Where the Sky is Born and Where the Dead Come Back to Life

I haven’t written in a stupidly long time. I genuinely don’t know where the time has gone. I suppose my only explanation is that I’ve been busy and just doing lots of lovely things.

I apologise to anyone who, for any reason, is interested in what I get up to. In this article I’m going to cover a couple of trips that I actually made before Christmas, one to the Sian Ka’an nature reserve, close to Tulum on the East coast of Quintana Roo (yes, in my mind it’s the Caribbean), and the other to Mexico City at the end of October for Day of the Dead Celebrations.

Generally when I got to Tulum I laze around on the beach, drink cocktails and wander around Maya ruins. This time I mixed things up a little. I lazed around on the beach, drank cocktails and floated around the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve. In Maya, Sian Ka’an literally means ‘origin of the sky’, although to me it sounds like a faraway land in a Disney movie, and is a ginormous ecosystem in which the wildlife is protected but the people who live there are also able to live sustainably.

It remains one of the most beautiful places I’ve visited. Sian Ka’an is bigger than Mexico City which, put quite is simply, is really, really huge. Our little boat trip wasn’t anywhere near enough to give you a realistic idea of the size of the reserve. It was just an endless maze of twisting canals, water meadows and tropical forests, beaches with sand as white as a snowy fields in England (which I hear is pretty accurate for this week’s weather forecast) and exotic and fascinating wildlife. We saw a family of beautiful manatees, crocodiles from a distance, spiders big enough to make me not what to get out of the van, the most awesome caterpillars, colourful friendly fish and various giant birds who looked too heavy for the branches they perched on (feel free to tell me the type of bird in the picture – not my area of expertise).

We spent a delightful morning travelling though the mangroves. In one area we were able to disembark the boat and, with rather fetching upside down life jackets which resembled nappies, we floated through the canals, carried along by the natural current in the water and protected from the sun by the twisted mangrove trees. This was possibly the most relaxing experience of my Mexican life. For 20 minutes I laid back and bobbed about in the water, not dissimilar to the rivers they have at theme parks but in complete peace. I was so content.

At the opposite end of the tourism scale is the crazy world that is Mexico City. I’m not even sure where to begin with this insane metropolis of life. Just arriving by plane and coming across the mountains to a view of endless colourful houses, buildings, towers, roads, and hills was enough to blow my breath away.

Being in Mexico City around the Day of the Dead celebrations was incredible, if a little scary. It was also full of tourists and spectators eager to see the procession made famous by Spectre. My sources tell me that the James Bond producers more or less created this spectacle and it has only been attracting visitors to the city since the movie’s release in 2015. We spent hours wondering up and down the streets in the centre watching all the dressed up dead people (who deliberately try to scare you) and taking pictures in the Zocalo square which had been decorated to look like Halloween threw up on it. There were sugar skulls everywhere.

 

Other highlights from Mehico Citay included

• Visiting the extensive and extremely impressive ruins of Teotihuacan. My only experience of Aztec ruins was pretty incredible and the race to the top was extremely rewarding (we didn’t make bets on how long it would take and then run to make sure we didn’t lose). See picture of the pyramid of the sun from which one can see the pyramid of the moon.
• Exploring some of the museums. Closely rivalling London for the most museums in a city, there are many to choose from in Mexico City. We opted for any free museum and actually ended up in a pretty cool aquarium which was underground and is the only place where I’ve touched a starfish (Plymouth aquarium got nothing on this). Didn’t make it to the Frida Kahlo museum. Next time.
• Listening to mariachi in Café Tacuba and stuffing ourselves silly on true Mexican food. We had saved up for this trip so we may have gone a little overboard with the ‘let’s treat ourselves’ attitude. But this was by far the best place to do it!
• Getting almost completely lost in one of the many markets in Mexico. I still can’t really believe we found the people we were looking for in this maze of stalls. I’ve never been anywhere quite like it and it was all a little overwhelming. I was encouraged not to stop for too long for security reasons but was able to take about 10 seconds to pay 10 pesos for some tiny Mexican Day of the Dead flags. I was very proud of my purchase.
• Oh, and we saw Paul McCartney.

