Tuxtla Gutiérrez

 I have been hesitating to write my first impressions of Chiapas for a number of reasons. Principally I am conflicted, secondarily I hesitate to pass on my sense of conflict. In coming to Chiapas I was intellectually aware of what we were going to be seeing but being here and living a gringo life for. couple of days has forced me to confront those demons that travelers must face up to. I am speaking of poverty.

Most Americans (ie: People from the US and Canada) have an uneasy sense of unfairness when it comes to Mexico. Internet forums are filled with people asking if Mexico is safe, and what they mean isMexico safe for a rich American like me to travel in? The perception is that Americans (from the US and Canada if I have to repeat myself) are at risk because we have more money than most Mexicans. Wealthy Mexicans feel the same way too, worrying about their safety outside their gated guarded communities.

On the whole I argue that perception is mistaken and when considering this separation between haves and have nots I look back at my own childhood when I spent the school year as a child of privilege in an upper class English school for the very wealthy and my vacations mucking it up with very poor Italian farm kids who had no idea how I lived in that faraway country filed with privilege and ease. I played with children who had outhouses and no hot running water, who made rather than bought toys and had no expectations beyond a life of manual labor.  How I separated the two I cannot say beyond the fact that children have an astonishing capacity of acceptance and it is a skill I am forced to summon in Tuxtla Gutierrez. 

Yesterday in the Plaza de Marimbas a 14 ear old boy charged me 75 cents (15 pesos) to clean my sneakers, a job I last had done in the zocalo at Uruapan in Michoacán. "No school?" I asked him once we had established I don't speak the dialect and he would have to talk to me in Spanish, and he said no, smiling. We gave him 20 pesos and he lost interest in US as quickly as a street dog whose hunger you have satisfied.

His buddies waiting for trade took time to do to Rusty what they would never do to their own street dogs and they made a fuss of the former stray who eats all he wants and sleeps on a hundred dollar bed from Costco. Yes, I struggle with contradictions hereabouts.

Can you imagine what "extreme poverty" looks like in Mexico? Chiapas is a border state and in the early days after Spain was vanquished in 1810 and new governments were blossoming Chiapas sought independence from both Guatemala and Mexico who argued over ownership until they signed a treaty in the 1820s and created the modern border between the countries. If you talk to Mexicans here they look at Guatemalans he way Americans look at Mexicans. The poverty rate in Guatemala is such that the Central Americans emigrate illegally to Mexico to look for work. The ironies in these parts mount up.

I would argue that a state that requires a Secretariat of Honesty and Open Government is not doing a good job of providing governance but we have the same problems in the US and they are getting worse. Income inequality is a global phenomenon and always has been. I find myself fortunate to have grown up in an era when income equality was the watchword but in my old age the principles I learned as child, watching the Italian peasants move into the middle class in post World War Two Europe are being eroded, and Chiapas is a glaring example of hopeless poverty.

We tried to drive out to see the Sumidero Canyon but access is closed on Tuesdays and we ended up taking a short tour of the areas on the edge of the city where poverty pushes squads of beggars into the streets like a cloud of insects hovering over cars at traffic lights. I got pretty grumbly with repeated gringo moments as I negotiated domes of the most random traffic yet in Mexico. Cars and motorcycles from all angles, pedestrians waving objects for sale and potholed streets devoid of lane markers. It was interesting and what I really mean is that it was messed up and I had a hard time coping.

I don't have answers nor do I seek them, not least because we live in a world that requires acceptance of inequality and lack of opportunity as a way of coping. Overpaying, heavy tipping, solves nothing but it assuages my inner voice that wishes for fairness in a world where I travel in a $100,000 van and sleep for a change in a Hilton Hotel, free on points, where I am treated as member of the ruling class. The contradictions are stark.

Humans take refuge in art and companionship, they build myths and legends to unite themselves ins hared misery and hope. We went to the only open museum we could find, a hidden museum of Artisan Crafts of Chiapas tucked away behind IHOP with an entrance so hump backed I doubted I could get Gannet 2 in, but I did somehow. Here we learned about the indigenous love of art and belief in weird creations stories.

Humans become yellow panthers...

Scary masks banish night terrors...

And crosses symbolized a tree of life's far as I could gather in some celestial juncture of heaven and earth. The museums tell the hostly of a people in harmony with the earth in some idyllic lifestyle interrupted by what is known politely as the cultural shock of 1492.

We are capable as human beings of managing every kind of indignity through art. 

There is a tourist industry here waiting to be exploited. Its frustrating when you consider the beauty that is being created ina state where people are living on the edge of modern life with no access to the benefits. My cynical self wonders who would benefit if tourism were boosted, if Americans could be persuaded to overcome their fear of poverty...but we all know the story of gentrification and the befits going to the few not the many. And yet there is beauty to be seen in Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

I have sent a couple of days pondering the injustice and my own unwillingness to take a hit. I live a life that drifts, and observes, and ponders and when its not enough I move on.

