Grandma's Cafe, Silver City, NM

Every restaurant in town is closed on Memorial Day except the big chains. Grandma’s Café has an open sign, so I whip a fast left and narrowly miss the one car coming from the opposite direction. It’s everything you’d expect from a café named Grandma’s:  A friendly (in a surly way) waitress. Tables decorated with floral plastic table cloths with matts on top. Thick white dishes. Jam in a  jar, with a big spoon sticking out.  A bottle of hot sauce next to a vase with a little bouquet of flowers.  Walls covered in floral wallpaper. Windows dressed in lace. Wood floors. A counter with a display of cereal boxes and a glass case full of pies.

A simple looking overweight man comes in and sits at one of the center tables. The waitress greets him by name: Bruce.

A teenaged boy named Jimmy swoops out of the kitchen and tells the waitress not to give Bruce a hard time. “You mess with Bruce, You’re messin with me!” Then to Bruce he says, “I got yer back man!” Bruce is beaming.

The waitress is chubby but has an amazing amount of energy for a sixty something woman. She asks Bruce if he wants coffee. He says no. “What? Our coffees’ not as good as McDonald’s”. Bruce says he wouldn’t go to McDonalds if you gave him a hundred dollars. It takes him a while to say it. She delivers coffee to the other customers, comes back to Bruce and says “So, we’re not your second choice after all?” He drawls out that he’s surprised to find Grandma’s open, all the other restaurants in town are closed. The waitress replies, “We’d be closed too if Jimmy had just hog-tied Gramdma this morning like he was supposed to.”

Two other locals come in, see Bruce and join him. There are a dozen tables seating 2-8 people. More than half are full, and there’s only the one waitress. She fills my cup – “You may have wanted the day off, but it sure looks like you all have a good time here.” I tell her.

She smiles and whips over to the next table to fill them up. 

Silver City Blues Festival

Crowds are large but not as thick as last year, high winds most likely keeping them away. A boy walks by holding a Styrofoam plate of fresh hot salty potato chips. The wind flips it out of his hands and it sails, chips flying in all directions onto a group of gray haired ladies dressed in the tie-dye shirts and hippie dresses they just bought at the corner booth. The poor boy is horrified, and still hungry.

The sun by late afternoon is relentless but made easier to bare by the wind which keeps the air cool. People have stayed out without sunscreen longer than they should. Every now and then a hat sails up over the crowd.

The bands are amplified to uncomfortable levels unless one wears ear plugs or wadded up napkin balls soaked in spit. Some enterprising vendor has sold bubbles to children. Often, without seeing them coming, a cold bubble lands on the skin in a chilly pop. A man in cowboy hat and thick luscious beard wanders around with Mardi Gras beads, doling them out to little girls and a few boys, some women too. He looks a kind soul, maybe a wifeless man who would have adored to be a father but is now perhaps too old.

Those who staked out a spot under the shade trees are the smart ones by late afternoon. The bands will quit at 6:30 today. The Pleasure Pilots just finished with a blues tune after playing several Van Morrison’s.

The couple sitting next to me look like people I’ve heard about from Arkansas. Both of them are missing some front teeth and have grubby looking hair in dire need of conditioner. But they talk like they’re from California. Turns out they are really down on their luck, homeless and living in a tent in the woods near by. They’ve been here in Silver City for 2 years. Friends let them shower and do laundry. They eat free lunches at the Baptist church during the week, and get some food from the food bank. But they have no way to cook. You can’t build a fire in these tinder dry woods – so I gave them my gas stove and a gallon of white gas.

The last act of the day was a sitar-blues-guitar fusion act. Harry Manx (only one person) had a drum at his feet, a harmonica at his lips, a mic for voice and a specially made instrument that resembled a guitar with more strings than I could see in that late afternoon sun. It sometimes sounded like a guitar with sitar undertones, sometimes like a sitar alone. He tuned it for a long time and joked that when musicians tune a sitar you can’t tell where the tuning stops and the song begins. So it was as he moved into the tune.

