San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas

Late last night, my program returned from what I will undoubtedly remember as one of the very best parts of my time in Mexico: two and a half days in San Cristobal de las Casas, a colonial-style city in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The travel time was long -- 14 hours there due to frequent stops looking for a diesel filling station, and 14 hours back due to....well, I'll get to that -- but valió la pena. It was well worth it. 

(red line in bottom right shows Mérida to San Cristobal)

I've been fortunate enough to see some pretty breathtaking sights in my life: German villages nestled in rolling hills, vineyards perched on the side of the Italian Alps. The Chiapas countryside, though, in part because I hadn't expected it to, ranks right up there with the best of them:

                           

Clouds at eye level

I think what I loved most about San Cristobal is that despite its long history (the city was founded in 1528), its spirit and character feel incredibly young. Unlike previous excursions, our schedule in San Cristobal was largely unstructured, giving us plenty of time to wander the streets and stumble across chocolate shops, cafés, and mercados galore.

Our hotel, Hotel Don Quijote

Casa del Pan, the organic/local ingredient/vegetarian restaurant where we had breakfast each morning.  

Seasonal fruit, fresh squeezed orange juice...and hot chocolate, of course!

It was chilly and rainy most of Saturday and Sunday...

...but we still managed to get out and about!

When the weather was really yucky, we took refuge in  TierrAdentro, a delicious café / Zapatista merchandise market...interesting combo, but it works!

We really wanted to take a meditation class at the Buddhist center across from our hotel, but it was closed :(

San Cristobal has a thing about building its churches atop hills with lots and lots of stairs.

(See the little church in the middle of the picture at the top of the stairs, between the trees?) It makes for a bit of a hike, and the altitude will leave you out of breath...

...but, once again, vale la pena. What a view!

                                             

Looking out over San Cristobal

Sunday morning we drove to the nearby indigenous villages of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan.

The community graveyard of San Juan Chamula. The church's roof caved in long ago and the building is no longer in use.

The people of San Juan Chamula are professed Catholics, but in practice they incorporate many elements of the religion of their Maya ancestors. If the head of a family changes his religion, he and his entire family are expelled from the community and may not be buried in the community graveyard. Many of the indigenous street vendors in San Cristobal are former residents of San Juan Chamula. 

We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, but the village's church has no pews. Instead, shrines to various saints are maintained around the perimeter of the sanctuary, and tiny lighted candles and pine needles (they smelled like pine needles?) cover the floor.

In the textile village of Zinacantán we visited a small, family-run mercado. This woman is weaving a table runner.   

After we had done our shopping, the family invited us into their kitchen for  homemade corn tortillas with queso and frijoles. 

Back in San Cristobal, the weather was kind enough to clear up for a beautiful final day in Chiapas. 

On our last night, a group of us decided to go back to Casa del Pan (which just happens to have a tiny cinema room in the back?) to watch a documentary film about the Zapatista movement in Chiapas. I still don't have a firm grasp of it all, but essentially the Zapatistas are a semi-radical group whose primary cause is land reform for the indigenous campesinos of Chiapas. The movement began with a violent rebellion in 1994 after Mexican preconditions to NAFTA redistributed indigenous lands, and has been smoldering ever since. The film was informative, powerful, and balanced, but I didn't realize just how relevant it would be to our group...

Remember when I said that the return trip lasted 14 hours as opposed to the expected 12? On Tuesday morning,  Zapatistas set up road blocks to protest various recent government actions. We were stopped twice. The first time the subject of the protest was unclear (something about combustibles?), but protestors had parked a large truck in the middle of the road, leaving just enough space for small, "private" travelers to go past. Although vehicles of comparable size were let through, an organizer informed us that our van was too big and that we would need to wait an hour. "Don't worry," our director Diana told us, "I've already notified the consulate." Yikes! Diana asked to speak to a different organizer, who agreed to let us try and fit though the gap. We barely squeezed by...only to arrive at another road block a few hours down the road. This second one (pictured above) was more straightforward: we sat in a line of stopped cars for a while, and then were allowed to slowly drive down a road lined with stony faced protestors holding hand-painted signs. They gave each driver a slip of paper written in English and Spanish explaining their demands: the return of land confiscated by the federal government in February 2011, and the release of two imprisoned "companions."

The next 8 hours of the trip passed uneventfully and we arrived safe and sound in Mérida! My classmates and I agree that we could have happily spent an entire semester in San Cristobal, but it does feel nice to be back in Yucatán. This is my final week of classes, so I'll be celebrating the Fourth of July by working on the two final papers I have due on Friday. Woop-dee-doo. Light a sparkler for me!