travel

A Goodbye to San Cristobal and a Homecoming in Oaxaca

by Ekua on October 6, 2011 · 2 comments in Mexico

The sun is brilliant on my last day in San Cristobal de las Casas. I pack my backpack and set it aside. I have until the evening, and I want to experience one last bit of Chiapas for Chiapanecos.

I walk to the market behind my hostel where I can roam for the whole morning and be the sole stranger in the crowd. Despite attempts to cover the walkways with tarps, curves in the earth hold little pools of muddy water. Mayan women in their perpetually plastic-sandaled feet step right into the puddles that I work hard to avoid. Going home everyday with mud covered feet is probably not much of a problem when Tierra is embedded in your soul from day one.

I go past stalls selling those plastic sandals. They resemble some of the Jellies shoes of my youth, except they are opaque and come in practical shades of black and brown.  I see stalls that look strangely similar to the teen-oriented accessories stores that are commonly found in United States malls. I see stalls with buckets full of fruits piled up in artful pyramids. I think of San Cristobal mornings spent eating sweet mangoes from this market with the juice streaming down my fingers. I see little women carrying squawking chickens as they maneuver through the market. I like this place; it is what it is.

Later in the day, I make my last stop at the little restaurant I’ve visited almost every day in San Cristobal. It’s a place where everyone says, “Buenas Noches” to everyone else when they walk in, whether or not they know them. I order my regular, a beautiful huarache and freshly crushed pineapple juice for under four U.S. dollars. As I enjoy my last moments there, I unmistakeably feel that I am ready to leave San Cristobal, but I am happy that I was able to find a San Cristobal that I liked.

At the bus station, the driver hands me a little box of headphones and asks me to select a drink from his cart as I climb aboard. Even though it was the cheapest ticket when I booked it, I’ve somehow ended up on a fancier bus than normal. It’s practically empty, and after our first stop, there are are only four of us left on the bus. We spread out in the first few rows.

It should be the most pleasant bus ride ever, but we are stopped at least three times by the police. In a crackdown on both immigration and drugs, all vehicles heading from south to north are suspect. Each time we are pulled over, the lights are switched on and a police officer climbs on the bus to inspect. One of those times, the policeman asks me where I’m from. In my delirium, I have silly paranoid thoughts that he will assume I am from the Caribbean coast of Central America and think I’ve snuck across the southern border. But when I tell him I’m from “Estados Unidos,” he nods and walks right on.

We arrive in Oaxaca around 6am. My backpack, which has been stored underneath the bus, is partially open. It is very apparent that it has been searched, and whoever did it was not very careful. A kind attendant at the bus station sees the concern on my face. He recommends that I look through my bag right away so that if anything is missing, I can file a report immediately. He unlocks a waiting room so I can check my bag inside. Everything is intact and I’m happy that I keep anything of value in my carry on.

I find a cab to take me to the hostel I stayed at last summer. When I arrive at this familiar place, I am welcomed by a familiar face. Mexico City and Oaxaca are the first places in my independent travels that I’ve ever returned to. It feels right. A sign of slowing down, but not stopping.

I return to a room I already know and interchange catching up on sleep with catching up with people I haven’t seen in a year. In the afternoon, I visit my favorite cafe for a cappuccino. I recognize one employee there and I see the warm recognition of me on his face when I walk in. From there, I spend hours in the Cultural Center of Oaxaca before taking a stroll around town.

It’s deliciously quiet and calm that Sunday afternoon, but I know that Oaxaca is never quite still. I love this about Oaxaca, that beneath the mellow surface, passion is always churning. It’s less than 12 hours into my return, and I already feel it profoundly. I have no idea how the Oaxaca aesthetic and the cactus and agave covered landscape seeped through my skin and into my heart, but by the end of my first day back, I know they are there to stay.

{ 2 comments }

Photo Essay: Scenes from San Cristobal de las Casas and Chiapa de Corzo

by Ekua on October 3, 2011 · 5 comments in captured on memory card,Mexico

Photographs taken while roaming around two colorful towns in Chiapas:

Exploring the town on my first full day in San Cristobal de las Casas.

Candles inside the Santo Domingo church in San Cristobal de las Casas.

Not long after I entered the dimly lit Santo Domingo, I turned around and saw the silhouette of a woman and her child. To me, this picture really says, “Chiapas.”

More lit candles inside the Santo Domingo church. There were many.

Chilly rainstorms were a daily occurrence in the high altitude rainforest climate of San Cristobal. I got caught up in a hefty downpour and took shelter underneath a gazebo in a square. I snapped this photo while I waited.

When the rain let up, I walked up these steps up to Iglesia de Guadalupe. When I went inside the church, there was a Mayan family of three on the ground in the aisle between pews, and a priest was performing some kind of ritual.

