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San Cristobal market is one of my favourites anywhere. In fact, i can't off hand think of another fruit and veggie market that i prefer. It's much more pleasant to wander around than the Victoria Market in Melbourne, Rusty's Bazaar in Cairns, or Ridley Road Market in Dalston. Although i'll always have a soft spot for Ridley Road, with it's strong West Indian influence and reggae music.
San Cristobal market is all local produce, which makes it cheaper than anywhere else i found in Mexico. There are a lot of indian campesinos who come into town to sell fruit and veggies they've grown themselves. It's hard to say what proportion of the vendors fit into this category, but it's probably a fair few.
There's plenty of good, cheap avocadoes - in fact, i was paying about one fifth of the price that i paid in Tonalá, on the coastal plain of Chiapas, a few weeks later. There's bananas, papayas, mangoes, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, pineapples, onions, garlic, herbs, oranges, limes, maize, radishes, mameys, peanuts, a few things i don't know the names of, and plenty more. All good quality, in good condition and cheap. There's stalls selling slices of pineapple and water melon, people selling hot corn on the cob - with chilli and mayonaise if you want it, drinks stalls selling fresh fruit drinks and open-air restaurants selling good, very cheap food.
As well as fresh fruit and veggies, you can buy dried beans and seeds, dead animals of the walking, flying swimming and probably also the crawling kind (although i didn't check this section out at all!), clay pots and handmade baskets and string bags made from maguey - the same agave they use for making tequila, cassettes, blankets, incense, candles and handmade animal soap. There's a tortillería, where you can buy freshly made corn tortillas. All in all, there's very little need to shop anywhere else in San Cristobal.
Anyway, that day i bought some avocadoes, carrots, oranges, peanuts in their shells and bananas - enough, i figured, to keep me going for four days if necessary, as advised by the piece of paper they gave me when i registered.
When i got back to Conpaz, there were a lot more people there, all just hanging around waiting for something to happen. Lots of people were coming in to get accredited too. I picked up my accreditation, which was a square of green card, with my photocopied passport photo, my name and a few more words on it. This was laminated and had a hole punched in the top for hanging it round your neck or pinning it on your clothes.
Eventually, i don't know what time, a couple of small buses parked outside, blocking the road, and started loading us on.
From San Cristobal to San Andres Larrainzar is less than an hour's drive through the mountains. The countryside which the road went through was pleasant, although quite seriously trashed by hundreds of years of colonization and deforestation. It's pretty much all small-scale agricultural land all the way, with a variety of crops to be seen, although maize is the main one by a long way - as it would have been for thousands of years in these parts. The land here seems to be more or less exclusively farmed by indigenous campesinos (peasant farmers). I saw a lot of soil erosion, particularly near the road, of course, and signs that the land was beginning to get a bit tired of supporting the hundred thousand inhabitants of San Cristobal.
The road passes through San Juan Chamula, a Tzotzil or Tzeltal (i can't remember which now) indian village, about halfway to Larrainzar. A lot of the indians who you see around the streets of San Cristobal, selling things to the tourists, come from there. They sell hand made souvenirs including little zapatista dolls made out of sticks and cloth, complete with black balaclavas and wooden rifles - which is a bit strange really, as they're one of the few groups of indians in the area who don't support the EZLN.
When we arrived at Larrainzar, nobody seemed to have much of a clue what was going on, but a woman who'd been at the previous dialogue showed us where the market was - this had been set aside for our use as a dormitory and base. It was a new building, down the hill from the main part of the village, surrounded by a newly bulldozed area of flat, bare soil. The market was quite big, built like a warehouse and divided up inside into small stall areas, partitioned off by chest-high concrete walls, with a lower wall at the front, topped by a six foot long, two foot wide concrete counter. There were stalls around the outside walls and a row in the middle, back to back, with an aisle between the outside ones and the middle ones running all the way around. The roof was high and made of corrugated asbestos or something similar and the place had the acoustics of a barn, with every little noise echoing off the roof and bare concrete walls and filling the place with a constant cacophony of disjointed sound.
