Down Mexico Way

  Stephanie and I went on a vacation in Mexico last fall.  Eschewing the typical coastal tourist destinations of Cancun or Acapulco or Puerto Villarta, we chose instead to go tramping through the jungles and ruins of the deep south of Mexico, through the cities of Palenque and San Cristobal in the state of Chiapas, and on to the incredibly-fun-to-both-spell-and-say capital city of the state of Oaxaca ("wah-HAH-kah").  Knowing that strangers' vacation stories are perhaps the most fascinating things that exist, here are some of ours.

Day 2 - Bonampak and Yaxchilan

   About an hour south of Palenque, tucked into the Lacandon Jungle, are the ancient Mayan cities of Bonampak and Yaxchilan.   Pronounce them any way you want, it still won't be right. 

   Bonampak is little more than a small clearing in the middle of a thick jungle. By Mayan standards, it was a two-bit town; a layover for caravans running from Palenque to Yaxchilan; the Cleveland airport of the Mayan Empire.  Archaeologists discovering the ruins in the jungle might have just ignored it and gone out for some tequila had it not been for a trio of murals painted on the inside of one temple. In each of three small trapezoidal rooms, badly faded paintings document-- well, it's not abundantly clear what they document. Time has not been kind to the Michaelangelos of Bonampak. What may have once been vivid representations of significant events in town are now largely indistinct, badly faded blobs of color. 

    That wasn't such a problem for me with the first mural, which, according to the interpretive signs, showed a victory celebration involving musicians and jugglers or something.  Yawn.  I didn't travel 5,000 miles and climb about 80 crumbling stone stairs to see a thousand-year old yearbook photo of the Bonampak High School Marching Band.  Ditto for the second one, which was even less visible, and apparently featured the presentation of the Emperor's heir.  Baby pictures, big deal. 

   The last mural, though, was a humdinger:  prisoners of war lined up on the temple steps, pleading for their lives while Emperor Shield Jaguar got ready to skewer one of them on a pike.  At least that's what the sign said was there.  I couldn't make out most of the gory details, but I was able to find a tiny recognizable figure in one corner: a chocolate-skinned prisoner on his knees, mouth agape, stared pop-eyed at his bleeding fingers, allegedly after having had his fingernails yanked out.  I kind of hoped that they'd have t-shirts of the guy at the gift shop, so I could get one for my secretary.

    South of Bonampak, hidden in a bend of the muddy river that marks the Mexico-Belize border is Yaxchilan, a genuine Mayan metropolis.  It's a groovy place, with overgrown jungle paths connecting the different construction sites, thus allowing you to play "Indiana Jones discovers the ancient temple" over and over again.  Down on the main plaza lies an "I"-shaped "ball court."  I remembered seeing photos of these playing fields in my high school Spanish class.  As I recall, we were shown photos of long, narrow playfields, sunk between two high tiers of stone bleachers, with small stone rings mounted high on each wall.  My Spanish teacher explained that vicious games of proto-basketball substituted for battles between warring factions; mighty all-day contests to cram a small, hard ball through a 20-foot high ring while avoiding the club-wielding barbarians from the other team.

    As it turns out, that was a bunch of crap.  First of all, I've had offices bigger than the playing field of Yaxchilan's ball court.  Second, the terraced "bleachers" weren't there for bloodthirsty fans to root on the hometown boys, but were actually the remains of two sloped "walls" that were covered with stucco to allow for some crowd-pleasing bounces.  In fact, there didn't appear to be any room anywhere for crowds to watch.   Third, it turns out that the game didn't involve chasing down and clubbing the guy with the ball, but "using hips, elbows, shoulders, and knees to move the ball and score points."  Are you kidding me?  I came all the way down to Mexico to check out the site of some ancient games of hacky-sack? 

     It was only of marginal consolation to see that anthropologists believe that the captain of the winning team was honored by being sacrificed.  How is it that this game survives a thousand years and migrates to liberal arts campuses in the northeast more or less intact, yet the parties somehow manage to forget this most important rule?

