The Adventures Continue

Sarah and I have gone our separate ways but you can still keep up with us on our blogs.

The Adventures of Sarah

RunDirkRun

Welcome home

The flight was fine, save the fact that the only dinner option was a cheeseburger for five dollars, and there was no free movie - come to think of it, I don't recommend Alaska Airlines...but we made it to LA in one piece. Customs was a breeze - and us bringing in at least five pounds of shells, seeds and coral - no sir, nothing to declare, and he just took the form, put it in a stack and said welcome home. It made us wish we'd stocked up on tequila before we left! LA is a strange place to land in after being out of the country. In some ways, it still feels like another country to me, since this isn't the US I'm used to. It's just about the opposite of Central America with the car culture, the huge clean supermarkets and everything packaged just so. And everyone so aware here of promoting their image makes me wonder what image I have... It is a pleasure to have hot running water, everywhere, all the time, and plumbing that you can throw paper into. Speaking english in stores is a huge revelation and I can't stop using spanish grammar in my english. LA feels like a limbo, it's great to visit our friends here, but it also feels like we're just putting off rejoining the working world.
-Sarah

Dirk was right

I just wanted to let everyone know that yes, the high priest of oil, the supreme and fearless leader of the ol´ US of A himself (accompanied by Fox and Harper) did indeed climb the temple, although I´m not convinced he´s as fearless on the steps as he is in the war room:












-Sarah

Chichen Itza....

...or my special visit to tour bus hell. Sarah and I decided to make one last ruins tour to the huge and popular site of Chichen Itza. Our Lonely Planet guide book (which I trust less and less as the days go on) recommended Chichen Itza as a site to wow even the most jaded traveler. I was wowed alright. We arrived as early as possible with a small trickle of visitors and got some good time to run around and appreciate all of the very well preserved buildings. Chichen Itza has the largest ball court in Mesoamerica and the buildings and carvings are all in excellent condition. There was a great platform with about 300 skulls carved all the way around it, most long staircases had amazing plumed serpents carved down the sides and the sacred cenote was gorgeous (as long as you could ignore the sacred gift shop in the background). The drawback to Chichen Itza is that you can´t climb most of the buildings and any interesting exploring you might do has been anticipated and blocked off with yellow caution tape. I didn´t really appreciate why until we were just about ready to leave the site and the tour busses arrived. It was kind of like being at a Six Flags or Disneyland but with ancient ruins as the backdrop instead of roller coasters and hot dog stands. In the last few buildings of the ruins there were tunnels that you could walk through with a few unlit dead end passages. Sarah and I both had our lighters out and were enjoying the cool solitude when, like moths to a flame, the narrow dark passages filled and clogged with Cancun package tourists following our adventurous spirit. I killed my flame and began pushing back towards the lit passages as a dozen more people pushed their way in, asking, "What´s back there? A room? A tomb? Can you get out? Can you go further?" From the tunnels all the way back to the entrance of the ruins was like swimming upstream through a river of tourists. Upwards of 40 large tour busses had disgorged their walking wallets just as we got out. It was all kind of surreal... we hadn´t seen so many people, let alone people from our country, for a good long while. The feeling of being removed from reality only increased when our taxi driver told us that George Bush was going to visit Chichen Itza on Thursday. We drove by the helipad and caught a glimpse of some of the preparations for his visit. I had visions of Bush stripping to the waist, donning a plumed headdress and addressing his people from the top of El Castillo (we can´t climb the temple but I´m sure the high priest of compassionate conservatism will be allowed). Human sacrifices are frowned upon these days but perhaps some sort of political sacrifice will be in order... I wouldn´t want to be a low level republican staffer at Chichen Itza tomorrow, it´s a long way to the bottom of the sacred cenote.
-Dirk

The Gringo Trail

The trip is winding down these days. Just as Oaxaca City was a great transition into our trip the last few days in Mexico have been great for transitioning out. I´d say we reached our peak of travel ability in San Cristobal de Las Casas. San Cristobal is a great colonial city with a great artist community and we were lucky enough to fall in with the very cool (chido) musician crowd. Of all the places we´ve visited San Cristobal is the town I think we are most likely to return to. The people are great, the climate is pleasantly warm during the day and cool at night, the town is cheap ($1.20 for a full breakfast, art house movies every night for $2, and lots of fun, free cultural activities) and it is strangely missing the seedy neighborhoods and ugly modern buildings we´ve found in most Mexican cities. Unfortunately it has all been downhill from there. Not to say we aren´t having fun but we have stumbled onto the gringo trail and the traveling doesn´t seem so exciting or exotic anymore. The route from the Palenque ruins on through Campeche and ending in Cancun is well established and well traveled. We seem to be traveling in a little tourist pack, we keep on running into the same people on busses or hostels. Here in Merida the first embassaries of spring break can be felt. Young kids approach us and just ask, "Americanos?" and the relief is obvious in their faces when we admit we speak their language. Well, like I said, it is a good transition back to the states. We´re speaking more english, finding more services and really getting into the souvenir shopping (after 5 months of denying ourselves the pleasure of buying things it is a real treat). We haven´t totally abandoned our independent traveler instincts though... today we took a colectivo to the ruins of Dzibilchaltun and hung out with a very cool family that picked us up hitchhiking on the way back. You can take the gringos out of Mexico but you can´t take the Mexico out of these gringos.
-Dirk

