Research, for science
Like a clown after the last circus show, like an emo singer after the farewell concert, I looked myself in the mirror on the morning after Day of the Dead, baby wipe in hand. A single tear rolled down my cheek as I cleaned off the skeleton facepaint (makeup). Nobody needs clowns no more. Time to hit the road.
And woo-ee, did I hit it! At some point in my hangxiety, I had looked at a map of Central and South America and realized that the southern tip of Argentina where I'm hoping to make it was, well, not that close. At all. And I'd been in central Mexico, a proverbial blip on the map, for more than a month. And my bank account, once as replete as Scrooge McDuck's coffers in the animated series "DuckTales," was starting to cough and splutter like a fish in a space rocket. I thought, hot dog, I gotta moving.
(For what it's worth, Scrooge McDuck's biography, which is also how I pitch myself on job interviews:
"Tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties, and sharper than the sharpies, Scrooge made his money fair and square. Part mysterious multi-trillionaire, part adventurer, his wealth combined with his overwhelming confidence has bred an unpredictable nature...")
Anyway, I booked a flight from Cancun, on the far eastern part of Mexico, for about two weeks away, and I had two weeks to cover the thousand miles from Oaxaca to Cancun, and that meant no more of the meandering, walk-in-the-park, look-at-the-flowers-and-scratch-myself type of slow travel I was doing. Time to rev the engine, slash and burn, smash the tarmac! Time to get going!
But also, while revving the engine and smashing the tarmac and all that, I wanted to see cool stuff and learn cool things, too. So that was the mission. The first decision was to use night busses, since: 1) You travel at night, saving time; and 2) You can sleep on them, kinda, saving money. Little did I know, the compounding effects would almost kill me. Time to go.
__
Leg 1: Oaxaca -> San Cristobal de las Casas
The first leg of this amphetamined fast-packing was Oaxaca to San Cristobal de las Casas, a cool city up in the mountains of the (non-Oaxacan) state of Chiapas. 10 hours of night bus. Ain't but a peanut, I told myself, popping two Dramamines like peanuts. 10 hours later I woke up about as groggy as possible and had to drag myself off the bus. Jimmeny Pete, I thought through the swamp of brain fog, what do they put in those things?
Dramamine is the first hard drug I've done in Mexico.
Anywho, nothing six cups of coffee couldn't solve. I walked through the light drizzle of San Cris, my head clearing, along the narrow cobblestone sidewalks slick with rain and blanketed under gray fog, enjoying the cold weather. I dropped my bags at the hostel and went to do a free walking tour. The guide, Claudio, had moved to San Cris from the northern part of Mexico, and I quickly realized he was a member of the spaced-out hippies that form one herbaceous ingredient of the town's melting pot. He had little teeth, I remember, and his face was always pulled back into a smile, but one that looked painful, like it got stuck there. At the start of the tour he took off his sunglasses and his eyes looked like little raisins, shrunken and staring straight ahead into the distance, and I realized he might be living in a perpetual acid flashback. But he was also very nice, and cared about San Cris, and shared good information about the town and the state of Chiapas.
And so, like a momma bird back from foraging, I'd like to regurgitate some of the information I learned from Claudio about Chiapas and San Cris, as well as bits I picked up from bus drivers and other people I talked to, and from my own inquisitive little research. Ready? Open wide, here comes the worm:
Rainy San Cris, rainbow San Cris, work station San Cris
___
January 1st, 1994: At 12:30 in the morning, the sky dark but the streets in San Cristobal illuminated by the lights and decorations of New Years' Day, a group of armed rebels marches to the center of the city. The group is made of indigenous women and men, balaclavas covering their faces, assault rifles slung over their shoulders.
"Did you hear that?" one of the guards at the Municipal Palace asks another.
"Güey, that's a firework," his partner says, impatient. "It's New Years."
Two rebels, rifles raised, step into their view.
"Dick," says the first guard to the second.
The rebels subdue the Palace guards and take over the building. They smash the doors and loot offices, spray painting the walls with anti-government slogans supporting "EZLN" -- the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. From the Palace balcony, a leader reads a document aloud, the First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. The message is clear: war against the Mexican government. Across the state in six other towns, simultaneous takeovers of official buildings occur.
