Showing posts by: funambulator@live.com
Yucatán’s Not So Insular Peninsula, Mérida 2: A Mexican Mega-Mercado and a Higgledy-Piggledy Street Grid
Mérida historico centre: Lucas de Gálvez market – the large mauve square next to the Post OfficeThe museums ticked off my list, the late afternoon/evening was freed up to explore more of the city. I had noticed on a tourist map of Mérida there were city markets somewhere on the south side of the green zócalo. I thought these might be worthwhile checking out. As I walked down Calle 56 towards the markets (named Mercado Lucas de Gálvez), I noticed how the streets were getting dirtier, the shops more basic and down-market and there were more pedestrians competing for space on the footpaths, and the people I passed tended to be not dressed in their best clobber to put it mildly! This was definitely not the big end of town, as we understand this term.
TripAdvisor pinpoints the address of Lucas de Gálvez market as being the corner of 56T Street and 67 Street, but when you are there its hard to, a) work out where it precisely starts, and b) gauge how big it actually is. I had in fact walked into the precinct of the markets without being aware I was in it! The markets seem to have spilled out of the original building or buildings into stalls lining the adjoining streets. I entered the markets building proper near where there were several stalls on a corner selling cheap clone versions of well-known American backpacks for paltry amounts, as little as MXN50 (less than AUD4)!
That well-known international fashion label “Tonny Halfmaker”!
Market Carnicería: Butchers’ fresh!Multi-markets, Carnicerías, pescaderías, etc Inside the markets it was a huge area and way too many vendor stalls to ever get your head around❈. There was row after row of narrow alleys stretching the length of the building, the whole place was pretty gritty and grimy (much like a market!) The market was divided into several separate sections including clothing and shoes, bags, fruit and veg, meat and fish, food seasonings, pots and baskets, records, etc. I didn’t fancy the look of the raw meat hanging up all day and the fish lying round, wasn’t sure about the refrigeration situation or the hygiene…if I had to cook in Mérida especially in summer, I’d think twice about getting my supplies of carne, pollo, jamon and pescado from this outlet. Outside in Calle 56T there were lines of street stalls flogging the standard souvenir stuff, and on the other side of the road the markets seemed to continue in another building✦…I noticed in this part that one whole aisle comprised mainly hairdressers’ shops. So many of the leather goods, merchandise and materials of any sort were “knock-offs”, transparently unlicensed Third World clones of famous First World brand name products.
The markets were of course abuzz with people coming and going every which way, these were locals mainly it seemed. I didn’t spot many overseas tourists while I was there, just swarming bunches of Meridians with that characteristic Mexican build, squat and solid forms busily stocking up on the weekly groceries, or perhaps there to find a special gift, some trinkets, or more practically, invest in a new pair of budget-priced shoes or a new pair of ‘threads’.
Lucas de Gálvez (continued!)Feeling a bit peckish I scouted out the most reasonably clean looking of the markets’ food outlets and settled on a small snack to eat (some battered, fried zucchini croquette-shaped morsel) and a soda. After wolfing the food down I enjoyably wasted the best part of an hour roaming up and down every single aisle in the enormous market. I concluded that I had ‘done’ Mercado Lucas de Gálvez…all there was to see of the city’s famous central markets I has seen – or so I thought! Spotting an open doorway on the northern side of the building I exited through it into a narrow lane. To my surprise, I discovered another market building separated by the narrow lane-way, this one bustling with every bit as much commercial activity as the first!
Mercado especialidades: religioso y joyería I ventured inside to find…more of the same merchandise, but also something a little different too. It was missing the comestibles, the meats, the fruits and vegetables and such of the first building, but it had a whole sub-section on items of religiosity, objects of (need I specify it?…Catholic) veneration and worship, some of it quite garish and kitschy stuff. Fortifying my atheistic senses against such a holy and pious assault on their sensibilities, I promptly quickstepped my way past its tempting arrays of ecclesiastical delights and necessities to explore what other merchandise the market had to offer. Away from the section catering for the fashionably devotional, a lot of the market seemed to be given over to yet more cloned items of clothing and accessories.
Joyerías galore!I noticed that this section of the markets had more jewellery shops (joyerías) than the first building, each alley had at least one or two jewellers in it, displaying signs proclaiming their silver and gold carat wares…Joyería Lorena Oro, Oro y Plata, Joyería Anael, and so on.
My appetite for mega-markets well and truly satisfied, I stumbled out of the northern end of Lucas de Gálvez into the cooler night air. I made for Calle 60 which would take me back in the direction of my hotel. Halfway down Calle 60, not far from the Catedral Mayor I found a nice little corner restaurant, lively but not too crowded. The food was good quality if a little more expensive than the more modestly appointed eateries in ‘Marketland’. I tried a different type of tortilla dish, accompanied by the obligatory cerveza. A succulent postre put the finishing touches to the meal. An unexpected bonus about eight as I was tucking into my comida was the appearance of a three-piece musical group. As they had set up within touching distance of my table, I couldn’t miss hearing any of the standard Latino numbers that the female singer with an opera diva’s physique performed (including The Girl from Ipanema and a retinue of well-worn Mexican classics).
