End of February 2022
[While in real time I am in southern Canada, preparing to canoe the Arctic Drainage, the transition has kept me so busy I am still catching up from bikepacking Mexico and Central America on the blogs.]
On our way out of San Cristobal de las Casas, we rode through a pine forested bike park to the lip of the valley then followed along many kilometers of cinder block wall around Military Base 31. The base abutted a local indigenous run recreation site, Cuevas Rancho Nuevo. A weekend getaway spot from the city, the park was full of families being walked around the parking lot on horseback, people grilling in the palapas, always the colorful Virgin in a glass case against the rock, lines of food stalls, and people squealing gleefully overhead on the zip line.
We had come with interest to walk down into the caves. As with Sumidero Canyon and all the other tourism stops, we paid an entry fee to the park. Then another one to the cave. 750 meters in there was another fee point to go deeper so we stopped there and just watched the bats in the cavern walls and wondered about what they thought of the floodlights. Neon noted the walls dripping minerals and building up around the wires which powered the lights. I liked thinking about how caves and bats will consume us in return. It is an ancient tradition from the Himalayas to the cenotes to leave honored deceased deep in caves, a sort of return to the womb.
Knowing that we were approaching the border to Guatemala all the nerves and logistics of border crossing were building up and telling us to hurry up. It took conversation and conscious effort to stay present, to give ourselves permission to explore a bit more before needing to close ranks and push distance to meet timeline and safety standards. Only two more contingencies stood between us and the border. The first was an corner of wild waters which were calling to me and the second was a minor gang turf war happening somewhere between Comitan and the La Mesilla Border Crossing.
We pedaled down to Cascada El Chiflón, at first following a dead horse in the bed of a truck to the regional dump, then getting lost in a maze of sugar cane fields where our GPS had roads marked from before the latest crops which had rerouted the dirt road network. Some gentlemen flooding their fields with the old “pieve of plastic and pile of rocks” method, pointed us out of the sugar cane maze. Neon got a flat on a dirt road, just before the paved road. Once on the paved we met a head wind during which time we accidentally passed a woman on a road bike training for a race with a pacer vehicle following her. We arrived to the tourist complex of Cascada El Chiflón just after lunch hours, having not eaten because of all the excitement and were bonking hard and very much ready for a rest.
At the entrance we were a bit confused as two different communities have staked claim to either side of the narrow canyon and they do not encourage crossing into the other’s turf but the skirmish did nothing to diminish the sheer splendor of the natural givings. We decided to stay the night and take it easy for a day there because it was a beautiful, safe place to stop in an uncertain territory. It was an absolutely stunning retreat.
I got to chatting with Gabriela, the receptionist at the site. She said her brother was living and working up in my pueblo, en Canada. To her the Untied States and Canada are basically the same thing, she answered my querry. Either way, she wanted to work up there as well because employment here was difficult. She explained first that she was lucky to have this job, as there aren’t many to be had. Here she worked 14 hour days and earned 140 pesos per day.
10 pesos an hour.
That is about .50 cents an hour as a receptionist and ticket collector at one of the only tourist attractions in her valley.
She had tried to come work in the US once. It was very expensive but she’d worked with a business she had seen on Facebook and had her Visa, plane ticket and everything sorted.
At the airport she found out it had been a ‘fracaso‘ a scam all along. She shrugged as she told me this. She took a breath and said she had been ready to try again but, while she’d had a Johnson and Johnson vaccine, they had written Sputnik on her vaccination card, so she could not cross. She had to wait.
The next morning Neon rested for a couple more hours (an understatement to what she needed…she’d had a sinus headache for several weeks which was making its way toward filling up her lungs, as exacerbated by all the air pollution we have been huffing and puffing through). I wandered up along the waters to meditate. This early in the morning I was the only visitor up there. Three local fellow who were working on the stairs which ducked and wove around tree roots and branches all the way up.
I enjoy the fact that the ancients built many incredible staircases we have been able to walk along. Then to get to meet their descendants who continue doing so to this day, mixing and carrying buckets of concrete by hand.
