A Surreal Experience

My plan was simple: take a 5-hour bus ride from San Cristobal de las Casas in highland Chiapas to Palenque, a town with some important Maya ruins. It was only after I got on the bus that I realized this was to be a very long descent. In fact, after awhile, I kept sort of looking for signs that the downward journey by twist and turn after twist and turn might be going to end. I saw none, only a succession of steep valleys on one side or the other.

San Cristobal is a former colonial capital, rich in history, with a pretty sophisticated population. It looks kind of European once you get used to it. It has ethnic restaurants, from Japanese to Middle Eastern and Greek. The young people of the family I was staying with are smart and worldly. Palenque, by contrast, when I got there, is two places in one. It´s a little country town where you can´t get a plumber who knows what he´s doing, and even he won´t come just because something he did has turned out to be wrong. And it´s a mecca for international tourists who come to see the ruinas. But that is not what the surreal experience was about.

There we were on a Sunday afternoon, a busload of miscellaneous folks, including many indigenas on their ways home from selling things at the feria in San Cristobal the week before. It was a lovely air conditioned intercity bus with a digital video system that played a series of movies to keep us all content in our seats. I watched these movies with one eye while looking at the passing scenery with the other. I watched as the upland vegetation gradually yielded to more tropical looking trees and plants. We stopped briefly after two movies and a truly awful video about visiting Hawaii. Then when we started up again, it seemed we were to watch "The March of the Penguins".

And this was truly surreal. The air conditioned bus was actually a little chilly. The view out the window suggested increasing heat and humidity as the foliage and the dress of the people at the side of the road changed toward the tropical. Palm trees of many kinds, vines everywhere, cocoanuts for sale by the side of the road, huge broad leafed things by the side of the road that look like what I know as house plants -- tropical, yes? But at the same time, there were the penguins at the end of the world, with their songs about how wonderful it is to live in the cold and white of the Southern snow desert. Marching, surviving the snow storms, marching again, fishing under the ice, wonderful penguins with wonderful music on the chilly bus. The so-called reality of the tropical outdoors was only to be seen, and with only one eye, and not to be experienced.

We came to the bus stop in Palenque -- fortunately a little after the movie ended. There it was, the reality of a warm, tropical afternoon in lowland Chiapas. I caught a taxi to my lodgings, reorienting myself as I went: tropical, Chiapas, tropical. Not just a change from upland Chiapas, which was different enough, but so very different from the snowy wastes of Antarctica! What is real, anyway?