Chiapas, Oaxaca

I stayed two days in San Christobal. On both days I went to the Museum and Clinic of Mayan Medicine on the outskirts of the town. The first day I visited the museum, herbal garden and pharmacy. In the museum there was a movie shown about midwifery and childbirth. It was very interesting. In Chiapas women give birth kneeling down, resting their heads on their husbands who support them by holding their shoulders. The placenta is carefully deposited in a hole buried in the earthen floor of the couple's house. The midwife pushes down the baby out of mother's belly by adjusting a woven belt around her belly. Very different technigue from the western style. There are different types of doctor in Mayan medicine: the pulsador (who by checking the pulse diagnoses the illness, which is similar to the Chinese medicine. He also uses acupuncture and the "needles" are sharp edges of agava plants), the herbalist, the midwife, the person who prays for different causes on top of the mountains (a type of shaman), and a person who deals with broken bones, sprains, and bone and ligament pain. The next day I went to see the doctor pulsador and he told me I was fine but a bit weak and my kidneys needed some enhancement as well. So I got herbs for strength and to purify the kidneys. I think the Mayan medicine works in a similar way the Chinese does but the Chinese medicine is more precise, more scientific.

From San Christobal I went to Oaxaca. The bus travelled on another extremally beautiful road through Chiapas. Chiapas, and particularly the road from Palenque to San Christobal and from San Christobal to Oaxaca, is another of my favorite mountain-valley sights (together with the Sacred Valley in Peru and the Cauca Valley in Colombia). What is amazing in Chiapas are the clouds which are layered, layered, layered... The different layers have a different shape and texture and through them you can see the lush green mountains. The road is a very winding road; it's basically only turns, right left, right left, right left, the head is spinning, the body sways to both sides (in Polish there exists this term "to hold the peacock on a leash" - peacock being the vomit, so colorful it is when it does get off the leash... - and that was what I was doing half of the trip). On one of them we saw a Coca-Cola truck which looked like it didn't make the turn and hit a stone wall and some of the crates went flying down into the valley. The local people immediately gathered at the place of the accident and looked like ants, carying the crates with the bottles which survived full. It remainded me of the road between Warsaw and my home town in Poland which is a road to Berlin and many TIRs are on it and many similar accidents happen and people carry the goods away in the same ant-like fashion. We saw two trucks with police on its way to stop the Chiapas people and I thought they should just leave the people alone... they were not stealing, only taking away what was half-damaged. I got to Oaxaca at 7 am and got picked up at the bus station by someone offering rooms at a Hostal Fernanda he works for. It was a very nice place and the group which was on my bus and the people we met at the hostal were nice as well. I was tired but decided to walk around the city. Oops, the internet place is being closed. I got to Mexico City today. Rest of adventures in Oaxaca and Mexico DeeFe soon.