It’s been a few days since I wrote a blogpost, much less posted one. I tried to write one last night, but we were camping and the bichas (bugs) were a little too attracted to my computer screen. Tonight we’re in an amazing little hotel in San Crstobal in Chiapas, which set us back the horrible sum of ~$32.
So, since I last wrote, we spent two nights (Tuesday & Wednesday) in an RV park in Catemaco, a little town on the shore of one of the prettiest lakes I’ve ever seen. We, of course, rolled into camp at dusk and set up the tent and got to cooking in the dark. Would we have it any other way? Chicken in lime juice with zucchini and avocado. Another pretty darn good camp meal, if I do say so myself.
We got up the next morning and headed into Catemaco proper to find a canoe to rent. No luck there, we headed around the north part of the lake for a hotel that our guidebook said rented canoes. Never found it. When we were about halfway around the lake, we came across a cowboy doing a pretty miserable job of wrangling two bulls. We carefully passed him and ended up on a horrible dirt road. Turning around we carefully passed the incompetent bull-wrangler and stopped at a hotel to ask if they rented canoes. While we were getting out of the car, the bulls came charging through the gate of the hotel (fortunately, we had just pulled over across the street). One of the bulls bumped hard into a car parked inside the gate and then the cowboy managed to get them out of the hotel. ¡Qué toro loco!
We rented a couple of kayaks and paddled out into the lake. There were all sorts of wildlife in the lake, including a ton of different species of birds. We watched a small bird of prey catching fish in its talons and a couple of other bids diving from the sky under the surface to come up with some fish. It was a really cool experience.
After the lake, we headed into the small town of Santiago de Tuxtla for their Día de San Juan celebrations that we had read about in the guidebook. Turns out there weren’t any celebrations, so after cafés lecheros, we headed to the next town, San Andrés de Tuxtla and went to the Santa Clara cigar factory. They let us walk around and watch the employees hand rolling various cigars. The whole factory smelled of fresh tobacco, like a giant humidor, and watching the workers craft the puros (cigars) so quickly was very interesting indeed.
We returned to our camp site and made friends with an Ontario couple who had recently retired to Mexico and a crazy Floridian who had just left her fifth husband for the RV park. They invited us to go to dinner with them at a private home that runs a restaurant out of the front whenever someone shows up wanting food. That too was a unique experience: the food was excellent and we were able to watch her cook just inside the little house while the entire family sat around watching TV and just generally hanging out. All told, the meal ended up costing us about $2 a piece for empanadas, gnauchas, flautas, tostadas, and platanos. That night we shared a few beers with our Canadian friend Dave, including our last two beers that we had brought from the States.
The next day we headed out toward Palenque, a Mayan ruin site in Northern Chiapas. We set up camp in a funky camp site full of hippies (one of whom juggled). It was only around 4:30 when we pulled in for the night so we were able to set up camp, go for a swim, and still have time to cook in the dark. We had bought a hot plate at the Super Walmart (Los precios más bajos… Siempre) earlier that day, which made cooking the chile that much easier. We poured over some guidebooks and got ready for bed a little early, which turned out to be a fortunate move since it started pouring soon after. We took refuge in the tent listened to the storm while watching the lightning. Early in the morning I awoke to the haunting cry of howler mokeys and something even less pleasant: la tourista (a.k.a. Montezuma’s revenge). To make things even more enjoyable, the camp toilets lacked seats. Apparently we were supposed to bring our own.
After a breakfast of regular oatmeal and honey, we headed out to the Palenque ruins. The ruins were really impressive and we were able to climb all over them, something you definitely wouldn’t have been able to do in the US. Climbing to the top of a temple up on a hill, we had a great view of the ruins and the surrounding lush mountains. Some of the ruins were still only partially excavated from the jungle, so we walked around those and imagined what it would have been like to stumble upon them back when they were first discovered a hundred years ago.
From Palenque we drove 5 hours on the most narrow and winding road we had ever drive on for about 5 hours to go only 200 km to San Cristobal and now we’re in our great hotel, a nice break from the camping and it has a toilet with a seat! Hopefully my stomach will right itself by tomorrow. We’re going to a Mayan town tomorrow to see a church that everyone raves about and then Sunday we’re headed over the border to Guatamala.
¡Hasta Pronto!
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