San Juan Chamula and "Las Grutas"

Mid-morning, Erin and I catch a shuttle to San Juan Chamula, a small town near San Cristobal populated by Tzotzil Mayans who all wear black wool, the men as coats, the women as skirts. There´s nothing very distinctive about the town itself except the church. We have to pay 40 pesos each to enter the church where absolutely no photography is allowed.

The religion here is a cross of Catholicism and the indigenous animistic faith. We enter to the melodically mournful sound of an indigenous band (guitar, accordian and drum)led by a chanting shaman. A fifth person burns musky insense whose thick smoke creates dramatic shafts of light from the two south-facing windows. Another person waits with two live chickens to be sacrificed at the end of the ritual. They all wear the black wool coats. Hundreds and hundreds of candles are lit on the floor, inches from the pine needles placed for the benefit of worshipers´ knees. Ceramic saints in ornate, glass boxes four feet high line the walls. To one side is a saint incased in a ten-foot-high box, at the top of which is a flashing neon star. Inside the boxes, the saints are lit by joyless blue lights and I can´t help but imagine each one of their vivid ceramic faces turning to me in unison. I´m not sure if this is the best or worst place ever to take hallucinagens, but there´s no way in hell I´d ever want to stay the night here alone.

We also check out the local cemetary, but there´s just not much else to explore in the town, so we leave after not much more than an hour.

We grab lunch back in San Cristobal then catch a shuttle to "Las Grutas," a cave system a couple kilometers south of the city (and whose longer name I can´t remember). We´re dropped off at the entrance of a campground similar to any in Oregon. At the far end of the park, we reach the cave entrance and descend. It´s big and dark and moody and epic and I hope you all get to see the pictures. Cami, I was thinking of you while staring up at the stalag...mites? Nope, Wikipedia says stalagtites. As in, they hang from the roof so they have to be stalagTITE. Get it? It goes on for several hundred yards and ends in black oblivion. Apparently, we only get to see a fraction of the cave, the whole of which stretches all the way to under San Cristobal. SO COOL.