When i arrived, some of these compartments were occupied and some empty. I grabbed an empty one, not far from a door, and put down a mat of woven rubber strips to sleep on - a small and obviously insufficient pile of them was available for us to use. Soon afterwards, Ana arrived and put her stuff in the same compartment. We found out later that the next door compartment, between us and the door, was occupied by Jabi, Joserra and Blanca (the woman from Madrid who i'd first spoken to at Conpaz) and a couple of Mexican men, Alvaro and Raúl. The seven of us turned out to be quite a long-lasting group, considering the transience of the circumstances.
I went up to the Zócalo, or central square of the town, which was where everything was more or less happening. There was quite a crowd of people standing or wandering around in a fairly aimless manner.
The square itself had a dozen or so permanent kiosks in it, which sold drinks, fruit, veggies etc. In the middle there was an awning with chairs and tables under it, with people sitting around not doing much.
Around the outside of the square there was a road. Across the road, on the opposite side of the square from the direction of the market, there was a large church. In the road on this side, there were a few people selling things like hot corn on the cob, fruit, cassettes of music and other things that people in such a gathering might want to buy.
Near the corner was Oscar's peace fire, which consisted of a small fire place, which he'd built on the road and which he kept a fire burning in for the entire duration of the dialogue. He'd been at the last one there, doing the same thing. He also had a peace pipe, which was a major part of the process.
To describe Oscar's fire, and do it justice is impossible. It was in a constant process of transformation and 'desarollar', which is the spanish word for development, but it somehow has quite a different feeling from its english equivalent. The fire itself, the fireplace and the almost altar-like arrangement of things arround it were in a constant state of change. Somehow, to me at least, Oscar and the fire where the physical embodiment of the spirit of the talks - at least from the indigenous point of view. I don't think the government side had any spirit or spirituality about it in even the most basic form. In a way, it was an external indication of what was going on behind the closed doors of the buildings where the dialogue was taking place. It was a powerful focal point for us outside - and one that usually had a small crowd of people gathered around it.
Round the corner, on the other side of the road, there was a stall selling EZLN souvenirs - lighters, keyrings, t-shirts, photos of masked-up Zapatistas, tapes of zapatista songs etc. Next to that, was a crowd of people gathered around a man with a guitar singing songs about Chiapas. The thing began to have the atmosphere of a Zapatista festival, which in a way was partly what it was.
Further on, parked next to the square, was a telephone company truck with a gigantic satellite dish on the back and a generator running. This was the conduit for all the extra phone channels which have to be in place in this little village for these talks to function - for the media mainly, i assume.
On the third side of the square nothing much was happening. Across the road, there was a small restaurant and a shop with another restaurant out the back. But not much else really.
The fourth side was where all the main action of this circus was taking place. There was a line of soldiers, facing alternately inward and outward, armed only with batons. They made up one side of the cordon that stretched the whole way round the block next to the Zócalo. Behind the soldiers, was a line of civilians, wearing white vests with "PAZ" (peace) and below it "Sociedad Civil" (civil society) in red letters. This was the Cinturón de Paz, or peace cordon. Inside this there was line of local indigenous people, making up their own peace cordon. And then a line of Red Cross workers making a fourth cordon around the buildings where the talks were to take place and where the EZLN delegates would be living for their duration.
In the road, between the square and the main building of the talks, there was a large, raised podium, more like a stage really, with a blue tarpaulin roof. This was for the press to film and record the reports that the various parties to the talks would make regularly on the steps of that building.
From the square, the lines of the cordons stretched off for fifty metres or so along the side of that block, taking up the complete width of the roadway. The whole thing had a very weird feel to it!
Fairly soon, i met up with some of the other foreign observers, including Jabi, Joserra, Ana and Blanca. We began to try and organize ourselves into shifts, so that a group of us would be keeping an eye on things twenty four hours. Obviously this is how the cordons were operating too. We organized three groups and took four hour shifts each, twice a day. This gave us four hours on, eight hours off every twelve hours. I was in the twelve to four shift with Ana and Jabi. Four hours from midnight and midday every day.
There were twenty or so foreigners there as observers and most of them ended up being invloved in this shift system in some way or other, although there was only a couple of times when there was any more than three in our shift.
