My last stop in Chiapas was the much ballyhooed San Cristóbal de Las Casas. I wanted to spend Sunday Funday in a Pueblo Mágico, as Sundays are great market days and bring out the locals. But I had a hunch that, after hearing so much about it and looking for places to stay and finding WAY too many options from hostels to five stars for a tiny town, it’d be underwhelming and overrated.
A quick 1-hour commute got me from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal (50 pesos). A 15-minute walk from the bus station confirmed my hunch. I really tried to give it chance and like it, but…
- The first thing you see when rolling into town is a fucking Sam’s Club. Charming, old-town Mexico kind of thing.
- Graffiti everywhere on walls down the main drag, by the Cathedral, etc., upset at the government.
- It seemed like every other building was a hostel, a hotel, a posada, an Oxxo, a travel agency/tour shop, or an overpriced coffee shop or restaurant that happily accepted euros or dollars. Red flag.
- Medium sized herds of white-haired, camera-on-the-neck-toting, pants-that-unzip-into-shorts-wearing, non-Spanish-speaking septuagenarians, walking without a purpose (aka, sloooowly, hogging large swaths of land without consideration. If I make it to old age I will remember this and stay to the right, where the slow people should go).
Yes, it’s colonial and well-preserved, and I recognize I was a tourist and part of the problem (not for long!), but damn. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent jumping-off point for day tours to Cañón del Sumidero, San Juan Chamula, El Chiflón, Lagos de Montebello, or Guatemala, and you can eat, shop, and walk your way around there comfortably. But I failed to find the magic in that pueblo (as with most Pueblo Mágicos, there’s a lot of marketing, but little magic). I am sure people will disagree, but, for me, San Cristóbal was just ok at best.
To the point that, after walking around all morning, I decided to spend my late afternoon enjoying the NFL playoffs at my hostel (Rossco Backpackers was great; 150 pesos) with some fellow Americans (first extended interaction with any, of course it’d happen here), and warming up with some beers around the fire pit later that night.
The thing I’ll remember most about San Cristóbal was that a group of 15 or 20 people from all over the world sat around the fire for a couple of hours (it was 30 degrees at night and there was no heating in the hostel…brrrr) and there was nary a glow of a phone screen anywhere. Everyone was engaged in conversation. It was refreshing! People living in the moment, talking about previous travels, next stops, former jobs, future hopes, hometowns, how cold it was, the playoff game etc., without worrying about social media or anything else on their phones. A rarity in this connected day and age.
Two things I will concede in this overrated place’s favor:
1) Comida Económica Doña Gloria. Good, limited-menu, home-cooked food by the church of San Francisco. $40 pesos got me a solid plate of the day, tortillas, and an horchata.
2) A mailbox at the bus station! It’s easyish to find postcards and stamps, but if the post office isn’t open, it’s hard to find a mailbox, so this was a great find. Not for the post cards of San Cristóbal I didn’t need to send, but for the ones I had from El Chiflón and from Puebla that didn’t make it out (since they had no smartly-placed bus station mailbox or one anywhere near there).
After 36 hours in San Cristóbal, I was really pleased to find that mailbox, send my postcards, hop on an overnight bus, and gtfo out of there. Of the five Pueblo Mágicos I’ve been on during this trip, it was by far my least favorite, so I was excited to continue a great journey in Veracruz, on the eastern coast of México.