"Güey," says Guard Número Uno, standing up and rubbing the bump on his head,"what the heck was all that about?"
Well, more or less, it was about this:
For 10 years, the Zapatistas had been recruiting supporters and members to their army in the highlands and mountains of Chiapas. Their aim was to secure respect and autonomy for the indigenous Mayan populations that lived in the area, ignored and abused by the Mexican government. Some of the history before the history:
The state of Chiapas has the highest percent of Indigenous population in the country, and suffers from serious poverty and lack of infrastructure (78.2% of the Chiapas population lacks adequate housing, the average income per worked hour in Chiapas is 1/6 of the national minimum wage, the illiteracy rate is 3x higher than the national average)
Land: Mayan populations view land as a collective right and responsibility, and the government kept trying to take it away. In 1992, in an attempt to pave the way for the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Mexican government amended the constitution, allowing the privatization and sale of communally owned (indigenous occupied) land
Later that year, Mexico signed into NAFTA with the US and Canada, which the Zapatistas saw as the government enabling the takeover of indigenous land by foreign corporations
After 10 years of underground organizing, the EZLN decided, enough is enough. On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA took effect, they declared war. (Actually, in their Declaration, they even said that. "Today we say, 'enough is enough.'")
So what next? The army moved in, replacing Guards Uno y Dos, and there was fighting for 11 days. The story got international coverage, and indigenous communities all over Mexico voiced their support for the Zapatistas. The Church stepped in and helped broker a ceasefire, leading to discussions towards a peace agreement. Over the next 3 years, the government continued to attack the Zapatistas. There were disappearances and massacres, and take-bakes on prior treaties.
In moves for autonomy, the Zapatistas reclaimed land and formed their own communities. They're called (and they very much still exist) caracoles, which means snail shells. These municipalities are totally self-governed and removed from dependence or contact with the Mexican government; they established their own schools, their own health centers, and their own leadership structures made up of counsels of community members. The goal was to create small-scale territories of indigenous, local autonomy that promoted above all local decision-making and land use. Moreover, the dignity of women has been central to the Zaptistas, and women hold power and influence in the caracoles -- they are community leaders, teachers, healthcare providers, and organizers -- and respect for gender and sexuality diversity are embedded into the movement.
Eventually, the Mexican government pivoted from their position of subversion and scare tactics, and they officially deemed the caracoles constitutional. And that's where it stands today: tense, but with officially recognized, autonomous zones in the state of Chiapas, operating like sovereign nations. Pretty fricken’ cool, pretty fricken’ revolutionary.
And now you know.
___
In San Cristobal de las Casas, these values of indigenous respect and visibility feel like they're at the forefront. It's a funky, artistic, multicultural city, and walking around the half-person-wide sidewalks I passed by people in colorful indigenous dress and in heavy black sheepwool skirts. Textiles and amber crafts and regional food are on display. Perhaps the most obvious sign is the language -- many people in San Cris and the surrounding areas speak Tzotzil, a Mayan language, as their primary language, and it's used socially and even in schools.
I liked San Cris. I liked it a lot. The history, I guess, and the landscape, has attracted a fair amount of countercultural folk, and you can spot them in their dreadlocks and drug rugs walking around smoking jazz cabbage and staring off with their shrunken little raisin eyes. There's an emphasis on small stuff, local stuff, like honey and booze and food. The fog, the hills, the narrow sidewalks, the rain, the spaced out zombie hippies, the many languages and hectic market and art stalls -- it all made for a cool vibe, a small town that had some big stuff figured out. It was neat.
More San Cris photos
The problem, of course, was that I only had two nights there, so I had to cram in a whole bunch of activities and learning and such, and there was a whole lot to see. So here's what I saw:
1) Sumidero Canyon: A two hour bus drive from San Cris. I sat up front and me and the bus driver became buddies, and he played 80's power ballads on the van radio and me and him sang along side by side to "Every Rose has it's Thorn," and then he dropped me and the other hostel cats at the boat launch.
The canyon was sick. You know canyons. Big rock walls on the side, all that. Plus there were spider monkeys in the trees, and plus there was a massive, ugly crocodile, all spotted and angry and hairy and nasty looking (insert joke about in-laws). Also, I saw something unlike anything I'd ever seen before: an I'm-the-main-character character.