The following account is another extract from the article i wrote for 4ZZZ:
Around sunset on the first day, the EZLN delegates arrived, in two groups of three and one group of two, in three separate convoys of cars with red cross and civilians accompanying them to ensure their safety. The first three were dressed entirely in black, with black balaclavas covering their whole face except for their eyes. In a bizarre contrast, they were wearing a local style of brightly coloured hats which have multicoloured streamers hanging from the brims. They were greeted by loud cheering and clapping as they drove through they cordons and got out of their car.At midnight, our first shift began. After the bustle and crowds of the day, it was pleasantly quiet.The second group arrived in the same manner. They were dressed similarly, except they weren't wearing the coloured hats. The last convoy to arrive came after dark and included the only woman in the group, Comandanta Trinidad, known as "Trini". She was the only one dressed in normal clothes, although she had a scarf over her nose and the lower part of her face, to disguise her features.
It was a strange, but moving spectacle, watching the arrival of these freedom fighters who have risked their lives - and even right there and then were putting themselves at risk - to fight for land rights and equality and against colonialism and genocide. At this point in history, these people and the rest of their communities are involved in what's probably the most important strugle for land rights in terms of global politics. In fact it's possibly one of the most politically important things happening in the world today, although it's being heavily suppressed in the international media. If the indigenous peoples of Chiapas win this struggle, it can't fail to have a serious beneficial effect on land rights campaigns and fights for indigenous survival elsewhere in North America and all round the world. Which of course is why the U.S. government and multinational companies are leaning so heavily on the Mexican government.
I've always liked working at night. Driving taxis in Melbourne, i only ever did night shift. It's so much more peaceful and calm - especially in the city. Here it was the same. It's partly with all those people asleep, they're not generating that vast quantity of psychic energy which interferes with my own thought processes and increases my level of confusion and agitation. This is probably why so many artists and creative thinkers work mainly at night. The air is clear or interference. Those sorts of people are the ones most susceptible to it, as it's their sensitivity to the non-physical that allows them - or more likely compels them - to be creative.
I've got no idea how many people are aware of all this psychic "noise", but i'd say that most people are affected by it to some extent - all except the extremely insensitive. It's an over-sensitivity to this noise, combined with a cultural inability to grasp what it really is, that produces serious paranoia, schizophrenia and other so-called mental "illnesses" which our hopeless and spiritually crippled society has no way of dealing with except to pump the poor bastards so full of drugs they can't hear their own thoughts, let alone other peoples.
Anyway, the Zócalo was quiet. There were people around, but not so many. Oscar was there, by his fire. All the cordons were still in place, of course, although the people in them had changed since earlier on.
We went for a stroll right the way round the perimeter of the dialogue site, just outside the cordons. It was a very weird scene. The front of the buildings - the zócalo side, was all lit up and seemed vaguely lively, although nothing was happening, but the other sides were a totally different story altogether.
The streets that the cordon occupied were reasonably well-lit, but still only normal street light level. The four rows of people, standing motionless and silent in the half darkness gave the thing the feel more of a vigil than a physical guard. The red cross seemed a bit more relaxed, but they stood with their backs to the buildings, looking outwards, which is not quite such an oppressively claustrophobic perspective. The next two cordons - the indians and the civil society - were facing the buildings, just standing there, looking straight ahead mostly, or turning round to watch us pass. The army were alternatively facing in and out. The silence, the stillness and the darkness combined to produce a strong effect that i really can't describe, but you may be able to imagine. We wandered slowly round the block, stopping to say hello to someone somewhere, and ended up back in the Zócalo.
We spent the shift mainly in the Zócalo, sitting around talking - in spanish only, as Jabi didn't speak any english. A lot of the time we passed sitting near Oscar's fire - maybe he was sitting there too, adjusting the exact form of the fire, possibly singing a song to it, or maybe he was lying in a blanket asleep. Every so often, probably about every half an hour or so, we'd go for a wander around the cordon.
Alvaro, from Vera Cruz State and Raúl, who comes from Chiapas, were doing a shift on the Cinturón de Paz. Alvaro had his jarana with him - that's a guitar-like instrument, a bit bigger than a ukelele, that comes from his state. He had it strung up with single strings top and bottom and the middle two double like a twelve-string guitar. I don't know if this is normal, or if he'd just broken a couple of strings along the way! Anyway, he was playing the jarana and singing - songs which i had difficulty following at first, as my spanish was still a bit creaky. But as the next few days passed, i got accustomed to his accent and began to understand a lot more of the songs.
