Puerto Chiapas

Our last Mexican port was so colourful! Puerto Chiapas is a relatively new port. Only 18 ships stopped here last year and they're planning 30 for this year. The locals have built a little market and a theatre where they can entertain the cruise guests, but their welcome starts as soon as the ship docks, as these dancers demonstrate in their native dress. There was dancing the entire day!

In Chiapas there is colour, culture and tradition. It's a paradise that offers lovely scenery, living culture, colonial inheritance and activities such as rafting, fishing and speleology (scientific study of caves). Chiapanecan's handcrafts are products of the sensibility and dedication of the inhabitants inside this cultural plurality. They are an image of their emotions for life and the searching of beauty.

We took a small 6-passenger boat down the "river" (more like a swampy creek) to tour the mangroves. At first it felt like we were entering a tunnel with the trees surrounding us, but it soon opened up a bit to the sky and the light enabled us to see the life all around us. The mangroves are long, stringy trees that have roots that grow to incredible lengths. Part of the root touches the bottom of the river, but much of the root is exposed above the water line. There were all kinds of mini-crabs crawling along the roots of the mangroves, four-eyed fish swimming (they really only have 2 eyes, but the eye is so elongated that it protrudes above the water to see above and below the water), and of course all kinds of birds. It was a quiet boat ride yet there was so much sound all around us - the sounds of nature! We were being propelled through the water by a guy with a very long pole that he pushed into the bottom of the river, like a gondolier in Venice.


I celebrated my 56th birthday and the crew came to sing "Happy Birthday" to me in English and Tagalog (Filipino language). They offered me a strawberry mousse cake with a candle that couldn't be blown out.