We chatted a bit and I thanked them for their work, “todo es para uds,” the elder gentleman gestured in the formal gifting way (one hand, fingers together pointing upward raised to just above the head and gestured in a small circle). “It is all for you.” The grandeur in presentation and giving seems very important and a simple thanks from a visitor allows them to exhibit the extent of their generosity. It’s delightful to experience.
When I got back to the base, I talked to the woman at the restaurant and asked if the laborers stopped through here, if she knew the old man. She did. I asked to leave an ‘agradecimiento‘ to cover an after work refreshment.
We rode on some 40 km and ended our day at Uninanjab. Here we got a real treat, staying at the family home, Cueva verde Yaxal K’e’en. While the lodgings are simple, there is great magic in the ground, in the form of exposed caves to a subterranean river system.
We spent much of the evening swimming in the caves, well into darkness when bats flitted and squeaked in a milieu, some running into the cave walls or dipping into the water. We sat sipping Mexican cocoa from our pots, watching them and listening to the trickle of the water.
The next morning we swam in cenote Koila and soaked our shirts before the dusty, sun exposed climb. We swam out to the middle, above the murky turquoise, where we floated for a few seconds until we got scared and raced back to the edge. I relate differently with Fear because of this journey. It feels more like a companion, maybe even a very serious mentor who needs sometimes to be adhered to absolutely and other times with a grain of salt. You never know which until afterwards.
We took one final stop in the city of Comitan for logistics, bike maintenance and another bout of illness (my turn this time), and to collate the information we had gathered and time out a plan for crossing through the river valley where rival narco groups were having a bit of turf war between the border and Rio Selegua.
It’s important to me that you understand narco organizations function much the same as local governments in many regions. In fact, in some areas, they work hand in hand. And one is not necessarily more just than the other, this is not a clear cut ‘good guy/bad guy’ scenario. For example, the latest rash of journo murders in Mexico (a notable uptick), were all of individuals investigating political corruption before they were tortured or murdered. In one well publicized case where it was a narco gang who tortured a journo, when they dropped him off afterwards they warned him to stop investigating a local politician.
These kinds of areas are not to be taken lightly, so we took the time to put together what we’d heard and plot it on the maps, figure out distances we could cover, safe places to lodge, having food accessible so we wouldn’t have to stop for long and bars and gel packs handy so we could eat and keep rolling.
We figured out when exactly we would cross through the area, aiming for the morning window, when the same feuding men’s grandmothers were taking wares to market, when their mothers were opening their shops, when their wives and girlfriends were walking their children to school. You still must be mindful about reading who to greet and how to navigate eye contact but all in all it went very smoothly.
We pedaled past the last bar just as the boys were playing their last round of cards, they greeted us cheerfully laughing at their own efforts at English just as the drinking music started blaring at about 11:30 am.
Passing the first of the military outposts that began the legal border area, we transitioned from social lookout to what I like to call legal-eye- watching for government buildings and officials. Here the Mexico and Guatemala border checkpoints are 4 kms of climbing apart and there isn’t a fence until the Guatemala station. We had been so overwhelmed by the bustling border activity that we had missed where we needed to stamp out of Mexico. Which meant we rode up and down the hill, past the burning dump full of vultures and a few other locals in ‘no man’s land’ 3 times.
Riding across the last of the flats abutting the wall of the Sierra Madres, Neon said, ” I can see why the Spanish couldn’t get to them [the Mam Mayans].” They had tucked up into and defended these mountains from the Spanish, and again in the 80s from a Reagan funded dictator’s troops. These folks have held on to their land since time immemorial and color it still with intricate textiles.
Transition zones and liminal spaces are often the trickiest to navigate because of all the gradients of change which happen in such a narrow band. To think of land borders also playing out in the temporal dimension boggled my little brain.
All in all the border crossing was a bit time consuming but went relatively smoothly. No matter how much reading, planning, and extrapolating I had done, the changes ahead were beyond my scope of comprehension. Lessons of many lifetimes which no passer-through could hope to delve completely. But my work be damned if I didn’t willingly break myself wide open trying.
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