Here's how it went. There was this lady I'd pegged as somewhat annoying in the van, and I pegged her as kind of annoying because at one point I wanted to take a little cat nap. But this German lady was sitting right behind me and telling this story about going to a wedding at the top of her dang lungs, and the whole story was centered around what a hero and excellent traveler she was and how she saved the wedding, and the story went on for honestly like 20 minutes, the poor listener just going "Oh?" at certain intervals, definitely not interested but stuck listening. Also, the lady wore this dumb cowboy hat. I checked, and she weren't no cowboy. And if I can't wear my ass-less lederhosen anymore for Halloween, I don't think some random, non-cowboy lady from Germany should be allowed to wear a cowboy hat out and about like that. Just saying.
Anyway, on the water, I'm-the-main-character of course sat in front at the point of the boat, facing all of us peasants. The trip started, and the engineman with the megaphone told us his one rule: "I'm gonna get this after-market lawn mower engine running about as hot as pigshit," he said. "We may get moving quick enough to break the sound barrier. So. Keep your life jacket on." Heard.
And then he gunned the engine, and my lips pulled back from my teeth, and we topped out at like 200 miles an hour and it was real fun, and I saw something fly past me. Could it be?! The cowboy hat?! Ha!
"Mein hat!" the lady cried. To my chagrin, the boat turned around, and we spent like 10 minutes at a dead crawl prowling the water for a wet black hat. Eventually the engineman found the hat and fished it out of the water and gave it back to my second least favorite person from Germany in history (behind, well, you know), and, tour sufficiently interrupted, we got back up to blasting through the canyon at rocket speed.
There's a few points on the intergalactically-sped boat tour where you get really surreal views. We were passing through them — wind in my hair, river spray on my glasses, big old rocks all around. I was happier than a turd bug at an elephant party. And then, over the megaphone:
"Put your life jacket back on."
What? The boat slowed to a stop.
"You, in front, the life jacket has to be on."
I look up from my reverie to see the cowboy hat lady, perched on the front of the boat in some dumb Instagram model pose, life jacket on the floor.
There was one rule! But it got worse. She pretended not to notice, pretended not to hear the megaphone over the dead stillness of the now-stopped boat, pretended not to (or maybe really didn't) care about inconveniencing thirty other people on the boat as she kept taking photos for Instagram. Everyone else looked at each other, silently wondering, is this lady a real person? The engineman had to walk all the way to the front of the boat and hand her the life jacket again. "No taking the life jacket off," he said into the megaphone.
With 300 pictures of herself sufficiently captured, I'm-the-main-character put the jacket back on, and we continued our intergalactic journey downriver.
She wasn't cool. But the canyon was still wicked.
Canyon images
___
2) Chicken Church: The next day I took a trip to one of the small towns surrounding San Cris, mostly because there's a church there that blends indigenous beliefs with Catholicism. The rules are pretty clear: no taking pictures, because one of the Tzotzil beliefs is that, if you take a picture of someone, the camera steals their soul. Soul-stealing wasn't on my agenda, but I did want to see the religious site. It's a typical Hispanic Catholic church on the outside, but the inside was like nothing I'd ever seen. Strawgrass covered the entire floor, except for little rings cleared out where people knelt by lines of candles. There was the typical Catholic iconography -- statues of saints and Jesus and the rest of the crew -- but they were painted, colorful. One even had human hair on it. In the dark, smoky church, families knelt to ask for blessings, give thanks, or perform cleansings. In the circles in the floor they poured Coca Cola and pox, a type of corn liquor. And, up front, I saw what I had really come to see -- the chicken.
I was told that, as part of the cleansings, a spiritual leader would kill a chicken there in the church (the belief is that the chicken absorbs the bad energy, and then is sacrificed and buried by the home). I think in my head I had imagined a bloody massacre, someone screaming at the chicken and stabbing it with a pen knife or something, the walls running red with blood.
The real thing was more somber. In actuality, I stood on the sidelines, listening to the prayer in Tzotzil, inhaling the smoke, watching the chicken held in the woman's arms. I kind of drifted off in the reverie -- the dark, candle-lit space invited it -- and when I looked back, the chicken was still.