PostScript: Mérida street grid, confusion by numbers – Calle Sensenta y Seis where are you? The original town planners of modern Mérida probably thought they were doing the sensible thing, arranging the city streets in numerical order to make it easy to navigate around and avoid getting lost in a sprawling metropolitan centre₪. It certainly makes sense…on paper. But when I tried to chart my way back to our hotel in Calle 66 after dinner, I discovered there was a gap between the theory and the practice! Setting off in a northerly direction my intention was turn at each intersection I came to and then head west until I reached Calle 66…simple! The flaw in the plan as it turned out was that the numbered streets didn’t run consistently, I’d find myself say passing Calle 54 and expecting to be at Calle 56 at the next cross-street but finding I was at Calle 58…Calle 56 with mathematical illogic had just disappeared! So I ended up in this increasingly frustrating “merry-go-round” situation going from street A to street B back to A again¤ (it also didn’t help that a lot of the street were quite dark and not all the corners had street signs!)
I had the presence of mind to bring the hotel’s business card with me but this proved of very limited value because the card, incredulously, had neither its address nor a street map pinpointing its location printed on it! I stopped a young local guy in the street and asked for assistance. The politely spoken Mexican boy didn’t know the hotel but kindly offered to ring the hotel for me so they could give me directions (my phone plan didn’t function in Mexico). But just to add insult to injury, the staff at the hotel were not answering the phone, even though he redialed the numbers several times! After another half-an-hour’s wandering around, through trial-and-error I eventually lucked-in and stumbled upon Calle 66 and the hotel, overcome by a feeling of both being relieved and pissed-off!
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❈ although I did later read that Lucas de Gálvez covered an area of 156,000 square feet and over 2,000 vendors operated at the markets ✦ on second thoughts it occurred to me later that this was conceivably an altogether separate market to Lucas de Gálvez on the other side of 56T ₪ the streets running east to west are named by odd numbers, starting at uno, tres, cinco, siete and so on…the streets running north to south are numbered by even numbers, dos, cuatro, seis, ocho, etc ¤ this asymmetrical formation replicates itself all over the supposed simplified grid pattern of the city! For instance, it starts off as it should sequentially, Calle 19 next to Calle 17 next to Calle 15, then instead of Calle 13 being next in sequence, we inexplicably have Calle 63E! (numbers and letters adds an extra layer of bewildering complexity to the task of finding your way round!) Calle 127 is initially on the west of Calle 129 and then it ends and restarts on the east of it! Calle 28, without changing its direction, suddenly becomes Calle 49, and so on. Now maybe all this criss-crossing, number-jumping imbroglio is perfectly fathomable to your average, local Méridian, but to state the bleeding obvious it was ultra-confusing for someone spending only 48 hours in the city!
Yucatán’s Not So Insular Peninsula, Mérida 1: A Green Zócalo, Colonial Mansiones Grandioso and a Trifecta of Free Museums
Leaving Palenque meant another all-night bus journey, this time to Mérida. The earlier overnighter, from Oaxaca to San Cristóbal, had been a bit of a “horror trip” for me – one long, draining and unpleasant ride. This time, as we wheeled our luggage along the uneven pebbly road surface to the La Cañada bus depot, I was feeling much more sanguine about the bus trip ahead. Mérida was only 480-odd kilometres and (hopefully) no more than nine hours away, The road in Yucatán especially Highway 190D was better than in Chiapas and we were going away from the hills of western Chiapas where the threat such as it was to vehicles from the Zapatista rebels seemed to be concentrated. It also felt reassuring that this time I wouldn’t be doing the long bus trek solo.
Mérida: town planning by numbers!On this occasion the overnighter did go smoothly and incident free, arriving at our new hotel in Mérida in just over nine hours. After a bistro breakfast of eggs and pancakes the only thing to do was slip on the joggers for an exploratory walk around the new territory. In terms of acreage I discovered that Mérida was quite a big place. After initially traipsing too far the wrong way away from Centro and finding f-all apart from a host of big international hotels, I doubled-back towards the historical quarter. Being short on the MXN folding stuff I spent much of the morning searching the local money-changers for the best deal before settling for a hole-in-the-wall tienda in Calle 55 that was offering 18-something for the USD*.
