A week in San Cristóbal des las Casas

We're spent a great week here and San Cristóbal is a beautiful town with some lovely people that we have met (look out for photos soon). The only drawback to San Cristóbal is that its cold!!!!! After I took all of the warm stuff home, or else we left it in San Fran - we could now really do with our vests and woolies. I've bought loads of shawls and ponchos and scarves to compensate! The town is at a high altitude, hence the temperature, and we are nearly in rainy season too so there have been some spectacular downpours.

The family that we are staying are great and the more we get to know them the better we like them. They are very politically aware and active and are friendly and easy going too. Señor Francisco, Señora Socorro, Hector (14 years), Miguel (27), his wife Anai and baby Caleb live in the house, with Rosa their domestica. Paco and Juan (29 and 26) visit but don't live at home. Today we were taken of a tour of San Cristóbal including into some of the poorer 'barrios' and the woods. We also visited Francisco's brother and family who had children of 11, 12 and 14. Miguel was doing a puppet show (something he does, educational puppet shows not just for children) that we were looking forward to going to see - we thought that was where we were going but somehow it never happened and we don't know why. Mark's Spanish is much improved but he wasn't able to find out why we hadn't gone.

Mark adds later: It turned out that the village where the puppet show was to be had cancelled, due to mixing up Miguel's organisation with another that they suspected were involved in the rumoured plot to pass off giant worm's eggs (huevos de gusanos) as hen's eggs. This rumour has taken southern Mexico by storm over the last few weeks - the price of eggs has tumbled, and who knows where the rumour started (though I noticed that Cubans call US-ers gusanos sometimes). In the end, though, as they say here, solo Dios sabes (only God knows) ...

We had a good week with our Spanish lessons. We all felt exhausted after the classes but certainly Mark has improved a lot and I have made a good beginning - can't tell what the girls have learned as they won't speak - but if I ask Rosa what a word is she often knows but just won't speak. Our teachers were really nice and the couple who run the school were a delight to hang out with and were very patient with us as we hung around taking advantage of their good natures! Thanks Sandra, Erica and Michael (and Mark's afternoon teacher, Dionyso).

We are planning to stay up to another week here, as we like it so much and haven't had much chance to look around yet. Then we are going to Oaxaca for a few days, then to Mexico city to fly to Cuba! Two weeks there and two weeks in Jamaica and then home!!!!!! Can't believe that we will be home soon.

- Heather

Started Language class

Rejoined the gang in Merida and the next day we travelled down to Palenque - stayed in the jungle in a hippy hideout and actually did some sightseeing! We went to look at some Mayan ruins - impressive, we went to some beautiful waterfalls and bathing places - refreshing in the very hot climate and also had a fantastic three hour horse ride - first time for all of us riding Western style and on stallions! We all loved it but are aching like mad today.

After riding yesterday we took the bus on a very winding road to San Cristobel and were met at the bus station by our host family for the week and the people who run the language school. The family are lovely and obviously very anxious to help us to learn Spanish. More about them later when we have got to know them better. They have four boys but only one of them is a child - Hector is 14 years old and very friendly and outgoing. We have great rooms, the girls have a room each for once and we were given a great breakfast too.

Today we started our course and our lovely teacher, Sandra, took me, Rosa and Melissa and Mark had the director Erica. The three hours flew by but we three are glad that we didn't opt to take more hours as we were all tired and there is a lot to absorb and homework to do also!! Mark is back there this afternoon as he opted for six hours per day - ha ha - I think he will be shattered but it will be worth it.

Tomorrow we are going to learn some dancing after class and on Wednesday we are going to do some cooking, Thursday more dance if we want and Friday a trip out to a very interesting small town near by - so we have plenty lined up to do. Our host family have a son who is an anthropology student and he has offered to take us to see some places of interest - we may have to stay another week just to take advantage of all there is on offer!

- Heather

Our busiest two days yet

Arriving in Chiapas, we initially stayed in the jungle, or the nearest equivalent to it we'll get on this trip, at El Panchán, halfway between the town of Palenque and the Mayan ruins of the same name.

After taking it very easy in Mérida, we risked our hard-won reputation as laid-back travellers by managing to do four tourist sights/activities in two days. Palenque (the ruins) was the first - the heat made climbing the ruins unattractive to all but me, and we only stayed a couple of hours:

Hot and a little bothered, we boarded a minibus to the next two sights - a tall cascade and some falls to swim in. The bus gave us only 40 minutes at the beautiful Misol-Ha, but I got in a swim:

The falls at Agua Azul were also very pretty - and there were lots of local families enjoying the water and the food stalls nearby. Here we met Lleni, a US/Peruvian doctor who was taking a break from her volunteership at a hospital near Altomirano, which had been guarded by the EZLN while it looked after the wounded of both sides during the insurrection of 1994, and is still trusted by the Zapatista community. And we swam.

The next morning, before heading off to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Heather finally got to ride a horse - as did the rest of us. Western-style riding, and on stallions at that, seemed surprisingly more comfortable than European style - after three hours in the saddle we didn't feel a thing. Well, not till the next day, anyway.

I got complemented on my riding, possibly for the first time ever - Terry said I was "natural in the saddle," so there. He was even more impressed that the ornery horse he'd given Heather did everything she wanted, but then she's always the clever one on a horse.

- Mark

Lazy days in Mérida

We packed Heather into a taxi, and waved her off from Mexico City to the airport and the UK - a few hours later we were off to catch our plane to Mérida in the Yucatan.

Mérida is a very pretty city, of which we took far too few photos, and for us a very hot one, coming from 2000 metres higher up, and several hundred km further away from the equator as we were. So we spent our week there taking it all pretty easy, strolling around town in the mornings and/or the evenings, making friends with fellow tourists in the greenery-filled Hotel Trinidad, or hiding from the heat in air-conditioned internet cafes, or the air-conditioned TV room of the hotel.

To make up for the lack of photos of the pretty city itself - here is evidence that Mexican muralism doesn't begin and end with Diego Rivera, from the Museum of Contemporary Yucatecan Art, and from around town:

We met the friendly Tracie and Anna from the UK (though the only photo we got of them is no good - send us a better one, if you're reading this!), in the early stages of a big tour of Latin America; Isaiah, your average Mexican/Cuban/Jewish/American firefighter/botanist from San Francisco and Yosemite, who hung out with us at La Noche Mexicana as well as at the hotel; Zoe, drama student from Canada (again, no good photo), bravely continuing solo on the last leg of her big Latin American tour even though her Spanish-speaking friend had bailed out some weeks ago; and Garet & Karina, permaculturey Californians (though Garet hails from Miami) on their way to surf the Oaxacan Pacific for a while after six months working with a 'kids eco-camp' in Costa Rica, who we were to bump into again in both Palenque and San Cristóbal de las Casas.

Our one big excursion was a day trip to swim in a couple of cool cenotes out in the Yucatan scrub - a great trip on a hot day. A hot walk through town picking up a roast chicken and lots of water on the way, and we caught a collectivo (minibus) to the little town of Cúzama, a bycicle rickshaw to the edge of the area with the cenotes in, and then a tiny horse-drawn cart running on rickety, very narrow-gauge rails to take us between the pools. We saw no banditos, but the cart ride through scrub had a definite Western feel to it. The cenotes, meanwhile, were great - it's hard to photograph the effects of the shafts of sunlight lighting these huge caverns, with stalactites and tree roots reaching down from the ceilings towards the clear cool water.

- Mark