San Cristobel de Las Cases

Just a quick trick to Chiapa de Corzo as it was a bit of a strange town 👀. We leave the heat of the city once more to head back into the mountains to 2200m, this time to a town called San Cristobel de Las Cases. The town is a colonial town, with a huge market that is buzzing with life and literally sells everything. We all feel like giants in this town as a large proportion of the population are Zapotecan, and they are about 5 foot max and even Seb described me as looking like a giant next to them!!

We embark on a walking tour of the town to get our bearings an d this is a wonderful experience. We get to taste a few of the local specialities, which are coffee and pox. Pox is described as a medicine that helps to ‘loosen the tongue’, more like gets you wasted at 11am and of course you talk nonsense and buy all kinds of rubbish from the market that you wouldn’t touch with a 10foot barge pole at any other time!’. The town is incredibly noisy and colourful, and the huge market that seems to stretch for miles, literally sells everything, including live cockerels. Who’d want them!

Unfortunately, the thing that is so striking, is the immense stench of car fumes everywhere. This beautiful little mountain town has expanded so quickly over the past 50 years, yet the infrastructure has not. The narrow streets which are all very colourful and pretty, are literally filled with car fumes as the air has nowhere to go. We also learn that when the town was built, they designed the sewage system in such a way that untreated waste water literally flowed down to the neighbouring community for them to enjoy and grow their crops! Enjoy your avocados from Mexico everyone!

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