“Lovers’ double-handlers” – for Amantes gigantes!The cambio de dinero was next to a cute little park called Parque de Santa Lucia. Here whilst buying some lunch I spotted for the first time a unique and endearing feature of the city’s parks…Meridians were big on these quaint “double-handler” seats or as someone described them to me, “the lovers’ seats the colour of white doves”💕: two U-shaped seats joined and facing each other to form a reversed ‘S’, so that the couple were diagonally positioned at a slight angle to one another. I later found theses distinctive seats elsewhere, especially in Plaza Grande.
Pasaje de la RevolucionScouting round the pueblo Viejo, the old town still has lots of wonderfully grand and dazzlingly elegant large colonial buildings, many with recent face-lifts it seems. As always in the Hispanic-speaking world the focal point of the city’s buzz was around the zócalo, the evergreen Plaza Grande, AKA Plaza De la Independencia (sometimes also known as Pasaje de la Revolucion)☿. On the cathedral side of the Plaza a line of brightly decorated horses and carts stood round waiting to catch the eye of visitors attracted by the prospect of a romantic, twilight carriage ride around antiguo Mérida. The carriage route includes a slow jog along the famous Paseo de Montejo (more of the Montejos below) which is lined with 19th century mansions.
Casa Monteja: stamping on the subjugated natives!Museo Casa de Mantejo: The colonial boot-print Museums are high on many visitors’ “to see” list in Mérida City and Plaza Grande is an ideal place to start a quest of the city’s history…and Mérida has lots of visible history, dating from 1542 – just 50 years after Columbus’s mis-discovery of India(sic). Museo Casa de Mantejo, directly opposite the zócalo on the south side was my first stop on the history trail. The 470 year-old mansion at № 506 Calle 63 is beautifully renovated inside with classy period furnishings, but it is Casa Mantejo’s facade that makes it most distinctive and most talked about. The Montejo family (the conquerors of Yucatán) started building the house immediately after the city was founded (it was completed in 1549) and it wears its ancient lineage in the weathered (albeit recently patched-up) character of the facade⊙. The unusual sculptural ornamentation surrounding the entrance is what marks it out for comment…two Spanish conquistadors armed with halberds stand – literally – on top of the heads of smaller figures, that of crushed down native Americans. The complete lack of subtlety of the carvings are a stark symbol of the absolute colonial power imbalance in force between the old and the new communities during that era. An odd assortment of other decorative symbols adorn the friezes of the entrance and the two front windows, including cherubs, monsters and demons.
Montejo courtyardSpecial mention should be given to the interior courtyard of Casa Montejo. The austere fawn and white balcony walls of the mansion look out on to an attractive and tranquil setting – a central courtyard consisting of a series of fountains with a knob-ended cross design and native plants and bushes nestling round them.
Olimpio Cultural CenterOlimpo Cultural Center, Calle 61 x 62, Centro I checked out two other museums also adjoining the Plaza Principal square. Heading back north from Casa Montejo I passed a couple of Dairy Queen stores catering for Mexican sweet tooths (DQs are almost as prevalent a sight in many Mexico cities as Oxxo stores) and came to a long, modern white building on the corner. This building, looking a bit like a beautiful but sterile government office building, had a lengthy corridor leading to an interior central courtyard that had a simple elegance in its all-white layout. Before I got to see the courtyard’s contents, a lethargic and apathetic looking official at the front desk made me sign-in to a visitors’ book (same as with Casa Montejo)❃. Upon entering the circular courtyard there wasn’t much to see other than space, freshly polished white and grey marble floor…and space! There was also nobody else there visiting at the time, so I was the only one looking at what was essentially blank space. This was not entirely true…inside the impressive arches of the patio were a scattering of exhibits of small colourful but unexceptional paintings, the sort you’d see in a community art centre or in a school exhibition…the abundance of unencumbered space reminded me, on a vastly smaller scale of course, of the famous Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, and with even fewer exhibits than Bilbao!✧
Courtyard of Museo Fernando GPMThe Ateneo Peninsular building, Calle 58 x 60, Pasaje de la Revolucion, Centro The third of the museums fronting the verdant zócalo – all of them gratis si se carga 🙂 – that I visited is on the cathedral side of the Plaza. Museo Fernando Garcia Ponce Macay is housed in a 16th century, light grey neoclassical building that bears the name “Ateneo Peninsular” chiselled into its facade. The Museo which specialises in modern and contemporary art is contained within a part of the complex that historically held an executive function, the Governor’s Palace. After you sign in at Security and stand in the courtyard’s decorative garden, you can get a glimpse of what is the best reason to visit Museo Fernando GPC. On the lime green and white walls of the first-floor balcony are murals that are part of the museum’s permanent exhibition.
