Pausing Here and There

I just arrived back from an afternoon trip to a small town called San Andreas Xecul, which is famous for its beautiful and colorfully decorated church. The outside of it is bright yellow and there are statues of animals, and saints, and red flowers adorning the facade. Apparently, it was built during the Spanish colonization, but is representative of syncretic Mayan spritual traditions and Spanish Christianity. The yellow of the church represents maize, and the sun; the green represents the trees (which stand on the mountainsides surrounding the town–their trunks tall and skinny with a flame of leaves sitting atop, like in The Lorax); the red represents fire.

We walked up the steep slope of road to a smaller church, which is right next to a very ancient Mayan spiritual site. It is marked by two crosses and a big heap of black ash. Below, we saw heaps of corn drying in the sun to be milled into masa for tortillas and tamales. All around there are mountains and the most beautiful puffy clouds.

However, the most exciting part of this trip by far was the short pick up truck ride from the bus stop to the town. Yes, the ford truck was a rusting yellow thing with no guard rails to hang from, but that was not what made us squeal in terror and delight. Instead, it was the thirteen year old boy, who looked about ten, who so seriously drove us, blasting his horn more than he touched the breaks. I asked if I could take a picture of him. It will be up soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.