Wonderful last act. Not dance tunes but then, we were all pretty well danced-out. I had spotted a woman in a yellow “Stand on the Side of Love” t-shirt. I knew immediately that she was Unitarian. Sure enough Maura and her friend Peggy had come down from Albuquerque. It was their third year. We met up after the last act and went to dinner at Isaac’s, a nice bar/restaurant downtown. They were delightful women, we drank and ate, chatted, and then they offered me their camping spot at Rose Valley. Maura has a Eurovan camper and there was plenty of room for both vehicles to fit into the long ‘slot’. So I had electricity all night, no need to park in front of the restrooms to recharge my batteries and run my computer!

Tent on Wheels

Silver City, NM

RV's lined up at the 'trough'.

I’m staying at the Rose Valley RV Ranch. They raise RV’s here. You should see them, all lined up at the troughs of electricity and water. The ranch is thickly decorated in a western theme. There are wooden fences with rusting machinery, dried up ropes, a horseshoe pit, ancient saddles artfully nailed over logs, even the stop sign says "Whoa".  In the center of the park there’s a building with 4 individual bathrooms and a laundro-mat. I’m currently parked in front of that building because it’s the only place I can get electricity. You see, I’m anathema to the place. I’m in a tent on wheels, also known as a dry camper.  I don’t have a bathroom or kitchen in my van, it is literally like a tent, no services whatsoever, except that I brought an extension cord. Most campgrounds have a place for tent campers, maybe some shade trees and a picnic table. But since this is an RV Ranch, they don’t take to kindly to tenters. It brings down the property values.

Western decor at the Ranch.

However, I have no tent, and look like a vehicle that just might be an RV so I passed muster last night when I showed up. They let me have the parking lot next to the barn (actually it’s a craft room that is built to look like a barn). There was no electricity on the outside of the barn, so I’m recharging my 12V battery using my own extension cord and the outlet on the laundry building. People pass by, walking their tiny RV pooches, and look at me funny. Now I know why Chihuahuas and toy Schnauzers were invented.

Old Mesilla Bookstore.

I spent Friday night in Las Cruces with a friend. We took pictures of the sunset casting pink light on the Organ Mountains, had a late dinner at a really good little Mexican restaurant that served about three times what one should eat for dinner and stayed up much of the night talking. Saturday I took all day to drive the 2 hours to Silver City. First I went to a grocery across from the University that was sort of a cross between Smiths and Whole Foods. They seemed to have a lot of ‘new age’ foods and organics, plus regular products at a 15% markup. On down University Blvd is the town of Mesilla. There I got wrapped up in a wonderful bookstore on the plaza that has been there for 50 years, still run by the woman who was a little girl when her mother owned it. It’s charming, old, dusty, and full of beautiful antique Navajo Rugs, old time western lamps, Zuni dolls and figurines, and books tumbling around on the shelves as if they were all read on a regular basis.

City of Rocks State Park, south of Silver City, NM.

It was a long dry, dusty drive to Deming once I figured out how to get onto I-10. Off in the distance, dust devils towered half a mile high, once in a while a gust would blow me to one side like a giant invisible bear paw.  I was tired from a lack of sleep, the sun was putting my eyes into sand-mode, and I was thirsty. I stopped at the tourist information center and they directed me to a park where I could take a nap in the shade, and eat my leftovers from dinner that I’d stuck in the cooler. Deming is an interesting small town. The streets are wide! Wide enough to park rows of cars head in and still have more than enough room for two broad lanes of traffic. Of course there is NO traffic, but whoever planned the place certainly thought ahead to a time when people might want to crowd up in a desert with no water, food growing ability, or industry. Nice road north up to Silver City too. I stopped at the City of Rocks state park and drove up to the overlook, took some 360 degree photos of the landscape, and then drove on to the Blue’s Festival. I thought it would be a good idea to find a place to park/camp for the night, so I tackled that project first. Good thing too, as all the campgrounds were full including the one where I’m staying.

The bands were set up in a gazebo in the middle of the park. This is my 3^rd year coming down for this, so I thought I might run into some people I recognize, perhaps Unitarians from my previous trips where I did home-stays as part of their fund-raising efforts. I saw the vendor who sells the best locally produced nuts, so I bought a bag of red-chile-honey pecans and ate those as a prelude to dinner. The BBQ guy whose brisket I so enjoyed last year was there too, so I bought dinner from him. It was pretty late, the dinner crowd was gone but the food was still good.  A lovely day of tripping around on my own.

In the back yard of the bookstore.

The church in Mesilla, beautiful, inside and out.