Ateneo Peninsular, next to El Catedral
Castro’s ‘Conquista’PostScript: Mérida and the Muralistas The murals at Museo FGPC and the other enormous paintings of the same scale on display (strictly speaking not murals because they were not painted directly on to the wall) are part of a Mexican Muralistas tradition, and of course instantly reminded me of the great history murals of Diego Rivera that I saw in Mexico City. And like Rivera and the other Muralistas, the artist responsible for them, Fernando Castro Pachero, upheld the ethos that art should be publicly available, not restricted to the exclusive domain of rich private collectors. Castro’s mural works in the museum exhibit the very distinctive style of the artist – sombre and sparing choice of colours, monotone contrasting of dark and light, sketchily pencil drawn outlines of figures. The paintings of the battle scenes convey an almost claustrophobic intensity in the proximity of each side of combatants.
In a long, rectangular room of the former palace you can find the bulk of the Castro artworks on display, all painted between 1973 and 1975. Thematically similar to Rivera as well, the canvasses depict scenes from turbulent and bloody episodes of Mexico’s history – eg, the Conquesta, the Caste War, the 1860s overthrow of the imposed emperor Maximilian I, Gonzalo Guerrero (credited with parenting the first mestizo in Mexico). The Castro murals are well worth a look, especially as you won’t need to part with any pesos to view them!
Plaza De la Independencia (Zócalo)﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎﹍﹎ * after Oaxaca I had given up on banks as a source for Mexican currency…one frustrating, totally wasted morning in Oaxaca I tramping all over the joint, trying Scotia, Santander and even the non-Mexican HSBC, none of them would exchange my USD, all ridiculously insisting I had to open an account first?!? ☿ Mérida’s zócalo was one of the most picturesque public spaces we saw in Mexico, a veritable oasis of green palms, bushy trees and ferns erupting as it were out of a concrete foundation ⊙ in architectural terms Casa de Montejo is a civic Renaissance building in the Spanish Plateresco style ❃ entry to all three Mérida museums I visited was free of charge ✧ with more information acquired after my visit I would happily concede my first impressions didn’t do the OCC full justice…there is a little more to it than the sparse scattering of unexceptional paintings – the building contained a planetarium, showed films and had a beautiful outdoor arched balcony with checkerboard floors (not open when I made my visit)
Palenque 2: A Temple City Overgrown by La Jungla
Palenque Parque NacionalThe highlight of a visit to Palanque is a 15 minute trip out-of-town to the nearby Mayan ruins (Palenque National Park) which dates back to AD 600 or thereabouts. Our minibus unloaded us just past a sign saying: Carreteria a Palenque – Zona Archaeológica. This UNESCO heritage site is what put tiny Palenque on the international tourism map! We met our local guide for the day at the National Park’s entry turnstiles, stacks of people were already visiting the site when we got there around half-nine in the morning (Lonely Planet’s ‘Guessimation’ of over 1,000 visitors to the park on an average day seemed feasible).
The site mapThe Palenque archeological site comprises an indeterminate number of temples within what was in its day a large Maya city with a plain on one side, a dense jungle on the other and the Rio Usumacinta running right through the middle of it. Before we hit the temple trail, Rafa our guide, who clearly knew his Mayan archaeology and antiquity, gave us a quick overview of the city using a cloth map affixed to a tent wall for illustration. Apparently Palenque’s original name was Lakamha (Meaning “Big Water”) – don’t think I quite got the significance of this name(?) unless it was a reference to the river which, not particularly noticeable today, may have been more significant in the time of the Maya. Like Teotihuacan on the outskirts of Mexico City, another indigenous civilisation occupied the site, predating the Mayans by maybe the best part of a millennium.
Temple bas-relief
Temple reliefsOnce we started exploring the site Rafa explained that most of what survived of the pyramids, what we could see still, was the work of the 8th century Maya king, K’inich Janaab Pakal, AKA Pakal the Great. Pakal’s long reign oversaw a major building program for the city. Probably the pick of the temples we saw was the one known as the Temple of the Inscriptions…the intact panels of the structure, which Rafa explained the significance of to us, contained important Maya pictorial inscriptions – these are a kind of ideogram, a single picture which equates with a word or an idea or a number. These symbols (adopted from the Olmec people by the Maya) put together formed a text. On the temples some of these glyphs (hieroglyphic characters painted on the walls) survive, although the Spanish Catholics destroyed a lot of them! The unique Mayan numbering system is also in evidence❈.
Temple of the CrossesWe did the obligatory adrenalin-driven thing that tourists do: sprinted up the steps of the nearest pyramid. Once at the top, nothing much to see, we proceeded more cautiously and slowly back down the narrow and slightly crumbling steps (themselves a mosaic of unevenly cut stone squares). It wasn’t permitted however to climb up the Temple of Inscriptions) opposite which some 80 feet above the ground held Pakal’s mausoleum. Rafa showed us some of the practical functions of the temples, for example the plumbing, as well as explaining the religious ones. Palenque is not as high and imposing as Teotihuacan’s “Sun and Moon” pyramids, but loses nothing in the decorative stakes. This is especially evident in the four edifices enclosing the rectangular square of the smaller Temples of the Crosses which boast elaborate, bas-relief carvings and sinewy interior chambers. At certain points Mayan relics lay around the grounds☀.
