Back home they call me Skeeter

There're are two massive gringo madmen running rampant through the streets of San Cristobál de las Casas, the picturesque town in the Mexican state of Chiapas in which lightly armed Zapatistas, black bandanas covering their faces below the eyes, staged a minor revolution not so many years ago. Wearing shorts and sandals, singing R&B at piercing pitches and patronizing every panaderia, pasteleria, and dulceria lining the streets, we're beasts of boredom with insatiable appetites for simple carbohydrates.

Yesterday we enjoyed a day excursion to the nearby Cañón del Sumidero, an adventure made more exciting when our fifteen-passenger van broke down on the way to the launch point. Thankfully, Mexicans are exceedingly nice and another bus, from a different company, stopped to assess our troubles soon afterward, graciously allowing us to crowd their bus for the final 15km. Once we arrived, we donned life jackets and were hustled into twenty foot motorboats, taking off upriver into a pristine, verdant canyon sandwiched by sheer, majestic rockfaces and peaks towering hundreds to one thousand meters overhead. Birds circling trees many hundreds of meters overhead cast shimmering shadows against the canyon walls, and massive crocodiles sunbathed on sandbars along the riverbanks, still as statues as butterflies fluttered about their snouts. On the way back to San Cristobál we stopped over in Chiapa de Corzo, a fine enough town but anticlimactic compared to the awesomeness preceding.

San Cristobál has grown on us too, transformed in my opinion by its own weekend nighttime transformation. The town, typically quiet save the wild west market center, the labyrinthine expanse of stands, tents, and alleys flooded daily with townspeople, jumps off for the weekend. Fly rides rocking suicide doors, custom paintjobs and lights cruise the suddenly congested streets; the zocala grows packed with a young, well dressed crowd; and bars, coffee shops, and restaurants before unnoticed are suddenly deluged with customers, all the central streets inundated with foot traffic stepping to the beat of live music calling from many enticing establishments. The guys look suave but the girls unbelievable, wearing jeans so tight they can't possibly fit a peso in their pockets. Many of the indigenous girls are beauties themselves, though dressed in vibrant, flowing garb, outstretched arms ornamented by beads and jewelery they can never afford to stop hawking. For us, walking the steets was at once the highlight of the week and a depressing reminder of our español inadequacies.

By morning the town returns to low-key, Jackson and I again the centerpieces of attention. I ran this morning for the first time during the trip -- motivated by the mountain of pastries I consumed over three meals yesterday -- a surprisingly easy 50 minutes given the approximately 2000m altitude to which I've apparently already acclimated. It was a good head clearer, and we've both admitted to having a few solitary, shaky moments during which we questioned our commitment to traveling and its affect on our futures; but we too concurred that new excitements soon swayed us back to the journeyman's camp.

Moreover, we're laughing so much it's proof we're summiting the pinnacles of relaxation and happiness. Our melodically and harmonically superior duets are soundtracks to all moments, breaking into spanish-littered english song sitting in our bedroom or benched in the zocala, walking to the fruit market or sipping tall beers on the hostel's rooftop terrace, eyelevel with the roofs and rooftop shanties encircling. We're practicing R&B for at least thirty minutes daily, not merely for the pantydropping potential but for the love of the music! From time to time we veer into hardcore/metal territory, never forgetting our roots, finding infinite hilarity in filtering words like mariposa and helado through the voice of Satan, splayed over some sludgy breakdown. And walking through town I'm constantly amazed by the resonance of the crumbled No Limit empire, blinded every few steps by a shriveled indigenous geriatric flashing her silver-and-gold studded grill.

