Mexico 3 – Land of the Zappatistas – Five Go Round The World

Vendor sells bundles of fresh garlic, wearing his San Cristobal hat

With the Zappatistas, came dignity and equal rights for women, no wonder Commandante Marco is considered such a hero, at least by some

The pedestrian street Guadalupe with it's church high up on the hill — The pedestrian street Guadalupe with it’s church high up on the hill

We are on our last stint now. Mexico it is for the next few months, then back! I can’t believe how quickly time has flown. We toyed with Colombia and Honduras, so many fantastic countries to visit; in the end we decided we just wanted to be in one place and we couldn’t NOT go to Mexico. So we are settled here for the next few months in a beautiful town, in Chiapas – San Cristobal de las Casas down near the Guatemalan border. It’s high up here and the climate is perfect – beautiful sunny days, thunderous rainy afternoons and chilly evenings in front of the fire. All very atmospheric.

Jemima and Gabriel go off to Spanish school every morning with Mark. I walk Millie to her little Montessori school, about 1.5 Km down the road, past the field where trucks are being loaded up with piles of carrots and cabbages, freshly dug up earth intermingled with the pungent smell of coriander. Her little school Pinguinos, is delightful; no English is spoken, though it is very international, Argentine, Bolivian and other Latin American countries, married to Mexicans, all living here. She has been dropped right in the deep end and is coping incredibly well and no doubt her Spanish will be better than all of ours. She is already speaking English with an Spanish accent, which we all find rather funny. Her best friend is a little girl called Luam, whose mother happens to be half Eritrean. It didn’t take us very long to make the African connections.

We are living in a house owned by an American photographer, who was here when Commandante Marcos lead the Zappatista rising here in 1989, on horseback with black balaclavas on their faces. He is perceived as quite a hero here. His concealed face is plastered everywhere, and you are more likely to see his face on a postcard here, or on the side of a paper shopping bag in a retail shop, than you are a postcard picture of a church or a beautiful street.

The house we are renting is strange – it’s full of quite morbid photographs. Although the sight of death is spared, you know by the faces on the women and men that something terrible has happened and that Janet was clearly there at the time, in the midst of things, when Marco came thundering along on horseback. Although we haven’t met her, she intrigues me and I wish I could meet her. She has been living here for the last 35 years.

The house has been less than perfect. It is small and we are squeezed into it. It stank of cats and dogs when we arrived and the cupboards were full of her ingredients, all covered with grease and dust and all the furniture was broken. We immediately started looking for another house, however there isn’t too much choice here. So we set to work, clearing and cleaning and replacing the furniture, which was fairly easy as she has another cottage at the end of the garden, so we just swapped things around (I don’t envy the people who rent the cottage!) Even the dog Ginger has been lovingly washed by our three. The benefits of staying are a HUGE garden, set up on a hill, slightly out of San Cristobal and it is cosy, now that we have bought fabric to cover ugly chairs and the fireplace is useful for chilly evenings.The kids LOVE it so we are staying…. and I am getting used to it (the house, not San Cristobal)

Whilst there are lots of foreigners living here, the more traditional conservative Americans in Mexico keep away, afraid of the radical leftist autonomous politics of the area, no doubt. We have met another American family doing a similar thing to us; when they left their house last Saturday morning there were builders putting topes (sleeping policeman) across the road, rather absurdly at 20m intervals, on a quiet road with not much traffic. By mid-morning, the locals had put huge boulders across the road, cutting it off from any traffic. By the time Jay and Elizabeth returned from their day, the topes had all been chipped away (by the locals) and the boulders had vanished, as though nothing had happened – all very intriguing. This is quite an autonomous state and the people clearly take matters into their own hands.

San Cristobal is a beautiful town high up in the hills at 2000ft, nestled in a valley surrounded by mountains. The roads are cobbled, the buildings colonial, all shades of oranges, pinks and yellows. It seems quite chichi, with its eateries, boutique hotels, little individual shops, bakeries and courtyard houses, but there don’t seem to be that many tourists here and neither Starbucks nor Macdonald’s have made it here, nor any chain of shops for that matter. It is a little jewel of a town, but real too. The market is amazing, a central place for all the local indigenous Mayan villagers to barter their wares and tares. Every village, has their own embroidered blouses and shawls for the women, with black hairy sheep-wool skirts, while the men wear white hairy sheep-wool waistcoats and fantastic cowboy hats and cowboy boots. It’s very colourful.

I bought 2 kilos of limes, 2 kilos of little plum tomatoes, 2 kilos of passion fruits a bunch of coriander and a melon and it cost £1.50! This will make up for that helicopter ride in NZ!

There are also large stretches of the market devoted to natural cures for illnesses, little piles of wood, sprigs of this and that, berries here, pods there, all being immaculately weighed and handed over to an enthusiastic crowd of onlookers. I was handed a bag of wood shavings to help get rid of the smell of cats in our house. Burn a little of this sappy incense to help diffuse the smell. It really helped!

I met a young Mexican Doctor in a cafe, we got chatting over a coffee. He is here doing practical medical time working in the villages. He is having an incredibly frustrating time, as the villagers have their own traditions and sharmas and their own way of dispelling their illnesses; no one wants conventional doctors from the cIty to come and tell them what to do. He is treated like a pariah here instead of with the usual respect.

Tomorrow it is Election Day in San Cristobal – we have been warned to keep away from the town centre and local villages. All the local shops stopped selling alcohol from Wednesday onwards, in anticipation of the elections, which is quite telling and an omen of what’s to come…..

The Children’s sayings…….

We arrive at a sweet shop, Jemima and Millie eagerly dive in and choose their sweets. Gabriel having a homesick moment says crossly “I’ll tell you what sort of sweets I want, they are called “I want to go home sweets”

Millie ‘s reaction when we heard the news that Princess Charlotte was born… “Is THAT what a princess looks like…..!”…methinks a little disappointed!