Chiapa de Corzo was a quick stop after my boat trip at the Sumidero Canyon. There’s not much happening in the town, but it has Fuente Colonial, the coolest zocalo gazebo I have yet to see.

Santo Domingo church in Chiapa de Corzo.

I enjoyed the vibrant colors in Chiapa de Corzo.

Chiapa de Corzo had an abundance of gorgeous flowering trees.

The Cathedral of San Cristobal de las Casas.

Slightly scary, slightly cute monkeys for sale at the craft market in San Cristobal.

A very young and very pleasant vendor and her wares in the Santo Domingo craft market.

Stray dogs sleeping in Plaza el Cerrillo.

Before I caught a night bus to Oaxaca, I watched a bit of this free concert in Plaza el Cerrillo. The rain came, but it didn’t stop the man in the forefront from dancing and yelling, “Bailamos!” in my direction.

{ 5 comments }

The “Hippie” Takeover of Chiapas

by Ekua on September 24, 2011 · 10 comments in rantastic

In my not so raving reviews of a certain foreigner scene I encountered in Chiapas, Mexico, I think it’s important to note that before I set foot in the state, I was already wary about some of the travelers and expats I might encounter there.

The first tip off came on my very first visit to Mexico City in June of 2010. I was sitting at a hostel computer chatting with a fellow hosteler from Switzerland. He was dressed in a manner that would lead people to believe that he figured himself to be a hippie.

That night, I was preparing to leave for Cuba in the wee hours of the following morning. I knew I’d be disconnected in Cuba, so I was making sleeping arrangements for when I returned to Mexico and went straight down to Oaxaca.

The guy from Switzerland kept looking over my shoulder at my computer. “Why are you going to Oaxaca?” he quizzed me.

“Well, I heard Oaxaca is a beautiful city,” I replied, thinking that was a reasonable enough response.

But it didn’t appease him. “Don’t go to Oaxaca! Oaxaca is ugly. Go to Chiapas!”

WTF?

He was unique and extreme in his pushiness, but I wondered what his projected persona combined with his love for Chiapas might say about the scene there.

When I made it to the wonderful and complete opposite of ugly state of Oaxaca, I linked up with an extraordinary writer who was based in Oaxaca city at the time. We met up several times and had great conversations about Oaxaca state and beyond. After I returned from a visit to Mazunte, a beach town on the Oaxaca coast, we found that we had similar views about the hippie expats there in that we were both perplexed by their arrogance. She had recently visited San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas and said that she’d found a similar scene there. I was equally repelled and curious about seeing it for myself.

Flash forward a year. There had been a lot of space between the formation of the previous year’s prejudgements and my actual arrival Chiapas. And then I encountered the El Panchan scene and it all came rushing back. I’d just had a sleepless night in a jungle in Southern Mexico thanks to 12 hours of techno music. I might as well have slept next to a warehouse rave in any concrete jungle in the world.

But despite a severe lack of sleep, I’d had an amazing day of sights — Palenque, Misol-Ha, and Agua Azul. At the end of the day, I was sitting in a restaurant with open walls at Agua Azul to escape the rain and take in the beauty of the stormy day.

I’d finished my torta and moved on to reading a book when a trio of hippie garb-clad 20-something guys from Europe occupied a table between me and a Mexican family. They immediately took out an iPod, hooked it up to some mini loudspeakers and began to play techno music as loud as the volume would go.

I didn’t understand this. Why would you override the soccer game the family who ran the restaurant was watching, the conversations, the peace, the thunder and rain and thundering waterfalls with your techno music? I knew that they sure as hell wouldn’t have the audacity to do that a restaurant or cafe in New York, Paris, San Francisco, Berlin — even the most casual one. Why was it okay to do that there? Because we’re in Chiapas? I asked them to turn it off.

The following day I moved onto San Cristobal de las Casas. I could immediately see why people compared it to Oaxaca. They’re both cities surrounded by mountains with lots of rows of short and colorful colonial buildings. The indigenous populations have a large impact on both cities. Both are associated with popular uprisings.

But the atmosphere in each city is very different. While Oaxaca has its touristy restaurants and shops, the city’s focus seems to lie in promoting all things Oaxaca. In San Cristobal there are certainly aspects of Mayan culture present, but it felt like the bulk of the shops and restaurants were more focused on appealing to “hippie” tourists.

I know some people want that kind of familiarity when they go abroad, but for me, travel is largely about the opposite, especially in a place that has such a strong culture. There are places in the world that naturally have that bohemian feel, but in San Cristobal, it lacked genuineness. It felt put on by monetary desires — a “this what people who come here want, so this is what we’re going to give them” mentality. Although it is dressed up differently, the ideas behind the tourist set up of San Cristobal are not all that different from the ones that create coastal resorts, places the hippie tourists in San Cristobal would likely sneer at.