Last but not least, we laughed hard for no less than thirty minutes last night, an ab workout courtesy the word "skeet." Indeed, the conversation started steeped in vulgarity, the part of speech variations of skeet being uniformly funny and well-worth exploration. Somehow the conversation devolved into a country-fried skeet circus, replete with heavily redneck-accented pronunciations and exlamations of skeet, skeeter and the like. ¨Round here they call me Skeeter.¨ ¨Back home they call me Skeeter.¨ ¨They call me Skeeter round these parts.¨ We rarely get through any of the above statements without bursting into laughter. Jackson has renamed himself Skeeter Letchworth for the duration of this trip. Seriously, if you were here with us, no funnier conversation has ever taken place, and a night's sleep did nothing to dampen the hilarity.

Patrick, the Pastry King

It's never a bad day when you see a fanny pack. Or, for that matter, man capris and other fashion faux pas courtesy our Euro-traveling brethren. And every day my immune system conquers the traveler's diarrhea lurking in every bacteria-laden bite of street food is reason to crack another cerveza, but, moreover, to be increasingly daring in my patronage of questionable curbside vendors. I might miss Thanksgiving in the US, but it's everyday during this end-far-from-seen vacation.

Our small hostel in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Hostel Conejo, is a few renovations short of humble, but it does boast hot water and a pot-smoking, rum-sipping twenty-six year old divorcee owner who wants to have sex with every female foreigner he can seduce to the hostel fresh off the bus. For once, we witness a man who lives by the admirable creed, "It doesn't matter what you look like." (Since handwriting this post last night, we've changed hostels to another for the same price, Hostel Plaza Central, which at 60 pesos each per night provides quiter, private rooms if less character, but the front desk attendent is another cool dude. A good change.)

I'm finding it a bit difficult hostel-hopping. Not for the usual expectation: my OCD stricken self being unable to function outside a realm of absolute order, repetition, and cleanliness. The day-to-day holds plenty surprise to distract me from the absence of ritual and the presence of personal reek. I'm a misanthrope by nature, despite the smiling facade that frequently fools bored gas station attendants and old ladies. I tend to expect the worst of people until experience proves otherwise, and I have little patience for the daily repetition of identical introductory conversations, characteristics hardly conducive to making friends in the short term (though that's hardly to say I haven't met some great travelers already, nor that I've loathed every moment of conversation). Sometimes I wish it were otherwise, but I'm never immediately interested in conversing with someone unless they're offering me a drink or making overt and affectionate gestures toward my crotch. I suppose that makes me a mild asshole. Maybe I can score copious quantities of prescription pain medication at a corner pharmacy, anything with euphoria for side effect.

San Cristóbal de las Casas is a nice, quiet town, if sometimes in a menacing way. It's certainly poorer and dirtier than Oaxaca, which still holds the crown of Best City Visited, and San Cristóbal's long, seemingly unoccupied alley-width streets lined with typical, brightly painted, window-barred domiciles and housefront shops tend to energize the mind trained to expect kidnappings and muggings. Still, it's a charming town, and Latin America's affinity for vibrant paintjobs is among its most endearing features. Packs of mangy wild dogs are less so, though none has attempted to snatch a pastry from my hands, so we have no beef. Yet. However, I do find myself secretly hoping for an exploding predatory large cat population to tear and claw the region back into a more personally preferential population balance. That's probably for the parade of truckbed-caged wild cats we saw on display in the streets of Oaxaca, jaguars and panthers and more, a free and uncoordinated market-side spectacle, full of kids risking their hands and wrists with flicks and waves inside the bars, within inches of severing-capable jaws.

I'm excited to eat an expat-run Isreali restaurant tonight, which, according to a Jewish traveler at our last hostel, serves excellent falafel (Update: it does!). The variety of quality international food is one of the greatest attributes of the US. But, whatever I miss about the US, it isn't cell phones, though Jackson and I both keep experiencing phantom vibrations in our pockets.

For those who've always wanted to hear me sing, our ever-improving and -evolving "I've got the voice of an angellll!" duet keeps us giddy and everyone else confounded, perhaps revealing too much of our current mindset in its newest, melodically identical incarnation: "I'm gonna stick my dick in an angellllllllll!"