   Inside Yaxchilan's evocatively-named Temple 33, high up on a hill guarded by nut-throwing spider monkeys cavorting in the tree limbs, is a decapitated statute of Emperor Shield Jaguar. Or maybe it's his son, Bird Jaguar.  It's hard to tell people apart when they're a thousand years old and covered in bat shit.  Anyway, the temple is divided up into several shallow alcoves.  In one sits a large stone torso; in the adjacent alcove lies the statue's head, clad in an elaborate-but-still-quite-manly headdress.  According to an ancient Mayan legend-- ok, according to Lonely Planet, really-- it was believed that when the statue's head was returned to its body, the world would come to an end.

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Figure 1.   Armageddon, Mayan Style

   Stop and think about that for a second:  your entire existence can be abruptly snuffed out at the whim of a handful of Mayan frat boys, drunk on fermented guayabana juice or whatever it was the ancient Mayans drank, sneaking into the temple one night and doing about 45 seconds of heavy lifting.   It seemed like building a headless torso and a torsoless head, knowing full well that putting the two together would bring the Apocalypse, was just asking for trouble, especially when it was decided to keep the two pieces in adjacent closets. You'd like to think that the powers that be might be a little more cautious to prevent a premature rapture, by, say, tossing the head in the river or trading it to the Spanish Conquistadors for guns or penicillin or something.  It wasn't exactly clear how the statue actually lost its head.  On the one hand, it seemed a little dicey that someone propose lopping off the head of a perfectly good statue of the emperor just to spice up the already lively story of Judgment Day.   On the other hand, concocting a full-blown threat of the End of the World just to cover up some shoddy workmanship by the sculptor seemed to be going a little overboard.  Couldn't he just have apologized and epoxied the pieces back together?

Day 5 - San Cristobal de las Casas

   On-- oh hell, I can't remember the name of streets, for God's sake.   It's hard enough to even find out a street's name in San Cristobal.   Sometimes, street names are occasionally written on small plaques, inconspicuously affixed to the side of the building on the streetcorner.  More often, however, street signs are completely absent and the name of any given street is consigned solely to local knowledge.  But I digress.

   On some street in San Cristobal de las Casas is a funky orange stucco hotel called the Hotel El Calle.  It had stylish blue trim, a spacious, two-story plant-filled atrium, cable television, and free bottled drinking water.  None of which entered into our decision to stay there, which was driven solely by the fact that rooms were a paltry $18 a night. 

   We awoke the first morning to the sounds of conflict echoing across the upper courtyard of the hotel.  I couldn't make out the words, which were definitely in Spanish, but I thought it sounded like two young schoolgirls, down on the street in front of the building, taunting each other.  I drifted in and out of sleep for the rest of the morning, but the girls' bickering, or whatever it was, flared up repeatedly, long past the time normal girls should have settled their differences and gone off to oogle boys or paint their nails or whatever it is young girls do.  By the time we finally got dressed and got on our way, the sidewalk in front of the hotel was empty.

   After a heavy day of slumming around San Cristobal, we came back to the hotel only to discover that the girls had returned and the argument had apparently not been resolved.  They must've been the daughters of the chambermaids or waitresses in the restaurant's hotel or something, because they were definitely back and still engaged in an animated discussion, only this time, they sounded like definitely up on the second floor near our room.  Staccato bursts of incomprehensible teenage yelling echoed above us as we climbed the stairs towards our room, but arriving on the landing, no one was there.

   We did, however, discover the hotel's mascot.  Tucked around a corner at the far end of the upstairs courtyard was a large cage containing a bright green parrot.  As we approached, the parrot gripped a bar of the cage with its beak, flipped itself upside down, and hung from the top of the cage by its claws. "Hola!" it announced.

   "Hola!" we replied.

   "Hola!" it said again. 

   "What's your name, little fella?" I asked.

   "Hola!" it said.

