Chiapas on the cheap

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The Frugal Traveler discovers joys of Mexico’s southernmost state where the peso’s still good against the dollar and tourists are few

IN CHIAPAS, the southernmost state in Mexico, green is never simply green. From the air, green rolls over the unending mountains, intense and damp where there are forests and nubbly like rough felt when the trees end. In the streets of San Cristobal de las Casas, the hill town in the middle of Chiapas’ central plateau, it’s a shiny layer of Kelly spread thickly across the facade of a Spanish colonial home. In the church of San Juan de Chamula, it’s the toasted green of pine needles strewn across the floor, and it’s the thin threads woven almost invisibly into the white wool tunics of indigenous Chamulan men.

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a Day-Glo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog’s uneasy colour, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over 10 days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap — as is much of Mexico, where the exchange rate has, since September, zoomed to 13 pesos to the dollar from 10 pesos. But Chiapas’ affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of post-collegiate backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few North American tourists venture there. Perhaps it’s a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it’s simply the state’s inaccessibility — at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City, and about the same by air from the New York area.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for not much more than $50 a day, mildly adventurous travellers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state’s 4.3 million people), to the ancient Maya ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, to lush, isolated rainforests, to good coffee, to quirky and affordable hotels and even to the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

I began, as most Chiapas visitors do, in San Cristobal de las Casas, the nearly 500-year-old Spanish colonial hill town that serves as base camp for exploring the state. Or rather, I would have begun in San Cristobal if there were regular air service to the city. Instead, I flew into the state capital, Tuxtla Gutierrez and took a taxi at a fixed fare of 220 pesos (C$20) from the airport to the bus station, where I paid 26 pesos for the hour-long bus ride to San Cristobal. It left just before sunset and was remarkably comfortable, with free bottled water, a coffee station at the rear of the vehicle, and The Last Mimsy, dubbed into Spanish, playing on overhead TVs. None of this, however, distracted me from the view out the window: the valley darkening into a deep red glow as we climbed 2,100 metres above sea level into mountains cut through with rivers and illuminated by the clustered lights of villages.

By the time I reached San Cristobal, a little before 8 p.m., I was energized by the crazily consistent beauty of it all, invigorated by the chilly mountain air and in love with my 550-pesos-a-night accommodations at Na Bolom. Built in 1891 as a hacienda, Na Bolom is much more than a charming hotel compound with mustard-yellow arches, scarlet balconies and more courtyards than I cared to count. It’s also a research institution, founded by the Danish anthropologist Frans Blom and his wife, the Swiss photographer Gertrude Duby. From the 1920s until their deaths (he in 1963, she 30 years later), they documented the cultures of both the ancient Maya and their present-day descendants, in particular the Lacandon, an isolated native population that never fell under Spanish (or, for that matter, Mexican) dominion.

Today, Na Bolom — it means Jaguar House in Tzotzil, one of several Mayan languages, but is also a play on Blom’s name — is a testament to their life’s work, with public rooms full of artifacts, a library of tomes on Maya and Mexican history and gallery spaces devoted to contemporary art related to indigenous people. Researchers and resident artists live there, and natives from distant villages have a place to stay while seeking care at local hospitals. And tourists, when they’re not getting cozy in front of the fireplaces in their reasonably spacious (but somewhat dated) guest rooms, can interact with all of these specialists, often by bumping elbows at the nine-metre-long wooden table in the dining hall.

Well, at least in theory. My dinner that first night — carrot soup, shredded chicken dressed with crema and strips of roasted poblano peppers, and a salad of lettuce, cucumber and avocado — was, if delicious and inexpensive (135 pesos, not including drinks), also a solo affair. And at breakfast each morning, my tablemates tended to be, like me, tourists, some from as far away as South Africa.

But I wasn’t about to spend his vacation just hanging around the hotel; I needed to get out into the streets. And San Cristobal was a city that had me joyously roaming its streets from morning till night. In fact, these lanes, paved with hexagonal stones, may have been the most roamable I’ve seen. Laid out in a rough grid, they climb up and over and down gentle hills until, at the far reaches of this small valley, they end in a ring of green mountains — "crouched all round like large and friendly dogs," as Graham Greene put it in his travelogue The Lawless Roads — whose distinct peaks locals use for orientation.

But more than anything, what distinguished the streets of San Cristobal were the indigenous people, who wore the traditional outfits of their native towns. Women from Chamula sported black tufted-wool skirts and belts woven with metallic thread. Women from Zinacantan, on the other hand, had black capes and jackets on which were embroidered flowers in the most unearthly shade of blue. As I sat on an outdoor table at the Yik Cafe, drinking a strong espresso (10 pesos) and watching the Plaza de 31 Marzo, where these colours swirled, Chiapas felt like a place out of time.