I learned one Tzotzil word while in San Cris. "Colaval." It means thank you. I said "colaval" to the man at the entrance and stepped back into the sun.
On my way out a little street kid called out. "Señor," he said. "Peso." He was sitting in a group of five other kids.
I was thinking about the church, trying to make sense of it. "Sorry," I mumbled, my head in another world, and kept walking, their little faces all hanging in dejection.
But the convenience store was right there. I shook my head out. I popped into the store. The lollipops were exactly one peso (about half a cent). I got seven and went back to the kids.
“Hey, that pendejo’s got candy!" the first kid yelled, and they mobbed me. I handed out the lollipops and kept one for myself and sat on the stoop with them.
"What flavor's yours?" I asked one girl, whose lollipop was for some reason shaped like an ear.
"Ear," she said.
"Is that a lollipop flavor?"
"Yup."
"Right on."
I don't know what to make of the church. Religion is a hard thing. I do know that, in a country where you're asked for money by adults and kids every day, it feels right to have one way to give something. Even if it's just ear-flavored lollipops.
__
One more thing about San Cris that's worth saying; it's got the highest per-capita consumption of Coca Cola in the world. Locals average 2.2 liters of Coke per person per day. If you don't know how much that is, imagine 2.2 liters of water, but in Coca Cola.
Here's the thing: San Cris has loads of water. But the public water is so contaminated, I was told not to let it touch my face in the shower. No joke. Why, in a waterworld town, doesn't anybody have clean stuff to drink?
The reason: Coca Cola. With the whole NAFTA thing in 1994, Coke built a factory just outside of San Cris on one of the country's biggest sources of fresh water. They use an estimated one million liters of water per day. If you don't know how much that is, imagine a million liters of Coke. But in water.
So, there are drastic water shortages since the aquifer is so strained, and a strategic marketing plan when the drink was introduced (promoting Coke in the Mayan language) has convinced many people that the drink has healing powers. Hence its use in the church. Now, it's actually cheaper in San Cris to drink Coke than bottled water. I have a couple of soulless business school friends from Emory who work in New York and would approve of this "cornering the market" (That's you, soulless Frank).
But the Zapatistas always saw this neoliberal capitalism as another form of colonialism. ("Neoliberal globalization" the Sixth Decree reads, "is a war of conquest of the entire world, a world war, a war being waged by capitalism for global domination.")
The Zapatistas didn't want a world where a Coke factory would exploit cheap Mexican labor, destroy the aquifer, and sell the Coke back to them in quantities that would kill their kids. But that's the world it is. And so they opted to build another one.
"In the world of the powerful there is no space for anyone but themselves and their servants. In the world we want, everyone fits. The Nation which we construct is one where all communities and languages fit, where all steps may walk, where all may have laughter, where all may live the dawn.”
A hell of an idea. Worth fighting for.
___
Leg 2: San Cris -> Palenque
The next night bus was from San Cris to Palenque, this time nine hours. My new friend Sofie from Denmark was doing the same trip from the hostel, so we walked to the bus station together, and then we both got on the bus and took Dramamine (just one this time for me, I'm trying to quit). She took four pills and the driver had to physically help her off the bus in the morning.
Palenque is a small town in the north of Chiapas, which is only really visited for one thing: the Palenque ruins. We'd arrived at six in the morning, so we figured we could hit the ruins first thing.
Palenque is the site of an ancient Mayan city state. We didn't pay for a guided tour, so I don't have a ton of information. I do know that it's about 1800 years old, and I also know you can climb all over the towers. As the day turned from normal hot to jungle steamy, me and Sofie clambered all up over them things, looking at stuff high and low. We learned that the main plaza was built by one ruler, Pakal, and then when his son took over, he figured he needed another plaza, so he built one right next to it.
(That reminded me of one of my college roommates, D.S., another of the morally unencumbered New York crowd, who told me that his one life goal was to have an office directly above his dad's. "Dude," I told him, "You need therapy.")
We had one more day after Palenque, and we spent that day at a waterfall outside of Palenque called Agua Azul. Like the ruins we climbed all up and over that thing, too, and a guy showed me lots of places you could jump in off the rocks, and it was a grand old day hooting and hollering in the water.
