Mexico city The 10th of December 2004, after a tiring string of plane commuting and airport waiting lounge downtimes, I arrived late night to Mexico D.F. from the Cook Islands via L.A. I spent a total of four days in Mexico city. In a way, it reminds of my own home town Madrid, only in a frenzied, out-of-whack fashion. Not only it's enormous (the largest city in the world), but also its streets are so busy, so alive. Pedestrian pavements are invaded by street vendors with their colorful stalls. The entire city appears like a massive flea market and an important percentage of the population makes a living out of street selling. There is this polemic character called Alejandra Barrios who's sort of the Godfather (Godmother, actually) of the street commerce guild. Right now she is in jail, but people consider her a political prisioner rather than a criminal and signs of "Free Alejandra Barrios" can be seen everywhere. And, of course, there are countless of taquerias, small tacos-serving stalls. Locals here eat them constantly. From what I have seen, they are keen of eating a taco every few hours in stead of the classical three lunch sets a day. It's more a social custom rather than a self-feeding action. It's kind of a social custom rather than a self-feeding action, just like Thai people. But whereas Thai food is hardly fattening, Mexican food is indeed, so most of the adults both male and female carry rather rounded-shapes. Talking about food, Mexican food is awesome, but the hype is true: everything contains chilly or some hot spices on it. Mind you, not to the outrageous extent of Asian cuisines like Thai, Lao, Korean or rural Mandarin Chinese. Mexican culture is extremely populist. As opposed to the Spanish society which is dominated by the predominant middle class, here in Mexico the lower classes are then ones ticking the country's pulse, and I don't restrictively speak about economic status but actually educationally-wise. Despite sharing similar colonialist roots, other significant spanish-speaking countries like Argentina or Chile enjoy a higher educational base within the population. I am not sure as of why Mexico hasn't followed suit in this department. However, this fact tints Mexican culture with a bright and rich folklore customs, like the above mentioned street commerce, or the importance of traditional music and mariachis which can be heard wherever you go, a constant as you walk down the streets. Also, some racism issues remain subtly latent here, having caucasian whites dominating the tabloids, high-societe balls, Mexican TV dramas and dominant positions in the country, and the largely outnumbering indian-gen'ed locals occupying the mid-lower end of the social spectrum. I don't know if this qualifies as racism, but it does happen. Downtown Mexico is reminiscent of central Madrid, with its XIX or early XX century building facades and the cantinas are so very similar to those in Spain. I got some nostalgic flashbacks wandering about the central drags of Mexico. Another thing that I've found striking is the linguistic gap. South American spanish and Spain's spanish are way more distant to each other than, say, UK's english as opposed to America's or Australia's English. Hehe I remember this afternoon when I walked into a cantina for a lunch and the waitress (called mesero here, or camarero in Spain's spanish) handed me the menu. I had a brief look at it and I was like hmmmm... "excuse me madam but I don't speak Klingon. Do you have a menu in Spanish?". I literally had to ask what every dish was about. I wrote down the dishes in a piece of paper and, for those of you from Spain, check this out. The menu was, literally, as follows: Dish #1: Pollo rostizado con chilaquiles (I have never heard the word chilaquiles in my life) Dish #2: Higaditos con verdolagas (I have never heard the word verdolagas in my life) Dish #3: Mojarra frita con papas (I have never heard the word mojarra in my life) Dish #4: Birria de carnero estilo jalisco (no idea what a birria is as far as food goes. In Spain, birria means "crap") Dish #5: Tamal Oaxaquenio con frijoles (I have never heard the words tamal nor oaxaquenio in my life) Dish #6: Cabrito en pasilla con papas (I have never heard the word pasilla in my life) Cursing words are amusingly different too: I went to a Mexican wrestling fight (you know, the farce ones, the ones they don't really hit each other) and people were teasing out loud at the wrestlers stuff like: "Montero picudo, chingale a la mamita que te dio!". Even though I process it as an insult from the tone of voice and such, it makes no grammatical sense whatsoever to me. Funny stuff. Talking about the Mexican wrestling, it's a good laugh. At some points it's so pathetically blatant that no-one is hurting each other (while profusely pretending to suffer terrible pain) that you can't help having a good time. But it was even more interesting to observe how passionate locals are about it. I mean, no one is fooled by this, but still they go ape standing up on their chairs and cursing away at the referee or at the fighters themselves. Pictures bellow. Note how each wrestler's mask has got its own specific design. Fans can identify every single fighter by the patterns on their masks.