A city of temples under cover of jungle
We had some free time to spend scaling one or two of the less formidable pyramids before tiring of this novelty. As we followed Rafa back to the entrance, we swiftly and adroitly swerved past lines of souvenir vendors loudly hawking their wares on the pathway. Outside, the group regathered and were shepherded by Rafa towards a nearby trail heading into a denser part of the jungle. I mentioned above that the temples of Palenque were of indeterminate number. The reason for this is that virtually the entire ancient city of Palenque was swallowed up by the jungle some time after the Mayan inhabitants left the area (circa AD 800). What what we could see and explore was the small portion that had been discovered and unearthed to this point!
Rafa blending in to nature – at one with cedars & sapodillaAn ecosystem of diverse biodiversity Rafa took us deep into a high evergreen forest along a path called Sendero Moiépa, pointing out different aspects of the biodiversity bank. The Palenque National Park was made up of 996 tropical species of flora and fauna…around us were millennium-old trees, red cedar, mahogany, kapok and sapodilla, as well as camedor palms including the threatened fishtail palm xate.
As we trekked along the muddy, sloping trail through ancient streams with fossilised shells, passing vines and unfamiliar plants, Rafa educated us as to the kinds of fauna that the jungle was home to…in all there were 353 species of birds – we caught glimpses of only the relatively easy-to-spot red-crowned parrots, unfortunately the very hard-to-spot toucans with their facility for changing the colour of their beaks to regulate heat were keeping their distance as usual. Another group of residents – the howler monkeys – were audible in full voice though not visible to us (presumably they were dangling high up in the canopy at safe distance but aware of the strange human visitors on the ground). Also not seen were the even more elusive ocelots, nor did we manage to see any of the 71 species of reptiles and amphibians including the very venomous pit viper, the Bothrops asper, which happily in this instance was giving us a welcome wide birth!
The temple, liberated from La Jungla!After about 30 minutes of hiking we reached our main objective, a peak on top of which the skeletal ruins of a Maya temple was peering out of the jungle. This until recently hidden temple was discovered by local archaeologists. Rafa explained that tests had indicated there were undoubtedly many more temples buried under the jungle still to be unearthed.
Before heading back out of the Palenque jungle, Rafa invited us to explore an underground entrance point largely concealed by a rock ledge. Most of us took the challenge to climb down into the hole which led into a short, very tight and damp tunnel which came out at a shallow stream of water. I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be looking for in the tunnel, a rare, fossilised Palaeolithic Age Mexican marsupial perhaps…it was too dark to see much of anything in the tunnel in any case!
Human “pack mules” doing the hard yakka…”Aspro, anyone?”
≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖≖ ❈ Mayan maths were extremely accurate in calculating the calendar year at 365.2425 days, anticipating the much later European estimate of 365.2522 ☀ when the archaeologists dug up Palenque they discovered small objects called censers lying round the Temples of the Crosses in particular. These are mainly brazing bowls made of ceramic used for making Mayan offerings to the gods
Palenque 1: Ambling about Town, Down Merle Green and Beyond
Big MayaTowards dusk we reached the township of Palenque, our next stay-over on our journey to the easternmost tip of Mexico. The first thing we noticed in the area known as La Cañada was this giant native figure propped up against a tourism building (Carretera Catazaja Tramo Central Tuxtla). The massive sculpture took on a slightly menacing appearance to me, like someone you’d expect to find engaging in bloodthirsty, ritualistic Mayan human sacrifices.
H. Xibalba
Hotel decorationArriving at our lodgings (Hotel Xibalba) we found ourselves assigned to a separate section 100 metres down the road from the main reception area. The architecture of our dwelling was unusual, almost avant-garde, it certainly caught the eye…a small, sandy-coloured, two-level building with an A-frame shape, a design replicated in the shape of the large, outward-facing windows which gave the structure a very airy feel. The doors to each of the sixteen rooms conformed to this sloping pyramid pattern. The grounds surrounding the entrance to the sleeping quarters were tastefully decorated with authentic looking native sculptural pieces. The accommodation annex looked like it was a recent addition to Hotel Xibalba.