We had a sort of little party there, on the corner, at the back of the block, in the middle of the cordons. Us three foreigners were outside the army lines and they were inside, but there was only a few feet between us. In fact, round the back, the army cordon wasn't quite so strict as it was at the front, where all the focus of attention was and more people were watching them.
We all stood there, Alvaro singing songs and making jokes, and the rest of us cracking jokes too, everybody laughing. Even some of the other people in the peace cordons allowed a bit of levity to penetrate their serious vigil. This was the way the pattern was set for the remaining nights of the dialogue. As the days passed and we got to know more people, we ended up wandering around, stopping here and there, chatting, cracking jokes and laughing all night. These night shifts were really the most pleasant part of the whole thing for me.
Then at four o'clock it was back down to the market to try and get some sleep before the next shift, in eight hours time, at midday.
Everything was quiet in the market - for a change. This was about the only time of day when there was anything approaching peace in the sleeping quarters of the peace cordon!
The other two, Joserra an Blanca, were getting up, as they were on the next shift and us three went to bed. I managed to get to sleep reasonably easily, although i woke up again at six as the peace cordon shift changed, which was always an incredibly noisy event! The barn-like architecture of the place made things worse, as all the sound would resound off the roof and the concrete walls. But those people seemed quite unconcerned that others had to sleep. I managed more or less to get a total of four hours sleep that morning, which wasn't much but it would do.
I spent the day wandering around, talking, meeting people, watching what was going on, with four hours from midday on "patrol". Nothing drastically exciting was happening. It reminded me a lot of being on a forest blockade, where most of your time is taken up with hanging around, just being there ready in case something happens.
At about one in the afternoon, someone from the government came out, stood on the steps in front of the press podium and made an announcement about how the talks were going. I could understand the words, but i couldn't get any sense out of what he was saying. I came to realise it wasn't worth listening to those people, as they never said anything at all - and they used a lot of big words and long complicated sentences to do it with. When you have to make an effort to understand it, you just switch off as soon as they start rambling on with meaningless filler - which, of course, is the moment they first open their mouths.
Later on, after dark, they did the same thing. But this time, after the government talking machine had read out his telephone directory speech, some of the EZLN delegates came out and spoke. In complete contrast to the government, they spoke simply and clearly and i had no difficulty following what they were saying. Nor did i lose interest in listening to what they had to say.
I managed to get a few more hours sleep before the next shift at midnight.
*-*-*
The following day, Sunday, it was pretty much the same sort of thing. I met quite a few interesting people during my wanders around the town centre. There were a lot of foreigners there, fully aware of the politics involved in the event they were taking part in. There seemed to be a high proportion of Basques amongst us, including a few journalists from Basque Country publications. It was really good to meet all those people from around the world who had the same sort of views as i did.
That night, when i was just getting up and about to go up the hill for the midnight shift, the woman that was co-ordinating the stuff at the market camre round waking everyone up. She said the EZ delegates had asked for everyone to be ready for trouble. She didn't know what was going on, just that some kind of trouble was possible.
I went up to the town and nothing much seemed o be amiss. The only noticeable difference was that the soldier had taken down their stupid metal detecting arches. There were three of these - the same type you find in airports - one on the church side of the square and two on the other side. they were set up as kind of doorways in the army cordon. No-one was allowed to cross the cordon except at these points. They were switched on and functioning all the time, and they bleeped for about half of everyone who went through them, but the soldiers never took the slightest bit of notice of the bleeping. They didn't care who carried what in or out. The arches were there partly for show and partly because the soldiers needed to be able to see where the doorway in their imaginary wall was...
Anyway, all that was different as far as i could see was that these arches had been removed. The soldiers were actually in the process of putting them back when i got up there.
There were still quite a few people about and the press were hanging around on their stage waiting for an announcement to be made, which eventually happened at about one in the morning. It was very late and all that was really said was that the talks would continue the next day.
