The Viajezote: a glorious 3-week disappearance from civilization

Today the rainwater is running down the stairs of the lonely basketball courts across from my house. It winds between the cobblestones in the street and out of the poorly-gauged drainpipes of the rooves, up through the soles of my shoes (all of which, I have discovered, have secret capillary entrances designed for discomfort on rainy days), and down through my hair onto my face, neck and glasses. And what do we do on days like this? We drink! No, wait... we blog.

Bueno, so were did we leave things? Oh goodness, we abandoned then so long ago...

Introduction: The Viajezote

5pm, 2 January 2010: Arrive at school with two overstuffed backpacks. Meet up with Alfredo and Jacobo, and we basically have the run of the vacation-swept, abandoned school. But as the weather totally sucks we mostly sit inside a classroom we've taken over and eat and shoot the shit. 11 pm the same day means the arrival of the buses that will take us all away to various parts of the Republic: I am off, in the absence of my closest friends, to the tropics: Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. We load up.

A full night of fitful rest later, I awaken to a Oaxaca sunrise, a good stretching session in the humid cold of the roadside, and another long haul out to Tapachula, Chiapas.

Part One: CHIAPAS

We arrived at about 6pm, everyone groggily unloading their stuff from the 17-hour torture chamber into the Tapachula Youth Center gym, where we were to spend the following three nights. Then we all hungrily set upon the town, to wolf down not-very-good food (why the food in Tapachula is so bad I will never know, but everyone agreed that Tapachula sucks, foodwise). The next day we set to work: day 1 was a visit to a mango and rambutan farm (the photo of a rambutan, which is like a furry lichi, is not mine, it is from the vast belly of the INTERNET). The kid who showed us around the farm (the farmer's son, actually), was right out of the '70s for his haircut, moustache and cowboy shirt, loaded us all into his pickup truck and took us rollercoastering around the semi-rainforested landscape to get to the orchard (because the bus obviously wouldn't stand such a rough trip). So we went crawling around in his orchard a bit. The soil in that orchard was SO gorgeous... they don't use machinery and they don't sweep the orchard floor, just cut down the weeds with machetes, so the soil was this black, deliciously friable substance with hordes of earthworms writhing within... and since it was the off-season the weeds were growing these beautiful pink flowers (it's some kind of Apocynaceous plant that you see all the time in gardens and nurseries, but in this orchard it's a weed). Furthermore, he fed us the famous and yet little-known jackfruit, a 10-pound mofo that looks disturbingly like a durian. It tastes like a mix between cantaloupe and banana, and has a wet, slimy, resistant texture that makes it kind of an adventure to eat. Furthermore, the inside of the rind produces latex, so you wind up helplessly sticky after you've eaten a piece... it's sort of exhausting.

Anyway, that night we stopped at the Guatemalan border, for the mere thrill of setting foot on foreign soil: frankly, I think northern Guatemala looks a lot like southern Chiapas, but whatever, it was novel to change pesos for quetzales and look out over the river that separates Mexico from Guatemala, see people (illegally??) crossing that river with giant boxes on their backs. I think the border patrol here is a little more relaxed than what I'm used to...

Next day to the papaya factory, and I say it like that because not only is it one of these high-tech operations with its own packing plant and the whole enchilada, but also because of its tendency (welcome to capitalism, Cat...) to convert people into machines. Pay 'em cheap and work 'em to death, then go to Guatemala and get some more. And congratulate yourself for it. The people picking papaya went shoeless in the fields, and the women who washed the papaya in dilute bleach work eight-hour shifts with their hands in the bleach bath. I asked the engineer who gave us the Grand Tour if they switch jobs during the day or at least during the week, and he said, 'Oh, no! These workers are highly specialized. ' Can you imagine working half-drenched in bleach eight hours a day? Imagine your hands, you eyes, your nose, your neurons... The engineer that toured us around was an incorrigible twat with no respect for the earth or human life, as it turns out. But he did give us boatloads of free papaya, so though I don't forgive him, I do have fond olfactory memories of the occasion.

I should mention how unbearably humid Tapachula is. It's one of the low-elevation zones of Chiapas and for that reason totally unpleasant if you're from California.

