"San Cristobal de las casas" Mexico Travelogue by paradisedreamer

We got the 10:05am bus to San Cristobal de las Casas. The 85km trip takes about 2 hours and you climb from about 1000m to 2500m in elevation so you can imagine the steep winding roads. The scenery is spectacular as you wind your way up the green hills. We passed a few small villages, the indigenous people of chiapas all have their own particular traditional dress and the churches dominate all the villages. There may only be a few ramshackle houses but there is always a beautiful church.

Once we arrived in San Cristobal we had to leave our bags in storage at the hotel as there was not a room available just yet. The room we got was probably the best we have had so far and the cheapest, only $23 for the three of us. They only charged us the double rate as Sam is under 5, bargain! The location is perfect, only a few steps from the Zocalo and with an Italian coffee company across the road to keep Marc happy and an internet cafe to keep me happy. We went to the coffee co while we waited for our room and I had the best cup of tea in months!!

We took a walk around the zocalo, had a look at the tours on offer and then went to a bank near the cathedral to change some money. The cathedral is beautifully painted in yellow, white and red. The whole town is gorgeous. Single storey (mainly) colonial buildings all pained different colous are very similar to those in Granada (Nicaragua), the streest are just narrower and there are no horse carts!

Before dinner we went onto the roof of our hotel to see over the town, stunning! We then took a wander again and found the Mercado des Dulces y Artesanias where we bought a lovely table cloth for next to nothing. This is definitely one of those towns you can just wander around for hours. We came back to the zocalo along the pedestrianised streets and booked a tour for tomorrow. We had dinner at a nice place just across from our hotel before getting an early night. It is much cooler here compared to Tuxtla, during the day it is lovely but it is does get pretty chilly at night!

We met at the Zocalo for our tour to the surrounding villages. The first village we went to was San Juan Chamula. We walked around the village and our guide gave us lots of information about the people as well as their religious beliefs. You can´t take photographs of the people as they believe that you will take their soul when you do, you can take pictures of the houses and the scenery as long as there is no-one in the frame. The people in the village all wear traditional dress. The women wear long dark skirts and white blouses with shawls over their shoulders or folded on their heads. They wear their hair in two braids interwoven with brightly coloured ribbon and are then tied together at the back. The church elders (men) wear white knee length trousers with a white angora tunic over it belted at the waist with orange cloth, they wear a white headress and carry sticks under their arms with orange sandals on their feet.
We wandered around the village seeing how the people live in the adobe (mud covered) houses. Agriculture is the main industry here and you can also see women weaving outside their houses. Outside the houses of church elders there are constructions made from branches and plants as well as green crosses decorated with branches and leaves. We then went down to the John the Baptist Church in front of which is a market.

The church was one of the best I have ever seen, it is a living church and unlike any I have seen before. You enter the brightly painted archway through wooden doors. Inside it is fairly dark and lit by hundreds of candles on the floors and tables and just about anywhere and everywhere. You can hear music being played at the front of the church. Cloth is draped from the ceiling to the side walls and the floor is covered in palm leaves between the candles. The are no pews just an open floor where people can sit and light their candles which are just placed on the floor. The people give sacrifices as well as bringing offerings. Some of these offerings are bottles of soda or in one case that we saw, a dead chicken. As you walk through the church you can feel the heat from the hundreds of candles all around that flicker and create a magical light. It does not have the opulence of many churches but it is the first I have seen where people are constantly coming in to pay their respects, a true church of the people.

After the church we wandered around the market, maily fruit and vegetables and some textiles. At one end of the market there was a huge crowd of men having a meeting, apparently there was some dispute between the villagers and the municipal workers had come to try and sort it out. Our guide pointed out that the men in black angora tunics with batons under their arms are the police. All the men wear cowboy style hats here.

We made a stop at the cemetery at the former church, it is not known if it burnt down accidentally or on purpose. In the cemetery there are different coloured crosses on the graves, white for babies or women who died in childbirth, green for teenagers and black for old people. There were an astonishing majority of green crosses.

Our next stop was the village of Zinacantan, the main industry is growing flowers in the many greenhouses but wre came to see a family of weavers. The women sit in the garden and weave tunics and blankets. We also went into a traditional kitchen. It is an adobe outbuilding with no windows but a gap between the walls and the roof where the smoke from the wood fires can escape. Inside a women was baking tortillas on a flat pan over the fire and meat hung from a rack on the ceiling. It gets so smoky after a while I don´t know how they manage to spent so long in there!

Back in San Cristobal we had lunch at a nice deli (no shortage of modern coffee shops here) and didn´t do very much else for the rest of the afternoon. We will explore town more tomorrow.

We are having a major battle trying to find affordable accommodation for Playa del Carmen, everywhere is way too expensive or there is no availability (high season). The place we stayed at before only has a deluxe room for $75 a night which means we don´t eat! Even the hostels are fully booked or don´t have rooms for 3 people. We will have to figure out something!!!