Such difference a little water makes. Above: a
cabbage field near Mesilla. Below: a single
flower blooms above the City of Rocks. 

Symmetry: a Pecan orchard in the Rio Grande Valley.

Count the Money

This is a long overdue post-note for the blog. It's now been more than a month since I got home from the trip to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas.

John arrived two weeks before I left, and that first night left his debit card in the bank machine when he got money. Note to self:  Don't get money out of a machine when you're tired, especially if you're brain dead from being up almost 24 hours traveling.

Poor John.  Four or five days later, he ran out of cash and went to a cash machine to discover that the card was missing from his wallet. We hiked over to the bank where he'd gotten cash the night he arrived, and of course they knew nothing of a bank card. He immediately called Wells Fargo in the States to cancel the card. They of course wanted a password, which he didn't know, and they would not cancel the card without the password. He told them he had another debit/credit card with their bank. He gave that number and guessed (it was a three times and you're out kind of deal) correctly the third time what his 'password' was and they said, "OK, we'll cancel the card." But as Murphy will have it, they cancelled the good debit/credit card, and NOT the card that had disappeared. This was promptly discovered on our first trip to Sam's club when John attempted to get cash out of a machine in Customer Service using what he thought was his good card. I've known John a while, and he rarely gets rattled, but he was bordering on panic mode.

A long series of conversations with various Wells Fargo people ensued, and eventually he was assured two replacement cards were on their way. He even got an email verifying they'd been mailed. Ten days later, there was no delivery and a call to Wells Fargo revealed that there was no record of cards having been sent. So, another promise was made and the cards were put into the 'mail': FedX.  This time John received a tracking number and daily interactions with the FedX website showed the package arriving in Tuxtla on May 3. A week later there was still no package. By now, I had lent him money that I got from various bank machines using my own cards. But, I had also left Mexico on April 29th. Poor John was quickly running out of cash.

He could call Wells Fargo, they had a regular US phone number, but for whatever reason, his Verizon cell phone would not allow him to call a 1-800 number so he wasn't able to call FedX directly. I became the intermediary. Wells Fargo would not let him electronically transfer funds to my account because my bank is NOT Wells Fargo. So I had to establish a PayPal account so he could pay me, and I could then use Western Union to send him cash. That worked reasonably well for a couple of weeks. I quickly discovered my own card limitations. I couldn't use my debit card for more than $500 at the Western Union transfer, and they wouldn't take a check. So after the first successful transfer, I had to go to the bank for large quantities of cash, go back to the Western Union, and then arrange the transfer. Gees.

Meanwhile, I was on the phone daily with FedX in the US and he was on the phone with the FedX of Mexico. The package with his cards was somewhere in San Cristobal, in a warehouse, but no one would give him an address to go pick it up. Apparently their personnel were out delivering packages and had no 'office hours'.  Unfortunately, their personnel made no attempt to deliver the package at all. Everyday, there were notes on the website: the package had been refused (by whom?), or they couldn't find the address. I talked to the International service center several times, gave them phone numbers for John, the landlady, even the laundromat next to the landlady's hotel. I gave them the address, the cross street, even described the hotel's glass doorway and the big sign on the laundromat!!  No one from FedX ever showed up. After two weeks the package was shipped back to Mexico City. John was on the phone every day with people there, who assured him they would send it back. Two more weeks have passed. He is, today, on his way to Ajijic and then San Diego, with plenty of cash, but no bank cards. Fortunately the cards were never used by anyone, but as a precaution, John took all the money out of those accounts, and I'd be willing to bet he switches banks as soon as he hits US soil.

Last Days and the Trip Home

Decorated Cross for Easter

Sometimes taking a day off to sleep and drink plenty of water is exactly what the doctor ordered. I felt almost back to normal on Saturday. We headed into the main part of town to see the Easter (Santa Semana) festivities. It was crowded. The Train people were there with their books-for-kids project. We had tried to make an appointment with Roman to interview him about the project. But he was busy driving the large ‘train’ around for the tourists. So his wife wrote down the answers to my questions and gave me their emails. I’ll write the article for MexConnect and maybe people will donate money so they can buy more books. The ones they have are getting pretty raggedy from so many children reading them. 