   Having thus exhausted the potential topics for conversation with an inverted, Spanish-speaking bird, we watched it swing back and forth like a pendulum and chew on the cage for a few minutes before we finally lost interest and headed back to our room.  We got inside, opened the window of our room, and laid down on the bed for a siesta. Within about three minutes, the argument between the two girls started again.  They were definitely nearby. 

    Determined to find out what was going on, I snuck back out of the room, now in my super-secret undercover spy mode.   I slowly and silently inched along the hallway, hearing fragments of what sounded like Spanish curses echoing across the upper courtyard.  I stopped at the corner of the building near the bird and listened again.  The girls were definitely there, probably fighting over who would have to clean out the bird's cage, or yelling at it to stand upright.  But when I stepped around the corner, there was just the bird, working its way up and down the cage with its beak and claws.  When it saw me, it flipped upside-down again and chirped "Hola!"

   "Stupid bird," I thought, and turned around to go back to my room.  As soon as I disappeared back around the corner, the girl's voices started back up again.  Peeking around the corner, there hung the bird, upside-down, repeating an argument it had probably overheard echoing up from the street, possibly months or years ago.  Expertly mimicking the voices of the girls and recalling every word that was spoken, the bird was like an upside-down, pooping tape recorder. 

   The original combatants probably grew up years ago and left San Cristobal for Mexico City or Houston years ago, probably now married and having kids.  They've probably lost touch with, or even forgotten about, each other. But on the second floor of the Hotel El Calle, deep in the State of Chiapas, they will forever be the annoying girls waking up the tourists, thanks to the boredom of an upended parrot.  

Day 6 - San Juan Chamula

   The hills around San Cristobal are dotted with tiny villages, providing a rural contrast to the crowded sprawl down in the valley.  One of the closest, a mere 10 minute drive in an overstuffed communal taxi, is the village of San Juan de Chamula.  Tourist guides promote a visit to Chamula to sample the colorful embroidery done by its weavers, or, perhaps more perversely, to gawk at the traditional hats worn by the men, which are festooned with bright pink ribbons hanging down from the brim.  None of the books mentioned the Coca-Cola.

We rolled into Chamula in the early afternoon, by which time the weekly market in the town square was winding down its activities.  Hours earlier, the square had been thick with people, perusing stall after stall containing heaps of dried chili peppers, piles of fresh-baked bread covered with flies, and scrawny live chickens. Now, the vendors had mostly packed up their wares for the week and gone home, leaving behind a blanket of fruit rinds, scraps of burlap, paper, and assorted debris that made the morning after Woodstock look like a freshly-mown croquet lawn.  Packs of stray dogs roamed through piles of trash, looking for a snack.

   Life in the rural villages of Mexico revolves around the church, and each town took great pride in their chapel, and Chamula was no different.  Presiding over the whole scene from the far end of the square was the village's church.  The small, mission-style whitewashed building with bright blue and yellow trim looked like it had been sculpted out of gingerbread and frosted.  Well, o.k., Chamula was a little different from other towns.  On the members of a small wooden cross at the top of the steeple was the legend "Viva Bautista."  Huh?  No mention of the big JC?

    Well, it turns out that the Spanish missionaries' efforts to convert the people of Chamula to Catholicism was only partially successful.  As it was explained to us, the Chamulans gravitated to the Bible, but not because of the headliner.  While Jesus may have gotten the bulk of the screen time, the Chamulans enjoyed the subtle, understated performance of John the Baptist, and they decided to worship him instead.   Jesus, they had decided, was John's little brother, who was a nice enough fellow himself, but that John was the big enchilada, salvation-wise.  Thus, the cross on the steeple praised John, not Jesus.  Camel-skin-wearing, grasshopper-eating, decapitated by Herod to please his trampy exotic-dancer of a neice, John.