I am grateful to Webb Chiles the eminence grise of travel and observation of my youth and formative travel years. He says going and seeing and reporting back is the purpose and I hope it is. I wanted to see Chiapas for two reasons and neither concerns social justice. The countryside is said to be extraordinary and we have caught glimpses of immense mountain ranges, startling cliffs and jungles and ravines and we've hardly started. The other reason is to see places that have built a reputation as inaccessible owing to the ager of the residents who seek more from the central government. Twenty years ago when we sailed the coast on our way to El Salvador, Chiapas was rife with revolt and protest. Less so now the reputation persists and I want to see for myself what this mysterious angry land looks like.

Our next stop is San Cristobal de las Casas up in the mountains themselves. There are waterfalls and canyons up there, and local people who create roadblocks and ask for pennies in tolls to allow travelers to pass, an irritation that drives Americans crazy. I read of anger at having to pay one dollar to protestors who will throw rocks at you if try to pass and not pay money to people with nothing. I find such anger bizarre and I want to test my own tolerance.

I don't seek advice or reassurance, answers if there are any will come with time. What I seek from myself is the equanimity to be able to cope when these feelings of revulsion rise up, when the thought uppermost in my mind is anger at lack of leadership.

My skeptical nature forces me to the sidelines and to observe the lives I'd like to see improved. I question what progress might actually be or the benefits it might bring. I've seen too much heartache in the Keys where gentrification and increasing wealth has brought displacement and loss to people I care about. I second guess myself and wonder if stable poverty yields continuity. If community trumps gain.

When asked I tell people our van took five years of work to pay for. We have no children and we have no other home. I don't know if that explains to space ship we travel in, a self contained world on wheels with oven fridge and toilet. We park it on the street and visit museums. We leave Rusty inside and here in Tuxtla we've left the roof top air conditioning on for him such is the heat. It seems absurd to treat a dog to luxuries that humans can't afford. Or does it? I have read the saying it's better to be a rich man's dog than to be a poor man. There's a jolt: I'm rich.

Chiapas will only throw up contradictions without answers but we plan to do our best to see what there is to see. We may well end up lost off line as this is a poor state with limited services and we will be driving mountain roads looking for beauty amid squalor and likely with no way to post reports from the edge of experience. I hope that over time I shall figure out some more satisfactory solution to my angst but for now I have spent a little time seek equanimity, some sort of ability to accept and cope, like a middle class Mexican who lives daily with the stark contradictions and glides by. Chiapas is a challenge and I think I can rise to the occasion.

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I mentioned some rather cheap wine from Valle Redondo sold in supermarkets and I don't recommend the stuff as a way to escape reality but I am including a photograph of the three dollar box of the white version. It comes in white red (Tinto) and pink.

And some other pictures I made along the road to where we are now, a place with strong  WiFi! A city of 600,000 people.

The enrage to Sumidero Canyon closed on Tuesdays:

Layne says I urgently need a beard trim. 

The Marimba Museum closed for Covid indefinitely. Marimbas are played in the park Sunday evenings at six. Layne was pissed we missed them.

The red line leads to an escape ramp for trucks with broken brakes:

Chiapas looks like Mexico from 50 years ago:

Beyond the entrance...outside, life is a museum.

The Road to Chiapas

When we left the waterfalls I had a plan to complete the tour of the peninsula where we had spent the night by continuing on round and then taking a couple of main roads south to our next destination of Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas (which has a Hilton Garden Inn with super powerful WiFi which is how I am uploading these many pictures, thanks to our accumulated Hilton points). Our rough itinerary.

A small touch of home, air conditioning, room service and strong WiFi in a town where afternoon temperatures reach 100 degrees!

Anyway I am getting ahead of myself. We left the waterfall campground Sunday morning, a spur of the moment departure after I walked Rusty in heavy drizzle and both of us decided a day spent parked in the rain in a wet field did not appeal that much. So I engaged first gear manually, and despite my concern, Gannet 2 pulled us straight across the field, uphill on the wet grass. I had engaged the front wheel drive lock so both wheels turned together and I had an eye on trees as possible anchor points if we needed to use our front winch but all was well, no slipping, until we reached the track across our path which lead to the gate and we started to spin as the 21 foot long van perched on the edge of the verge, our weight unbalanced front wheels up and rear wheels down under the lip of the track and we weren't moving. I was reluctant to back up and lose ground down the slope but our front wheels were spinning uselessly. I saw a group of farm hands at the gate watching us. I smiled and waved and they glared back at us looking as best as I could describe as sullen. Fine. I reversed a little and repositioned the van more parallel to the track and we pulled up over the small verge off the grass and onto the gravel. The men continued to stare in a way that I can only describe as not very cheerfully Mexican. We drove away relieved to be gone.