On the plaza in front of the Cathedral, there was a book fair. It has been going on much of the week, today would be the last day. I’ve heard from Brigitte and others that Mexicans don’t read many books. They read papers and magazines, articles on the internet, but books? Not so much. Judging from the lack of bookstores, I guess that would be right. At the fair I got a cookbook that John recommended, in Spanish, so I guess if I cook much from it, I’ll have to get a gram scale as most of the measurements are weighed.

As the end of the trip neared, it became evident that if I left a few things behind, like my towel, and the shirt that was ruined by the clothesline, I could squeeze in a few material things. No longer the market patsy, I’ve learned to bargain. My Norte-Americana guilt is a bit too strong for me to bargain to the bottom line like John sometimes does, but I’m not above using him to get a better deal. After I’d paid $110 pesos for a purse the first day only to find the asking prices were as low as $50p for the same purse elsewhere in the market, I quit wondering who was taking advantage of whom.

In the Artesanias market there was a particularly attractive table runner, embroidered with birds and flowers. At first the seller said it was $200 pesos, but then she immediately began to drag out other runners to show me, at $300p, that were not any more intricate than the one I wanted. I said I wasn’t interested in them, but she kept talking, and next thing I knew, the one I liked was also $300p. She refused to admit she’d changed the price and wouldn’t bargain, so I said I’d go get my ‘husband’.  She didn’t like that at all and started to haggle, but I walked away. About an hour later, I came back with John. She pulled the same stunt, trying to distract him with other runners. At one point we walked away and she called us back. He got her down to $250p and then said to me, “If that’s good enough, pay it!” Then he walked off. Suddenly the price was $260p!! I turned to leave but she called me back to sell it for what she agreed. When I took it, she mumbled “barrato” (Cheap!) and I said, “Si”. Now that time I didn’t feel an ounce of guilt!!

Objects in the Jade Museum

There are still so many things I didn’t get to see in San Cristobal. I never climbed up the hill with the other church, the one on the west side of town, to see the views from there. (Hey, what’s one more ‘pyramid’ after Palenque?) I hadn’t seen the Jade museum or the Café Museo Café. Chiapas is the coffee growing capital of Mexico and there’s an entire museum devoted to it. Unfortunately, I left without seeing that one, but the Jade museum was worth the $30p entrance fee! 

Pakal in his tomb with floating mask.

There were no original Mayan jade masks or objects in the museum, they were all copies, but each was solid stone, and after pricing the good jade around town, those objects must have been worth thousands of dollars. In the back, the last stop before leaving the museum to enter the store, there was a reproduction of Pakal’s tomb. It was impressive. The original buildings, inside and out, at Palenque, were RED. Since the real tomb has been closed to the public forever, this was my opportunity to see what is probably a pretty good reproduction. This one of course was fully ‘restored’ and elaborately painted with bright red walls and decorations of yellow, blue and green. Instead of a desiccated mummy or bones, the king Pakal was displayed newly dead in full Jade and gold splendor, his jade death mask suspended above his face. 

Dancer on the plaza.

To top off my last day, we went to see the theatrical production of Palenque Rojo. It is a dance production, mostly, telling the story of the end of Palenque when the son of Pakal was abducted and held captive for ten years by the female ruler of Tonina. John and I both agreed, we’ve never seen a better dance theater production. The man who portrayed the Jaguar could, on “all-fours”, keep his back level and lithe just like a cat. His costume and mask made you forget entirely that it was a man. The action occurred down the middle of the audience and on all sides. The set was a jungle, with vine swinging monkeys, birds and bird sounds, snakes, crocodiles and giant mythical creatures. I’d thought the entrance price was a bit steep, but afterwards thought it the bargain of a lifetime.

Luck was in store for me on the trip home. Brigitte’s friend from Mexico City was scheduled to leave 10 minutes after my plane so they offered me a ride to the airport. I got to see the countryside I’d missed when I arrived so late in the day to San Cristobal. Tuxtla is much lower in altitude. Later, in the rainy season it’ll perk up but it was almost shocking how crispy-dry the hillsides are.

The road between the two cities is a ‘cuota’, a toll road. While it is technically only two lanes, the shoulders are wide so larger vehicles drive along the edge letting the smaller ones zoom past. It’s a high-speed version of city driving where cars slide past each other with inches to spare. Fortunately, Brigitte’s car is new and has seat belts that I gratefully used. Her husband Bob drove, and he’s good, but not as “Mexican” a driver as Brigitte. They’ve lived in Mexico for over ten years, dividing their time between San Cristobal and Ajijic where they have another home.