    Naturally, the peculiar religious beliefs of the Chamulans made seeing the inside of their church only more enticing.  However, our sources advised as to undertake a visit with great caution-- Lonely Planet warned against taking photos inside the church, going so far as to briefly relate an almost-certainly apocryphal story about two German tourists who were hacked to death with machetes by angry villagers when they refused to stop snapping pictures.  The driver of our taxi carefully explained that, before heading to the church, we had to stop and obtain permission from the "Chamula Tourist Office" across the square.  Obtaining this "permission" entailed paying 50 pesos each to an indifferent official inside a dark office in exchange for a slip of paper and another warning about taking pictures.   Tromping across the square, we arrived at the front of the church only to face another pair of dour, stone-faced officials who checked our permission slip before waving us towards the thick oak door.

    The change from bright sunlight to the darkness of the windowless church meant that my first sensations involved the murmuring sound of people chanting prayers and the smell of pine.  As my eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark, I noticed that the floor, all the way up to the altar, was empty, save for a thin layer of pine needles.  All the pews and benches that were probably used on Sundays were pushed off to the sides and covered with sheets, like the church was some junior high school cafeteria preparing to host a sock hop.  Scattered across the front half of the floor near the altar were tiny grids of flickering lights, with dark figures scuttled back and forth among them.

     A church official standing off to one side gestured to me.   At first, I assumed he had noticed Stephanie's camera bag, and was preparing to give us another warning.  But instead, he motioned for us to step up from the back of the church and get a closer look.  Stepping forward, we found that the grids of light were actually rows and rows of birthday candles that the villagers lit and methodically stuck to the floor in pools of wax drippings, all the while quietly chanting prayers.   After setting up the grids, the villagers, usually accompanied by restless children, kneeled in front and continued praying. 

   Then, one of the kneeling churchgoers reached into a pocket and pulled out a tall glass bottle of Coca-Cola, popped the cap off, and took a swig.  "That seems a little profane," I whispered to Stephanie, "drinking soda in church."  However, still chanting quiet prayers, the woman stood up and, hunched over, proceeded to pour a small trickle of Coke in between each of the rows of candles.   After irrigating the whole display, she returned to kneeling and praying, only to begin lighting a new row of candles and pouring more Coke on the floor.  The church official quietly motioned to us to feel free to wander around, so we slowly circled around the floor, watching other worshipers praying over their own displays, large and small, of candles.  Each one had several bottles of soda by their sides, mostly Coke, but other flavors were also represented, including the odd bottle of orange-flavored Fanta, all of which they reverently poured onto the floor to mingle with candle wax and pine needles.

     We never really managed to obtain a coherent explanation of what we saw; I figured that if photos inside the church got you a machete haircut, asking pointed questions why they worshipped Coca-Cola especially in a language I didn't speak too well, was asking for trouble.  Maybe, for poor villagers, spending a few pesos a day on soda was a tangible, penitential sacrifice for their accumulated sins (and maybe the brand of soda was even significant-- Coke for your basic sins, Diet Coke for minor infractions, orange for the really nasty stuff).  Maybe the whole place was a Central American equivalent of the South Pacific cargo cult-- the bands of Pacific island natives who mistook World War II Air Force pilots ditching planes filled with crates of food and supplies as Gods delivering manna from on high.  Or maybe I was just being provincial about the whole thing.  After all, other Christian denominations work wine or grape juice into their ceremonies, and soda was probably more affordable to poor villagers.  And the whole John the Baptist fixation was probably no weirder than the Catholics' fixation on saints generally was to more mainstream Christian denominations.  Stephanie, for her part, was practically a convert.   Quiet, contemplative spirituality of any stripe was just her speed, and the quirky integration of both pine needles and multinational conglomerates into the religious canon only made it more appealing.

     After leaving the church, we took one final walk around the square, and it was only then that we noticed the fleet of Coca-Cola trucks lined up along one side.  More than a dozen trucks were parked, sometimes three deep, and a small army of workers were busy unloading plastic trays of bottles onto hand trucks, while others diligently stacked pallets of empty bottles onto the trucks for re-filling.   The side of the trucks bore the Coca-Cola logo, and indicated that they came from a distributor right there in Chamula. Given that the big city of San Cristobal was less than 10 minutes down the road, and that the entire population of Chamula was probably less than 1,000 people, the fact that the town had its very own Coke distributor suggests that the people of the sleepy village of Chamula certainly managed to find time to do a hell of a lot of sinning.

