This article is about two distinctly distinct trips. The very first to Costa Rica, and the second to Mexico.
It really is a clear, moonless night when we assemble for our pilgrimage to the seashore. I cannot recognize how we are going to see anything in the blackness, but the guide's eyes look to penetrate even the darkest shadows. We start strolling, our vision adjusting slowly.
We have come to Tortuguero National Park, in northeast Costa Rica, to witness sea turtles nesting. As soon as the domain of only biologists and locals, turtle-viewing is now a single of the a lot more common activities in ecotourism friendly Costa Rica. As the most essential nesting website in the western Caribbean, Tortuguero sees far more than its honest share of visitors. In truth since 1980, the yearly amount of observers has gone from 240 to 50,000.
The guide stops, factors out two deep furrows in the sand - the indicator of a turtle's presence - and spots a finger to his lips, creating the 'shhh' gesture. The nesting females can be spooked by the slightest noise or light. He gathers us about a crater in the seaside within it is an huge 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 price of her hatchlings simply because only one particular of each 5000 will make it previous the birds, crabs, sharks, seaweed and human pollution to adulthood.
We are all mesmerized by the turtle's bulk. Though we are not permitted to get too shut, we can catch the glint of her eyes. She does not seem to be to register our presence at all. The whirring sound of discharged sand continues. Right after a bit the guide moves us away. My eyes have adapted to the darkness now, and I can make out other gigantic oblong kinds labouring gradually up the seashore 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 upon a brightly painted saintly icon, The man took a swig from a Coca-Cola bottle, a signal not of globalization, but of the expurgating energy of soda simply because the Tzotzil men and women feel that evil spirits can be expulsed through a robust burp. Here, inside the church of San Juan de Chamula, such faith does not seern all that far-fetched.
This is the Zapatista heartland of Chiapas, a misplaced world travel group of dense jungle and indigenous villages in which descendants of the Maya cling to the rituals of their ancestors. All through the area, the iconography of Subcomandante Marcos, guerrilla leader and poster child of the struggle for indigenous rights, reveals a continuing undercurrent of rebellion. San Cristobal : de las Casas, one of Mexico's most alluring towns, was the site of an armed Zapatista revolt in 1994.
Outside San Cristobal, the village of San Juan de Chamula is practically a law unto itself, with its very own judges, jail and council. Timeless rituals are unveiled here, where women sell brightly coloured, hand-woven garments in the main square, returning residence at midday to prepare a meal for their husbands, a lot of of whom are shared. Men can have up to 3 wives at a time, and I am not specified to be envious or not!! Each year for the duration of the pre Lenten festival, perhaps the most interesting time to check out, the village's guys run barefoot via blazing wheat.
Four 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 females pummel tortillas and weave textiles, often with a watchful eye on the sky due to the fact many homes have gone up in smoke as a outcome of rogue fireworks.