Hum­ming­bird (cropped)

I’m never sure if it’s a great idea to save money on hotels by using overnight buses. It is, how­ever, a very effect­ive use of time. Just so long as you can get some sleep. The bus to San Cris­to­bal was cer­tainly as com­fort­able as was needed — we could only get seats on the UNO ser­vice, a first class ser­vice, with lounges (not wildly com­fort­able, but secure enough that you don’t have to watch your lug­gage too care­fully) and extremely com­fort­able fully reclin­ing seats. You can, basic­ally, curl up and get a good night’s sleep.

San Cris­to­bal itself is a pretty, colo­nial town, made up of low rise houses and, in the centre at least, a mer­ci­ful lack of poorly assembled con­crete. It’s one of the pret­ti­est places in Mex­ico and well worth a visit.

From there we took a horse ride up to the vil­lage of Cham­ula, where a fest­ival was in full swing. This mostly appeared to be made up of lots of men walk­ing around wear­ing some­thing resem­bling furry tank tops and wide brimmed cow­boy hats. No pic­tures, sadly, as the loc­als here believe pho­to­graphs steal their soul — which means ask­ing and, often, pay­ing a small fee. Yes, you can have a little bit of Mex­ican soul in your cam­era for just a pound or so. Bar­gain. How­ever, not feel­ing com­fort­able with the respons­ib­il­ity of soul own­er­ship I decided to not bother too much.

What you can’t pho­to­graph, for any amount of money, is the church. It’s not unknown for loc­als to become quite viol­ent if you try. In a way it’s a shame because visu­ally the interior proved to be one of the most beau­ti­ful of the whole trip. You pay twenty pesos (£1) for entry and as you pass through expect­ing JAC (Just Another Church) you find your­self faced with thou­sands of candles. On tables, in front of the altar and, most incred­ibly, all over the floor. Given that the floor is also covered in pine needles it’s prob­ably a good idea to tread care­fully, lest you acci­dent­ally knock a candle over and start a major inferno. There are no pews either — they’d prob­ably just get in the way of the candles or, per­haps, simply add to the fire risk. Well worth a visit, but like I say — this is a place where tour­ists are tol­er­ated and grudgingly accep­ted, as opposed to being seen as a good thing — so be sens­it­ive if you go.

Unfor­tu­nately, the 1.5hr horse-ride back star­ted in a fair amount of pain. The ride up had been pleas­ant, if some­what excit­ing thanks to the rocks and steep hills you need to nego­ti­ate, but ulti­mately horse rid­ing involves your back­side get­ting a damn good pum­mel­ling. Mine isn’t well pad­ded, and I suffered on the cheap, mostly wooden saddle my horse had. When we returned and climbed off we all staggered around a little, with crooked knees.

At this point it’s worth giv­ing an hon­our­able men­tion to Gosia — this was her first ever horse-ride. And these weren’t the skinny and slow meta-donkeys you find in many places. They would trot without too much encour­age­ment and could even be encour­aged into the odd gal­lop. She was ter­ri­fied, and the only instruc­tions she had were from me and along the lines of “pull left to go left, right for right, and both of them to stop.” Not exactly a com­pre­hens­ive horsey edu­ca­tion, but it seems it helped a little.

The next phase of the trip was tak­ing a minibus with another of Fangio’s long lost loqua­cious rel­at­ives. He clearly believed that a tour had to be run as quickly as pos­sible. This wasn’t actu­ally a bad thing, once you dealt with the fear of immin­ent death — he got us to the break­fast stop and to the main sites before all the tour­ists arrived. One, how­ever, had to be skipped. It seems that the loc­als had decided that they were fed up of tour­ists traipsing around and often spend­ing very little money, so they’d decided to set up a road block and insist on a pay­ment for the visit. The details, unfor­tu­nately, evaded us until we’d read their handout and by then the driver had set off in keen pur­suit of Palenque.

Before Palenque we stopped at a water falls called Agua Azul which at first looked…well, not as impress­ive as the book sad. And it wasn’t so much Agua Azul as Agua Brown. Still, once we actu­ally looked around we real­ised it was an impress­ive and com­plex series of water­falls. And we saw our first hum­ming­bird which is one of those birds that should be shown to depress­ives — they cheer every­one up. Rather like any­body beat­ing Manchester United cheers up Scousers, I suppose.

I’ll blog sep­ar­ately about Palenque, and try to actu­ally do some research first so it makes sense — it’s a his­toric and stun­ning site. One pic is included the fol­low­ing gallery:

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