That night we acted on Hector’s dinner recommendation, leaving the Xibalba we ambled up Calle Merle Greene❉, past several cantinas and restaurants with picturesque displays of pot-planted flowers under their awnings. Around the bend we came to La Hector’s dining choice for the night. We partook of a nice seafood meal with a bit more Mexican cerveza sampling thrown in. At the end of the dinner while things were winding up, the guy who ran the restaurant, a German expat came over and engaged us in some small talk…he was quite a garrulous character, speaking in fluent English, he seemed very comfortable and relaxed, and exuded an almost a weary air of familiarity about all things Palenque (I surmised that he had been domiciled in Mexico for quite some time). After leaving the restaurant Eric and I slowly inched our way back to the hotel, taking in both the night air of this small town and of course the mandatory ice confectionary at the local “7/11” style store.
The next day my roommate Pétros and I decided to check out the old part of Palenque which wad down the road over a weathered, rusty bridge. This was definitely the poor part of town, as we walked I saw very few international tourists checking out this part of Palenque (too far away from the fancy tourist restaurants perhaps?). The faces we did see in the street were mostly indigenous ones – these are largely Ch’ol people (of Mayan descent)۞.
The shops were uniformly low-brow – no frills discount shops, cheap, grimy eateries and grocery stores. Lonely Planet gives Modern Palenque town very short shrift indeed – “sweaty, humdrum…without much appeal except as a jumping-off point for the ruins” [Mexico: Palenque, www.lonelyplanet.com]. No hyperbole here I’m afraid, compared to the “jawdropping jungle ruins” the town itself has precious little to recommend itself.
Silent HowlerThe wilderness of la jungla is palpably close however. On the return walk back to the hotel, crossing the river heavily camouflaged with overgrown vegetation (in reality a barely trickling stream), I half expected to catch, if not a sight, the sound of local howler monkeys emerging from the forest scrounging round for food in the town (it had been reported that deforestation in the area was driving them into the city). Unfortunately none of the Alouatta critters put in an appearance during our walk, couldn’t even hear a murmur of their famous vocalising from far off in the jungle. Nor did we get a glimpse of that other local jungle resident, the jaguar. But the following day we’d be in the Palenque jungle itself, I thought, who knows, maybe we’d be a shot at spotting one of these fabled jaguares – but not too close of course!
Footnote: Some perhaps less photogenic people are known to have been uncharitably labelled with the disparaging sobriquet of ‘Dishhead’…in La Cañada near the “Big Maya” mega-figure as you head back onto Highway 189, I noticed this modernist style street sculpture in the middle of the roundabout, which (art being open to all manner of individual and idiosyncratic interpretation) I like to call “Head in dish-man”, literally. That’s what it looked like to me anyway!
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❉ our street, so named for famous American artist and archaeologist, Merle Greene Robertson, who developed a technique of “life-size rubbings” which preserved a visual record of much of the Pre-Columbian Maya art in Palenque and elsewhere in Mesoamerica
۞ I didn’t know this statistically at the time of visiting but Palenque is the poorest city in the state of Chiapas. When I came across this snippet later, it clearly tallied with the empirical evidence of what we had observed – the shops generally rundown and grimy, some of the local people were a bit on the scruffy side, the dirt and refuse on the streets
The Road to Palenque: Ocosingo Pit Stop and a Diversion to Agua Azul (or should that be Agua Turquesa?)
The following morning we said goodbye to Casa Margarita and San Cristóbal and set out in a north-easterly direction for our next base Palenque which is close to the Mexican city eponymously known for its celebrated hot condiment, Tabasco.
TopeBy tope to Palenque For the journey we “mini-sized” down from a full bus to a mini-van. The 212 kilometre trip on Federal Highway 186/199 took us, with two breaks, well over six hours, and introduced me to a new Spanish word, tope. The road was full of topes! About every 100m or so (it seemed that short a distance anyway!) the driver would bring the mini-van to almost a total halt and then ease it ever so slowly over a speed bump in the road. Some of the topes were in fact giant mounds of pavement! At time-to-time we’d see a highway sign that said ‘Tope’ (with or without a black-on-yellow diagram of three parallel humps), occasionally the sign said ‘reductor de velocidad‘. Either way the warning to motorists was clear, another ridge in the road surface coming up, so slow down again. The ridiculous frequency of the appearance of these topes made for a taxing, tedious slow drive.
Ocosingo, a brief respite from the bump and grind We covered almost half the distance in this stop-go fashion before, to our great relief, we turned off Highway 186 at Ocosingo for (what time-wise was) brunch. The tour guide choose a little outdoor eatery perched up on a small bluff with a delightful view of the lush and verdant valley. Unfortunately, to put it plainly, the food didn’t come close to matching the view, it was pretty ordinary fare. The eatery was buffet style and every time you went to add something to your plate or get a new course, a little guy who looked like he was running the place would annoyingly rush over and ask what you wanted (I think he was, overzealously, keeping a check in case you snaffled anything additional to what you had requested when placing your order).