"I have to pee," Sofie said as we were leaving.
"Why don't you pee in the water?" I proffered, a natural problem solver.
"Don't you worry about all the fish and bacteria and stuff swimming up your pee hole?"
Well, I do now.
Palenque Ruins, Sofie taking pic of waterfall
__
Leg 3: Palenque -> Merida
Okay, one more night bus after a one-night stint in Palenque, after the waterfall. I was starting to feel the effects, feeling like doodie, to be precise, but nothing to do but push on. Another 12 hours, two Dramamines, and I woke up out of Chiapas in the Yucatán. The city of Merida, to be exact. I was ready for a change from the hostels, so I'd arranged a Couchsurfing stay with a college student, Bryan, and his roommate.
The Couchsurfing was, well, okay. Bryan was a very nice person and generous for letting him stay with me for free, and he also loved to get dummy high on rank kush. He met me in the city center for lunch and said, "I know a place, and I walk fast," and then he took off at a dead sprint through the big crowd of people, and if I weren't so tall and muscular I would have lost him as he slippery-eeled his way to the market.
After lunch back at his apartment he asked me if I knew what a gravity bong was, and I said yes, and then he asked if I'd like to hit one, to which I said, "Uh, not really," and so I sat next to their their tailless cat and watched as he and his roommate got truly baked. And then we all sat in silence for a while, and then we all went to bed.
The next day I poked around downtown Merida. I didn't love the city, but I had cochinita pibil for lunch, which is pork cooked in a hole in the ground, and it was so good it made my conchinita tingle. I got coffee, I took a nap on a park bench, and then I went with Bryan and his roommate to help their friend move apartments. The friend had pet rats, and the roommate took one out of the cage. It had a strange name, like “Dirty Boy" or something. "Do you want to hold Dirty Boy?" he asked. "Uh, not really," I said.
After helping them move we kind of sat around the new apartment for a while, and none of the friends who we helped move really said anything to me, which didn't make me feel super welcome. And so I got up and left, and I sat in a cantina where they had live music, and this French guy started talking to me about the NBA, and it turns out he used to work at the cantina, and so I drank with him and his girlfriend for free. Then Bryan and his roommate met up with me that night, and we hit a few different bars and ended at a taco stand, which is always a good place to end a night, and then we went back to the apartment, and I woke up and took one more bus, a day bus, to Valladolid.
Photos of Merida, home of "Dirty Boy"
___
Leg 4: Merida -> Valladolid, Dog Wisdom, Health Panics
At this point -- three night busses and one day bus in seven days -- I was feeling like I'd been run over by three night busses and one day bus in seven days. I'd covered 900 of 1,000 miles I needed, and thankfully I was planning to lay low in Valladolid until the flight. I'd developed deep purple bags under my eyes, and I started every morning by waking up in a panic and coughing up about a 1/2 cup of primordial ooze from my lungs. I figure a bug got in there and laid eggs or something. Good ol' Mexico.
The panicking, I think, was brought about by minimum sleep and maximum coffee consumption and the Dramamine comedown. First I worried about bugs in my hole from peeing in the water. Did that happen at waterfalls in Mexico? I got on Google. I think I'm in the clear, but I resolved, no more peeing in the water on this trip.
Then I started worrying about bedbugs. Did I get bitten in San Cris? Were these mosquito bites arranged in a sort of pattern? Should I deep clean my clothes? Again, a lengthy, fruitless dive into the depths of Google.
After that was mosquito-borne illnesses. Chiapas, the CDC says, has malaria. I have malaria pills in my backpack, but I figured since I was only there for 4 days, I didn't need them. But I did get bitten in San Cris and in Palenque. Could this hacking cough be, well, you know...? I Googled symptoms. I Googled how long for the onset. I Googled if Vermonters had natural immunity. The verdict: It's malaria and dengue and Hep B and scurvy.
The other disease I had a good little frighten over was rabies. The hostel in Valladolid had a dog named Quesadilla, and she was pretty cute, so that first night I gave her some of my chicken. What I didn't expect was that, after eating the chicken, Quesadilla would follow me around the hostel for an hour, nibbling my shorts and humping my leg.
"Woah woah woah," I said, "what's this?"