A note to finish on. If you haven’t seen it yet, go and watch Coco in the cinema or however you watch your movies these days. Yes, it’s a Disney movie. Buuuuut it’s a really beautiful representation of Mexican life and the cultural traditions surrounding Day of the Dead. It’s also got some great songs in it.

 

 

 

Adventures in Chiapas

This might be the quickest I’ve ever written a blog post about a trip but simultaneously the longest it’s ever taken me to publish one. This is most definitely down to the fact that I spent over 30 hours (probably quite a lot more but I haven’t worked it out…) on a bus travelling between Chiapas and Yucatan so I wrote a lot in one go. Since then I have only in the last couple of days had the time to read back through my notes or properly sort through the mountain (‘scuse the pun) of photos I took. So, finalmente, our trip to Chiapas…

Lettie y yo decided that we needed to escape our Mérida bubble for a few days over Easter and so embarked in a little adventure to Chiapas, a state not too far from Yucatan. We’d heard nought but good things and were keen to see some rivers deep and mountains high and also to experience some cooler weather.

Our first stop (out of two) was the ‘city’ of Palenque. I use inverted commas because Spanish speakers don’t really differentiate between village and town and so anything bigger than a small town is kind of just called a city. ‘Palenque: Mística y Natural’ is what’s written on the plaque as you enter the city and this filled us with excitement for our week ahead.

While staying in Palenque we visited a couple of truly mystical and natural sites. The waterfalls at Roberto Barrios, Agua Azul and Misol-Ha were simply beautiful. Agua Azul is justly named; the water is a glorious blue that doesn’t even appear to be real when you first see it. We enjoyed swimming (slipping and sliding would also be appropriate verbs here) and attempting (and failing) to jump into the pools that sit at the bottom of the waterfalls. We also visited the famous ruins at Palenque which were incredible. These were possibly my favourite Maya ruins so far. A crazy statistic for you; only 5% of the ancient city is available to explore, the other 95% is still hidden and buried in the jungle.

After a couple of days in Palenque we headed to San Cristóbal de las Casas. We’d been told that this was the place to visit in Chiapas but we were quite unprepared for what we found. San Cristobal is a city nestled in between mountains, approximately 2,000 meters above sea level. The city has a beautiful, colonial charm to it with hundreds of colourful houses lining cobbled streets which lead you up to churches at crazy heights and through some of the best markets I’ve ever been to. This is by far the coldest I have felt in a really long time. While the temperature in Mérida was creeping closer and closer to the 40 mark, San Cristóbal was chilling in the mountains in the delightful mid 20s. It was the first time since arriving in Mexico in August that I’d worn a coat.

Whilst in San Cristóbal we made a trip to the Cañon Sumidero. I do believe this was my first ever canyon and I came out of the experience rather windswept, with serious neck ache from constantly looking up and feeling like an extremely small human being. It truly was awe-inspiring. Much to Lettie’s disappointment we didn’t spot any crocodiles but on the plus side I bought a new hat (which was supposed to act as sun protection on our 2 hour boat ride through the canyon but didn’t stay on my head).

To wrap up this blog post, our trip to Chiapas was important for many reasons and it reminded me of many things:

• Sometimes you need to get away to get out of your little bubble of life. Don’t get me wrong there’s a lot of great things that I love about my life in Mérida right now but it still did me a world of good to detach for a couple of days and do something completely different.
• That I’m doing fine. There have been a few ups and downs recently but all it takes is to see life from a slightly different perspective and you realise that it’s all good.
• That Mexico is possibly the most colourful country I have ever been to. And I mean colourful in that the countryside, the towns and the lives of people are all painted with colour in a way that I’ve not seen before on my travels. All this does is remind me that Mexico is huge, something which I genuinely had no idea of before I came here, and it makes me want to explore this amazing country so much more.
• And finally, that I will never really really get to grips with the Mexican approach to time. I love the whole laid back thing and the ‘Mexican 5 minutes’ (which equates to, at best, half an hour), but it does get somewhat frustrating when you want to know where your bus is because it’s 3 hours late and nobody really seems to care! I’m just too English for this.