The End

Well, I'm now well and truly home. This blog kinda fell by the wayside as I journeyed further into the heart of the Mexican darkness, mostly off the beaten track, mostly in the back of a truck, always with reckless abandon, often stupid.

Circumstances conspired to bring me home – lack of money, inflexible air fares, swine flu (just kidding). I was reluctant to come back, but so far the transition has been relatively smooth. Although – it has to be said – I'm nearly 28, single, with a postgraduate education and I'm working in a bar. It's as if the last five years of life and love disappeared into some rift in the time-space continuum.

But now it's all new beginnings, fresh starts, clean slates. Rebuilding from the ground up. Learning life's harsh lessons. Drinking too much.

My energies will now be focused here and there.

Until the next tRip... viva zapata.

More Photos – San Pedro & Semuc Champey, Guatemala

San Pedro La Laguna, Lago Atitlan, Guatemala


mmm coffee






The view from San Marcos – San Pedro's quieter hippy sister village



My favourite Banana Bread lady Juanita


Semuc Champey, as seen from the lookout

Semuc Champey means 'where the river hides beneath the earth' in Q'eqci', the local Mayan language... and that's exactly what it does. The pools in the above photo are part of the natural limestone bridge above where the water goes underground. Wow.

Middle of nowhere

Here I sit, in the middle of the Guatemalan wilds on a wireless internet connection! Ain't technology grand! Sadly it's not good enough for Skype, Bittorrent or uploading of photos to this blog, but good enough for basic HTML email and text blogging...

After a week of nothing much in San Pedro La Laguna, I've made my way north, to the dead centre of the country, to a little place called Lanquin. San Pedro was nice – if only slightly overrated. Paradoxically, San Pedro is a town full of Spanish schools... where everyone speaks English. Menus are never in Spanish, even the drug dealers speak English. Seems like a shitty place to improve one's Spanish if you ask me. I caught up with my old mate Matze from Dresden, Germany and we drank overpriced Guatemalan beer (shite for the most part) and were subjected to cheesy late 90s trance in any number of sleazy gringo bars. It was fun, although far from cheap.

(While I'm on that point... to all the peeps who have travelled to Guatemala and raved about how cheap it is, I regret to inform you that it is no longer the case. Indeed, food, beer, and transport are far more expensive in Guatemala than in Mexico, especially Chiapas. How much this has to do with the devaluation of the Mexican Peso and how much with the Guatemalan propensity for price-gouging and ripping off tourists is debatable. I find it difficult to believe that somehow Mexico's economy has suffered more than the economic powerhouse of Guatemala... so maybe it's the latter).

Lanquin is a would-be ecotourist hotspot, and thankfully it seems to suffer slightly less from the rubbish problems that plague the rest of this very beautiful country. All around are waterfalls, caves, rapids, etc... it is a place of undeniable beauty, and as this post's title suggests, I really feel like I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere (despite the wireless internet and hordes of gringos). It's great.

Yesterday I visited Semuc Champey, a natural limestone bridge and series of pools that is honestly one of the most incredible pieces of nature I've seen ANYWHERE. Words do no justice, you'll have to wait for photos.

From here it's on to Flores, the jump-off point for the fabulously overpriced ruins at Tikal (around AU$30 entry I'm told) then back to the adopted mother country – Mexico. There's a Zapatista gathering taking place for International Women's Day, so I'll probably check that out, then head back to Oaxaca to wether the financial crisis.

Gotta go. Dinner's ready where I'm staying.

Peace. x x x

San Pedro

I'm now in San Pedro, on the shores of Lago Atitlan in Guatemala. I came here for a reggae festival, which has since been canceled :( Not sick, happy, surprisingly not broke yet!

Much love to all, from the Amsterdam of Guatemala.

X

Forced Sobriety + Temazcal = rebirth (Or: Meanderings through the Selva Lacandona)

First, apologies to anyone who was upset by the apparent gruffness of my last post on this blog. Without going into details, I’ve been experiencing a fairly wild ride on this trip, a story for another time no doubt. And besides, poverty IS depressing. Think about it.

