Part two of Christmas vacation

San Cristobal de las Casas
We left Palenque (by bus) to move into the mountains.  We chose San Cristobal because it is known for the local markets of artesian handicrafts (particularly woven cloth) and because it is in the heart of dozens of small towns of indigenous people.  We stayed at the Hotel Don Juan, which used to be a hacienda outside of town.  Now it is on the edge of town, surrounded by other hotels and stores.  But we could imagine it in it's past splendor.  If you squinted and blocked out the sound of traffic, you could imagine horses and cattle and wide-open spaces.


 


 

 




New Year's Eve:  We found a nice bar and celebrated early in the evening.  The girls ordered pina coladas "sin alcohol" (without alcohol); after drinking several inches of their drinks they suspected that something wasn't right.  We sent them back to the bar where we learned that they were "con alcohol" (with alcohol) so the kids celebrated New Year's Eve with their first sips of rum!

     

San Juan Chamula.  

We took a tour of two villages of indigenous people.  Each village is characterized by it's own language and it's own costume.  The first was San Juan Chamula, which we visited on market day and the day that the village spiritual leaders changed, from one set of men to another.  Photographing any spiritual leader was prohibited so we have no photos to show the costumes of this village.  The women wore black wool skirts and colorful embroidered shirts with dark shawls.  The men wore either a white or black wool tunic, cinched around the waist with a leather belt.  They wore white simple pants and sandals.  Leaders wore a white handkerchief on their head, topped with a straw hat with ribbons on it.
       

The church of this town was amazing.  Again, we couldn't photograph it.  There were no pews and it was full of chanting, swaying people in small groups around candles that were burning right on the floor of the church.  The colors of the candles reflected what the people were praying for: health or vengeance or prosperity or a good crop.  Spiritual leaders were scattered among the crowd, waving vessels of smoking pine resin, so the room was smokey and thick.  It is also the job of the leaders to scrape the melted wax off the floor, making room for the next group of people to set down their candles.  We saw some people with bags of chicken eggs on the floor beside their candles; others with bottles of Coca Cola.  They use chickens and eggs in healing ceremonies (and I've forgotten why they use Coke!).  This community had rejected Christianity, forcing the last remaining priest to leave in the 1960s.





   We packed into buses and continued to the next village. . . .









Zinacantán

This was a much smaller village and it wasn't market day so it seemed tranquil.  We met a family of weavers.  They make these beautiful shawls and tightly woven black skirts that all the women wear.
   


    



This woman is weaving with a very old technique: hip weaving.  One end of the fibers are tied to a tree or post; the other end has a strap that you wrap around your hips.  You lean back, pulling the fibers taut, and start weaving.  It seemed like the perfect portable loom, particularly in an environment where you can be outdoors most of the time.  You can tend sheep and weave at the same time.  

We saw examples of this loom on the murals of Diego Rivera in Mexico City in which he is portraying the history of Mexico.

















Below is a wedding dress woven by these women, adorned with chicken feathers.  They fed us tortillas with crushed pumpkin seeds scattered on them.
   

   

Again, we have no photographs of the church of this town, but it was quite different from the one in Chamula.  This community had not rejected Christianity completely and half of their church was quite conventional: pews in rows, Jesus on the cross at the front, etc.  But, in the second room was a thatched hut decorated with balloons and flashing lights.  Inside the hut was an elaborate nativity scene with not one baby Jesus, but three!  We were told conflicting stories: some said that they represented the mayan division of the world into three parts (below ground, above ground, and in the sky); others that they represented the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as separate entities, rather than all encompassed in one body.

Guatemala (sort of . . .)

From San Cristobal, we took buses and taxis to the Guatamalan border, where we entered Guatamala only long enough to have our passports stamped and re-entered Mexico, with new visas in hand.  The country side at the Guatemalan border was nice, but the place where we stepped across the border was quite forgettable.
 

So, that part was anticlimatic - we had wanted to spend several days in Guatamala, seeing villages and mountains, but with a dead car in Veracruz, it seemed folly to travel around Guatamala when we needed to figure out how to get back to Morelia.  On the light side, we got very good at packing quickly, loading our bags into the belly of a bus, packing 5 people and all their belongings into taxis, and sleeping on buses.


Back to Veracruz

                   

We learned that the part for the car that had been ordered a week earlier had still not come in (and probably wouldn't come in).  While Don wandered the streets of Veracruz looking for a mechanic, the girls went to the beach.  We drank fresh pineapple from the shell of the fruit, we played in the water; most of all we tried to stay out of the sun.

 

While walking on the dock one afternoon, we saw these young men diving in the water with great excitement.  We couldn't figure out what was going on (were they catching fish?) until we got closer.  They would ask passersby to throw coins in the water and they would quickly jump in and catch the coin before it sank to the bottom.  They would wave it happily when they resurfaced and carry it in their teeth as they swam back.  We wondered how much money they made in a day compared to, say, the guys who wash car windows at stop lights or the men who watch your car in a parking lot.  They certainly had more fun than these other professions!

   




End of the vacation

Two days before the kids were to start school and the car didn't seem like it would make it back to Morelia.  Rather that risk all of us getting stranded on the highway, we nominated Don to do this while the rest of us got on a bus to Mexico City and then to Morelia.  Not surprisingly, less than 30 minutes outside of Veracruz, we saw our green Subaru on the side of the highway with the hood up - it had overheated again.  Don waited two hours for a tow-truck (they call them "Green Angels") - when it arrived it towed him back to Veracruz (for free!  This is a perk of a toll road).  He waited 5 days for mechanics to fix the car (in the meantime exploring Xalapa, which he enjoyed a lot).  By the time he finally limped home, Becky had flown back to Vermont and the kids were almost done with their first week back at school.  By this time, we felt like we needed a vacation!!!