Dancers ready for their turn, from Chamula.

I enjoyed visiting with Marsha. We had so much time before our planes took off, that we ate a leisurely breakfast before parting company. My plane was an hour late but I met a woman who was also flying to Mexico City. She is a crafts dealer and gave me her business card to pass on to Brigitte. She knows Juana, the potter I was going to photograph but didn’t, in Aguacatenango. I’ll bet Brigitte could put her in touch with many other artisans in villages she may not know about.

Fried bananas and Churros 

The air in Mexico City was not so polluted this time around, in fact the odor wasn’t noticeable. I had about an hour to find and get on the next plane, and most of it was used up standing in line going through yet another baggage inspection and passport check. My luck held out beautifully, for seated next to me was a very attractive man, in his early forties, an engineer with Dell computers. We had a great time over the three hour flight showing each other photos of our trips and chatting. He and his beautiful wife went to Cuba, and have been all over Mexico. When we landed, he offered to have his wife drive me to the border since they lived near there and it would be no trouble. That saved me about $25. His wife checked me over carefully, saw that I was not some bimbo her husband had suddenly dropped in her lap, even asked me how old I was! We had a very nice conversation about their kids and living in Juarez while he filled the car with gas. It was good for me to make contact with people living in this city that, according to the American press, is so dangerous only an idiot would dare traverse it. She said it’s like any other city, there are places you just don’t go, and the drug cartels are much more interested in killing each other. It’s basically a turf war. She asked if I thought it was ugly, and I said no. It’s obvious there’s a lot more money than deeper in Mexico. Things are newer and cleaner, the roads are wider, there are more cars. It’s in a desert, so it’s dry and dusty, but it’s not ugly. There are much sadder places than Juarez to be sure.

Woman with baby. She'll be selling the goods
in the black bags later at the night market. 

My cousin sent her driver to pick me up after I dragged my bags up over the bridge and through customs. Back in the United States of America! Our beautiful flag was standing at attention in the cool breeze. It felt good to be home, even if it was Texas….

Mary Jo and I had a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant in El Paso, where the portions were another form of culture shock. I had sure gotten used to paying small prices for small meals that were just right. I took a box back to her house and had the leftovers for breakfast the next day.

In the morning I discovered the battery was dead in my van, so I was delayed a couple of hours leaving El Paso. The winds were outrageous. Driving through southern New Mexico was like driving through brown fog in places. With stops to visit friends and family, and another to meet the famous Alexandra, from whom we rented the apartment in San Cristobal, I rolled into my condo parking lot at 10:30 that night. The end to another fabulous, miraculous, and (wow!!) safe trip to Mexico.

Stacks of cookies and sweets.

Tecojotes in liquor. They only look like olives.

Outdoor restaurant

Down with Revenge!!

Good Friday. I woke up with the Revenge. It ran its course, helped a bit with Pepto Bismol. We had planned to go with Joe (Jose) Myer to Acteal, but I bagged it, preferring to stay a bit closer to the bathroom.

Brigitte at El Chiflon

John reported it is just as beautiful as Brigitte said, probably the most beautiful countryside he’s seen in Mexico. The town is a very small village with perhaps 10 houses and a small church. It is the site of the massacre in 1997. I was under the impression that the military people were Feds, but that is not entirely accurate. They were a paramilitary group, in opposition to the Zapatistas, but consisted of local people. They murdered 45, only 9 were men, the rest were women and children at a prayer service inside the church. According to Joe, who has spent a lot of time getting to know, and fundamentally supporting the Zapatistas, only a couple of the murderers served any time in jail, and all are out now, and back in the village! The villagers assume the government was behind the massacre due to the blatant lack of convictions and there were plenty of witnesses.  The people killed were Abejas, the Bees. They are supportive of the Zapatistas but are Catholic, and do not condone killing or violence. (Many Zapatistas are Protestant, disliking the Catholic church almost as much as the Federal Government.)  Joe didn’t know the circumstances leading up to the massacre but he has talked at length with a waiter at Tierra Adentro whose father and several other relatives were killed. Even after all that has happened, the Abejas do not condone violence or revenge. They do, however want justice, and the perpetrators, all the way up the chain of command, should be tried and punished. They are followers of Jesus, to the core.