In Mexico D.F. I met Dani and Txelu, two spanish guys who had been sent here for a month working on a magazine article about Mexico and its people. They had already familiarized themselves with the city and provided me with useful tips and places worth visiting. In fact, we went together to the wrestling fights above mentioned, and also to the Lagunilla flea market, followed by a lunch and an evening beer in a local cantina. It was nice spending the day with people from my own country for a change. I hadn't talked to any in months!   Allow me now to show you some random pics of Mexico City downtown:
The very beautiful Bellas Artes building	The Cathedral - I found it rather graceless
Downtown Mexico is reminiscent of a Spanish city center	This was very amusing: someone had assembled four metal sheets and voila! you got a brand new hair dressing studio!
Mexico city lies strictly on top of the former Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Right behind the cathedral there are the badly preserved ruins of the Templo Mayor, which was the geographical epicenter of the extinct Aztec Empire. Too bad for them that one fine day in early XVI century this folk called Hernan Cortes (a spanish conqueror) arrived to these latitudes, delivering havoc left, right and center under the dubious might of the spanish swords and, foremost, spanish diseases for which natives had grown no body-immunization against. So yeah, the ruins of the once exuberant Tenochtitlan are in really bad shape, probably having been swallowed by Mexico D.F. Next to this ruins, there is a museum showing a scale model of what it used to look like, and let me tell you it must have been magnificent, specially in size as it dwelled hundreds of thousands of people.
However, there is another ruins site about 50 km away from the Mexico D.F. Its native name is Teotihuacan, which translates to The City of Gods. Basically, it was a cult-town dedicated to worship their deities. Here, the massive Pyramid of the Sun was erected in the VI century if I recall correctly, which is almost as large as the pyramids of Egypt; and also there's a slightly smaller replica called Pyramid of the Moon. Once the construction works had concluded, over 250 souls were sacrificed at the altar as an offering to Quatzelcoat, the feathered snake-bodied Aztec God. Hehe and you thought going to mass every sunday was a pain, uh?
The Pyramid of the Sun. Note the stairs leading all the way up top   The Pyramid of the Moon as seen from the Pyramid of the Sun summit
Another shot at the Pyramid of the Sun, surrounded by smaller ziggurats	Quatzelcoat motives decorate the staircase. They are supposed to be feathered snake heads.
After few days in the capital I was ready to move on. As I intend to cover the entire Central America all the way down to Panama and I am running short of time, I decided to give the whole northern half of this large country a miss (Mexico D.F. more less dots the country at its geographical center). As a general idea, the northern half is what we all have seen in the wild west films: hot, dry, cactus-filled arid esplanades whereas the southern half is way greener, hilly and, what interested me the most, the land where the most advanced pre-spanish civilization had flourished. So I headed straight down into the Chiapas province to start the fabled Maya Trail.
San Cristobal de las Casas My good friend Leila, whom I had met in China few months before, had traveled herself thoroughly in Mexico (and most of South America, actually) and gave me a list of key-places I shouldn't miss by any means. San Cristobal de las Casas was one of them, so I dutifully endured the 15 hours bus ride there. It proved to be no mistake. By the way, I'd like to point out that bus traveling within the country is outrageously expensive by Mexican standards. There is just no correlation whatsoever between the cost of a meal in a restaurant or a single room on a budget hotel and the price for a inter-province bus ride. They are as expensive as in Australia!
Anyway, San Cristobal de las Casas is the capital of the Chiapas province and therefore of the Zapatista guerrilla army, a left wing peasant group fighting for the indigenous rights. They have been giving the Mexican government some serious headaches for years with their piercing hit-and-hide assaults over the lush hills of Chiapas. The city is also a tourism hub all year round, both for foreign travelers and for Mexicans and that's because this town is amazingly charming with its remarkable colonialist spanish architecture and its cultural mayan roots. In fact, a significant percentage of the region's population are direct descendents of the mayas. I was surprised to find physical similarities between the locals here in Chiapas and those in Tibet: both short and robust, dark skin due to sun overexposure, dressed in bright traditional costumes and even similar facial features. Picture on the right: mayan woman selling fruits at a local market. By the way, very few would let you take a picture of them.
