Mexico's canyon del sumidero

It honestly felt like I was in Jurassic park with the 1000m high rock walls surrounding us, the pelicans and other species of birds flying over and the crocodiles basking in the sun. Although as far as I know, as opposed to Jurassic park, humans are not at risk as every year there is a major international open water competition where swimmers from all over the world swim through the canyon and there have never been incidents of the crocodiles attacking the swimmers. This beautiful canyon is only 1h30 or so from San Cristobal de Las Casas it's definitely worth a visit. Impressive figure: apprently every year they need to clean about 3000 tons of waste that accumulate in the canon due to its location downstream from many big cities.

 

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Pakal the Mayan King

We arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas and were introduced to a famous Mayan king through a rather interesting play that may have caused us to giggle more than once. It was told in a local indigenous language with very few subtitles, which made the story quite challenging to follow.

Pakal, the king, lived till he was 80 and was very tall, he is an emblematic figure of Palenque, an archeological site close by. The play showed some of their rituals, such as piercing their genitals or thigh with a needle. The blood that came out was burnt and the smoke represented their offering to the gods. It felt a bit like a smoky room with people on drugs hallucinating. There are carvings in Palenque that explain this ritual.

We also got to see the famous ball game, they used light projections to show the trajectory of the ball. It would have been more exciting to see it with a real rubber ball but I believe it's quite complicated to play, especially on a small stage play.

 

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The Mexican national car

Before I move on to the next state we visited: Chiapas. I thought I would talk about what seems to be Mexico's national car: The Beetle! It's everywhere, I hadn't noticed at first but once Emma pointed it out I didn't stop seeing them. Volkswagen had some big factories in Puebla and produced the Beetle until early 2000's. Apparently the last beetle in the world was produced in Puebla in 2003.

 

 

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Puzzle Pyramids - built without any mortar

This was an important Zapoteca place of worship. A distinguishing feature of these pyramids is that they were built without any mortar. Pieces of the pyramid were stacked and fitted together in such a way that no type of cement was needed - this is the such archeological site in Mexico I believe. The small pieces of stones were fitted together to form these pretty patterns (the cement seen in the pictures was added as part of the restoration process, but you can clearly see most stones have no cement between them).

Oldest and biggest tree (in the world?)

The tule tree in Oaxaca is quite impressive. I had my doubts about going to visit it, but I'm glad I saw this colossal tree that is over 2000 years old and has a trunk diameter of 15 m! When I asked what the entry fee of 10 pesos was for, they said it was to contribute towards the 14 kilos of water they need to feed it each day! Here's a tree-selfie, some of the people on the left can give you an idea of the size of the tree.

I would expect such a huge tree to be in the jungle, but less than 10 meters away, its neighbour is none other than this pretty church (the leaves on the top left corner of the picture belong to the tule tree).

Monte Alban - oldest city in mesoamerica

A zapoteca city built in 500 BC and very little is known about how they lived at that time. Our guide kept emphasising that all things that had been told about the place were all speculations - he more or less said that our guess was as good as his.

The ball game is a curious ritual/sport that was played by many civilisations - although it's not clear how similar the game played in this early zapoteca court is to the mayan or aztec game. The overall rules are that a rubber ball was hit mostly using hips and in some cases the players were sacrificed to the gods at the end. Some say it was the winner that was sacrificed, as they wanted to send the most powerful one to the gods. Here you can see one of these courts. 

Oaxaca and it's teachers

Malu Lajous (consultant, civil servant and micro financer) tells us about the situation of the teacher's protest in Oaxaca against some (as many people said, much needed) government reforms. It has been going on for months, when we visited they had been camping in the zocalo for a while. On the second day of the new academic year (19th of August) they closed down the school opposite Malu's house, so the parents started protesting. It was interesting to see these local politics - it felt a bit like being back home in France ;).

 

Picture of the parents protesting outside the school - I didn't want to get too close, seems like journalism photography isn't my forte.

Emma on the comfy 5h ADO bus from Puebla to Oaxaca.

Part of Malu's beautiful garden, instead of a cement wall she has a wall of cactus separating the garage from the garden.

 

 

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