The festivities consisted of a long procession of about 250 people, performing rituals at each station of the cross, ending with a long service at the end that was part religious, part political. The village has a display of crosses, each with the name of one of the victims of the massacre.  John said the course they walked was about 2 kilometers, but he dashed up to the front to take photos (they were allowed for a change) and then dashed up to the front again after the procession passed. The photos are his. He suggested I take a photo of the throne in the bathroom, since that’s what I saw most of the day!

El Chiflon, looking like a big
hand coming out of the mountain.

The day John was sick, I took some time in the afternoon to go to the Mercado and shop for food. As usual, there were new things to see and learn about. My favorite tiny bananas are Dominicans. I don’t know if that means they are from the Dominican Republic originally, or if the Dominican monks developed them, as they did many other varieties of plants, or if it simply means “Sunday”. While at the Mercado, it poured rain. I browsed a teensy stall with all kinds of beauty products and came away with bees wax hair cream, olive oil face gunk, some matches, hand lotion, and chewing gum, all for less than four dollars. The lady there was happy to chat with me and we had a good time swapping stories until the rain let up enough for me to finish shopping at the more open stalls.

In spite of all the problems living here, there are a few things that make it all worthwhile. One is fresh squeezed orange juice. I buy green oranges from Veracruz. They run 10 pesos (80 cents) a kilo, about ten. I’ve never seen a more juicy orange. The skin is very thin and it’s almost all sweet wonderful juice. Fresh OJ is cheap and easy to find at any market, and most of the little restaurants. The oranges are cut by hand and squashed in a press, ½ an orange at a time. I’ve had fresh OJ at the Frontier in Albuquerque, but they use a giant machine. The oranges are in a hopper at the top and roll down one by one into a holder where the machine pokes through the skin with what look like knitting needles, then it rolls down a bit further and gets pressed. All the acid flavor of the skin (not to mention any dirt or germs) goes right into the juice. It just doesn’t taste the same, and they get a fortune for that “freshly squeezed” juice. The other foodie item that makes living here a delight are the avocados, so creamy and perfect you can spread them like butter. We always have guacamole in the fridge ready to put on eggs, toast, or chips.

Beautiful aquamarine playground.

On Thursday, Brigitte wanted me to go with her to a little village and photograph a woman potter. Her friend Marsha from Mexico City is here visiting, so the four of us headed south to Aguacatenango. We saw the potter and her family walking on the road and stopped to talk to her. She said come back later in the afternoon. So we went to another little village so Brigitte could check on a weaver friend who regularly stops at her house for coffee but she hadn’t seen him in a long time. The last time he came by, he said he had been diagnosed with diabetes. She talked to him at some length about what kinds of changes he can make to live with it. He didn’t know about Splenda or artificial sweetners, and the doctors had not given him any information about taking care of himself, other than to take the pills.  He also has cataracts and didn’t know about surgery for it. So we stopped and talked with his family. He had actually gone into town earlier that day to see Brigitte!  According to his wife, he’s doing much better, got one eye operated on and is scheduled for the next.

Their concrete block house was very pretty, nicely painted and simple. One room is not walled in, so it’s is a deep porch with bedroom doors opening onto it. We sat in chairs parked on the concrete floor, and chatted for a while. I glanced in to see simple beds on wood frames, made up in colorful blankets, and that’s it. No decorations on the walls, no chests of drawers or toys spread about, just neat, clean and simple. Their kitchen is an outdoor affair inside a blackened roof where they cook over an open fire. There were seven or eight children milling about, gawking at us strange gringos, sucking on paletas. In the corners were 50 kilo bags of beans, rice and corn flour. John asked the man’s son how many children lived there and he replied, about 10. I doubt they’re all his at it seemed to be a rather large family compound with several houses opening onto the central area where the kitchen is located.

The lower cascades of El Chiflon.

