Section 3 : Mexico City to Panama City : Chapter 14

“History: An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant.”

Ambrose Bierce

The guide was a very fat very dark skinned Mexican in a Panama hat. When he grinned, which he did immediately on meeting us, his teeth were a porcelain white gash in the middle of his face. His laughter boomed around the ruins.
“My name is Ricardo, like my son.” he said clapping an arm around the shoulders of the slightly built seventeen year old who had been showing us around Teotihuacan until his father arrived.
“But you must call me Gorilla because I am big and fat like an old Gorilla. No? My son has been doing a good job. Now you know all about Teotihuacan and I can go home and rest.”
Another bass chortle rolled from somewhere in the depths of him.
“No. Now he can go home and rest and I will show you everything else.”

Mexico City with its twenty two million people may be Mexico’s biggest city now but once that position was held by Teotihuacan with a mere 200,000 inhabitants. At it’s peak it was one of the largest cities in the world covering more than 20 square kilometres and although by modern standards that’s scarcely a small town it was a vast metropolis 1800 years ago. Two vast pyramids, Piramide del Sol y Piramide de la Luna and Temple of Quetzalcoatl at the southern end dominate it with the Avenue of the Dead running along the length of it. The younger Ricardo had shown us most of the temple but Gorilla did a quick tour around it in case he had missed anything, moving surprisingly quickly for a man of his size. His description of the carvings and the architecture was matched in more or less equal part by his comments on modern day Mexico. His views were reactionary to say the least. As we strolled across the open ground towards the Pyramid of the Sun he was holding forth on the laziness of Mexicans.
“Never give any money to Mexican beggars,” he said “They are not poor they are lazy. There are no poor Mexicans. Only Lazy Ones.”

As we went down into one of the excavations to look at the interior of one of the buildings his discussion of why there was never any human sacrifice this far north suddenly turned into an antifeminist diatribe that had some of the women bristling.
“We had here in Mexico a conference.” he said “A conference of feminists. Before they came everyone was equal. Men. Women. We all did the same work. Now all the women want to be feminists. Being equal isn’t good enough. It will destroy us. You will see.”

Nevertheless he was clearly a man held in some esteem by the dozens of hawkers selling their carvings around the grounds. They all greeted him as a close friend and even co-operated when he lined half a dozen of them up as a kind of impromptu identity parade to demonstrate the ethnic differences among Mexicans.
“This one,” he said of the first, “Is almost a pure blooded Indian. Here, you can see it around the eyes and in the complexion. This one here, he is Spanish.” He went on along the line. At the end was a tall solidly built man in his twenties with a cowboy hat and sunglasses.
“And this one. He does not know what he is.” Gorilla pushed up the brim of the man’s Stetson,
“But he knows what he wants to be. He wants to be Tom Cruise.”
He bellowed with good humour again and all of the line-up joined in before scattering among us to sell us their wares. Perhaps that was the reason for their exaggerated friendliness - it gave them a good opening sales pitch for the stone knives and animal carvings.

The Pyramid of the Sun was impressive. It’s about 70 metres high and, so Gorilla informed us, the third largest Pyramid in the world. There are steps in the side that lead right to the flat top and from there, after a short but fairly strenuous climb the views were superb and the whole site could be taken in in a single sweeping panorama. We went back down and gathered at the wall on the opposite side of the Avenue of the Dead.
“How long would it take you then,” I asked Charlie flippantly “ To run up and down it?”
He took me seriously.
“About five minutes. A bit less.”
“Go on then.” I said, never expecting for a moment that he would take me seriously. I should have known better. Charlie isn’t capable of resisting a dare. In a moment he was off, sprinting across the grass and up the steps. As we watched the distant pink vested figure Gorilla wandered up, he had been to get a cup a tea.
“What are you looking at?”
We told him. He shook his head at the madness of the gringo but said nothing.
Charlie had reached the top and was on his way back down. I checked my watch. As he reached the bottom it was clear that he had given it everything. He ran back across the avenue and collapsed in a heap, panting and retching from the exertion.
“Sorry mate. You’ll have to go again. That was five minutes and twelve seconds.”
Fortunately he was too breathless to reply.

The character of the trip had changed with the group although the two things were related only in part. The main change in the nature of the trip was because we were no longer out hiking in the wilderness of the National Parks, no longer looking at wonders of the natural world. Instead, for the next few weeks we would be seeing mostly the ruins of the Central American pre-Hispanic civilisations, Olmec, Mayan, Toltec, Aztec. We would be seeing not the timeless and indestructible creations of nature and geology but the remnants of the much more fragile works of man. Mexico and Central America have plenty of ruins to see. Teotihuacan was just the first in a long line that would include Oaxaco, Chichen-Itza, Tulum, Copan, Tikal and many others along the way.
The change of personnel had also had its impact. The older members of the trip had left us and we had two new, younger couples. There were also two Australian women travelling together, four new English women and a very loud and gregarious German guy, Ingo, whose twin aims of drinking Central America dry of tequila and sleeping with every woman between the ages of sixteen and sixty that he met were, only briefly and intermittently, amusingly eccentric. On the whole the new blood had rejuvenated the group. It promised to be another good trip.

