Travel: Chiapas, Mexico

Chiapas green is the golden green of fair-trade coffee beans ready for roasting, and the translucent olive drab of banana leaves wrapped around steaming tamales, and a DayGlo pear growing in a backyard orchard. Nowhere have I seen so many variations of Kermit the Frog's uneasy colour, and yet there was one place in Chiapas, which I visited over ten days in October, where green served little to no purpose: my wallet.

Yes, Chiapas is cheap – as is much of Mexico, but Chiapas's affordability is compounded by its relative obscurity. Apart from the packs of student backpackers experimenting with Maya mysticism and awkward hairstyles, few tourists venture there. Perhaps it's a fear of the Zapatista rebels, whose 1994 seizure of five Chiapas towns gained them worldwide headlines. Or maybe it's simply the state's inaccessibility – at least 12 hours by bus from Cancun, Oaxaca or Mexico City.

Either way, the lack of crowds means that, for around 50 (30) a day, mildly adventurous travellers have unfettered access to lovely colonial towns and indigenous cultures (Indians make up a fifth of the state's 4.3 million people), the ancient Mayan ruins at Palenque, Bonampak and beyond, lush, isolated rain forests, good coffee, quirky and affordable hotels and even the shadowy Zapatistas themselves.

I began, as most Chiapas visitors do, in San Cristobal de las Casas, the nearly 500-year-old Spanish colonial hill town that serves as base camp for exploring the state.

I was energised by the crazily consistent beauty of it all, invigorated by the chilly mountain air and in love with my 550-pesos-a-night accommodation at Na Bolom. Built in 1891 as a hacienda, Na Bolom is much more than a charming hotel compound with mustard-yellow arches, scarlet balconies and more courtyards than I cared to count. It's also a research institution, founded by Danish anthropologist Frans Blom and his wife, Swiss photographer Gertrude Duby. From the 1920s until their deaths (he died in 1963, she 30 years later), they documented the cultures of both the ancient Maya and their modern descendants, in particular the Lacandon, an isolated Indian population that never fell under Spanish or Mexican dominion.

Today, Na Bolom – it means Jaguar House in Tzotzil, one of several Mayan languages, but is also a play on Blom's name – is testament to their life's work, with public rooms full of artefacts, a library of books on Maya and Mexican history and gallery spaces devoted to contemporary art related to indigenous people.

But I wasn't about to spend this trip hanging around the hotel; I needed to get out into the streets. And San Cristobal was a city that had me joyously roaming its streets from morning till night. Indeed, these lanes, paved with hexagonal stones, may have been the most roamable I've seen. Laid out in a rough grid, they climb up and over and down gentle hills until, at the far reaches of this small valley, they end in a ring of green mountains, "crouched all round like large and friendly dogs", as Graham Greene put it in his travelogue The Lawless Roads. Locals use the peaks for orientation.

The houses were mostly single-story Spanish colonials, nearly windowless with colour schemes that veered from turquoise and orange to magenta and blue to bold red and yellow. Occasionally, their walls bore graffiti and stencil art, sometimes simple political slogans like "The revolutionary acts, not speaks!" But more often they were adorned with clever exercises in absurdism: a pregnant pope; a two-headed Betty Boop with a devil tail; a woman's face subtitled "She is in love". (All, I learned, by an artist named Hakro.)

When I looked up past the walls, I could see the smooth domes of centuries-old churches and convents rising from among the crenellated terracotta roofs. Some, like the Templo de Santo Domingo, had facades elaborately carved with saints and double-headed eagles; others, like the Templo de El Carmen, had vaulted wood ceilings that perfumed the pews with the scent of the forest.

But more than anything, what distinguished the streets of San Cristobal were the indigenous people, who wore the traditional outfits of their native towns. Women from Chamula sported black tufted-wool skirts and belts woven with metallic thread. Women from Zinacantan had black capes and jackets on which were embroidered flowers in the most unearthly shade of blue. As I sat at an outdoor table at the Yik Cafe, drinking a strong espresso (10 pesos) and watching the Plaza de 31 Marzo, where these colours swirled, Chiapas felt like a place out of time.

"The only place it compares with is maybe Nepal years ago," says Walter Morris, a grey-bearded US anthropologist who has lived in San Cristobal for 35 years. "In terms of leaving your normal space and being with people who truly think differently and do interesting things, this is as exotic as you can get."

Morris, who happens to live right behind Na Bolom, is an expert on Mayan weaving and tracks the accelerating evolution of indigenous styles.

Artisanship in San Cristobal also shades quite smoothly into art – when I was there the Basque artist Gorka Larranaga was showing his light-box paintings of exploding buildings and bridges.

Strangely, the one place I had difficulty finding local craftsmanship was at the dinner table. Despite the presence of a big marketplace on the north end of town, with rainbows of beans, pyramids of guavas and tubs of poetically named chillies (paloma blanca, miraciel, simojovel), many of San Cristobal's restaurants either served a generic Mexican menu or focused on international cuisine.

Thanks to guidance from Morris, however, I discovered El Mercadito, primarily a takeaway but with four booths open at lunchtime. The food is true Chiapanecan, distinct from the moles of Oaxaca and the habanero obsessions of the Yucatan. The azado of pork featured chunks of falling-apart meat in a rich, chilli-based sauce that was also delightfully sweet; the fat chile relleno came stuffed not only with pork but with raisins as well; and the plantain croquetas, ordered as a side dish, were saucers of fried, smoky goodness, with a heart of tangy cheese. My two lunches there averaged 70 pesos.

My evenings in San Cristobal were just as good. I would find a stool at Revolucion or Perfidia, order a Dos Equis and listen to a rock band or flamenco guitarists, then button up my jacket and wander home through the cold, half-lit lanes, noting new pieces of street art (a praying mantis menacing two businessmen, an "assassin wanted" poster) and not minding one bit if I became lost. After all, I had the mountains – so green at noon, so black in the moonlight – to show me the way home.

New York Times

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This article was published in The Scotsman Magazine on 06 February 2010