Like I said before, the colonialist architecture here in San Cristobal de las Casas in really pretty with its hacienda-style houses, brightly-colored churches and cozy small cafes; the town's central streets probably look like what a Spanish town in the XVII century would have looked like. Very sweet place to walk about. Also, it teems with activity both from locals and tourists. Among backpackers, there is a cheesy-yet-cool hippy atmosphere. There's really a number of backpackers doing the Central America route, just like there are ungodly numbers of them doing South East Asia. However, I have noticed that here in Central America the backpacker average age is a bit older, less party-centered and more culture-conscious. Hell, I have met tons of backpackers here actively studying and taking Spanish lessons. Yeah, I'd definitely say that the traveling bunch here are slower paced, more relaxed and more willingly to actually learn about local traditions. I really like it in here, plus it's quite budget-friendly.
Typical inner patio, straight from southern Spain   Cathedral at dusk	Detail of the Templo de Santo Domingo   Medieval hacienda reconverted into a museum
I spent three days here in San Cristobal de las Casas. One of them I visited the Mayan minority village of San Juan Chamula, barely 15 kms up the hill from San Cristobal. Its citizens still keep a heavy influence from their mayan ancestors, from their colorful dresses to their language: even though they are fluent in spanish, they speak a totally unrelated language that's been used in the area for centuries. Another day I navigated down the El Canon del Sumidero, a creek with impossibly vertical one-kilometer-high cliffs wrapping a wide river. Yup, that's 1000 meters of squared-angled rock walls (see picture on the right and bellow). I read somewhere that a tribe of mayan warriors, having been cornered by some Spanish conqueror at this very creek, decided to jump off the cliff before facing slavery. And the third day I took it easy and relaxed with the guys at the guesthouse, going to the movies and having a beer at some local bar with live music. Not everything is explore, explore, explore you know?!
My next destination would be Palenque, a Mayan site that's unique because it was built right in the heart of a dense jungle, bathed by the echoes from dozens of tucan birds and howling monkeys calling each other in the distance. Sweeeeet!
Palenque One of the most important Mayan ruins remaining today, Palenque saw its heyday during the VII and VIII centuries. Unfortunately, its high density of population and a tragic battle lost against another neighboring Mayan city drove its citizens to abandon it and consequently fell into forgetfulness till eight centuries later (eight!) when the Spanish rediscovered it, asleep and engulfed by the surrounding jungle. Why would two Mayan communities fight each other? well, the thing is that there's no such a thing as a Maya Empire as a whole. In fact, it was rather a cluster of independent cities sharing the same country and cultural characteristics. I guess it's a similar phenomenon to Ancient Greece with Athens, Sparta and the rest of independent city-states constantly kicking each other's ass for centuries. Anyway, Palenque is widely considered the prettiest of all the Mayan sites precisely because of its location, sitting right in the middle of a thick rainforest. I mentioned above the howling monkeys living in the area. Well, you wouldn't believe the noise of these apes floating over the entire place. It's definitely not the sort of short and high-pitched screech you'd think for a monkey; it's something closer to a cave-deep, long bellow: hhrroooooohh-hhhrroooooooohh. Yeah, something like that. It raises the hair on the back of your neck and had I been alone there, I would have been shit scared. But, truth to be told, they enhance the lost-in-the-jungle feeling of Palenque. Palenque sort of reminded me of Angkor Wat, being both wonderful ruins from long gone civilizations set in a lush, exuberant location. Of course, Palenque is no match to the absolute magnificence displayed by Angkor Wat (but then, what is?), but the similarities are there. Even though the general major building-structures are well kept, the walls and hieroglyphical inscriptions are quite damaged due to the corrosive effect of the tropic's humidity and moss. At one point, it started raining quite heavily as I was up top on the highest of the pyramids looming over the rest of the buildings, so I took shelter under the roof-top and got to sit and wait for half an hour watching the rain pouring over Palenque. It was a special moment that I enjoyed enormously hehe. The site is not that large, so three hours is enough to visit all the temples and the comprehensive museum at the ruins entrance. Here you go some pictures!
Here is where I sat for 30 mins as rain fell over Palenque
Look at the size of those leaves. Over a meter wide! Mayan people used to use them as umbrellas	This is what eight centuries forgotten in the jungle did to Palenque
This picture is a personal favourite	Inner courtyard
Amazing Palenque!