The good news is I’ve isolated the source of the physiological funk that has contributed to my state of mind and killed the little fucker. After a few weeks of feeling pretty shitty, I finally bit the bullet and visited a medico, who fairly quickly diagnosed me as having a kidney infection of some variety. This is obviously a fairly debilitating illness, especially when coupled with a well above average alcohol intake (an occupational hazard for a semi-pro traveller such as yours truly).

So, a course of penicillin and a full week without a beverage was to be the treatment, with a gutful of ibuprofen (gross) to alleviate the virus-like symptoms the infection was causing. It came at a time just when I was contemplating the impact of booze on my health and my bank balance, so it really wasn’t that hard. The fact that I left San Cristobal for the jungle, waterfalls and ruins of Palenque also made drying out/getting healthy a lot easier. Yes, well San Cristobal. It has been a while since I’ve communicated with cyberspace, so let it be chronological. Brace yourself, or scroll down for photos.

San Cris certainly was nice, although the aforementioned post does capture the tangible melancholy of the place fairly well. A bit like Prague or somewhere, the place seems a little fake – it’s all very nice, with the colonial architecture, the great coffee, the accessibility of Zapatismo. But you really feel like you’re in tourist central, as if the authenticity of the place has been sucked dry by the gringo dollar and desire for an experience of cultural diversity. Ooh, look at the Mayans!

Having said that, it is certainly a place worth visiting. Chiapas is undeniably a magical part of the world (again with that), and in my time in the city I managed to visit some natural wonder in the form of the Cañón del Sumidero (photos below), and fulfill a long-held desire to come face-to-balaclava with the EZLN.
Cañón del Sumidero

A little over an hour out of San Cristobal is the Zapatista Caracol (community) at Oventik. Oventik’s proximity to SC makes it the most commonly visited Zapatista site, and again the feeling was that it was all a bit of a show. You can’t deny the real work being done here however, which includes a clinic, a school and the seat of the area’s Junta de Buen Gobierno (JBG or Good Government Council). The Oventik Zapatistas are well used to welcoming interested gringos, and provided a comprehensive presentation on the history of the movement, its aims and how the caracoles work. For a ratbag like me, I was like the proverbial fat kid in the lolly shop.

To Palenque: Undeniably one of the most impressive ruins in Mexico, and a jumping off point for visiting any number of waterfalls, jungle treks or even crossing into Guatemala. Palenque is also famous for its hongos or magic mushrooms, which are in abundance along the road to the ruins and in the surrounding farmland. I think they were gold tops for those that are interested. I’m off the mushies, but by all accounts they are the goods.

Seeing as I know nothing much about the ruins and/or the many and contradicting stories the tour guides come up with to explain it all, some photos for your consideration. The place speaks for itself. Wow.

(Change of plans: Palenque photos are in RAW format, you'll have to wait until I've Photoshopped them, or do a google image search and pretend they're my photos).

The next day was taken up with a visit to two waterfalls: Misol Ha and Agua Azul. Both very impressive, and well worth visiting, although I didn’t swim. The empanadas available at 5 for AU$1 are also highly recommendable, especially the chicken ones.

By now, I had gotten to know a few people around the jungle where I’m staying, and got wind of a hippy commune/organic farm/retreat nearby named El Jardin. I’ve been on a quest to experience a Temazcal or traditional Mayan sweat lodge since hearing of it through the grapevine in Mazunte, but despite their ubiquity I still hadn’t managed to get inside one myself. It was with much joy that one of my newfound friends told me there were plans afoot at El Jardin to make a Temazcal the following day. I already had a ticket to go back to San Cris and on to Guatemala, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We arrived early to help Martin and Silvi, the German-French couple who own El Jardin make preparations. We fetched firewood, gathered the stones that are heated and used to generate the steam, ate yummy vegetarian food with home-made chapatti, chanted mantras, sang around the fire and revelled in the bohemian-ness of it all. Many folks say el Temazcal can be an entirely transcendental experience, that the complete darkness, herb-scented steam and introduction of chants and meditations can result in a disassociation from the ego, and in some cases, divine visions and direct contact with whatever God means to you.

I sadly can’t say I reached this level of sweatiness, but not for a lack of trying. Perhaps the fact that we were making our own polytheistic version of a Temazcal, where ritual was more Hindu than Maya (Martin is a Yoga teacher) had some bearing. Nonetheless, I sweat out what little trace of the blues and any kidney infection there may have still been in my system and spent all of yesterday and today buzzing from the experience, with what I can only describe as a shit-eating grin plastered to my face. It was fucking intense, extremely enjoyable and I will be looking to do it again in a more traditional style.

