a hotel owner whose nephew would bring me for 700 pesos (the cheapest price I had been able to find at that point) and wait as long as I wanted (as opposed to the 3 hours offered by most drivers). Plus, he apparently knew his way around the park, which was a plus. At 5am the next morning, I was flying down the highway to Calakmul.

Just as I had been told, Calakmul was empty. We were the only car in the lot when we got there, and the ticket office wasn't even open yet, so we just headed in. My driver was really great in the end, as he pointed out a whole bunch of wildlife that I otherwise would have walked right by, including a few forest hawks chilling in the trees. At one point, a whole group of spider monkeys began passing overhead - the first one scouting us out before they all began to swing on by, having a jolly old time. We later saw a group of wild boars grazing on the hillside about 50 feet away, tons of jungle turkeys (which are quite hilarious creatures), flocks of parrots, and mosquitoes so big that they might as well have been parrots themselves.

I still wasn't all that impressed with Calakmul until the very end. Up until that point, we had seen tons of small ruins, and sure, there was nobody in the park, but I wanted to see the BIG stuff. Sure enough, two hours into our hike through the jungle, we arrived to the collosal temples.

Just like at Tikal, you could climb all over them, and even better, there was nobody at the top to ruin the experience for you. An arduous climb to the top was rewarded with a 360° view over the jungle, my only company being the vultures that scattered as I arrived at the top and proceeded to soar overhead waiting for me to leave (or fall off). 700 pesos well spent.