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!