So way over time and way over budget, my time in Mexico draws to an end (for now). Guatemala awaits; I’ll be kicking things off in San Pedro de la Laguna, on the shores of Lago Atitlan, a place of great beauty and apparently great parties. My first taste will be a reggae festival happening there this Saturday (FUCK. YES.).

More stories to come. Thanks for hanging in there.

Peace, harmony, universal love and light. Om Shanti.

Mazunte Photos

Sunrise...

Mazunte, from Punta Cometa

Lovers/fuckers on the main beach

Where I slept (like a baby)


These little buggers were everywhere, I wasn't quick enough to catch one of the many Hummingbirds though :(


Playa rinconcito, as seen from my 'room'

Two of the local dogs on their regular morning walk. There was also a goose on the beach!?


Punta Cometa – a bit like Cape Byron, but no lighthouse


Sunset from Punta Cometa

Mazunte to Chiapas (with apologies to HST, who I've been reading a lot of)

There's nothing quite like child labour to kill the buzz of two weeks of sitting on a beach smoking mota all day. 14 hours on a bus over two mountain ranges helps take the shine off too...

Arriving to San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas (Mexico's southernmost and poorest), it's immediately obvious why the Zapatista movement would have started here. Much like the Basque country in Spain, which gave rise to the 'terrorist' group ETA, these people have really got the short end of the stick. Mexico City, Oaxaca – fuck, even the beach hamlet of Mazunte, where I locked down, navigating an emotional fuck-around of a time – are all undoubtedly Mexican, developing world places.

But in Chiapas the desperation and the misery are staring at you like balaclava-clad eyes of the Zapatistas at every corner. The cunt-paradox of endorsing child labour in the form of a shoeshine or some trinket or other - or not - is always around. Do you give these poor Mayan kids the few cents they desperately need? Or do you politely, repeatedly decline and direct your time, money, efforts and consciousness to addressing the cause of the malaise rather than the sickness? The eternal question.

I write this, suitably listening to Rage Against the Machine outside a San Cristobal hangout called Bar de la Revolucion, replete with images of Mexican Revolutionary heroes, who've long dreamed and died in their attempts to free their people from this terrible lot. In true clash-of-civilisations style, there is a Burger King directly opposite, where many of the not-so-revolutionary gringos will fill their fat faces with shit after dancing to Manu Chao all night.

The perverseness of this scenario is something akin to eating a plate of human faeces after spending a fortune on prime seats at the opera, ballet or any other bourgeois, high-cultural pursuit you might care to mention. But for 99.98% of gringos – at least of those I've met – this is as logical a thing to do as lighting a fag after rolling off whichever English/Australian/Canadian/Yank you've had the good or bad fortune of doing the horizontal salsa with that night. No wonder they fucking hate us. Not that the locals are above doing the same, of course.

Getting bogged down in philosophy and politics like usual, you fool. This was meant to be a post about how great a time I've been having in a place of heart-wrenching natural and human beauty; tales of Mezcal, mota, reggae, sun, crystalline water and abundant wildlife. Suffice it to say that Mazunte was all this and more – the skeptic-mystic duality that tends to turn my cerebral cortex in on itself had no difficulty in reconciling the presence of the 'energy' of this place.

I swam, ate, drank, smoked ad infinitum, day-in, day-out. I lived by the movement of the sun: rising with it, knowing the time (another absurd concept) by its position in the sky and its influence on the bountiful fauna of land, sea and sky. My only anchor in the 'real', ugly world of outside was a tube of Colgate toothpaste (no soap or deodorant for two weeks, but you can't avoid wanting clean teeth), monetary exchange and sporadic internet contact. Fuck everything else, it holds as much significance as our pitiful roles in this great universal clusterfuck.

Again with the philosophy... It's dark now, too dark to write without a light, and the cold that altitude brings has quickly descended. Time to get warm and revel in the milk of human kindness of another group of randoms.

Glad to have gotten that off my chest. Photos when I'm not on a stolen internet connection that comes and goes with the wind.

Viva Zapata!