From there we went to Comitán, where we stayed at a coffee farm. There we learned nothing about management, because the guy in charge was basically an accountant who had bought the farm and had no idea what he was doing, but he was trying to establish an agrotourism kind of thing. There were ziplines and little palm-roof palapas for guests to hang their hammocks. There was also a gorgeous river in which we all did our bathing at night (which is to say we swam around in the dark, floating on our backs and staring at the stars and mars and the moon through the canopy of trees, listening to the chorus of birds and bats and bugs). Here are some observations: 75-kilo sacks (that's how much I weigh) of fresh-picked coffee: both adults and children (all of them Guatemalan imports because they put up with less pay and lots of abuse) carry them out of the hilly fields on their backs, strapped to their forheads. Then they pour them out to dry on the concrete patio... but bueno, the kids have to work with their parents, because what are they going to do, leave their kids alone in the forest while they go pick their coffee all day? They reach their quota faster if they've got a little help anyhow...

Then we moved right along to the heart of the matter: the rainforest. Sweeping due north from Tapachula we passed through Ocosingo (Zapatista territory) and up into Palenque, home of the famous Classical city. The coolest part about Palenque if you've already seen the ruins, is that when you're hiking up the giant hill to get to the archeological site, there are all of these tiny, unmarked paths just quietly sneaking away from the main road and if you're subtle about it, you, too, can sneak off with them, and find yourself entangled with aerial roots, the screaming of the sarahuates (howler monkeys), and the creeks that carry fossilized snailshells in their rocky beds.

The next day we went to Metzabok, and saw another rainforest that's not to hot (though equally as rainy), and a nice lady Doña Cristina, took us around... I think I'm going to have to devote another post to this topic, so remind me to do so.

Part Two: CAMPECHE

Racing across the Tabascan bottleneck to Campeche, we went to Calak-mul, another Classical ghost town, and the adjascent Biosphere Reserve, the latter being the coolest part, because we got to learn about rainforest management. The trees are thick and house more howler monkeys and spider monkeys, toucans, guacamayas (macaws), parrots, and leaf-cutter ants. It's like, epiphyte-central, too. If you perch on top of a pyramid, the other pyramids stick out of the foliage like rectilinear anachronisms. It's not one of the most-visited sites so it's really quite nice to go running around there.

Part Three: QUINTANA ROO

Arriving by night to Bakalar, Quintana Roo, all we knew was that there was a laguna. It wasn't really visible in the total darkness, but we went swimming anyhow, the brave few who support cold water on a cold night. I mean, I couldn't resist, personally, because I was sweaty from rainforest-running the previous day, and that clean natural bodies of water require that I immerse myself in them, period. So I jumped into the starry water and floated on my back again, wandering around the shallows and appreciating the uninterrupted sky.

The following day we saw what a marvel we had been soaking in the night before: the 7-color lagoon of Bakalar, its white sand full of snail shells, its sparkling surface. So we jumped in again, 7 am, even colder than the night before, but who cares-- when you have a lagoon to yourself, you just have to.

So from there we split into two groups, and we went to invade two different ejidos in the region, and I went to Pet-Cakab, where we met Doña Romuela, a little old lady who is the community's traditional herbalist. She devoted the day to showing us around the roadsides, introducing us to the local vegetation and how it can be used in medicine and a little witchcraft. Later, she took us to her house to show us how it works on the treatment floor (that's to say on her bed in her house): she took Rafa, who had injured his leg playing soccer some time before and had a hard time on the hike, and informed us that she was going to heal him.

'Take off your pants, kid.'

So there's Rafa in his underwear, and she's rubbing this weird ointment on his knee and explaining to us how tendons work, massaging his calf and shin and ankle with her tiny hands, as we all sit and stare, barely fitting in her tiny wooden house.

It fits to mention here that the south of Mexico is the only part in which I have seen wooden houses. Wood is an extremely uncommon building material in Mexico, but in the tropical countryside it's the only building material you see. The houses are usually painted candy colours and don't bother with glass windows (some don't have windows at all).

I should also mention that that night began the town's fair, which consisted of a carousel, some arcade machines, a spanish-bingo game and some food stands. But it lit up the tiny square and brought the very small population out. We were staying in the ejidal house, right in front of the square, so it was pretty fun to jump outside and see what was up.

Furthermore, there is extensive exploitation of the forest for the hardwoods they have there, especially caoba. The ejido has a sawmill, and the president of the ejido took us around. It's really incredible how much wood they waste. What's more incredible is the shaved patches of forest where they go cut the trees... But what are they going to do? It's the only source of income they've got.

I'm going to stop here and keep going next week ish with more Quintana Roo, plus Yucatán, another round in Campeche, and the grand finale in Tabasco...