The Clarke Show rolls into town

I`m sitting in the central plaza of my new home town, chiapa de Corzo at some indiscriminate time in the morning, all the clocks here either seem to be broken or defining their own unique time zone. It`s a warm cloudless morning, and groups of Mexican tourists and locals drift by as a steady stream of traffic circumnavigates the square while I sit in the shade of one of the many trees dotted around the plaza.

I was picked up from Tuxtla Gutierrez airport after a short wait by Enrique, the husband of the director of the Dunham Institute. A well presented and polite chap, he was in possession of an enviable fluency in English, allowing us to chat on the short ride to Chiapa de Corzo. The road wound its way over dry scrub land punctuated by desperate trees and dusty roadside settlements before sweeping right over a wide river that, to the left of the bridge, flowed into the beginnings of the deep Sumidero Canyon.

We cut a right off the highway and with a verbal flourish Enrique pronounced "Welcome to Chiapa de Corzo!". The first thing that struck me about the town as we drove through it was the colour. CDC is a colonial settlement about 500 years old, and viewed as a rather special item in Mexico`s cultural portfolio so the residents seem to have made efforts to present the town well; residential houses dotted around the narrow streets through which we drove were painted in a wide range of vibrant colours which, despite a seemingly callous disregard for the laws of palette matching, combined to create a wonderful spectacle.

Negotiating the indecipherable system of one way streets, we arrived at the institute and I was introduced to Joanna, a perpetually smiling redhead with a booming voice who for the majority of our time together seemed to have a tired child draped over her. She drove me in spiralling circles around the town to assist my orientation and drop me off with my host family. On our travels, Jo pointed out an ancient set of steps, sandwiched between two branches of a fork in the road. "That" she explained, "Is part of one of the oldest Mayan ruins in the world; the site is huge. It is also" she went on, "The same site upon which Nestle decided to build a milk factory". Indeed as we swung around the corner, I could see a blocky industrial buildings and gleaming white cylindrical towers, all bearing the badge of the company in question.

With my head spinning with the orientation and sights of the (admittedly rather small) town, I was almost slightly relieved when I was dropped off at the family house and introduced, over the course of a couple of hours and a variety of locations about town the the entirety of my host family; Padre Javier, Madre Toni, brother and sisters Javier Jr, Toni Jr (easy enough) and Andrea and Dolly the Dog, one and a half years old and in possession of a rather unfortunate combination of a dislike of strangers and an astounding capacity for forgetfulness. Since my arrival they have all been incredibly welcoming, giving their food to me at the dinner table on my first rather jet lagged day instead of unleashing me into the community to find something and, despite an obvious aptitude for English tenaciously persist in speaking to me in Spanish; presumably a frustrating exercise as my contribution to these conversations is rusty and limited at best and seems to revolve around the verbs "to be" and "to have"...

Chiapa de Corzo
4th January 2009