Later that morning, i discovered what all the weirdness the previous night was about. Apparently that evening the Zapatistas had had enough of having to try and deal with the nonsensical talking machines of the government. They were worn out from having to wade through the sea of meaningless words and try and extract some form of sense out of it, when there clearly was no sense there to extract. The government representatives were deliberately running them round in circles with their unintelligible and complicated ravings, knowing quite well that for most of the EZLN delegates, their first languages were tzotzil, tzeltal, tojolabal, chol and other indigenous languages. They would have all grown up speaking the language of the community they came from and would have learnt spanish with some effort later. Because of this, it was even harder for them to sort out the confusing drivel they were being bombarded with, so they left the meeting room.
The government had ordered two more battalions of armed troops to come from a nearby garrison - probably San Cristobal - and completely surround the village. We never even noticed this and i don't know how far from the town they were.
The soldiers in the cordon around the dialogue broke up the cordon and gathered in large groups of a hundred or so, on either side of the buildings. The red cross left their positions and grouped around the main exit doors - probably to make sure the government people could escape safely, but who knows?
At the same time, the indigenous people mobilized themselves and grouped up ready to defend the delegates. This could easily have been the beginning of a civil war in Mexico. It was full moon that night - and full moon in Scorpio, for what that's worth!
Anyway, the intermediaries managed to get the two sides talking again and things slowly got back to normal. If you could describe this bizarre situation as normal that is!
No doubt there was a fair bit of disappointment in U.S. government circles when they knew that this had got so far - and no further. They were certainly waiting for something like that to happen to give them an excuse to send in their troops and take control. A civil war in Mexico would have suited them perfectly right then, they were running a bit short of scapegoats now the USSR had turned capitalist. As i wrote in the 4ZZZ report:
There might be better prospects for a positive outcome if it wasn't for the U.S. government, like a hungry wolf panting at the border, waiting for an opportunity to march in and exert military control in addition to the economic power they already have. It's only 150 years since the U.S. forcibly took over half of Mexico and incorporated it into their country, and of course they're not happy with just half, they want the whole bloody lot!*-*-*
That morning i met Pramila. She was born in Canada of (asian) indian parents and had lived in New York most of her life. She was in Chiapas for a week or so and was trying to make a video of what was going on there at that time. She was a really interesting person with a lot of ideas similar to my own and i spent the afternoon chatting with her.
That evening, the talks ended and there was nothing left to do except wait for the Zapatista delegates to leave, and then we could go too.
*-*-*
They were all masked up as usual, but to get to look into the eyes of those people and divine some vague sense of who they were was interesting. Of course, they're just ordinary people - and they don't act any different to ordinary people. They don't put on any pretensions or anything. I guess if they weren't like that though, i wouldn't have been there anyway...
Eventually, at about four o'clock, they left in the same convoys as they'd arrived in and in reverse order. And that was that. The peace cordons had to stay there until the army'd gone for some reason, but we went back down the hill to the market to try and get some sleep.
However, there was no such luck! Within an hour, the whole place was deranged noisy chaos as everyone began to leave as quickly as they could. We were virtually thrown out around six or seven and we wandered up to the town to find some transport back to San Cristobal.
*-*-*
When we got back to San Cristobal, Ana invited me to stay at her house, as i had nowhere to go except a hotel. Jabi was going to be staying there too. She lived just around the corner from the Conpaz office, not very far from the market. It was a really nice house, as houses go, which isn't very far with me - i see them as just glorified small prisons. You came in the street door and straight away you were in a courtyard, with a small garden with a large peach or almond tree (i'm not sure which it was) in the middle. On two sides of the courtyard there was a roofed cement verandah with three doors off it. One went to the kitchen and a back room, one went to a larger bedroom and the other went to a room with a fireplace that was obviously intended as the living room, with a smaller bedroom off that. Out the back of the kitchen there was a garden and a small back yard with a water tank - like an asian mandi - outside the back door. There was another similar tank just inside the street door too. These were essential as, in that part of San Cristobal there was no running water between eleven in the morning and eleven at night, presumably because the mains water system isn't good enough to supply everyone all the time and they have to take it in shifts.
I lay down and tried to get a bit of sleep and then i went out to have a look for Pramila, who was going to be staying at the Casa Margarita. She wasn't there when i called by, but i caught up with her at the Fray Bartolome Human Rights Centre, where she was arranging accreditation to go out to the selva for a few days. She wanted to go and film some of the villages which had been destroyed and occupied by the army. Her, two american journalists and a japanese journalist were all going off the next day in a car that the american women were hiring.
