San Cristobal de las Casas

After a long trip, since one road was blocked and the bus had to take another route, we found a nice spot at Merida’s partner hostel. After the first sight of San Cristobal we fell in love this little town which sits on over 2000m altitude.

Early next morning we joined a tour to two close by villages with indigenous people. In the first village – Chamula – we visited a cemetery. The interesting part about the cemetery where the different colours of the wooden crosses – white for kids, green for middle aged and black for older people. It was strange to walk over the graves.

The Indigenous in this area are very superstitious and don’t want to have pictures taken from them. They believe you take away their spirit and might do something bad to them with some voodoo. You were allowed to take pictures of the scenery and if a group of people were on it that wasn’t a problem.

Especially officials don’t like to be on a photo and so the police officers run from one tourist to the other who didn’t want to respect those rules.

The church was beautifully decorated with saints and thousands of candles – unfortunately also no pictures allowed so you have to come for yourself to check this out. The floor was covered in pine needles and families were sitting together and burning candles.

In Zinacantán the villagers are dressed in those stunning clothes covered with flowers made out of fantastic needle work. The men plant flowers and the women do the weaving and needle work. In town we visited a Casa where the women showed us the weaving and cooked delicious tacos for us. Michael couldn’t resist and bought some beautiful weavings.

Since we are already in Chiapas land we heard we have to explore the Cañón del Sumidero. On the damming the Río Grijalva we followed the Cañón and saw some crocodiles and birds. Suddenly we were in a river of plastic bottles. In rainy season all the garbage from the area gets washed down in to the river. It was pretty sad to see. Who invented plastic which will last forever and covers our planet.

We stayed in total for 5 nights in San Cristobal since I caught a cold and needed to rest. But we finally get ready for Central America and Guatemala.

Accommodation: Rossco Hostel

Price: MXN 500 double room, own bathroom (coupon from partner hostel so we
         got one night for free)

Comment: quiet area, accept the fireworks from the churches are a bit crazy,
                beautiful garden