Banner site mapWe left the gastronomically forgettable Parador Turístico Selva Maya and returned to our tope highway. About three-quarters of the way to Palenque we turned off on a side road to the right and followed the narrow road for two to three kilometres till we reached one of Chiapas State’s top tourist magnets, Agua Azul (Blue Water)…although as my blog heading indicates, the water of the (Xanil) River and its series of waterfalls are distinctly turquoise on colour, suggesting that the attraction much more accurately have been named Agua Turquesa❈.
Cascada las GolandrinasCascadas de Agua Azul: waterworks and wall-to-wall tourist stalls The mini-van dropped us off at the entrance, near all the food outlets selling an array of paper-plated dishes including cocos fritos, empanadas and papas y frijoles. We made our way to the waterfalls’ viewing platform to witness at close hand the sheer volume of water spewing down the mountains from multiple waterfalls◘. The waterfalls here are made up of two sections, the more easterly one was smaller but comprised a series of large steps down which the rushing torrents flowed into the large pool of water at the base. Further down in a narrower stretch of the river the falls’ power had dissipated a bit allowing some locals to wade out with the aid of a rope strung across the water.
Thatched souvenir tienda hutsThe topography of the Agua Azul site made viewing of the waterfalls more accessible…visitors are able to ascend up a hill parallel to the contour of the falls and gain different vantage points of the wildly gushing waters. The only drawback to this was that the pathway up was lined by untold number of tourism tienda huts, so on the walk up (and back!) we were pestered by hawkers either flogging their Agua Azul souvenirs or trying to entice us in for a meal – going up and back I became totally proficient at anticipating their predictable pitch and would hop in with a preemptive, firmly spoken No comida! (No meal!) to cut them off!✥
The falls’ stepsI asked two of the Americans on the Intrepid tour, Louisvillians Shirley and Phil, if the tourist hotspot had changed much since they had been there 36 years earlier. Unsurprisingly, over such a gap in time, they said the whole thing had grown exponentially. Most of the development since they had visited involved the vast spread of souvenir and food shops which had occupied only a minute proportion of the Agua Azul site in 1981.
Waterfalls in the jungleAgua Azul is surrounded by dense jungle terrain, providing a bit of a foretaste of the jungle-engulfed archaeological site we were due to visit at Palenque the following day. When I got tired of taking photos of different points of the waterfalls, I spent the reminder of our two hours at Agua Azul strolling along the edge of the water looking at the riverine botanical features, I found it was the best place to dodge the tiresomely persistent souvenir sellers.
It was a relief to get back on the mini-bus again, but I managed to do so after running the gauntlet through a cordon of more over-zealous hawkers, this time a group of young girls gaily and colourfully attired in indigenous garb who had surrounded our bus and were clamouring for us to buy their local snacks. We settled down on-board for the 70km drive (over yet more topes!) to Palenque and our hotel for the next two nights.
┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅ ❈ clearly though with tourism being the name of the game I would readily concede that Agua Blue has a much more romantic and appealing ring than Agua Turquoise! ◘ as impressive as the volume was, I was surprised to discover that the 8.2 magnitude earthquake in September 2017 (only three months before our visit) had adversely affected the course of the river, causing the water level to drop alarmingly ✥ I should admit that my resolve to resist the souvenir buying impulse did fail, resulting in the purchase of three decorative wall pouches…I regretted it immediately as it involved me in a frustrating episode of trying to barter down the local seller, frustrating because she possessed neither a skerrick of English or a calculator!
Chiapas Getabout 2: Chamula Excursion and a Church with Strange, Shamanistic Ways
Town of San Juan ChamulaSlated down on the tour itinerary for Day 2 at San Cristóbal was an afternoon side trip to Chamula, a regional cabecera (headtown) famous for a most unusual and unorthodox Christian church. Chamula’s location is just over 10 km from the township where we were staying, but given the state of the link road and other contingencies it ended up taking us the best part of an hour’s driving to reach the town.
First-hand encounter with the ‘Conflicto de Chiapas’
The ‘contingencies’ included having to deal with unofficial roadblocks on the highway. Chiapas State is base to the Zapatistas (officially Zapatista Army of National Liberation – EZLN), a small, left-wing political/ militia group resisting the authority of the central government in Mexico*. As we approached the outskirts of Chamula our mini-bus came to a fairly abrupt halt with half-a-dozen or more vehicles banked up in front of us. A group of Zapatistas or their rural trade union affiliates had blocked access into the town, draping banners across the road stating the protesters’ current, specific beef with the unsympathetic government (Hector had earlier warned us of the prospect of this and there had been recent reports in the media of buses being hijacked by the Zapatistas!).