I spent most of the afternoon sleeping and then went to El Puente, which was a sort of international community centre. It was mainly devoted to teaching languages and cross-cultural exchange of one sort and another. There was a restaurant which served a good selection of fairly simple vegetarian food - including brown rice, which was amazing. That evening there were a lot of people from the dialog - pretty well all the international observers as well as some of the mexicans, including Oscar, Raúl and Alvaro.
There was a Zapatista video being shown there that evening, an interview with Tacho, who'd been one of the delegates at the dialog. It was really badly made, the sound was terrible as whoever had made it had used automatic recording level, which made it really noisy in between bits of speech. It was visually really boring too, just a talking, balaclava-masked head. I couldn't really follow it as i was having trouble staying awake, so i went out to the restaurant part to have a beer.
The following day, Pramila went off to the selva in a flurry of chaos - like she was off to film a video in the forest, but she'd forgotten to charge the battery of the video camera... She left me with her ticket to New York, which was for Saturday from D.F., so i could confirm it for her, as she hadn't had the time.
In the evening i went to El Puente again. Part two of last night's video was on. Again i tried to watch it, but i didn't get very far that time either. That evening at El Puente, too, there were a lot of people from the dialog, mainly the foreigners.
*-*-*
Here's a couple more bits from my report to 4ZZZ, which might give you a bit more of an idea of what was going on around those parts at that time:
These dialogues are a complete farce, with the government deliberately setting out to confuse the Zapatistas, whose first lanugages are the local indigenous ones, rather than Spanish and to buy time in which to increase the pressure on their communities. But the EZLN has no choice except to try and get some positive results from them. Their communities want them to talk. They don't want the war which seems to be the only alternative. And whether or not they really have any faith in a government which is just another force of colonialism in a five hundred year long history of european colonization, they seem to see it as the only solution.*-*-*...
Meanwhile, the work of rebuilding the indigenous communities destroyed by the army in February is well underway. Made possible by the organization of encampments of foreigners and civilian Mexicans who are keeping an eye on the army, all but one of the villages have been reoccupied. However it's a massive task to recover from the damage done. Rebuilding houses, planting crops and finding ways around the problem of poisoned water supplies is enough in itself, but the biggest problem is that they haven't got any food. Because they were driven out of the villages, they've been unable to plant crops and therefore there's no harvest to live off. There's a disatrous level of malnutrition, with a lot of the children showing bloated bellies as a result.
However, from what i've heard these problems are being overcome somewhow and the villages are being rebuilt, still along the political lines of the old autonomous zone. There *is* hope, but there's a great need for outside help. Support, both personally and financially from independent overseas sympathizers will play an important part in helping the indigenous people of Chiapas overcome the latest in a long series of imperialist attacks.
On Friday afternoon, i ran into Paula in Calle Insurgentes. She was a little bit out of it. She'd just come back from Palenque and had changed her previous plans. She decided to go to Quintana Roo, the most easterly state in Mexico, on the Carribean coast, to spend a week or two on the beach there before flying from Cancún to Canada.
That evening i cooked a good vegan meal, which everyone enjoyed. The ignorant, meat-eating fools had probably never eaten anything like it before! We started on the beer early in the evening, or late in the arvo really. Then later on we went out to 'Las Velas' which is a late night bar near the Zócalo. Very late on, we bought some cocaine and went home and took it. I think i went to sleep just before sunrise.
*-*-*
We went out for a walk and to have a fruit juice or something. I was feeling quite depressed and had a strong feeling of wanting to go home - only, i didn't have a home to go to! It's a familiar feeling, but i hadn't had it like that for a long time. And i didn't know it then, but it was going to last, in a milder form, at least until i left Mexico (which is when i'm writing this!)
At about half past two, after a lot of indecision, i decided to go with Paula to Quintana Roo. I had to frantically rush to get my stuff packed and get to the bus before three, which wasn't a very good thing to be doing at all, the way i felt! We just about made it.
