Our last couple of days in San Cristobal passed with a hit and a miss with our excursions, good times relaxing at the hostel and quite a horrible day of sickness…
On Saturday we went to Cueva Rancha Nueva a few kilometres outside of the city. We’d read reviews and knew that it wouldn’t be too exciting for Iris and me, but thought it might be good for the kids. The main ‘attraction’ there was a cave, but as far as caves go, it was very uninteresting. The kids weren’t too keen to go in, so I had to entice them by going on a search for ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. Unfortunately he was on holiday.
We also went on a short and expensive horse ride which was also rather underwhelming. The best thing there was some hundred metre slides where you could get up to some frightening speeds by sitting on squashed plastic bottles. Thankfully there were no injuries!
The Puerta Vieja hostal has been a great place to hang out at and we spent the rest of the afternoon there playing soccer with the kids and Simon, a guy from Austria. Liam and Sofia were in the same team and every time they scored, they would yell ‘Goooolllll’, like you hear from commentators of South American football, and run to give each other a big hug – much to the amusement of a crowd of hippie travellers who were sitting in the garden, quietly puffing away at what hippies puff.
The next day we went to a village called San Juan de Chamula which is about 10km from San Cristobal where we visited the market and the local church. It isn’t often a church would make it into the top ten highlights when travelling, but the one in this town was simply amazing and completely unlike anything we’d seen before.
Unfortunately, photography was strictly forbidden in the church, but an internet search for ‘Templo de San Juan’ should bring up some images. There were no seats or pews in the church and the floor was covered in pine needles with worshipers, dressed up in their village attire, sitting and praying over thousands of candles – the smoke of which was illuminated by the morning sun streaming through the windows – making for a very surreal environment. There were also some interesting quirks. One of these was that everyone praying seemed to have their own bottle of coca cola which they were sipping and passing around as they were praying. I’m not sure how that tradition started, but I’m sure it would be a fascinating story!
As we returned to San Cristobal, I started feeling very unwell. An outgoing cold intersected with an incoming stomach bug, making for a very unpleasant combination. I’m unsure which one gave me the fever, but I was in bed for the rest of the day with a temperature often above 40. Not nice.
Thankfully though, with the help of a number of drugs, I was OK-ish today for a bus ride to our next stop, Palenque…
21 people squeezed into the Collectivo for the return trip to San Cristobal