The road round the peninsula onto red to be well paved and we drove along noticing no one waved smiled or even made eye contact as we drove. We did pass one gringa, a tall blonde woman in dayglo green jogging on a collision course pretending not to notice us nerdy vacationers in a van, but we expect US vacationers and US Mexican residents to ignore us if they accidentally cross our path. Mexicans usually smile and wave but around the peninsula they looked away as the elephant hove into view. It was unusual.

We caught occasional glimpses of the Caribbean Sea as we went but the waters were frothed up by the winds and the gray skies gave the place a rather forbidding air. And the people with the sullen faces and eyes averted gave us the creeps. We pressed on, Layne waving and smiling and counting any waves surrendered in return. I know utmost sound odd but Mexicans usually let us know they are glad to see us by waving and smiling, tourism is a big deal in a country where money is hard to come by.

Its funny how we retreated inside our van mentally, in the face of the rather bleak exterior. We wound up the windows and turned the air conditioning on low more to dissipate the damp than to cool us. We put a Michael Connolly novel on the van stereo system, a Bosch detective novel Layne had downloaded from the Libby library app and in that way we shut Mexico out of our small life support bubble. There was no WiFi, no cell service and despite the prosperous looking farmland we got the feeling these were poor and marginalized people not used to outsiders, not aligned with the more modern Mexico the rest of the country is projecting.

It may have been the damp dark weather, it may have been in our heads and it may actually be the way these places are, along that side road but we were glad to be back on the main highway, a stretch of road we had driven before we stopped at the Jungle campground. We spotted a coffee shop we had passed previously and this time we stopped for cappuccino and an empanada for breakfast. Taoli and Woni, the name sounded Indio to me.

I have come to like Mexican coffee very much, as its not bitter and trying to prove a point as so much heavy black coffee is in the US. I like the cinnamon flavor they give it sometimes and usually I don't need to use much sweetener if any. The only problem here was we had to spray our legs to keep the no see ups at bay and they were biting hard on this damp day.

I don't like eating and being watched by hungry dogs and there were a couple of those here. One ate a little and left to go home while the other dog sank his fangs into the bag of dog food but even his hunger wasn't a match and I had some left over to put away in the back of Gannet 2 where I keep dog food and treats for any animals we meet along the way. This guy got his tail up and was quite chipper when he trotted off unable to eat another bite.

I had spotted a cross country highway that would get us to the "cuota" (toll road) that would take us straight to Chiapas State and the capital city of Tuxtla Gutierrez. So we drove back to San Andrés Tuxtla and took Highway 187 south, a road new to us. And soon to be cursed by us...I have no idea what the building is or was but we passed it as we drove down along the river bank in San Andrés Tuxtla on Highway 187:

I don't know exactly what the word Tuxtla means but it is found in several city names in southern Mexico, pronounced "tooks-tla" and I think it has some  Mess American/Indian history. Chiapas is the poorest state in Mexico with a long history starting with claims over it by a newly independent Guatemala. Mexico secured its claim in 1824 after Independence but the state has been operated largely as an agricultural fiefdom of wealthy absentee landowners. There have been attempts at independence and autonomy with the working classes accusing the federal government of ignoring their needs. So the government has been trying to show it cares by engaging in public works and renaming sites to better reflect local feelings. You could call it whitewashing if you are a cynic...

So why do we want to visit Chiapas? Because it has a reputation for stunning beauty, mountains, canyons, rivers and jungles. A decade ago there were violent protests against the Feds but the revolutionary spirit has died down and all e expect to encounter as we drive are occasional local roadblocks where protestors armed with stones impose a "road tax" to pass unmolested. Pay a buck or two and off you go. You can imagine how well this sort of local initiative might go over with some self righteous gringos who aren't particularly clued in to the local politics and expect to be exempt from local irritations. Pay a dollar to pass? Never! And once there has been violence it will never be forgotten so US citizens stay away from Chiapas in droves deist the ending of the uprising in San Cristobal a decade ago. That makes me want to visit it all the more. But we still had to get there and Highway 187 was unforgiving.

It took us an hour to go 25 miles and that was only because the end part was better quality and allowed me to speed up and increase our average miles per hour. A hole marked by the carcass of a fridge:

Some good old fashioned washboard where the asphalt has been worn completely away:

Potholes? You want potholes?

 All the potholes you could want:

We saw beautifully maintained agave fields:

Corn fields of course:

And the flowers:

And eventually we crossed Highway 145D (D= cuota= toll road) and the open road beckoned once again. 

It looked good at first, four lanes, a median barrier, striping, the works, and a full service Pemex with a dog walk of all things!

