As I’m walking down the main street in San Cristóbal, enjoying the buskers – the loud, French-sounding accordion player who sings at the top of his voice, and the beautiful and gentle classical guitarist – a man thrusts a leaflet into my hand. I take a quick look and realise it’s urging me to visit a website that provides evidence against the official story that Al Qaeda were responsible for 9/11. I don’t give it too much attention and continue on my way…
We’ve been looking for some time to find some horse riding opportunities around here, but all we can seem to find is the rather boring walk to Chamula. Millie’s school is doing a little show and lots of parents and friends turn up to watch. Fi ends up chatting to an interesting looking Finnish girl called Heidi who turns out to be working on a ranch that does horse-riding. I say interesting, but actually she is fairly typical of the many Bohemian types living around here. She’s had the inside of her lip/gum pierced, with a ring hanging down in front of her top teeth, and has long blonde dreadlocks. We enjoy the children’s very cute show and make plans to visit the ranch the next day.
Evergreen ranch is about 30 km south of San Cristobal, 7km along an unpaved road off the Pan-American Highway. It’s set in a beautiful rural location, among the rolling hills of the central highlands of Chiapas. Sam, the owner, comes out to greet us from the simple house he’s built there. He’s about my age, with long grey hair, a beard and cowboy hat. It turns out he is one quarter Cherokee Indian and lived the first eight years of his life on Indian reservation. He left the US 25 years ago – he said that when they elected a Californian filmstar as president, enough was enough.
I’m not sure quite how, but within the first 5 minutes of our meeting, Sam asks me who I thought was responsible for the 9/11 attack. When I replied Al Qaeda, he quickly derided that opinion and proceeded to challenge me with all sorts of questions. For example, why were four commercial aircraft that left their designated flight paths (for up to 1 hour 45 minutes), that turned off their transponders and failed to respond to air traffic control’s communication, not intercepted by military aircraft, as per the standard protocol? This conversation continued, very robustly, for about an hour. While I wasn’t equipped to answer some of the questions he was throwing at me, he wasn’t able to say who was responsible and what was the motivation. His view was that the government is a puppet of big business, but he was unable to suggest which specific businesses would benefit from this (other than arms companies) and how. It’s a very heated but good humoured and and entertaining discussion. Sam seems to think that all CEOs of major corporations are psychopathic mass murderers! When I told him I’d worked for a big multinational for many years, he suggested that the reason that I hadn’t made it to CEO was because I clearly didn’t have the necessary psychopathic tendencies! He comes up with other conspiracy theories too, such as HIV being a genetically engineered virus, the result of an attempt to implant a drug to treat auto-immune diseases into the virus. Needless to say, he believes that many diseases are created by the evil pharmaceutical industry to generate revenues for their drugs. To be honest, I’m not sure how much Sam truly believes all these theories (although he certainly believes the CIA was responsible for 9/11) and to what extent he is just trying to wind me up! Already I like him.
Sam lives here with his French wife Stephanie and their two daughters, Zoe (12) and Cheyenne (10) – by coincidence, they turn out to be the two girls Gabriel and I met at Capoeira. Today, Stephanie and Zoe are in San Cristobal, so we don’t get to meet them, but our children enjoy playing with Cheyenne, particularly given that there are also 14 puppies to play with! Half of them are Chihuahuas, the other half a cross between Elvis the handsome German Shepherd and a fairly typical Mexican mongrel mum. The children are more than happy playing with the puppies while Sam and I continue our debate.
So, having turned up about half an hour late and after about an hour and a half’s discussion, the conversation gradually turns to horse-riding. We had anticipated a ride out in the country but Sam said he wouldn’t take us out before he know how well we could ride – this seems pretty reasonable (although un-Mexican!)
Five Go Round The World 