Day 10 - The Experiment

     Okay, I'm going to try to keep this as brief and dignified as possible.

     Everybody's heard of Montezuma's Revenge, the tendency of some travelers to Mexico to come down with a case of diarrhea. Travel guides-- everyone's favorite source of medical information-- explain that the condition is triggered by strains of bacteria in the water supply that are not present in America's faucets.   The bacteria aren't particularly harmful, just foreign to the typical U.S. immune system, so that Mexicans and (this is the important part) foreigners who have been sufficiently acclimated to it can safely drink water straight from the tap.  The rest of us are advised to insist on bottled water in restaurants, to stay away from salads (which may contain vegetables washed in tap water), refuse to drink out of glasses (which may not have been washed well enough), and generally avoid anything else that might bring you into contact with these bacterial banditos.

     Just about everyone I've known who has traveled to Mexico has either come down with a case of Montezuma's Revenge, or at least had someone they're traveling with who got to do some extensive "indoor sightseeing."  And these were people who knew what they were getting into and scrupulously followed the rules.  I just assumed that intestinal distress was effectively unavoidable, and I waited for it to hit us.

    So, by the last evening of our trip, when neither one of us had been diverted one whit from our regular bathroom schedule, I had come to a conclusion.   "Think about it," I told Stephanie, "it's been 10 days.  We've eaten lots of stuff from God knows where, including that tamale you bought from some anonymous woman in the market, and that lunch at what seemed like a bus station.   Sure, we've had bottled water everywhere we went, but we've eaten just about everything else.  All without even a moment of digestive discomfort.  The human body is a marvelously adaptable thing.  So, I submit, that, over the last 10 days, we must've become acclimated to the local bacteria, and could conceivably drink the water without ill effect." 

    Stephanie was not impressed.  "10 days isn't long enough to get used to the bacteria," she said matter of factly.  "My friend lived in Cancun for a year and a half and still got sick from the water."

   Clearly, as I explained, her friend was a person of delicate constitution, whereas I was a magnificently robust specimen.  "Fine," I said, after an extended discussion in which she summarily dismissed my argument.  "I propose a controlled experiment to test my hypothesis: tomorrow morning, before we leave for the airport, I will drink one glass of tap water.  You, as the control group, can have the rest of the bottled water.  If I don't get sick, I will expect you to concede my point."

   And so, with only minor fanfare, I stood at the foot of the bed the next morning with a glass of water in my hand.  (Stephanie had raised an objection to my drinking actual tap water, citing undocumented concerns about genuine pollutants, but offered to compromise by consenting to me drinking a glass of water from a large decanter that the housekeeping staff left on the nightstand each day, and which she believed probably contained bottled water specifically for tourist consumption.  I raised a concern that introducing uncertainty about the origin of the water in the decanter left my experiment open to criticism when it came to peer review, she told me to shut up and just drink the damn water so we can go get a cab.)  "To science!" I toasted, before knocking it back, finishing with a lip-smacking "aahhh!"  Stephanie rolled her eyes and asked if we could leave now.

    Twelve hours later, back in New York, I was aglow with the illumination of discovery.  "I feel great," I explained, performing a few desultory jumping jacks to highlight my point.  "See," I said, "we adapted."  Stephanie was uninterested in discussing the scientific ramifications, choosing instead to go to bed.

   At 3:00 a.m., I awoke.  Stumbling to the bathroom to renew an acquaintance with the plumbing I was going to be enjoying for the next 72 hours, I finally understood the significance of the cross-legged, grimacing figure seated on the reverse of the 100-peso note.   It was not some ancient Mayan war god; it was Us.

Posted: 2/22/02