On the bus between San Cristobal and Ocosingo, we passed Oscar walking along the road. The Ecologist and a couple of other people were a little way in front of him, carrying a gigantic white cross on their shoulders! It was a very weird sight. I waved from the bus window and they all waved back.
Later on, not long after we'd passed through Palenque, a fair while after dark, an immigration official got on the bus and wanted to check our passports. That was when i discovered i'd left mine behind. And my travellers cheques! I remembered immediately i'd put them somewhere safe. Normally they're always in my bag and go everywhere with me, so i'd forgotten about it in my fucked-up rush. The immigration officer said i'd have to get off and go back for it, but he didn't mean it, or at least if he did, he didn't push it, which was a good thing as i didn't fancy my chances of getting on another bus in the middle of nowhere after dark.
Shit! This is a real fuck-up! The main reason why i had to go to Quintana Roo was because my visa was about to run out and there was no point trying to renew it in Chiapas, as you only got fifteen days from the immigration people in that state. The mexican government didn't want foreigners in Chiapas (so they could slaughter the indigenes quietly without the rest of the world noticing). I was thinking of going to Belize. Then when i crossed back into Quintana Roo, i should have got a decent ammount more time. There wasn't any need to leave the country though, i could have just renewed it in Cancún or somewhere. But i fancied a look at Belize anyway. Well, that was out now! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
*-*-*
Pretty well immediately, i began to get the feeling that this was somewhere i didn't really want to be. The immediately obvious physical signs of this were that it was all newly thrown up tourist trap style flashy shit. It's hard to put a finger on this exactly, but a few weeks later, at Puerto Escondido, i realized what it was.
I was walking up the beach at Puerto Escondido in the rain, almost at the end of June, in the late afternoon. The sea was a bit stormy and very grey. I looked at the town, which is on a hillside above the main beach, and felt "i like this place - i don't know why really..." Despite the fact that it's a bit of a tourist hole, it's nothing like Playa Del Carmen for instance. Why...? What's the difference?
Puerto Escondido is Mexican. Playa Del Carmen isn't. Puerto Escondido looks like it's grown up gradually and like all Mexican towns - in the tropics, at least - it's crumbling gradually too.
Playa Del Carmen is new, sterile, heartless and just thrown up by people with plenty of money who want to make lots more money very quickly. It's got no function other than being a tourist trap - although real people must live there somewhere, pushed to the outskirts, to serve the rich europeans and north americans that the place is designed to atract.
Playa Del Carmen would be identical wherever it was in the world. Puerto Escondido definitely wouldn't.
Anyway, i certainly hadn't put my initial feelings into any coherent form at that point, early in the morning after just getting off the bus. But i did start expressing some of my negative feellings about the place to Paula, which didn't really come out well, as they weren't very clear in my own head. She got pissed off and we had a brief, almost unspoken fight and went off in different directions. I never saw her again before i left Mexico!
Paula had offered to lend me a bit of money so i could spend a few days on the beach before i had to go back to get my passport, but without this, i had no choice but to go straight back to San Cristobal that day, as i had just about enough money for the bus and not much else. However, first i had to have a swim in the Caribbean Sea!
I walked up the beach, carrying my bags with me, as there was nothing else to do with them, in the direction of where Paula's Lonely Plonker guide book said there was a nudist beach. I never found it. I got sick of walking and stopped on the next beach up from the town beach and went for a swim. It was beautiful. The water and the beach, anyway. The water really was very clear and blue and the beach was clean white sand. It's certainly very different from the Pacific coast beaches. It's strange how one bit of the ocean can be so different from another bit of what's really the same ocean. It's only a few islands that separate this sea from the rest of the Atlantic, but you'd never guess, looking at the ocean in northern Europe, say, that over here it could be like this. Sadly, this blue sea and white beaches is what's led to the developers totally destroying amost almost all the coasts around the Caribbean. They've just got this obsessive compulsion to destroy anything that's beautiful - the more beautiful it is, the faster it must be destroyed. Money's just an excuse for their sick, perverted orgies of destruction i'm sure.
After that, i caught the bus to Cancún. Partly because i wanted to have a look at the place, partly because i wanted to check out some travel agencies to see if there were any cheap flights to Europe from there and partly because i thought it would be easier to get the bus back to San Cristobal from there.
