With the bewitching liquor's smokey spirit still stirring behind my eyes I stepped in to a ratty van on its way out of Oaxaca City. I was going to a high mountain town known for it's magic mushrooms and sweat ceremonies. There was a tall Australian man with dreads and glasses that owned a little hostel on the hill above town. It was a simple place with a few stand alone shacks, one full of bunk beds the other acting as a kitchen. There was a good view out into the pine filled valleys and mountains and off the to the arid plains to the East. I met a young woman named Milly and together we went off on a trek to a distant village of reputed beauty. Without much idea where we were going we set off, making river crossing after river crossing in the well wooded valley. Several times we wondered if we had gotten lost. Milly hazarded a crossing with her shoes on and dunked them fully so that she was now walking on sponges. At one point she reasoned it would be better to hike without them and resolved to continue barefoot on the pointed stones of the road. After a full day of wandering we finally made it to a paved road that led at last to the village we had heard of. Indeed it was beautiful there on a small shelf tucked into the mountains. The place we had been planning to go for some food was closed comically, so we started to search around on little paths that wound through the homes, chicken coops roughly clabbered goat pens. We were invited in to a small dirt floored kitchen with a woman cooking on open flames. She made us up something delicious as we sat in the plastic chairs laughing about our misadventures. By the time we wandered back into the heart of the small town the sun had gone behind the western ridge and night was settling in. Negotiating a pickup truck ride back to the town where our hostel was proved challenging. It's sometimes hard to know if you are getting fleeced or not by the locals so things got a little heated, at least for Milly. she was so pissed that he changed the agreed upon price that she threw her empty beer can in the truck bed "here, he can have that!" she said laughing cynically. I climbed back in the truck and grabbed it despite her protests.
The owner of the Hostel also cooked dinner for the guests though he spent most of the night smoking giant spliffs with a Belgium girl named Elfje who was sharing his bunk. When he finally made food it was 930 at night and I ate the full plate right before laying down. My body rebelled and filled the bunk house with crazy farts the whole night through. I was surprised that the guy on the bottom bunk was nice to me in the morning, he was from the state of San Luis Potosi further to the North in Mexico and was heading to the same town as me out on the coast.
On the road into Mazunte I realized that I had been there before about a decade ago during an epic hitchhiking journey from Chiapas back to my fathers boat anchored in Zihautenejo. Back then I had chanced upon this town after sleeping in someones dirt lot at the crossroads with the main highway and hiked in on a hunch. I had been blown away to find many of the traveling eccentrics in that small town, whom I had come to know in the Chiapas jungle during a harrowing encampment deemed "The Intergalactic Rainbow Gathering." I had slept out on the peninsula, bathed in the sea and given a large gemstone to the tribe's tarot reader, though I declined a reading. However that was a decade ago and somehow the peninsula didn't look as inviting as it had, so I shacked up at the same hostel as my new friend Pedro. The place was made of bamboo built right on the sand with mosquito nets over simple beds. Pedro was involved in the arts community in his hometown, he photographed dancers and performers and had also learned excellent english at his university. So we talked about our lives, how different they were but still with common ground to connect on.
Pedro and I would travel to San Cristobal De Las Casas together as well, where we spent Christmas and where he took me out to the street vendors to introduce me to the various forms of homemade fireworks for sale. On Christmas night we stocked up on a variety of small explosives, many simply made from gunpowder wrapped in newspaper and glue with a fuse sticking out. We also bought handfuls of little rockets that came taped to sticks and would shoot out with a trail of sparks and a deafening whistle. "But the strongest one by far" he said grinning while picking it up from the table "Is this one here" It was a bit larger than my palm shaped out of cardboard and painted to look like the Devil's head, eyes glaring wildly from a brooding red face. We filled a few bags with our shotty ordinance and took to the street. Sitting outside the main cathedral eating traditional holiday fare, hot chocolate and fried food he told me of fond memories growing up, raising hell at midnight on the holidays, the sound of loud music and explosives filled in behind his words. Sometime around 11 that night we went out into what seemed like a cheerful battle zone. We started the nights tirade in the cathedrals plaza, I quickly learned how dangerous the little things could be. I lit a rocket and before I could aim it properly it went of, hurtling at great speed through the air nearly taking out a family walking across the plaza. Then another one flew over to the street and ricochetted off a building nearly taking out a couple. Pedro laughed hysterically at my reaction, as I reached out hopelessly to try and stop it or alter it's course. It wasn't until we started lighting off the big stuff on the old plaza stones that the police that had been watching the whole time came over and told us to move along. We walked off into the narrow cobbled streets in darkness punctuated by bright flashes, it smelled of gunpowder everywhere, the gutters filling up with burnt scraps of newspaper. Suddenly out of a side alley flew a little homemade grenade blowing up before us. Laughing like mad men we lit and threw a few of ours back indiscriminately. One of pedro's devil heads failed to detonate, he picked it up and saw that the fuse had went out just before reaching the powder. He lit a match and held it to the nub. Before I could get out the words "what the hell are you doing?" I felt the impact of the explosion on my chest as it went off mid air a few feet away. Wide eyed and deranged we sauntered off cackling into the maze of smokey streets.