The second of our ruins was Monte Alban, just outside the town of Oaxaco (pronounced Wah-Hack-Co). I’d love to be able to report something about it but aside from the fact that it looked like a football stadium where someone had put a pile of rocks on the centre spot, my mind is blank on the subject. Its easy enough to explain, ten minutes after we had started our tour of it my mind - along with everyone else’s had shut down. It was all Elmer’s fault. Elmer was our guide and he was certainly no Gorilla although his insights and discussions were certainly as diverse. He told us about Pythagorous theorem, the Great Wall of China, Stonehenge, prehistoric medicine, astronomy and God-knows-what else. All of it was accompanied by a series of stick drawings in the sand. The problem was that if there is a more boring and duller human being employed as a guide anywhere on the planet I sincerely hope I never meet him. He looked like a blind blues singer and spoke in a flat didactic monotone that would, had it had a little more character, have been almost robotic. It was impossible to keep the mind focused on anything he was saying and soon we had all wandered away to look at the view of Oaxaco at the foot of the hill. For anyone contemplating a tour of Mexican ruins the best advice I can give at Monte Alban is ask for Elmer so that you can identify him and then pick another guide, any other guide.

Oaxaco is a lovely city. The streets are lined with delightful colonial buildings, the Zocalo is ringed with cafe’s and restaurants where you can sit on the pavement and watch the colourful world whirl past your eyes. There aren’t too many people trying to sell you things and the ones that are there aren’t too persistent. When you tire of sitting you can stroll along the narrow straight pedestrian streets and just admire the architecture. I made a point of walking around with the ‘new people’ as we had only been together for a short time and the group wasn’t integrating very well yet. It’s trite but true that it’s much better when the whole group gels properly. I’d travelled too often with groups that have started out wary and ended up at war to want to do it again.
Oh, for the power of foresight.

This group though was fine. It was only a certain initial reticence and the natural difficulty of jumping into a crowd that are already friends that was keeping them slightly apart.
Late in the afternoon I had to leave them. I was in the cooking group for the day, joining my new team of Richard and Yashmine for our first meal together. Richard was an Englishman who had already been travelling solo for quite some time and Yashmine was travelling as far as Ecuador and then planning to do her own thing from there. I want to try very hard not to be mean about Yashmine, I was mean enough to her in real life without being nasty now. Much as I’d like to get on with everyone I meet life isn’t like that. Sometimes someone just, for no very good reason, rubs up the wrong way. Until now I had formed no real opinion of her but as the three of us went down to the market to buy the food for dinner I started to find myself being irritated. It was only petty things such as the way that - had we followed her suggestions for our vegetable curry - we would have had every type of vegetable known to man in it and enough to feed the whole of Mexico City. Or the way that, for reasons I accept were completely outside her control, she arrived to cook dinner so late that not only had Richard and I finished cooking it but we had all finished eating it. It wasn’t her fault but it was still a little irritating. Oh well I’m not going to say any more except when I come to the story that reflects entirely to her credit and entirely to my shame.
Even without Yashmine’s help we managed to produce a dinner that was pretty well to everyone’s taste - everyone that is except Beer who had an aversion to spicy food that bordered on the pathological. I thought the results of our culinary labours was pretty tasty although possibly too mild. Fooled by my assurances he tucked into a plate for it and after only a couple of forkfuls ran for the water and drank down several litres. For the rest of the trip he treated everything I ever cooked with the caution that is normally lavished on unexploded bombs and to this day accuses me of trying to poison him.

In all the places that I had travelled so far, and in all the places that I would travel in the coming months, I encountered no town as pretty as San Cristobal. Towards the end of my trip there was Paraty in Argentina but even that has a sort of holidaymaker phoniness about it that undermines it’s admitted beauty. San Cristobal has no such problem. Not only are its narrow parallel cobbled streets lined with gorgeous buildings in pastel shades of blue and orange but they all belong perfectly where they are. In the Plaza 31 de Marzo there is a splendid if rather blocky cathedral and the square itself is wide and tree lined, surrounded by large colonial buildings with balconies that overhang the pavements and fill the corners with black shadows. The insides of the buildings, at least of all the bars and restaurants that I visited, are equally attractive - well maintained wooden interiors with bright cheerful decoration and prints by Diego Riviera or Frieda Karla on every wall. It’s the external colours though that capture the eye and the imagination. The courtyard of our baroque hotel was a cartoon bright profusion of blue and orange walls and pillars complemented by the wooden furniture and the terracotta pots filled with all sorts of trees and bushes and flowers. There was a wheelbarrow filled with dried sunflowers . Brass lamps, trimmed with blue flowers, hung down from the ornately scrolled wall tops. It was a perfect idyllic place to sit on a sunny afternoon with a cold drink, writing and reading. I sat there and composed a piece for my local newspaper, something a rant actually as the idyllic surroundings here contrasted markedly with the stop we had made on the way at the Sumidero Canyon.
Not that there is anything wrong with the canyon itself. On the contrary it is a beautiful place, a massive fissure in the ground through which the Rio Grande de Chiapas flows. Not only is it spectacularly beautiful but it’s the heart of tourist country. You can take a boat ride, either a fast speedboat or something a little slower along it and admire the walls of the canyon and the scenery. At one point a waterfall washes down for hundreds of feet over the trees plastering their boughs and branches to the mountainside like dark green blankets draped over the rocks. It’s a wonderful place. At least it’s a wonderful place until you look down into the water and then Mexico’s problem comes back at you with a vengeance. The surface of the water is covered with rubbish, a hideous flotsam of plastic bottles, rusty cans, pieces of wood, bags of rubbish and pieces of broken furniture. Where the eddies and currents move it into the rocks and crevices of the shoreline or one of the many high and echoing caves it is even worse, trapped and reinforced until the water is hardly visible at all.