Cancún was a horrible nightmare that made Playa Del Carmen look positively friendly! There's long miles of beautiful beaches there - and they're lined for their whole length by expensive and incredibly ugly cliff-like hotels. It's just beach, then concrete right behind it and it's disgusting. I don't know what's wrong with people that want to stay in shitholes like that! And pay vast sums of money for it. Why don't they just use the money to put a beach in the middle of their cities? It would look just the same and save all that boring travelling to get there!
Anyway, i was on a bus out of there as soon as i could possibly manage it. And, strangely enough, it was the same bus i'd come on, with the same crew. I told them what had happened and they were quite amused by it all really. So was i in a strange way!
I went back to the house in San Cristobal where i'd been staying and retrieved my passports and travellers cheques. I wasn't going to go anywhere else that day, that was certain. I wasn't quite sure what i was going to do now, as i still had to get my visa renewed.
Before i ran into Paula the other day, and got caught up on her trip, i'd been planning to go to Taxco and visit my old friend Gretchen who'd been living in Mexico for over a year at that time. Then i could have gone to Mexico City and done my immigration stuff there as it's only a couple of hours on the bus from Taxco. I felt like i should have done that in the first place and i decided that the next day that was where i'd go.
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About an hour after Pochutla, the bus arrived at Puerto Escondido, which was the end of the line. I went and had some breakfast and then jumped straight on a bus to Acapulco. That was a seven or eight hour journey and some of the countryside on the way was quite interesting, although nothing spectacular. Acapulco was a hideous nightmare city, overlooking what looks like it would once have been a beautiful bay. I got on a bus out of there as quickly as i could. This bus took me to Iguala, which is about four hours north of Acapulco and from there, it's less than an hour on a local minibus to Taxco.
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What a hell-trip that was! Sixty hours on buses in four days - including three nights! I was shattered, to say the least, but i was there at last. All i had to do now was find Gretchen's place, which actually wasn't so hard. Taxco's built entirely on the side of a hill, and it was a long way uphill from the bus station, but i eventually found it.
It was good to see Gretchen again. It had been a couple of years since we'd seen each other last, and we hadn't spent much time together even then. She was living with Victor, who came from Mexico city, in a small, more or less one room flat on the roof of a three storey building. They were both studying jewellery making at the art school in Taxco.
Despite the fact that i was totally buggered from the journeying of the last few days, i didn't get to sleep till very late that night. It was nearly ten o'clock when i got there and as me and Gretchen hadn't seen each other for so long, we sat up talking for hours.
The next day, i went down to the art school with them. It was a really good place, in nice surroundings and with good facilities. Mexicans paid a hundred pesos a month to study there and foreigners paid a hundred dollars, which is about six times as much. That was quite reasonable really as it didn't mean that only rich mexicans can go there. Gretchen had managed to get some kind of scholarship, which paid the fees but she was struggling to survive on a few hours of teaching english every week. There was a swimming pool at the spanish language school next door and we went swimming that afternoon.
The following day was Friday and i knew i should go to Mexico and do my immigration stuff, as it was the 26th and my visa ran out on the thirtieth. But as goverment offices close at one o'clock in Mexico, it meant getting up at about five in the morning to get an early bus to make sure you actually got it sorted out without having to go back the next day. And as it wasn't the absolute last moment, i didn't bother.
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Of course, when i got the the immigration, i was looking kind of seedy, because i was sick, which is not the sort of state to deal with immigration people in. It was also a Monday morning, which is not the best time to deal with government employees either! Anyway, he asked to see my money and i hadn't got any. I actually had a couple of hundred pounds in travellers cheques, but i knew this would come anywhere near what he wanted to see, specially as i didn't have a ticket out. So i had to say i'd left it in Taxco. He told me to come back with it within three days.
That was a real drag, but it wasn't disatrous. I had to get some more money sent over to me anyway, but to be forced to do it then, and in a hurry, was a bit of a pain in the arse. I spent quite a few hours, going round in circles in Mexico that day, trying to sort out the best way to get money sent into the country. Mexican banks are well known to be useless for this purpose, they sit on your money for weeks or even months sometimes. Eventually, i managed to work out how to get travellers cheques sent and got it organized. But by the time i got on the bus back to Taxco, i was exhausted.
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