Zapatistas

We have arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. It´s a beautiful colonial city surrounded by mountains with tons of art and music and culture. More details on San Cris will likely be written, but for now I wanted to share the experience of visiting a town outside of the city. I went and visited an autonomous Zapatista zone called El Caracol about an hour outside of San Cristobal the other day. We had to give our names at the gate, and they recorded everything in notebooks, and then we met with the Junta de Conocimiento, a rotating pair of volunteers who answer questions that people come to them with. All the official Zapatistas wore the balaclavas over their faces, symbolizing the indigenous people´s absence from Mexican politics, and specifically the constitution. All the buildings in El Caracol are painted with these amazing murals. Many local organizations have their headquarters there. That´s why it´s called El Caracol, which means the shell, like the conch they used to use as a trumpet to call people to gather for a meeting. There were headquarters for two coffee cooperatives, women´s handicrafts cooperatives, a clinic, a school and a church, none of which answer to the Mexican government, or the mal gobierno as they called it.The indigenous people have been repressed in Mexico basically since the Spanish got here, hundreds of years ago. A recent horrifying example was in 1910, Porfirio Diaz, the Mexican general who was president (although he took it over militarily, with support from the States totaling about 9 million dollars, or maybe it was pesos) and enslaved the indigenous people in tobacco and maguey plantations. Maguey is a cactus that was used for its fibers, to make paper, rope, etc. The indigenous people weren´t even allowed to walk on the sidewalks. So what they told me in the junta was the following (more or less):
Before 1994, the indigenous people marched and protested to get the government´s attention because we were dying of malnutrition, we didn´t have any education or any services. The government didn´t listen so we took up arms in 1994. The government asked our intentions and we met to discuss. They signed a minimum agreement, but then they rejected it. The indigenous are now practicing autonomy. We have our own school and clinics and we will receive anyone. We do this without asking permission from the mal gobierno (bad government). We fight for a better life one day. We didn´t take up arms to get a chair, or for a piece of bread but to change the capitalist system and to change the constitution of Mexico. Many of our brothers and sisters have died. In 1996 in Acteal, 45 people were murdered while praying because they were Zapatistas. We cannot exchange the blood of our brothers but we can turn the blood of our brothers into the fruits of our fight. Marcos is traveling to hear the words of other states in Mexico because we know there are other brothers and sisters. We appreciate that you have come here because it´s not true what the mal gobierno says that we are all dead. We are advancing the fight of our people. This is a simple house but it is for everyone, and we thank you for coming.
Then we walked around the community and looked at the clinic and the school and the workshop where they make shoes for the guerrilla fighters. The clinic was really nice, small but very clean and orderly, with educational murals on the walls and herbal and western medicines in the pharmacy. They have two ambulances donated by an Italian NGO, and they have volunteer nurses, doctors and teachers from many countries working there. Overall at this moment it seems like some really good things are happening for the indigenous people through the EZLN, the Zapatista party, and hopefully, like the guy said, the blood of their brothers won´t be for nothing.
-Sarah

Roatan Numero Tres

Well, we thought we´d stop diving and leave Roatan, but after one fun dive and three days out of the ocean we were convinced to take the PADI Advanced Open Water class. We found a really great, laid back dive shop called Tyll´s through meeting one of the instructors over lunch at our favorite restaurant (a little two table place with daily lunch specials for about 3 bucks called the Galley). The Advanced class allowed us to expand our training in 5 specialties. We chose to do a night dive, a wreck dive, a deep dive, a dive called peak performance bouyancy and underwater navigation. Details! The night dive was incredible. We got out to the boat around sunset, and cruised out to our dive sight where the mooring was mysteriously missing. No problem, the captain can keep the boat in the same place. As we readied our gear, the O-ring on Dirk´s tank blew. That´s the connection between the piece you breath out of (regulator) and the air tank. Our instructor replaced it twice with no luck. They were prepared with an extra tank on board, so we switched the gear around and got into the water with no further mishaps. It did make for a nervous start to what was the most intimidating dive. By the time were underwater, it was completely dark out and all that we could see was whatever we shone our torch on. The advantage of a night dive is seeing the nocturnal creatures and also seeing the true colors of the corals with the beam of your light. We saw two octopus, (Dirk spotted them both) a couple of lobsters, fish sleeping on rocks (!) a drum fish and lots of strange little blinking night swimmers. The best part by far was the phosphorescence. At the end of the dive, we turned our lights off and waited for our eyes to adjust. As we waited, more and more lights appeared in the water, and as I moved my hands in front of my face, little lights appeared in the disturbed water like handfulls of stars. A unique occurence in Roatan is called the String of Pearls and is a line of lights one above the other that slowly rise around you. Nobody knows what they are. It was incredible to sit at the bottom of the dark ocean and see all the lights around us from all the little animals living down there. My favorite part of diving is floating amongst the schools of fish. On our last dive, we went to a wall at the end of the island called West End Wall where we swam with a huge school of some of my favorite fish: creole wrass, horse-eye jacks, yellow tail snappers and black groupers.
I´ll miss swimming with the fishies, but I think it´s better for us land animals to live mostly on land...
-Sarah