Hosteltality // Spring Break Pt. 2
After we departed the beautiful city of Oaxaca and its amazing food, Dad and I hopped onto a plane for Chiapas, Mexico. We had made our first two stops about eating, but we went to Chiapas to be wowed by beauty. And it wowed. Chiapas borders Guatemala, and features this incredible scenery that I started admiring from the plane window.
We drove through hours of gorgeous terrain before arriving at San Cristobal de las Casas, our final destination. San Cristobal is this stunning little colonial city absolutely bursting at the seams with colors, handicrafts, amber, and coffee of mind-blowing quality. We discovered this last gem sheer minutes after we arrived.
Our hostel, La Casa de Paco, turned out to be a fantastic find. Paco and his wife Elena run the family operation, and Elena had just recently turned a street-facing room into a coffee shop. To be fair, "coffee shop" isn't really the best term for it. If you purchase her coffees in the way that Dad and I did, requiring a cup of it before making your decision, it involves her grinding and individually brewing each mug in a little camping-friendly contraption. She's not in the business of brewing coffee. Really, she is there to sell high quality coffee beans. And she does it darn well.
We sampled all of her coffee before we headed on, and left with a collective 30 pounds of it (yes, 30; and before you invite yourself over on your most caffeine-deprive day, only two of them are mine). In between cups of coffee, which were so caffeinated that we had to spread them out over the course of our visit, we explored as much as we could of the city and its surrounding towns.
Chiapas is home to a number of small, indigenous communities. We took a tour of a couple of these little villages with a guide, Esteban. Esteban is from an indigenous community himself, and he leads the tour in the most casual of styles. We'd get out of the van, wander a bit, and then notice that Esteban was standing by some monument of importance. We'd mosey on over, and he'd start explaining said monument as if he had just decided to share some fun facts with friends. It was great.
It was fascinating to see the layers of difference between the towns of Zinacantan and San Juan Amchamula, even if Esteban's words didn't do much in the way of illuminating them. Perhaps the most obvious difference is the dress. The women of Zinacantan wear elaborate capes, tapered at both shoulders to mimic bat wings, and complement these with long, colorful skirts. In San Juan, the shirts are less elaborate, but the skirts are made of black fur, heavy and stiff against the hustle and bustle in the city center.
In the drive between these places, Esteban and I hit it off. I sat in the front seat next to him because of my car sickness, which gave us the chance to visit sporadically throughout the journey. He learned Spanish as a second language, which we bonded over, and he had been working hard for decades in this language and English. He loved that I was here to teach, and shared that his childhood hadn't had much in the way of education. He left school to sell gum at the age of nine.
His conversations were as quiet and casual as his tour, and it made it the facts he'd share with me, like the staggering cost of one of the black skirts in San Juan, seem more real and personal somehow.
At one of our stops, we tried pox (pronounced "posh"), which is a sugar-cane based liquor that the Mayan priests used to commune with the gods. The taste is sweet and delicious, and unlike many samplings of this type, the liquor was not offered for sale afterwards. In the car on the way back to San Cristobal, I asked whether my dad and I might be able to buy a couple of bottles (because 30 lbs. worth of coffee is not a heavy enough souvenir). Esteban said that he could hook us up. He took my number, and said he'd call once he could buy the bottles from his friend who produced it himself.
The rest of the day was spent between the city, the hostel, and blog-worthy moments. Maybe the most exciting of these moments was when we walked into a restaurant and noticed, almost accidentally, an unassuming plaque stating that this restaurant is a remodelled home, one of the three oldest houses built in the Americas.
After lunch, we made our way back to the hostel for another couple of cups of coffee. I loved the way that Paco and Elena would greet us upon arriving, as if their home/hostel was also ours.
And lest you think that all hostel-stays are equally as fantastic, know that my following stop in Cancun (a place I stayed alone for a couple of nights), was memorable in a completely different way. And by this I mean that I will never forget getting woken up in my shared dorm by a person asking me whether I spoke Spanish, only to gauge whether or not we could carry on a conversation at 5:00 AM ("Louisiana? You're from Louisiana? How $#*@ing cool!"). Life is like a hostel, I guess. You never know what you're going to get.
On our last evening in San Cristobal, the evening after our tour, I got a phone call from Esteban. I ran out to the street with the money to pay for the pox.
"I'm really sorry," he said. "My friend was out of everything but cinnamon pox." (The one kind we hadn't asked for).
He handed me two coke bottles, the labels peeled off, of the caramel-colored liquid.
"Well, thanks for bringing us these!," I said. "How much do I owe you?"
Esteban waved his hand, "It's a gift. You both have a safe trip back home."
I paused, tried to hand him the money anyways out of a feeling of awkwardness, and felt even more awkward as he declined. So, I thanked him. Then, Esteban climbed into the tour van, packed with tourists heading out for an evening excursion, and nodded goodbye.
When I told Dad what had happened, he was as surprised as I was, "How nice," he paused, "how unnecessary."
I agree. But maybe the nicest things are the unnecessary ones—the warm extension of hospitality; the friendly chat between a tour guide and a customer on a tour that you can't rate on TripAdvisor; the exquisite flavors of food you theoretically just need for function; the gift of sugar-cane liquor in unmarked, plastic bottles.
Maybe we need more unnecessary acts of kindness to fill our thoughts on plane rides from Chiapas to Merida. Maybe we need them to fall back on when our sleep has been rudely and randomly interrupted. Maybe we need them to remember that humankind is a good group to be a part of, even with the buzzy headlines and encounters of mundane cruelty that might make us think otherwise. I think this with more than a "maybe" level of certainty. And I think it because of people like Paco, like Elena, and like Esteban, who are nice when it's unnecessary, and who don't let that stop them from being it anyways.