"The only place it compares with is maybe Tibet, Nepal years ago," said Walter Morris Jr., a gray-bearded American anthropologist — better known as Chip — who has lived in San Cristobal for 35 years. "In terms of leaving your normal space and being with people who truly think differently and who do interesting things, this is about as exotic as you can get within a few thousand miles of the United States and a short plane ride."

Artisanship in San Cristobal also shades quite smoothly into art. Just down the street from the purported Banksy was Galeria Studio Cerrillo, where the Basque artist Gorka Larranaga was showing his light-box paintings of exploding buildings and bridges.

Around the corner, three artists — an American, a Swiss and an Italian, all of whom had spent more than a decade in San Cristobal — were working hard to paint, furnish and open Elisa Burkhard, a hybrid museum-gallery that will showcase local artists as well as the work of its founders. Kinoki, a cultural centre and cafe, showed Spanish documentaries as well as Emir Kusturica’s bizarre Arizona Dream, starring Johnny Depp and Cybill Shepherd.

Strangely, the one place I had difficulty finding local craftsmanship was at the dinner table. Despite the presence of a big marketplace on the north end of town, with rainbows of beans, pyramids of guavas and tubs of poetically named chilies (paloma blanca, miraciel, simojovel), many of San Cristobal’s restaurants either served a generic Mexican menu or focused on international cuisine.

Thanks to guidance from Morris, however, I discovered El Mercadito, primarily a takeout-and-delivery shop but with four booths open at lunchtime. The food is true Chiapanecan, distinct from the moles of Oaxaca and the habanero obsessions of the Yucatan. The azado of pork featured chunks of falling-apart meat in a rich, chili-based sauce that was also delightfully sweet; the fat chile relleno came stuffed not only with pork but with raisins as well; and the plantain croquetas, ordered as a side dish, were saucers of fried, smoky goodness, with a heart of tangy cheese. My two lunches there averaged 70 pesos. So little for so much!

I couldn’t eat every meal at El Mercadito, however, and I did manage to find some worthy alternatives. Chiapanecan tamales were Dona Ame’s specialty, indeed, the restaurant’s main offering, and I gorged on the Chamula, stuffed with pork and steamed in a banana leaf, and the chipilin, cooked in a corn husk with chicken and the bitter, herbaceous leaves of the chipilin plant. At La Vina de Bacco, San Cristobal’s only wine and tapas bar, I drank a dense Mexican cabernet sauvignon (35 pesos a glass) and munched juicy ham on crusts of bread. I even ate pretty well — more Chiapanecan tamales, plus a lightly tomato-y soup studded with chunks of nopales cactuses — at TierrAdentro, an airy, courtyard-like restaurant run by the Zapatistas.

Yup, those Zapatistas, properly termed the Zapatista Army of National Unity, or EZLN, whose failed revolution has given Chiapas a frisson of danger. A decade ago, that reputation was well-earned, thanks to the Mexican military’s pursuit of the EZLN, the massacre of Tzotzil Indians in the village of Acteal and frequent unrelated but frightening raids by bandits who cross the border from Guatemala.

Today, however, the revolution is below a simmer, invisible except for the occasional tortilla shop named "1 de Enero," a reference to the Jan. 1, 1994, uprising. The revolutionaries still exist, living in autonomous collectives throughout the state, tolerated by the government but limited in their movement. But compared with the drug wars being waged in northern Mexico, a region where the State Department’s website warns of rising crime, Chiapas is Switzerland. Subcomandante Marcos, the pipe-smoking, balaclava-clad EZLN spokesman, is an object of interest mostly to backpackers and idealists who might find Che Guevara too mainstream.

Except that Marcos and his Zapatistas are well on their way to a Che-like level of fame — and commercialization. When you can eat at a Zapatista restaurant, buy coffee and political artwork from the Nemi Zapata boutique and pick up an iSubcomandante T-shirt from the iPod Tours storefront, does the movement’s anti-globalization message retain any meaning?

In San Cristobal, however, it hardly seemed to matter. In the evenings, I would find a stool at Revolucion or Perfidia, order a Dos Equis and listen to a rock band or flamenco guitarists, then button up my jacket and wander home through the cold, half-lighted lanes, noting new pieces of street art (a praying mantis menacing two businessmen, an "assassin wanted" poster) and not minding one bit if I became lost. After all, I had the mountains — so green at noon, so black in the moonlight — to show me the way home