Fully equipped dog run, The Florida Turnpike could learn a thing or two here:

But the restaurant was closed:

So we did the sensible thing and pulled over when we saw a nice lady selling pineapple juice and tamales from her cooler by the side of the highway. 

A buck fifty for two, chicken flavored. We did not, as Layne put it, pay the gabacho price- one charge for Mexicans and another for foreigners (gabachos, so called). We don't actually mind the so-called gringo tax though expatriates bitch about it all the time online.

We ate lunch at our tables out of the sun and then got back to the business of getting south. There is a hundred mile stretch of highway toward Tuxtla Gutierrez that is devoid of services or stopping places. The highway winds through valleys and hills and by passes towns or villages. There are farms and so forth but we wanted to get to the next listed stopping place on iOverlander before dark, restaurant parking area on the shores of a lake. It was afternoon, we had enough time but we couldn't dawdle.

We came to a bridge that rather reminded me of the Sunshine Skyway over the entrance to Tampa Bay near St Petersburg. This one is smaller, over a river, and with rather less focus on the safety of the users.

I have to say Highway 145D was rather less smooth than we might have liked. There were potholes, uneven stretches, and weird patching jobs that caused traffic to swerve rather unexpectedly as we drove along. I was watching the vehicles ahead of me and I followed their lead, switching lanes as patches of terrible roadway appeared. I tried to imagine traffic acting so irrationally in the US. Then it started to drizzle.

We had a calculation to make.  If our planned stopping point at the restaurants at the lake were not good, if we got a bad vibe or if parking was no longer allowed, always possibilities we needed a back up plan and that was a truck stop at a Pemex an hour further on.  This meant we had to have enough daylight to get as far as the Pemex in the worst case scenario. However after a day of pothole dodging I needed a break.

We had passed through a slice of Tabasco State  and had just entered Chiapas State, we were getting close and the mountains were starting to look a little bit dramatic. When wearied at the lake the skies were still cloudy and threatening rain which never materialized as it turns out.

Truck drivers know their food so it looked promising when we arrived and saw their vehicles lined up. The night watchman said it was fine to park for the night and the restaurant was still open. I ordered a beer. We were done driving.

Layne ordered pork in a green sauce and I had my first Mexican meatballs of the trip.

It was a splendid end to a long day on the road. Someone puts me time into this open air eatery with a lovely lake view.

We gave the night watchman 50 pesos ($2:50) as a courtesy and we parked alongside the sidewalk so we could step out without getting muddy. Oh the luxury!

The trucks left and we were alone as usual. I put a bag of food out for the watchman's dog and any others that happened by in the night and there was a little left in the morning so I guess they got what they needed while we three slept inside. It was a quiet night but my sleep was interrupted by some insect bites on my legs that kept me awake with itching. Traffic tends to die down at night in Mexico and even though there are some trucks traveling numbers are much fewer than you'd expect to see in the US.

Rusty and I went for a walk in the morning, Rusty with his nose and me with my Panasonic LX100 pocket camera.

There seemed to have been an attempt to create a zip line out to an island in the lake but the wires were both hanging into the water so I expect there has been subsidence or something.

You can see where the water levels here in this artificial lake have dropped. The lake was formed by the construction of the Malpaso Dam.

It was a lovely spot and we wandered happily while Layne got up, heated water and made tea. Its a treat to get back and have a huge Tervis tumbler of Yorkshire Gold waiting.

Despite the overcast and dark skies it wasn't cold but it was unpleasantly damp, like the air was holding too much water.

It reminded me of twenty years previously when we had reached Coast Rica sailing down the coast. We had left behind the dry season in Nicaragua and crossed into another country, but also the other season when rain fills the skies. It looked just like this at anchor in Bahia Culebra ("Snake Bay") in 1999:

I mentioned this deja vu to Layne and she agreed. We both agreed it was rather pleasant to have a dry cabin to climb into and get out of the damp which we could never do on the boat unless the sun came out and dried us. We were younger then and perhaps more resilient!

We made the bed together and swept out the floor and got ready for the road. First an exercise tape then off we went, leaving just after eight in the morning. And the official name came up on a tab for one of my pictures, so you can figure out how to pronounce it; I can't:

And then we were back in traffic in Tuxtla Gutierrez.

And Layne had a plan: two nights for five thousand points per night in the Hilton Garden Inn. That's a cultural shock: now I have to remember to throw the toilet paper into the toilet, not into a separate basket as you do in the rest of Mexico. That and hot showers and I hear a rumor we are going to enjoy some room service. I promise I won't forget to use the WiFi to upload some pictures of what we do, but I am planning some mindless American time for a couple of days. Its good to be home temporarily, as much as I like Mexico!

You'll have to show up in southern Mexico to take advantage of a hundred megabyte uploads. You can envy me from a distance.