For Mom, Love Steve

And were on the move. Leaving Comitan wasn´t so bad as now that I had a good experience under my belt with Mexico, I was looking forward to see what else this country had to offer. My next destination was actually my first choice in destinations, San Cristobal. Mexico has been a pretty big step up in the lifestyle versus the rest of CA and the transportation reflected it. The chicken buses that I had been frequently using are I am assuming not legal on Mexican roads. My new form of transportation seems to be these quite new and nice mini-buses. Before, they were used only by the tour operators ferrying around the foreign tourists who were on some sort of package tour. Here, it has become the minimal form of transport. With American style road conditions, cruising has become smooth as silk. M$35 (M$12=US$1) at a private bus terminal and I was on my way. Two hours later through the winding mountains we pulled into the Colonial town of San Cristobal.

San Cristobal is one of the souths highlights and is a magnet for foreign and domestic tourism. Wih the influx of tourists comes the nicer facilities, extensive food options (my hotel has a Lebanese restaurant next door), and some well kept Colonial era buildings. I wouldn´t say that it is much different than say the major tourist destination Colonial cities of the other CA countries, but just to a larger scale. It took about two hours of walking around to find a good value place to stay as most places were geared toward the flashpacker and above. Not wanting to stay for too long and having arrived early enough, I spent the day wandering around the city hitting most of the highlights. San Cristobal can easily take a few days of hard trekking to see all the sights with a lot of activites in the surrounding hill sides. There is a heavy presence of unique hillside tribes in neighboring villages, but I am not sure if I am going to visit those as I am kind of over the whole colorfully dressed local people thing. There are a couple of hillside churches with views over the city, a few large parks, and a lot of pedestrian streets lined with cafes, restaurants, tourist shops, etc. Lots of musicians around as most guys seem to have a guitar strapped to their back and a lot of foreigners selling their artistic stuff in the parks and streets. It kind of reminded me of my time in Goa where it is a magnet for the traveling artist.

I worked my ass off today and look forward to taking it a bit easier tomorrow. I still need to figure out my route as this is the pivot city where I have to pick a destination. For now, I am tired and am going to have a nice early sleep as this is the first place that I have not had a tv in a long time.

Hasta luego.

The view from the rooftop patio.

The edge of town.

From one of the hill top churches.

The tourist pedestrian streets. Cafes, restaurants, jewelry stores, tourist kitsch, etc.

Parliament building.

The church in the main center had its own plaza.

The tourist stuff plaza next to the churches in the north end. All the colorful candy clothes you could want.

Volkswagons old and new.

Dancing on the plaza.

People demonstrating against the upcoming bull fights. As long as it doesn´t affect the flow of Big Macs, I am all for it.

Live tunes on the church plaza.

Salsa anyone?

The famous archway.

What I´m reading.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.