7. Mexico - Campeche (coast) and San Cristobal (mountains)

covering 31 January – 10 February 2020

Campeche. two priests on their way to church, Sunday morning

Campeche was a delight, an old town still partially encircled by a defensive wall with a grid street layout inside it of generally low rise and often coloured buildings.  One big plus is that the town stands right on the coast so the temperature is tempered by sea breezes.  Once so near the coast that one church has a lighthouse on the top of it.  The waterfront itself now lies beyond reclaimed land and is some three hundred yards from the Sea Gate, one of the defensive bastions or forts which helped protect the town, usually from pirates.  A few hundred yards of the original two mile wall plus some bastions are still standing and we were able to walk along the walls which stand about twenty feet high and are quite narrow.  The wall has a low battlement on the outside, possibly reflecting the height of the inhabitants several hundred years ago and a walkway which is only about three feet wide.  It was built following a very damaging pirate raid of about thirty ships in the 1660s. 

Campeche. Puerta de Tierra (Land Gate), Bastion and walls

peddler and sling slung child

The old town is quite small and if you stand with your back to the Sea Gate looking into the town, it’s possible to see the gate on the other side of the town straight along 59^th street about half a mile away.  This particular street is filled with restaurant tables in the evenings and part way along a few places have tables set out in the morning where we had breakfast each morning.   It was quite a peaceful sort of town, a wandering around

Campeche. our regular breakfast spot

not doing too much sort of place and it was just what we wanted.  Alongside the sea ran the Malecon, a promenade on the seaward side of the coast road with separate lanes for cyclists and pedestrians stretching for a couple of miles or so either side of the town.  Back inside the walls there were some old colonial buildings which had been demolished in the 1960s and have now been reconstructed.  It seemed a bit short sighted to demolish them but then I remembered many of the old bits of London that were being destroyed at the same time.

There certainly is some effort going into making Campeche a lively place and there is a definite feeling of civic pride, which I judge by what is being done that doesn’t immediately have a payback or an entrance fee.  There weren’t really that many tourists and locals were conspicuous at various outdoor activities.  On the Saturday night the Plaza Principal (not Mayor for a change) had a very good Marimba band playing with three players on the big, wooden xylophone and a couple of saxophonists.  After that there was the regular sound and light show projected on the whole two hundred feet or so façade of the Cultural Centre.  This had dinosaurs, conquistadors, native populations and animals in

Campeche. the excellent hot chocolate shop

what was about a half hour show.  It didn’t make much sense to me but was very impressive and clearly popular with the crowd that gathered to see it.  After that we hot-footed it to the Malecon to see the sound and light fountains show, another very impressive half hour with a big crowd.  There was a very large array of fountains with some sort of programmed display changing the heights, colours and spray patterns.  This show takes place a couple of times each evening.  All of this is in a relatively small place and back home in Poole they can’t even find the money to keep the park’s little train running – and they charged for it when it did run.

Campeche. 59th Street - early morning

Campeche museum.  a magnificent jade Mayan funeral mask

We use the first class buses when we can because they really are so comfortable and the bus stations that they use seem quite new and often very smart.  The biggest difficulty is that the TV screen destination boards don’t often work and you must take into account that some of these bus stations are very big.  Security personnel here in Mexico always have a gun and often a big stick too whatever they’re guarding.  At one bus station while we were sitting somewhat bemused wondering which was our bus, one of them wandered over, asked where we were going, disappeared and came back a couple of minutes later to tell us that the bus was refuelling and which area it left from.  He returned two or three times to reassure us and then pointed the bus out when it arrived forty minutes late.  This was more extreme in helpfulness than most but not at all untypical of the attitude of Mexicans to visitors.  We found them to be almost universally helpful, friendly and welcoming.  I should mention here that transport works on Mexican time.  It will often leave late, perhaps half an hour or more but usually arrives on time, so a fair bit of slack is built into scheduled timings.

San Cristobal.  now would you paint your house like this ?

So via forgettable what’s it’s name we reached undulating San Cristobal on time, back up at about seven thousand feet having climbed across some magnificent scenery on the way.  The central mountainous areas of Mexico really does have some beautiful countryside.  San Cristobal was sunny with blue skies as we’ve got used to but the air had just a touch of crispness to it, especially early in the morning and once the sun had gone.  It was another good place to spend some time, particularly along the two main pedestrianised streets set at right angles to each other that were full of restaurants and shops.  

San Cristobal. one of those hairy skirts

San Cristobal was the place in Mexico in which we saw more poor indigenous people than anywhere else, many of them children selling trinkets or offering to shine shoes.  Tourists were still buying from them but we considered it just an encouragement to get more kids on the streets in what is after all child labour.  The indigenous women here often wore traditional dress, usually an embroidered blouse and a black hairy skirt that looked for all the world like a cross between a shag-pile rug and half a gorilla suit.  They must have been baking hot in them.

San Cristobal.  typical local dress

Now a little about driving in Mexico.  Probably to most people’s surprise I found Mexican drivers attitude to pedestrians not just considerate but courteous.  It’s a bit like Japan where if you linger a tiny bit too long on a kerb near a corner, cars will stop to allow you to cross.  If you’re not waiting to cross you feel compelled to anyway but in no time at all you can cross back again.  However, on the open road they are a bit more, shall we say, adventurous in their driving style.  The other unmissable thing in Mexico is the unbelievable number of speed humps on everything from small roads in town to dual carriageway main roads.  Of varying humpness, some are big, often unmarked and cars usually have to slow down to first gear to get over many of them even on those main roads.  So the braking and then accelerating regularly must reduce fuel consumption a lot and add a lot of pollutants from exhausts, tyres and particularly brake linings to the atmosphere. 

San Cristobal. standard assault course pavement

To conclude my Mexico blogs I can say that in San Cristobal for what I think is the first time ever in our travels, our accommodation was a museum.  It was a large traditional building, nondescript from the street with walls straight onto the pavement but with several courtyards inside.  It stood two storeys high and our room was on the top floor so we didn’t have museum visitors to look at or be looked at by, we enjoyed a view of distant hills one way and a wooded garden the other.  The property had been bought in 1950 by a Dane and his Swiss wife.  He was an archaeologist and she a photographer and anthropologist.  While he excavated Mayan remains, she recorded the lives of and

the dining room at our hotel, Na Bolom 

befriended one of the local tribes.  A tribe which had not been conquered by the Spaniards but had just retreated out of their reach into the jungle.  The large house, research and teaching property was now the museum.  On our guided tour we were told that it had cost 11,000 pesos in 1950 and was in a sorry state at the time.  Today that’s about £450 (US$550) but playing with the internet and checking historical rates that was about £50 in 1950.

Heather at breakfast, Na Bolom

well we've all seen a stretched limo
but I've never seen a squashed Beetle before