The bus idled for several minutes as we gradually inched our way up to the blockade. The roadblock party looked a bit fierce and daunting to us, like they really meant business, even Hector seemed a bit tense. For several minutes the driver and Hector exchanged words with each other and with the protesters, while we in the back tried to figure out what was going on. As the conversation proceeded, the workers’ sternness dissipated and relations gradually became more cordial…it all ended harmoniously with smiles all round after our driver deposited an indeterminate amount of pesos in the workers’ “contribution fund bucket”. The protesters obviously satisfied themselves that we had exhibited sufficient simpatía (empathy) with their cause as we were permitted to continue through the roadblock without further delay!
=”http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image.jpg”> Mercado Chamula[/capti
http://www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-1.jpg”> San Juan Basilica[/caption
Stepping my way carefully past the carpet of pine needles and the rows of candles I observed that the icons on display represented a blend between the pre-Conquest Mayan customs and the orthodox traditions of Spanish Catholicism (images of Mayan gods and Catholic saints adorned the walls side-by-side). We noticed that among the reverent icons on display, the eponymous San Juan (St John the Baptist) of course took pride of place in the church. Another curious feature of the interior near the altar was a series of long, draped sheets affixed to the walls and roof forming an inverted V shape.
//www.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-7.jpg”> El Iglesias
[/caption]Iglesias de San Juan, although a startling departure from ecclesiastical orthodoxy, is not unique among churches in the Americas (I recall seeing one or two composite religion churches in Peru), the synthesis of Catholic and indigenous religions, the bending of Catholic traditions to accommodate native belief systems in the Chamula cathedral was as starkly defined as any I could imagine.
A little bit of street art and a lot of identical Chiapas native bird bags After several minutes of shuffling up and down the nave, I made my exit, as did the others progressively. Outside, we had been allocated about 45 minutes of free time to leisurely explore the square. The markets had been going full-tilt to then but were just about to taper off for the day. Time enough for some rapid gift-buying (six tiendas in a row all selling the same woven carry bags with the identical Mexican Redhead Parrot design!).
.7dayadventurer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/image-4.jpg”> Peluqueria Estetica + accessories!
After the[/caption]After the presents were taken care of, I had time to veer off the zócalo and explore a nearby side street…what caught my attention in particular in this street were two shop fronts, about 40 metres apart from each other. Both these tiendas were men’s hairdressers coincidently (peluquerias)! Painted on the walls were cute, comical depictions of young Mexicanos dudes with haircuts which were sort of fashionable – though the hair styles looked like they were modelled more on Elvis and 60s rockers than on anything 21st century contemporary! The other hard-to-forget (and less delightful) memory from my free-time roaming was a pitiful sight – a mother and toddler standing in the market, holding captive a pathetically forlorn looking turkey, it’s torso enveloped in a garbage bag and feet tethered with a piece of rope. More sobering Third World realities.
By the time we left Chamula (late afternoon) it was starting to get cooler – a pointer to the town’s highland location (altitude 7,200 feet!) We arrived back at Casa Margarita with time to relax before dinner. I took in the splendid hacienda-like ambience of the hotel’s outdoor central courtyard before venturing out to do some restaurant hunting and catch some of the town’s night-time sights I hadn’t yet discovered – like this modern SC administrative building.
PostScript: Los Mexicanos – making a virtue of symbolic protest, an end in itself? The episode with the roadblock staged by the pueblos ordinario of Chiapas reinforced for me a peculiarity of the Mexican character I had noticed elsewhere on my travels in this land – rhetoric and ideology aside, the Zapatistas (and the impoverished and aggrieved agrarian workers who support them) know in their heart of hearts that they, with all the will in the world, are NOT going to overthrow the iniquitous national government (as they envisage it to be). But, and this seems to be intrinsically ingrained in the mindset of the Mexican peasantry after centuries of being on the receiving end of high-handed authoritarianism, the people collectively will always make as much noise and commotion as they possibly can to protest any perceived injustice perpetrated by the state…just for the symbolic right to do it, and irrespective of how futile their actions might be in trying to prompt real and profound change in society. It is as if the mere act of protesting itself is a wholly gratifying, as well as a cathartic, experience for the Mexican masses.
I would hasten to add that this trait is by no means peculiar to Mexicans, I have personally observed similar purely symbolic protests in places like Lima in Peru, but I wonder if it might a particularly Hispanic and Latin American characteristic?
_______________________________________________________________ * poor, primarily indigenous, Mexican farmers are the backbone of the Zapatista movement, with the roots of the disharmony traceable back to the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s and the failure from that point on of the historic party of power in Mexico, PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), to deliver on promised land reforms ✦ there was none of the really weird (to foreign Western eyes anyway) goings-on while we were visiting, but I learned later that the church was famously notorious for rituals aimed at ridding families of “malicious spirits”. This often involves the slaughtering of chickens over the candles and the consumption of Coca-Cola and a local ‘moonshine’ known as pox