Of course, I shooed her off, said it's not her it's me, etc. But in Quesadilla's quest to get a piece of my quesadilla, so to speak, she also scratched my leg. I knew, of course, that she didn't have rabies. But the old panic started creeping in, and I Googled if you can get rabies from a dog scratch, and even though everything on the internet said the dog had to be currently infected with rabies, I still went up to one of the hostel employees and said, "Excuse me, does Quesadilla have rabies?"
They said no and told me that it was a fairly dumb question. But hey, I was panicking! I was falling apart at the seams!
And then I got to thinking of all the ways dogs and people are similar....and I got an idea.
I went up to a girl at the hostel. "Hey," I said. "Do you by chance want a piece of chicken?"
She said no. Dangit!
Jokes aside, there is one characteristic we do share with our canine companions, one that I ruminated on while running around Valladolid. I thought, as I previously noted, that it was the stray dogs that scared the shit straight out of my butt while running. As it turns out, the dogs that bark like crazy and give chase are rarely the strays. Instead, it's the dogs with owners, with houses. Those are the ones, when you run past their property, that go nutso and make darn sure you know you're not welcome. The destitute, the downtrodden, are happy to just lay in the sun and eat garbage, and they'd let you lay down and feast right there with them, if you wanted.
How about that. The mean and the selfish are the ones with the most. I thought about the most selfish people I knew. Silver-spoon types, all of them. And Coca Coca, billionaires, stealing all the water. Mexican officials, millionaires, selling rights to occupied land. Something to think about, next time we're scared of someone passing through our property, stepping on our physical or metaphorical turf. Are we just playing big dog, protecting a house we don't even own?
_
Alrighty, Valladolid. Valladolid rocks way harder than Merida, and I was really glad to choose it as the place to re-center before the flight. The best thing about Valladolid, by far, is the cenotes.
Valladolid looks like this
Cenotes, for the ignorant, unworldly readers (Frank), are big old holes in the ground. We've all, I'm sure, heard of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, leaving only chickens and alligators and cockroaches. That meteor touched down, actually, in the Yucatán peninsula, and either from the ripples or from meteor fragments, one of the side effects was these big holes in the limestone. There are underground rivers that connect all of these mini impact sites, and soon they filled up with water and with little baby catfish. I decided to spend the six days running and biking to as many of these strange craters as I could find and jumping in for a swim (and not peeing in the water).
Assorted cenote photos
Around that time, too -- early in Valladolid, feeling like the contents of a cow's fourth stomach -- I began to take stock of myself. Really what happened was, I looked in the mirror. "Yuck," unfortunately, was the word that came to mind. Along with the raccoon eyes and stringy hair and moldy undergarments, I'd gotten, well, fat. For the past two months I'd eaten nothing but tacos, and staring back at me in the mirror was a big white taco. I had turned into a fat boy.
I opened up my Strava to check my history. Strava, for the uninitiated, is social media for athletes, where you post your runs and rides and workouts and other people can give you "kudos." Yes, it's awful. I have the paid membership because I am a piece of garbage, and the paid membership has this feature called "fitness score," where it gives you a rating of how fit you are. I pushed my grubby little taco-stained finger on the button. Here's what I saw:
Six. Six?! I knew I'd fallen off a bit, but...six? Jimmeny Pete, that's low. Over the summer, when I ran my last race before hurting myself, I was up at a respectable sixty. But in four short months, I'd lost 90% of that. The graph revved me up like an aftermarket lawnmower engine attached to a riverboat. I was ready to slap some sidewalks. Fat boy no more.
So that’s what I did.
I put in an 11 miler to these caves in a cave park outside San Cristobal, and I put in a 5 miler in the jungle heat in Palenque where I saw parrots and turtles all over (including a lady carrying two turtles, who refused to say what she was doing carrying two turtles, which makes me think soup).
In Valladolid I ran to a bunch of cenotes, the first of which is right in the middle of the city, two blocks from the main cathedral, and I said “Holy Quetzalcoatl” when I saw the big blue hole. I jumped off the rocks and splished and splashed about. Also, it's widely accepted that you can eat and drink anything you want as run fuel, so after cenote swims I'd lie in the sun trying to dry my skivvies and drink an 11AM Corona and eat chips or Snickers and then hoof it back home.
