San Cristobal Pt 2

At some point between tequila shots on Halloween night we decided to join Mike (guy we went drinking with from London) on this tour of these little villages. I didnt really remember any of this until my alarm went off at 8 in the morning (somehow I had managed to set it without my own knowledge), crowning a wonderful 4 hour sleep...needless to say the four of us (me, jas, ry, mike) were all extremely hungover, but managed to walk down to the square and look for this tour. Good thing we did! The tour guide was a local guy and seemed to have endless knowledge about the area and it's inhabitants. We visited two Coca-Cola Mayan villages up in the mountains and luckily our tour landed right in the middle of the Day of the Dead ceremonies. The graveyard and church around the town were full of stumbling locals who were sharing the day with their dead relatives who they called out with the help of the church bells. Once they've arrived (the spirits), everyone goes over to the their graves and essentially gets completely gassed from this locally brewed alcohol called Posh (which, in an attempt to get some of the fur of the dog that bit me I tried...not bad, very strong). We then went up to one of the Mayordomo´s (religious leaders of the town) houses and sat in there while they went through about 15 tons of incense and another 25 litres of posh each. At seemingly random times, the mayordomo would give the code word, and a flurry of explosions would echo through the streets as his minions unleashed their 6 peso fireworks into the sky, loud...so...loud. The whole town was really interesting in that, when the spaniards came and brought the church along, for some reason the shipment of John the Baptist statues piled up in this area. So, as time went on, the locals began to worship these statues above all else and now they dont really care about jesus or anything else, they're just obsessed with john the baptist. The sheep is now incredibly sacred to them (all the statues show John holding a sheep) and there seemed to be an endless supply of sheep wandering around. They´ve kept their own traditions though and we were told that the catholic church loves the idea of these people sacrificing chickens in front of the virgin mary (simple healing principle: grab a chicken, transfer your problems to it, kill it, boom, no more problems!) By far, the strangest thing is the Coke. Somewhere in their belief system is the idea that burping gets rid of the sins of your soul, this used to be accomplished using Posh, but now its mainly done with coke (and some pepsi). EVERYTHING in this village has Coca-Cola printed on it. The houses with coke murals contain coke umbrellas which keep the trillion cases of coke in the shade while people sitting on coke chairs sip coke and guys ride by on motorcycles covered with coke symbols. The guy in charge of distributing coke to the region has a monopoly and owns the biggest house in town (his only rivals for square footage are the pepsi brothers, who also own relatively huge houses and drive land rovers). Next stop on the tour was the neighbouring town. Didnt stay as long in this one, but it was equally cool. The tour guide has a deal with some local families to let them earn extra cash, and he brings us into their mud brick home. 9 people (Mom, Dad, 7 boys) slept in this tiny little one room house. The mom made us all traditional tortillas and tostados using black corn (day of the dead only!), pumpkin seed powder, black beans and this kind of sweet potato thing. They were quite delicious and I wolfed down five of these things (minus the beans!) and still could have eaten another dozen. From there our last stop was the local church, where two poor guys have the 'honourable' duty of ringing the church bells from 6am to 6pm for all the days of the celebration. Watching these guys for 5 minutes had me clenching my teeth in boredom, not sure if it was an honour or some substitute for a jail sentence.

I didnt get to take many pictures as the locals believe that a snippet of their soul is taken with each picture. Although many of them could be offered a few pesos in exchange for a snapshot, I guess the going price for a soul these days is quite low. I did get the odd picture though, but this computer is having issues with my card reader, so they'll have to wait!

Bought out tickets for Palenque and hit the road at 11am tomorrow morning, San Cristobal is cool but we're all definitely looking forward to moving on!

Adios!