I first learned about mole from Diana Kennedy’s cookbook, The Art of Mexican Cooking. At age 95, she has spent most of her life living in Mexico and traveling to different areas to document regional recipes with ferocious attention to detail. She is often called a “culinary anthropologist” and she approaches mole with a scientific attention to detail from sourcing … [Read more...]

One of the things I love about long term budget travel is that I always lose weight.  I don’t have to watch what I eat or exercise for my health.  The secret is in all the humping of backpacks, climbing and negotiating seemingly endless steps, and walking everywhere. That and the food, whether it’s the availability of food, its desirability, or its safety.  Finally, there are … [Read more...]

While we were in San Cristobal, we visited Na Bolom, the former home of Danish archaeologist and explorer Frans Blom and his wife Gertrude “Trudi” Blom, a photojournalist, environmental advocate, and fellow explorer. The house, whose name means “House of the Jaguar” in the Mayan language (and was also a word play on Blom’s last name), was built in 1950 over the ruins of an old … [Read more...]

We had read stories about people coming to San Cristobal specifically to visit the Mayan Medicine Museum, so we wanted to check it out while we were in town. However, when we looking for directions we were disappointed to discover several posts from late 2017 which said the museum was closed indefinitely.  Since we’d already encountered several restaurants which were out of … [Read more...]

A number of travel bloggers I’ve read have said that their visit to the main church in the town of San Juan Chamula near San Cristobal de las Casas, was one of the most awe inspiring things they did in Chiapas, so we were very excited to check it out.  There were conflicting details about where the colectivos for Chamula departed from, so the day before we planned to go, we … [Read more...]