The next day we awoke after 14 hours of sleep, stomachs still iffy... amongst at least one other body part which shall remain unnamed. The day was spent recovering and resting. The hotel was perfect though it whacked the budget, but it felt good to have a great place to stay after so many challenging ones.
Midday we had to move our gear to a different room, but felt good enough to wander out and take in San Cristobal de Las Casas in its sunlit glory. It was yet another beautiful Mexican town, the same but different, if you know what I mean. It was a clean place with its own set of colors and building designs, surrounded by mountainous terrain and great walking streets.
The main square was filled with native Indians selling blankets, wraps and various other things. Most of the women wore skirts made of black lamb’s wool with tufts pulled loose. The effect looked exactly like cheap, fake black fur from the fabric store in the U.S., but I convinced Kim it wasn’t. It didn’t take long to find out they wanted no part of being in pictures, so I tried to be as surreptitious as possible with the camera, but I got plenty of angry stares. They apparently have eyes in the back of their heads as well.
The town was a great mix of Indian culture, Spanish architecture and a modern Euro-hippie funkiness, replete with coffee shops, art and funky merchants. There were a lot of street musicians as well. The town definitely had a great vibe.
We found several churches and squares to explore, stopping for a while to watch a children’s program put on for poor children in front of a church. It was fun watching the kids just excited to be getting prizes - pretty heart tugging I’ll say.
Surprisingly, the town had almost no street food vendors, quite a change from most of the towns we’d been in, so it took exploring the depths of the side streets and the rambling mercado to find food. I wondered if somehow the city had decided to limit food on the street in order to drive business to the myriad street cafes and restaurants.
That evening we had some pizza on a sidewalk cafe, sharing tables with some European folks. Down the street we heard great music, and after a while the musicians, playing African drums and jazz mix parked across from us and performed.
Folks wandered past and dove in with crazy dances. We had fun watching the spectacle and tossed some pesos in the hat.
Selfie Dance
I hate it when people steal my best dance moves
It was after dark and on the way back we found an "EZLN" souvenir shop. For those who aren’t aware, the EZLN are a local rebel army that had formed in anger after years of the region being ignored by the Mexican government. They’d invaded and took over the town of San Cristobal for a few days until the Mexican army drove them out.
A guerrilla war ensued until a shaky peace came when the government backed off and allowed the area of the rebels to be somewhat self-governing. There are a great number of people who support the cause in the area. The EZLN are known to set up roadblocks throughout the countryside and charge “tolls” for people to pass. They are famous for the black masks they wear.
Anyways, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to slather a few EZLN stickers on the bikes in the hopes they’d give us a break on the “fees” charged at any roadblocks. It couldn’t hurt right? Unless of course we had to stop at Mexican army checkpoints which are frequent too, but whacha gonna do? I left with a handful of cheap homemade stickers printed on somebody’s inkjet printer and felt much safer with my decal plan...
The activity picked up as the night progressed. We found a doorway to sit in and watch the vendors spreading their wares on the streets, including selfie sticks, cell phone accessories, jewelry and the ubiquitous indigenous wraps, tops and blankets. It was fascinating watching the interchange and exchange of goods as natives traded between themselves, one family inspecting the colors and fabrics, before agreeing to swap goods - three of these wraps for two of that pattern and such.
As we wandered back towards the main square, a fireworks show over the plaza was our entertainment until it finished and the sound of Led Zeppelin came to our ears. Walking into the main plaza a cover band was rocking the 70’s classics, including the best Janis Joplin cover I’ve ever heard. We listened to some great music while I did my best white-man head bob.
Kim noticed some people across the street staring up at the night sky. We turned and looked up to see what they were looking at. There was a clear crescent moon, several bright, pin-sharp stars, and in the midst of them, a cloudy, soft, glowing cluster, almost as if seeing a galaxy. It was bluish green and moving slowly.
Around this glowing mass were groups of sharp white lights, circling and moving slowly in towards the colored galaxy-like mass. The individual lights eventually disappeared, but the gaseous aura continued moving slowly across the sky. I pulled out the telephoto lens but the autofocus had difficulty focusing on the black sky obviously. I struggled to manually focus but the mass was still small in the viewfinder and the dotsof the screen were amplified by the camera trying to massively overexpose. Despite the poor image, I could see the mass was soft and glowing, and changing color from green into a blue. Around it were other small, orbiting clouds which slowly changed color as well. I tried taking some shots but the camera reading the black sky went wonky and locked up in long exposures. I finally gave up trying to get it to work, handing the camera to Kim so that she could see through the lens but it just was too difficult.
As she tried, I noticed that several groups of the Indian merchant women who sell blankets had joined us, staring up at the apparition as well. One woman looked at me as if to say "Are you seeing it?", then she and her children continued to watch it moving across the sky.
When it was finally far away, I looked back at the Indian woman and said "la luz?" She said something to me as she turned away with her stacks of blankets, children and mother, of which all I heard was "Este es por que...", which means "This is because…” I wish I could have heard the rest of her statement.
I've never seen anything like it. Kim is the ultimate skeptic, but she turned to me and said “I was not a believer in any of this crap until tonight”. I hesitate to call it a UFO as it didn’t seem to be any sort of craft, but I would classify it as a “sign in the sky” type of happening. Our minds were well blown.
All I can say is, anything that can make Indian women stop selling stuff for 10 minutes straight, must be pretty special. That night we slept well, but having been informed that all the hotel rooms had been reserved for the next night and we’d need to find other accommodations.
The strange phenomenon we'd seen in the sky swirled slowly in my mind and in our slowing conversation as the darkness of sleep came.
