Teargas Hurts!
I was going to tell you about my Oaxaca adventures on Sunday in this post, but I have decided to tell you about today (Monday) instead. Right now I am in my nice room and I can hear shots being fired so it seems timelier to report on today since the shots are part of the story. Live from Oaxaca…
This morning I bought my $90 airplane ticket back to Puerto with much relief. It leaves at 9:00 so it works perfect for my 11:00 AM class. There have been reports this weekend that there would be protests today, a national holiday, so I wanted to get the ticket before anything happened. I figured protesters don’t start so early in the morning!
I then went to Monte Alban which is an ancient Zapotec ruin dating back to 500 BC – 800 AD. Now that is ancient! I can tell you that it blew my socks off. It sits on a mountain overlooking all three valleys that come together around Oaxaca and has truly awesome views of the city and surrounding mountains including the ones that nearly killed me on the drive from Puerto! The builders certainly chose the best site possible. The ruins are basically an ancient city including temples, palaces and pyramid shaped entities. I walked up and down steep pyramid steps as well as the grounds in between for about three hours. My feet were very sore by time it was time to catch the bus back to town. Beside the views and the ruins, I really appreciated that the signs were in English as well as Spanish and an Indian language. They conveyed enough information for me to imagine what the place, people and living situation were like 1200-2500 years ago.
The drive to Monte Alban is only a few kilometers, but it climbs over 300 meters from the city of Oaxaca. The drive took us through the outlying neighborhoods surrounding the city. While the inner city is quite nice and not “third-world”, we drove through areas which basically contained sheet metal and some concrete shacks stuck to steep hillsides. Whereas most American cities with hills would have the choicest homes on those hills for the views, it seems flipped here. I assume it has to do with distance from the center of town equating to less desirable locations, but I may have also not seen the complete picture of outlying neighborhoods of Oaxaca. Regardless, I can tell you that there has been nothing about poverty or the less-privileged that I have seen in Oaxaca State that compares to what I saw just about every day in Africa. Oprah might even say that there is no poverty in Mexico, but she (I mean ME!) is only seeing a small portion of this large country so we won’t get too overboard with the generalization. I can tell you that I have seen most people here living at a standard which is very far beyond Africa. I’m not sure why this is important, but until I see somewhere at Africa’s level, I am going to keep saying it.
So, I get back to town around 3:30 and I decide that even though my feet are sore, I am going to walk around a part of town that I have not seen. It involves walking back through the zocalo. While on Monte Alban, I thought I was hearing thunder which seemed to be plausible due to the stormy clouds in the mountains on the other side of Oaxaca. Well, it turns out that protests did take place and the “thunder” which I am still hearing now is the report from teargas guns. I was walking through the police area not knowing anything was amiss when all of a sudden they started to move in large numbers towards me. Yikes! So what does a tourist due when they find themselves in this kind of situation (which many people warned me about!!!)? Pull out the video camera of course! I spent the next two hours watching police shoot teargas, protesters light a bus and another vehicle on fire (I was walking on a quiet street with a bus blocking an intersection before I realized that there was a lit fuse coming out of the bus’ gas tank – another Yikes!), and other general mayhem. All of this in the surroundings of beautiful buildings and a lot of locals standing about watching with many of them using their cell phones to take photos. Other than a couple of surprise moments, I did not feel any major threat (it seemed pretty minor league as far as “riots” go and the police presence was not going to allow it to become anything dangerous). I will say that I can probably show some video which would make it seem bigger than reality and I just felt it proves my point that we all need to turn off our TVs and take all media with a large grain of salt because they only magnify the reality. “Video at Eleven” kind of thing. Now maybe more is going on now that it is dark and maybe some people will get hurt or worse, I don’t know. I spent my riot time circling behind the police and then the protesters. The biggest dose of reality I got was when winds carried teargas to where I was located and my eyes and throat hurt very much. I put my sunglasses on and that seemed to help!
Near the end of my “reporting” – the end because I was starving! – the most surreal moment took place. I had been behind the protesters enjoying the late sunshine lighting up the Santo Domingo cathedral when I went around the “situation” using empty streets. I got to an intersection and found that I had placed myself between the police two blocks to my left and protesters two more blocks to the right. This could only happen because by then they were only looking at each other, but it was strange. Of course, I had to take some more video before scurrying off to something more important – dinner! Speaking of which, all of the restaurants in the protest area were closed and I did not want to eat in the zocalo area behind the troops so I had to walk a way to reach normal Oaxaca and find a restaurant. I enjoyed some great chicken fajitas which I had always assumed was something that was fake Mexican made up in America. Apparently not! I do hope that things are just as tame in Oaxaca protest-wise going forward and that the media is not reporting more than the reality (I’m more hopeful about the tame protests than media portrait – speaking of which – I saw basically no journalists here). Maybe I should make some stories up and sell the video to CNN!
Tags: Central America, Mexico, North America, Travel
vagabondrick
Bet your videos would be the highlight of CNN! What adventures!!
Your adventures on your own are already thrilling!!! I will imagine you catching all kinds of wonderful video, everywhere you go…probably something that will be of interest to those hollywood types!!!