The church in the little town is very old, painted white with primitive brown designs and had an effigy of a man hanging by the neck. Brigitte said it is Judas, and they’ll burn him on Saturday, but the sign said his name was something else, so I suspect he’s serving dual purposes, one religious, possibly the other political. Marsha and I went inside where men dressed in costumes were keeping vigil. Brigitte says that people spend time with the saints so they don’t get lonely. This looked like something else though. The men wore white shirts with colorful bandanas tied around their necks. They looked a bit like oversized Cub Scouts. They had long white pants of cotton, but over the pants they wore a second pair of much shorter black embroidered pants. Most of them were barefooted. They sat on both sides of a large rectangular area filled with dozens of lit candles. Two boys, maybe 10 years of age, were on their knees holding a large wooden cross. For a long time nothing happened, then from the back of the church came deep throated drumming and a strange low horn played a mournful tune.

Little girls in the church courtyard were fascinated with my camera’s screen but screamed and ran away when I asked if they wanted to have their picture taken. I showed them a photo of my son and they laughed, he’s got a beard!!

Great place to relax with a beer and a girlfriend.

We drove on to El Chiflon, Mexico’s highest waterfall. The name means the Whistle. According to people there, the falls make a whistling sound when the wind blows a certain way, but I also heard a bird that made a high pitched series of sounds that then blended into a long clear whistle. The waterfall, from a distance looks like a giant hand. Up close, the water has a similar blue color to Agua Azul, though not quite as deep a color. The place was packed since this is a national spring break from the schools and Semana Santa. Up and down the river, on both sides were palapas (thatched roofs) with bar-b-q grills. People were roasting hot dogs and burgers, chicken and pork chops. The smells were heavenly. Brigitte and I braved the heat and climbed almost to the top of the falls. Way up there, they had zip lines across the falls so people zipped from one side of the river to the other. It looked like fun, and was only $8. They also had some climbing ropes and rapelling options if you wanted to try that too. The stairs were endless, the heat almost oppressive. I wasn’t dressed for this weather, I’d thought we were going to a high town to photograph a potter, so I’d worn hiking boots and long pants, a long sleeve shirt, etc. The climbing was on par with Palenque only many many more steps, the heat and humidity, not quite as bad. The water wasn’t as cold as Agua Azul and people were swimming and dipping in the water everywhere. On a regular weekday, I could see this being a very tranquil and lovely place, but it was mayhem on Good Thursday.

Glorious waterfalls.

We left a bit later than intended and drove to Comitan, a nice little city very close to Guatemala to catch the main highway back to San Cristobal. It was too late in the day to photograph the potter, unfortunately. Brigitte didn’t want to drive in the dark. She dropped us off in the center of town, which was also packed solid with people. We watched several bands, had some dinner at Tierra Adentro again, and finally met the owner Ernesto. Joe lived with Ernesto for some time before joining up with a language school and living with a family. It would be Ernesto’s car they would take to Acteal the next day. I asked him if Joe would be driving. He laughed, crossed himself, and said yes!!  Good luck, he told us.  John said Joe was a pretty good driver, very cautious. He’s not as good as Brigitte though. She drives like a Mexican, fast and furious, but safe. At least she never passed a line of cars on a curve like so many of them do. 

Mercados vs. Grocery Stores

I just got back from a bus trip to the Mercalto, the Merposur and the Mayoreo. In an earlier blog, some guy told me a funnel was called a mercalto, or at least that’s what I thought he said, but in fact, he was saying I could find one in Mercalto, it’s one of three major markets. Mercalto is the nicer, newer, cleaner, less crowded market of small vendors selling everything from ice cream to dried fish, clothing to electrical supplies, plastic chairs to tarps. The Merposur is directly across the street and is packed solid with booths. It has more little restaurants that make tacos and tamales, served on hard plastic plates covered with a plastic bag, so all that gets tossed in the trash is the bag. I kind of like that clean way to do things, sure beats huge volumes of Styrofoam going into the landfills. Some of the places serve directly on the plastic plates, then wash them in a big tub, along with the flatware used by customers. Somehow that doesn’t seem quite sanitary, but so far, I’ve never gotten sick eating in one of them.

Mayoreo is a wholesale place, or so you’d be led to believe by the name, but in fact it’s just a grocery store like many in the US. The prices for everything are a tad higher than the mercados. A 4-pack of TP is $13p, where I can buy the same thing in the Mercado for $10p. It doesn’t sound like much but I can easily spend $100p in the grocery, I’m weighted down if I spend that much at one of the markets. The Mayoreo does have wholesale items like 50 kilo bags of white flour, dog food, corn masa, detergent and other things, but they also carry a wide assortment of yoghurt, cheeses, cookies, cleaning supplies and bottled water.