On my last day in San Cristobal, I stopped by a craft market to buy some Chiapaneco gifts and souvenirs that I wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere in Mexico. This market was full of Mayan women and a few men selling lovely woven handicrafts, amber jewelry, and more. But interspersed were a few non-local hippies, some of them selling trinkets decorated with images of marijuana leaves.

And can you guess who had more customers than almost every other stall at the market? Tourists in their flowy skirts and gauzy shirts and contrived pale dreadlocks flocked to these vendors.

Technically, these salespeople had as much of a right to be there as the indigenous women. They probably went through the same process and payment to set up a stand in the market. But to me, it’s disrespectful, arrogant, and straight up thievery to take away customers from the indigenous women at the market with crocheted weed paraphernalia.

I hope you don’t think I am a hippie hater. I do live in San Francisco after all, a city that played a key role in creating the genre as we know it today. There are people I know here who I respect immensely and if I had to label them, I’d call them hippies. They are people who not only believe bettering the world, but have committed both their work and personal lives to doing so, despite the difficulties and effort it requires.

A key difference between them and the so-called hippies I encountered in San Cristobal is action. Where the hippiedom I respect continues on with a to-do list left over from the 60s and adjusts to the problems and needs of modern times, hippiedom in Chiapas is often just about the look. It’s arrogant and standoffish towards fellow foreigners whose style doesn’t fit in. It romanticizes about the hedonistic aspects of the 1960s counterculture but offers none of the sacrifice that went with those times. It feels entitled to El Panchan and San Cristobal.

Perhaps a key difference in the way Oaxaca and San Cristobal have evolved is that Oaxaca has a mestizo population with weight in the city whereas San Cristobal is largely indigenous and white. A large poor indigenous community that keeps to itself makes San Cristobal ripe for takeover by even those with the best of intentions.

I understand why people love Chiapas. It’s a fascinating part of the country and it’s not a Mexico that you expect. My life has been blessed with abundant opportunities to view beautiful scenery, and I would say that Chiapas holds some of the greatest. The perseverance of the Mayans in Chiapas is enticing and inspiring. I would go back to Chiapas and I’d highly recommend it to others.

So go explore Chiapas. Claim your love for it. Just don’t claim it.

{ 10 comments }

Photo Essay: The Colorful Markets of Mexico City

by Ekua on August 15, 2011 · 21 comments in captured on memory card,eats and drinks,Mexico

In order to appreciate and be inspired by the misunderstood Mexico City, you have to go beyond the idea of simply seeing it. You have to live it. You have to open yourself up to the everyday Mexico City, roll around in it, absorb it. And eventually it will reveal the tremendous heart that both overtly and subtly is a part of the city’s daily life.

Mexico City’s lively markets are great places to begin. Before saying a temporary goodbye to Mexico City and boarding a night bus to Chiapas, I visited three of the city’s most notable markets. It was a tour led by Alejandro, the exceptional guide who introduced me and a few fellow hostelers to the stories behind La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on a previous day tour.

We took a small rickety local bus to get to our first stop, the Mercado de Sonora, a center of commerce for alternative medicine and religion. While people tend to focus on the witchcraft aspect of this market or the cult of Santa Muerte paraphernalia, what caught my eye there were the stalls with burlap sacks full of centuries-old herbal remedies to help people sort out a variety of ailments.

Alejandro mentioned that a lot of the vendors in the Mercado de Sonora weren’t too keen on tourists poking around with their cameras, so I waited until we were in the more lighthearted sections of the market before taking pictures. Pictured above is a market stall full of all things Lucha Libre.

Piñatas for sale at the Mercado de Sonora.

It was a short walk across a bridge over a road to our next stop, the gigantic Mercado de la Merced. The highlight of La Merced Market was the food. Pictured above are dried chili peppers.

Spices and nuts for sale at the Mercado de la Merced.

Seeing various moles in different forms made me even more excited for my eventual return to Oaxaca. Mole is not much to look at, but once you’ve had a good one, there’s no going back.

As a U.S. resident, it’s both uncomfortable and liberating to visit places where goods are not all tightly wrapped in plastic.

Buckets of candy at the Mercado de la Merced.

Pinatas for sale at the Mercado de la Merced that were conveniently located next to some of the candy stalls.

We hopped on the metro to get to our last stop, Mercado San Juan. Alejandro prefaced our entrance into this meat market with a discussion on how people in Mexico tend to have a closer relationship with their food. It was his way of warning the potentially squeamish about what we were about to see as well as encouraging people be open to different ways of looking at food.

