This article is about two distinctly distinct trips. The first to Costa Rica, and the second to Mexico.
It's a clear, moonless evening when we assemble for our pilgrimage to the beach. I cannot understand how we are going to see anything in the blackness, but the guide's eyes seem to be to penetrate even the darkest shadows. We commence walking, our vision adjusting gradually.
We've come to Tortuguero Nationwide Park, in northeast Costa Rica, to witness sea turtles nesting. Once the domain of only biologists and locals, turtle-viewing is now a single of the far more popular routines in ecotourism friendly Costa Rica. As the most essential nesting web site in the western Caribbean, Tortuguero sees much more than its fair share of site visitors. In fact considering that 1980, the yearly variety of observers has gone from 240 to 50,000.
The manual stops, points out two deep furrows in the sand - the indicator of a turtle's presence - and areas a finger to his lips, generating the 'shhh' gesture. The nesting females can be spooked by the slightest noise or light. He gathers us all around a crater in the seaside within it is an tremendous creature. We hear her rasp and sigh as she brushes aside sand for her nest.
In whispers, we comment on her plight and the solitude of her job, the minimal survival charge of her hatchlings because only one particular of every single 5000 will make it previous the birds, crabs, sharks, seaweed and human pollution to adulthood.
We are all mesmerized by the turtle's bulk. Although we are not permitted to get as well near, we can catch the glint of her eyes. She does not appear to register our presence at all. The whirring sound of discharged sand continues. After a bit the manual moves us away. My eyes have adapted to the darkness now, and I can make out other gigantic oblong kinds labouring slowly up the beach in a silent, purposeful armada.
As the chanting reached a crescendo and the incense thickened to a fog, the chicken's neck snapped like a pencil. The seemingly ageless executioner sat on a carpet of pine needles, surrounded by hundreds of candles, his eyes fixed on a brightly painted saintly icon, The guy took a swig from a Coca-Cola bottle, a signal not of globalization, but of the expurgating electrical power of soda since the Tzotzil people feel that evil spirits can be expulsed through a robust burp. Here, inside the church of San Juan de Chamula, this kind of faith doesn't seern all that far-fetched.
This is the Zapatista heartland of Chiapas, a misplaced planet of dense jungle and indigenous villages exactly where descendants of the Maya cling to the rituals of their ancestors. All through the region, the iconography of Subcomandante Marcos, guerrilla leader and poster kid of the struggle for indigenous rights, reveals a continuing undercurrent of rebellion. San Cristobal : de las Casas, world wide travel one particular of Mexico's most alluring towns, was the web site of an armed Zapatista revolt in 1994.
Outside San Cristobal, the village of San Juan de Chamula is virtually a law unto itself, with its personal judges, jail and council. Timeless rituals are uncovered here, where ladies sell brightly coloured, hand-woven garments in the principal square, returning house at midday to prepare a meal for their husbands, numerous of whom are shared. Guys can have up to three wives at a time, and I'm not certain to be envious or not!! Every 12 months in the course of the pre Lenten festival, possibly the most fascinating time to visit, the village's guys run barefoot by way of blazing wheat.
4 kilometres from Chamula, San Lorenzo Zinacantan is equally fascinating. Right here, the males, in red-and-white ponchos and flat hats strewn with ribbons, which are tied if they are married, loose if not, launch rockets skyward to stir the gods into sending rain. The ladies pummel tortillas and weave textiles, constantly with a watchful eye on the sky because several houses have gone up in smoke as a consequence of rogue fireworks.