When I got here, Alexandra had left a giant water bottle that I swapped at the tiendita down the street for a full one. I left it as the bottom of the stairs, inside the locked gate and would refill smaller bottles to haul the rest of the way up to the house. That worked out until the giant bottle got light enough to carry up the hill. However, our half full bottle, purchased just a few days ago, disappeared.

Our landlady Maria Elena, Mateo (little guy with the bib)
and John in his new bib from 'WalMart'.

The landlady came yesterday. She brought her daughter who cleaned out the downstairs apartment, and the same handyman who blew water all over when he replaced the faucet. Today when I went down to refill the small bottles, the big one was gone. The trash had been removed and the area was really cleaned up nicely, which leads me to believe the handyman took the bottle. I wasn’t sure why he’d do that until I went down the hill to buy another and found out there’s a $50p deposit on the bottle! So now I’m not sure if someone else in the neighborhood might have climbed over, or taken it when the gate was left open, or just what. Hmmm. The missing water bottle. Hardly the subject of a detective novel.  We’ll simply have to hide it better or bite the bullet and man-handle it up the 61 steps to the house (John counted them!). 

I never thought I’d be so concerned about water, but the stuff coming out of the tap should not be used even to brush teeth. It can be boiled and sterilized. It seems to be good water otherwise, it’s probably from a well. There are a lot of minerals in it that settle out when boiled. I noticed that when I heated some to wash clothes. Brigitte boils tap water all the time, so that’s what I’ll have to do for a while. This is what it means to live in a ‘second’ world country. It’s not third world…..I don’t have to pull my drinking water from a well with a bucket.

The largest market, the San Antonio, is north of the center of town. It’s the one with the stinky meats and fish. I’m sure I’ve not explored all of it and probably won’t. We’ve stopped there a few times when in that part of town, but that’s a very long way to schlep heavy bags of fruit and veggies when I can buy the same much closer. I think my preference so far, and this is my American bias: is Mercalto. It’s simply more spacious with more light, covered with a large arched roof in one section and a big pitched roof in the other, to keep out the rain. Because it’s newer and probably more expensive to rent a booth there, it’s cleaner. The roof leaks in places though. I was there yesterday during a serious thunder and lightning downpour. The din on the roof made normal conversation impossible, and in no time vendors were postioning buckets and covering up their goods with tarps. 

There is another store we’ve not had a chance to explore yet, another WalMart type called Chedraui. It’s a Mexican chain. In Palenque I saw an official looking road sign pointing off to the right: Chedraui 2km. I thought it was a town.

The Night Market setting up around 8:00pm.

 I love to take photos, John loves to shop. He hadn’t known about the night market until just a couple of days ago. We stayed late in town to see the Zapatista movie at Kinoki. Afterwards we wandered down to the plaza and the indigenous market was going full blast in front of the Cathedral. I stumbled across it my first night here. Women set up blankets in some preordained fashion and then spread out their goods. Mostly they sell embroidered and hand-woven clothing, blankets, shawls, stuffed animals, and purses, plus some jewelry and leather goods. In spite of lamp posts shedding some light on the proceedings, it’s quite dark. The women have bright LED lamps they pop on the minute you start to look at their stuff. One girl, maybe 16 or 17 was very insistent that I look at her things. She spoke Tsotsil, Spanish, English, and when a French lady came up, she addressed her too. I was cold and she noticed me holding my arms tightly against my body. She pulled out a wool shawl and almost forced me to buy it. How could I resist someone working so hard, so quick and smart?  

All kinds of woven goods for sale,
including giraffes & zebras.

There are still many things I’ve not done, and probably won’t on this trip. I’d love to do some hiking, or biking. But I need to find people who would do that with me. The guide book is clear about not exploring too deeply into the indigenous areas without a guide.  If I were here longer, I could go with Brigitte to more villages. We are going to another one tomorrow, to photograph a ceramic sculptor.  I would like to visit some of the high lakes and kayak or canoe on them. It’s a beautiful area, and while I’ve done a lot, I’ve barely scratched the surface. John will stay another month or two. We’ve discussed renting a place here since it’s such a good base for exploring Guatemala and central America. It’s a lovely cosmopolitan city.