In Valladolid too I did an 18 mile bike tour one day and then a 40 mile loop on another to a far cenote, this one a cave cenote with a tiny little hole in the ceiling letting in enough light to see all the big stalactites and the little fish that nibble your toes. The bike was a rinkety-dinkety old beach cruiser with no hand brakes and two flat tires, but I’d go further than 20 miles to get my toes nibbled, and it was a wicked ride anyway. I stopped for lunch and talked to this 10-year-old working at the empanada stand with his mom and taught him “How are you? / Good” in English, which he got a kick out of, and then he told me lollipops were only 1 peso here. I got the hint and gave him ten pesos with the instructions to spread the love. He ran out to the road with a fistful of lollipops to wave goodbye as I biked away, and that was neat.
And then on my last day in Valladolid I went back to the cenote in the center, now feeling kind of worn down but in the good physical way, and as I was leaving I stood at the top and looked down at the strange, strange hole, thinking of the 2,000 years of people using it for rituals and swimming, looked at the iguanas running all around, the stalactites and blue sky and colonial buildings in the background.
I'm a lucky little fella, I reminded myself. And it's true.
Cave selfie, parrot hole, run fuel, cave cenote, hungry fish, the 40-mile chariot
___
Final Thoughts: Brain Soup
So that's it. That was my last push and final stay in Mexico. I survived the fast-packing through Chiapas and I got my mojo back in the Yucatán. Now I'm at the airport in Cancun (in the VIP lounge like a millionaire), on my fourth coffee and waiting for my flight to Guatemala. It's been about two months in Mexico already. I suppose I should write about what I've learned, so I'll touch briefly on two ingredients in my bubbling brain stew.
First ingredient: I need exercise and sleep and good food to feel good. The first part of this trip was kind of a break from that, but the last push made me realize that physical well-being and being able to do strange explorations is important to me. That's how these things go; you get to break all your old habits, and you see which ones matter. So, from here on out: a little less street meat, a little more movement.
Second is all that stuff about the Zapatistas. Look, the Coca Cola thing and the neoliberalism are too big for my rat brain. Right now I'm wearing two socks that both say "L" on them, and I've been so hungover recently that I bumped into a storefront mannequin and said "excuse me." So I'm not out to solve any global issues, here.
But one thing about reading all the Zapatista declarations is this: they say what the world is like. In a lot of ways, it's kind of rough. Land stealing and disappearing people. Multinational companies raping aquifers, governments selling their own people downriver. Destitute towns, starving dogs, trash in the fields and in the water. In a lot of ways, Mexico makes you see all that stuff, too, all that labor and exploitation and general crap that exists behind the labels of our shiny toys. But at the very least, those people in the caracoles in the mountains are trying something.
Maybe the world is the way it is. There are haves and have nots, first worlds and third worlds, and hungry kids are just part of the deal. Maybe the best thing to do is to get yours, to make money and make sure you land on the right side of the line. Callousness is a necessary defense.
But when something is wrong, the worst thing to do is nothing. I sure can’t solve the whole thing, and I’m not in any position to try. But that doesn’t mean I should do nothing. Ignoring people asking for help, brushing aside someone who's hungry and asking you for food, is wrong. Ten cents’ worth of candy is about as minimal as it gets. But I know it isn't nothing.
_
I keep coming back to the Zapatista idea from their Fourth Declaration: a world where all the worlds fit. A world with space for everyone. That means space for the shrunken-eyed hippies, for the Instagram girl in the cowboy hat, for the kids sucking gravity bongs, for the other travelers and for the indigenous people pouring Coke in the church. Space for the kids skipping school and the kids begging for change and for the tour guide overcharging for a bike rental. For the sleeping dogs and the angry dogs, for the people that want to talk to me and the people who want nothing to do with me. Just like I have a whole world about me in my head, so do they, and the only way we make space for each other is by realizing, you know, your whole world is just as big as mine. So let me move over a little bit, and withhold from judgment for a minute, and if there’s something I can do to help, I’ll do it. And then there’s room to spare.
__
Thank you for reading. Be a YIMBY, however you can. Off to Guatemala.
-Daveydoo
Another banger! Finally Frank’s crimes are brought to light in print. Bring back some ear candy.