I had been angered by the needlessness of it but as I walked around the streets of San Cristobal and noticed that they were unusually clean. I have no idea why. Perhaps the people there realise what a true treasure their town is and keep it that way. Perhaps the authorities are more ecologically minded than elsewhere in the country. Perhaps the streets weren’t really any better than elsewhere and it was just my perception of it as a beautiful place that blinded me to the reality although that seems unlikely. In any case real or imagined I was moved by the contrast to sit down and write what can only be described as an angry piece about the problem. I’ve just discovered now that I’m still angry about it. When I see the fly tipping and thoughtless, casual side of the road dumping that goes on in my own country I know that places like Mexico - and it isn’t alone - are much much worse but if we keep on trying I’m sure we’ll get there in the end.

With my rant over and temporarily out of my system I went on a village tour and let someone else rant for a while. Mercedes Hernandez is a remarkable woman. Her tours of the villages are so popular that several of the guide books mention her specifically although I was going by Helen’s recommendation. She is a short round woman who can easily be spotted by the enormous multicoloured umbrella that she waves in the air in the square where the tours begin. We went first to the village of Chamula which was - by village standards - quite large. Mercedes took us to several houses to show us the contrasting lifestyles. The first was a stout brick built building belonging to a local politician, an important man in the village who nevertheless had only a one roomed dwelling - all of the houses we saw were single roomed construction. Inside there was an electric light and a fireplace but very little furniture. Food was stored not in cupboards but in sacks and bags hanging from the rafters. We sat down on the floor while Mercedes talked about local and national politics in equally uncomplimentary terms. In the San Cristobal area, she told us, there are about 450,000 indigenous Indians. The ethnic mix is weighted in their favour by eighty percent to two percent Spanish with the remaining eighteen being mostly mesquite - of mixed Spanish-Indian descent. The two per cent hold virtually all the power. In England it was remarkable that the Conservative party held power for fifteen years. In Mexico one party has been in office for seventy years. Even when it comes to English politics I have only a minimal political awareness but in matters of foreign politics I know even less. I had of course heard of the Zapatista and thought them to be one more bunch of the lunatic terrorists that seem to have filled the twentieth century. Mercedes view was quite different. While not agreeing with their methods she described them as being at the very least an organisation that cares deeply about raising the lot of the Indians. The official government line was, she suggested, aimed less at convincing the world that the Zapatista are monsters than at convincing the Indians to turn against the people who want to help them. The extensive government road building program was only incidentally helping the causes and tourism and the national infrastructure and was in fact aimed at greater troop mobility.

All this political comment gave the impression of Mercedes as a firebrand but at our next stop she changed tack and started to expound her own personal beliefs. We were visiting a house that was built of wood and was much smaller. The inside was decorated with enough flowers to stock Kew Gardens. It was, she explained, a kind of shrine and the flowers were constantly tended and replaced with fresh ones by the family who lived there. She described their religious views as a comparison to her own which appeared to be a unique synthesis of Buddhism, the local beliefs and Catholicism with a large spoonful of New Age Mysticism thrown into the pot to spice it. This was simply another facet of her complicated character although everything about her was filled with an astonishing caring and compassion for the community in which she lived.
Senecanta was an even larger and clearly more prosperous and progressive town. The people’s clothes were brighter and there was a more open and friendly attitude - in Chamula I had felt a certain wariness on the part of the villagers. For the first time we visited not the home of someone important, or a home made into a shrine but an ordinary clay built house. About twenty of us squeezed in and it could hardly accommodate us. Ironically although it seemed poorer than either of the others it also seemed happier. The mother and two daughters were at home preparing dinner in a pot buried in the fire at one end of the simple open room. At the other end were a bed and some mats on the floor for sleeping and in the middle, marked by a single wooden bench was the living room. Everything needed around the home, kitchen utensils, brooms, food and so on was hung from hooks on the walls. Although by western standards it all seemed hopelessly primitive it was as happy a home as I have seen. With Mercedes as their translator and with lots of giggling and laughter at these strange gringo guests that were looking at their perfectly ordinary home they described their way of life to us. It left me briefly longing for the simplicity of it all although that was an effect that wore off when I was back at the hotel sipping a cold drink after a hot shower.

Nevertheless it had been a fascinating and thought provoking afternoon made all the more so by having such an opinionated and outspoken guide.