{ 21 comments }

7 Reasons to Work Up the Nerve to Travel Solo

by Ekua on May 29, 2011 · 23 comments in d.i.y. travel,listastic,solo travel

For the last few weeks, I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about my potential summer travel plans. Many of these discussions end with an incredulous look in my direction and comment about my ability to travel solo. I get a lot of, “I can’t believe you just go on your own!” or, “I could never travel solo!”

What amazes me is how much most people I’ve talked with do want to travel but don’t. Aside from the average American job’s lack of vacation time or choices about where to spend money, one of the biggest travel deterrents seems to be not having anyone to go with.

This may sound weird, but it pains me a little when people let something like that prevent them from doing the things they want to do. So I decided to write a solo travel for beginners series, starting off with seven reasons why it’s worth it to take a solo trip:

» To connect with places more deeply and foster your creativity

When I travel with people I know, I value the ability to interact with them in a different setting and the closer relationships that can come with that. At other times, I want to feel my way through a place. When I am alone in the middle of somewhere new, I’m much more able to tune into the nuances of a culture or the scenery. Solo travel’s built in need to sense and observe feeds my creativity.

» To meet people you would never otherwise meet

This seems like a given, but most people I come across who are unfamiliar with traveling solo often assume it means that you will constantly be alone. If I look back to my first solo trip, this was a fear of mine as well. But it turns out that that fear was unfounded. On the road, I mostly befriend 20- and 30- somethings with similar views on life and travel, but I’ve also made friends with local people, people significantly older or younger, and a few eccentric people. Solo travel has enabled me to make life enhancing connections with the people who everyday life probably wouldn’t have led me to connect with. When you’re away from home alone, you’re more likely to do away with the ridiculous criteria for friendship that you often inadvertently establish at home.

» To experience life at high speed

Life seems to move faster when you’re traveling solo. The surface-skirting small talk portion of friendship is usually bypassed and you might find yourself in deep discussions with people you’ve met just hours before. When you’re alone in a strange place, things that are everyday experiences for the people who live there might send you back to feeling like a child when everything seemed so new and exciting. You have to start from scratch in so many ways and in a very short period of time, adjust to unfamiliar people and places. For me, somehow this sped up life seems to stick, and things that happened in just a few days on the road can be as a significant part of my life as things that happened over the course of much more time at home.

» To challenge yourself

When I visited India, I was terrified every time I set foot in a train station or bus terminal. In fact, on every trip I’ve ever been on, I have unreasonable fears about not being able to catch the right bus or train at the right time. Airports are set up to be internationally understandable, but local transport is often a lot more esoteric. So when I take the bus or the train, I typically wish I had a travel partner to alleviate my worries. But there’s something about successfully getting from place to place on my own that thrills me. On trips where I have quite a bit of stops to make, when I get to my last destination, I want to shout, “I did it!” For me, transportation is often my biggest challenge, but there are plenty of other challenges to tackle on a solo trip like cultural immersion or simply learning to sit comfortably with your own thoughts.

» To have the freedom to experience your obscure interests

Are you an American who’s down to go to Cuba? Are you more inclined to discover gritty alleys full of street art than check out established museums? Are you anthropologically driven to explore cultures in remote parts of the world? Sometimes you’re pumped up about something that doesn’t appeal to everyone. Sometimes it’s more fun to take just your enthusiasm and to explore your interest on your own and find people who have similar interests once you get there.

» To choose your travel style and maintain your friendships

When I travel, I typically stay in basic hotels or hostels, eat street food, and take ground transportation as much as possible. While I have my moments of wanting to be more in a traditional vacation mode, this is largely the style of travel I want to stick to for now. Whenever people say to me, “I want to travel with you sometime!” I run this by them. While some people I know could absolutely hang with a budget travel style, I know a lot more people who are not willing to share accommodations with strangers, are squeamish and picky about food, want to fly everywhere, and don’t want to travel for more than a week or two at a time. I’ve seen others jeopardize relationships over vastly different travel styles (as in siblings who drove each other crazy, friends not talking for awhile after returning from a trip, etc.) and I don’t want to go there. Sometimes it’s better to go solo than travel with someone whose style has the potential to be incompatible.

» Because life is too short to wait until everything is “right”

If you’ve been thinking about going somewhere for awhile and the right travel partner with the right schedule hasn’t come along to join you, you might as well just go. If you’re able bodied, a travel partner is not a requirement for traveling the world. In the end, you’ll find that it’s easier to go for it and take the trip rather than to live with the regret of letting the opportunity pass you by.

{ 23 comments }

← Previous Entries