Mayan Riviera So there I took yet another long distance night-bus northwards into the Yucatan peninsula. The eastern shore, bathed by the Caribbean waters, has been branded as the Mayan Riviera by some marketing-savvy tourism tycoon. Here, a number of holiday resorts have sprung all along the coastline, being the controversial Cancun the crown's center jewel piece, while many others like Tulum, Playas del Carmen, Isla de Cozumel or Isla Mujeres are the up-and-coming young-guns. You could say that the Mayan Riviera is the Caribbean equivalent of the Spanish Costa del Sol (a string of vacational coastal towns in Spain's south east Mediterranean region) and Cancun a mirror-reflection of Marbella (I like Marbella a big deal better though). I chose Playas del Carmen as my HQ for the next few days due to its convenient location, merely a stone's throw from the rest. The beaches here in Playas are of the mile-long, white sand and azure waters sort, but unfortunately terribly mobbed too, way too much for my taste. Shocking is to squint over the horizon line on a clear day: you get to see Isla Cozumel's sky-piercing luxury hotel buildings. The planet's curvaceous surface won't allow you to see the island itself being 30 kms offshore, so basically you just see buildings mushrooming outta the sea. Disheartening really how such an amazingly beautiful island has been transformed into a Caribbean theme-park resort for package tourists. Bleh! Playas del Carmen certainly ain't free of its good share of Sheratons, Holiday Inns, Hiltons, Melias, etc. The coastline pedestrian drag is street touts' territory with restaurants and overpriced cocktail terraces elbowing for a piece of real state, alluring gringos in with colorful happy-hour claims. Most of the tourists here are from USA and even the ballooned up-prices in the tourist-catered establishments are shown in US$ instead of Mexican pesos. I dunno really, I have mixed feelings about the Mayan Riviera: in one hand, it sure is a beautiful coastline with world-class submarine reef for scuba divers. On top of that, it's been constructed and developed under a graceful urbanistic planification, light-years ahead of the chaotic and tasteless Bali. One can instantly realize that truckfuls of dollars have been poured in the area. But, in the other hand, there is nothing really characteristic nor special about it. I have seen some too many of these cheesy wrapped-up-in-glassy-paper vacational towns where loaded honeymooners do nothing, God forbid, but to wake up in the morning, bake up to steaming point on the beach, go mindlessly shopping at the local LaCoste store, get miserably ripped off at the handcrafts market (while thinking they've gotten a great deal), chew down into a 3 kg lobster for dinner at a seafront restaurant and finally rinse it down afterwards with a late evening cocktail named "sex on the beach" or "Elvis is alive". Then, copy/paste that for a week or two and you got your brand new exciting pre-paid holiday package. Yaaaaaawn. That's boring in my book. Alright then, so Cancun and Playas del Carmen didn't get me wet in the knickers. Well, I took the ferry to the tiny Isla Mujeres, 6 kms offshore off Cancun. Reputedly a pirates and buccaneers hideout in the old times, now a days it's become a quieter, cheaper and more relaxed version of Playas. Still portraying some resorty, gringo-aimed feeling but not as bad as in mainland. Here in Isla Mujeres I got talking to a mid-aged Canadian folk who's opened a pizza-serving stall, years-running now. He likes it in here, you know, slow-pace life, good weather and stuff. He was like: yeah, I cook my pizzas for lunch time, sell them, and then I go back to the office. And then he grins widely and concludes: my office is that hammock you see over there on the beach hahaha! Yeah buddy, I think I could get used to that myself too! Oh, by the way, here in Isla Mujeres I dipped my smelly toes in the Caribbean Sea for the first time in my life wooohoooo!
Playing football on the beach	Enjoying ourselves, ain't we?
The Mayan Riviera: it's all about the white sand, the turquoise waters and the luxury resorts
Not too far away inland there's the famous Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, which is the most popular among one-day tourists due to its proximity to Cancun and the rest of towns along the Mayan Riviera. Chichen Itza had been one of the most important e influential epicenters in the Maya world between 800 and 1200 AD, getting abandoned by the end of the XIII century. The main building in the prominent Castle, a perfect pyramid laid out right in the center of an enormous flat yard. Apparently, and only during the spring and autumn equinoxes, a visible effect of a moving serpent can be seen over its steep staircase as the sun rays hit it. I wasn't there during either equinox, so I cannot comment first hand. Also famous is the ball court, the largest of all across Mesoamerica. Sized larger than a basketball court but smaller than a soccer one, the acoustics are simply breath-taking, and if you clap while standing inside the pitch, the sound bounces around like five times from every outbound wall. Imagine the acoustics back then when a group of athletic warriors would rebound the ball all over the court and hundreds of heated throats were cheering their favorite players. Must have been utterly deafening!
