Last Day in Mexico

Today is our last day in Mexico. Last night we met Ronny Roma and his friend Eric and cooked them a pasta dinner in exchange for them giving us a free place to stay. They´re both real cool dudes and are graduate students at Universities here in Mexico. Tonight we´ll do the same, cook them dinner and get a free bed, and early tomorrow morning we are taking a van to Xela, Guatemala and should be arriving in the afternoon. Ronny is Guatemalan, so he had lots of advice to give us and could answer lots of questions, particularly regarding safety. The usual precautions seem to apply, and traveling at night is a no-no unless you want to get shanked prison-style or be murdered for your precious, plump, nutrient-rich North American organs.







Yesterday we took an excursion to a canyon outside the city. There were some delightful spider monkeys playing in the trees and I got some video of them swinging around. Funny how the most mundane aspects of monkey life provide such endless thrills for us higher primates. Everyone in our river boat flipped out when we saw the monkeys, particularly these Venezuelan girls who brought two bottles of wine on the boat and were passing them around and taking pictures of each other swigging from them. ¨MONOS! HAY MONOS ALLI! MONOS EN LOS ARBOLES!¨ They´d stand up and scream. The alligators were another fiasco with those girls, but they didn´t provide quite the thrill that the monkeys did.


Photo: Canyon Sumidero. Monkeys not visible.







We also went to a Mayan Medicine museum and learned about traditional medicine. Apparently, the techniques have evolved a bit since 1000 AD, and modern-day ¨traditional Mayan medicine¨ often involves spitting Coke and/or Pepsi on the afflicted patient. It´s supposed to be purifying, or food for the spirits or some similar shit. If you ask me, they lost all their credibility (and I lost most of my respect) as soon as they started using cola for indigenous healing. They do, however, use spider fangs to treat inflamed testicles; a practice I respect deeply.

We also got to view a film on the upright birthing process and the ceremonal placenta-burying that is typical to the indiginous culture here. It´s all quite bloody and unsanitary, and involves extremely young indigenous pregnant girls, machetes, and strong incense.










Above: Traditional Mayan birth, as performed by mannequins.











In Oaxaca I lost my tourist visa, so today we went to the Migrations building to take care of some beaurocracy. It took forever, I had to explain every detail of where, when, how, and why I lost my visa, and give many-a-detail about what might have happened to it. The guy who was dealing with me had to leave to do something else, though, so he passed me on to some other guy who then forged the first guy´s signature on all the official documents.







Oh, Mexico. Te amo.

Guatemala, here we come.