This article is about two distinctly different trips. The 1st to Costa Rica, and the 2nd to Mexico.
It's a clear, moonless evening when we assemble for our pilgrimage to the beach. I cannot realize how we are going to see anything in the blackness, but the guide's eyes seem to penetrate even the darkest shadows. We begin strolling, our vision adjusting slowly.
We've come to Tortuguero National Park, in northeast Costa Rica, to witness sea turtles nesting. When the domain of only biologists and locals, turtle-watching is now a single of the a lot more popular routines in ecotourism friendly Costa Rica. As the most critical nesting website in the western Caribbean, Tortuguero sees a lot more than its fair share of guests. In fact given that 1980, the yearly quantity of observers has gone from 240 to 50,000.
The guidebook stops, points out two deep furrows in the sand - the sign of a turtle's presence - and places a finger to his lips, generating the 'shhh' gesture. The nesting females can be spooked by the slightest noise or light. He gathers us around a crater in the seashore inside 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 reduced survival price of her hatchlings because only one particular of each and every 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 as well near, we can catch the glint of her eyes. She does not look to register our presence at all. The whirring sound of discharged sand continues. 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 on a brightly painted saintly icon, The guy took a swig from a Coca-Cola bottle, a sign not of globalization, but of the expurgating energy of soda because the Tzotzil people think 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 globe of dense jungle and indigenous villages the place 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, a single of Mexico's most alluring towns, was the internet site of an armed Zapatista revolt in 1994.
Outdoors San Cristobal, the village of San Juan de Chamula is virtually a law unto itself, with its own judges, jail and council. Timeless rituals travel management jobs are unveiled right here, the place females promote brightly coloured, hand-woven garments in the major square, returning residence at midday to put together a meal for their husbands, many of whom are shared. Males can have up to 3 wives at a time, and I am not specified to be envious or not!! Every year in the course of the pre Lenten festival, probably the most thrilling time to go to, the village's guys run barefoot through blazing wheat.
4 kilometres from Chamula, San Lorenzo Zinacantan is equally fascinating. Right here, the guys, 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, always with a watchful eye on the sky because a lot of houses have gone up in smoke as a outcome of rogue fireworks.