The great pyramid of Chichen Itza. As you can see, it's crowded with american day-trippers from Cancun   A random temple with an unusual rounded tower (rare in Mayan architecture)   The Temple of the Thousand Columns, peeping over the treetops, as seen from the pyramid summit
Detail of the ball court. The ring is situated at 5m height   The pyramid late in the afternoon	Late Classic Early Post Classic periods? hhmmm....   The moon creeping over Chichen Itza
Chichen Itza is an interesting site, but Palenque is widely superior from the aesthetic point of view in my opinion.   The last night in Playas del Carmen I befriended Facundo, from Argentina, at the guesthouse and we went out to have a taste of the booming night life to a posh local club by the beach. Facundo was telling me how Mexico, caught up in an economical up-trend during the last few years, has become an immigration hotspot for lots of Argentinean citizens searching for a new beginning after the 2001 economical crash, so there's apparently an increasing Argentinean community here in the Yucatan peninsula.
Belize border crossing and out Belize is a small country sandwiched between Guatemala and the Caribbean Sea. I wanted to cross from Mexico into Guatemala, and the only way was hopping through Belize. It eventually turned out to be a nightmare of chicken bus commuting, taxi-vans and whatnot, and I had to spend a night at the frontier town of San Ignacio, on the Belizean side of the Guatemala-Belize border. Hadn't Belize been an established democracy (never mind the rampant corruption), it could have been seen as the role-model of a tropical banana republic. Despite its proximate location with Mexico and Guatemala, Belize's culture and society is actually closer to that of Jamaica or Haiti than to its latin neighbors as England landed its colonial grip here deeper than their Spanish counterparts. In fact, Belize's coasts used to be the head quarters for English buccaneers on their rapist assaults onto the gold-loaded Spanish ships on their voyage back to Spain. Travelers to current Belize can also notice another side of Belizean history, the African natives slavery trade, as a huge percentage of Belize citizens are black. And, needless to say, they speak a broken dialect of English of which I could understand literally nothing. Unfortunately, poverty has always stricken Belize hard and the bleeding economical and development gap between Mexico and Belize is disheartening. No wonder many of them emigrate in droves to the USA. There in San Ignacio I had a very interesting evening with John, owner of the small-but-neat J&R's guesthouse where I slept overnight, a 60-something y/o affable local man who took me out for dinner to a Chinese restaurant (many Chinese immigrants here, go figure) and we stood up till the wee hours talking about life in Belize and about his seven sons and daughters gone to the USA in hopes of a better situation. What a nice man he turned out to be.   And that's it. I am sadly aware that I have missed out a big deal of what this enormous and exciting country of Mexico has to offer, but I am now in the final sprint of my journey around the world so I am sort of pushed both time and money wise. Mexico in itself could easily eat up at least two months of any backpacker's time, and I just cannot afford that much given the circumstances. So... The day after I entered Guatemala early in the morning on my way to Tikal, capital of the Mayan empire for many centuries.
Palenque: mysterious forgotten Mayan ruins in the heart of the rainforest with the monkeys howling about. Can't get much better!
San Cristobal de las Casas with its exquisite colonialist architecture and super laid back atmosphere is a cool town to let your mind slip away and relax for few days The whole Maya Trail with its multitude of sites of explore Mexican cuisine is very tasty, and I mean the real mexican thing, not the burrito cliche nonsense we get back home El Canon del Sumidero with its kilometer-high cliffs, near San Cristobal, is worth it if you are in the region Mexican populist culture, lived in the streets, around a taco-serving stall and listening to folklore music drinking a Corona beer. Mexicans are pretty laid back and stress-free. Plenty of backpackers here, specially Americans, so it's easy to make a friend or two on the road.
I am still undecided about the Mayan Riviera: beautiful and neat but characterless and all around cheesy The price of long distance buses is outrageous for Mexican standards and a lump in an otherwise cheap country to travel in.