Mexico

A caving expedition to Chiapas with the Alberta Speleological Society. The written account survives; the photographs do not.

What I Did on My Spring Vacation, 1996

What I did on my spring vacation 96.

May 10 96 The situation in Chiapa area is worsening. Perhaps our culture is under the same neurosis as the Aztek, that we need to sacrifice ourselves lest the sun not shine another day. This trip was in April 96 near Gutamala with the Alberta Speleological Society. I have an amusing list of Stuff to bring to Mexico , some of which I purchased from Inner Mountain Outfitters and the rest from Mountain Equipment Coop here in Calgary. Visit Onstation for an excellent cave mapping package written by Taco here in Calgary. About the trip itself, A rush of images, reflections, voices. More like music than a linear story; thrash 'music'. Long harmony of dirt road bouncing by, barefoot children, mangy dogs, punctuated by federales, machine guns and zapatista rebels crowded around roadblocks. Game Developers Conference April 1st 1996. Convention Center Hotel check in counter. I honestly have never seen so many geeks in one place. It's funny how you can kind of recognize them, checking in, wandering up and down the escalators, disappearing and appearing from behind columns and decorative plants. One small thermonuclear device here would probably set back the games industry five years. Although I've been in the games industry since its inception, I've never participated in any of the public forums or discussions; I've always been something of an early adopter into new techologies and haven't really had a group of peers to work with. Meeting other people of my skill level and higher was therefore quite neat, this show was worth the couple grand out of pocket just for the caliber of intellect. I was able to go directly into geek talk skipping all the preamble, and to be have my thinking challenged in the areas I am most interested in. Best of all, what I learned here, I was able to think about over the (mostly) lazy two weeks to follow. I have a show report elsewhere, but briefly, at a technical level it appears that 3d hardware is still fragmented and in my opinion there is no common technical ground at the bottom, thus 3d hardware accelerators will fail. MMX technology from Intel, seems to be the best of all worlds, however Intels previous NSP technology seems to have bit the big one, and it is likely that Intel will fail to fully deliver. Direct Draw is extremely popular, but again, it is not optimized for custom needs - I kept challenging the Direct3D dominance by asking about how to do a spline based procedural texturemap game using Direct3D. At a design level I found the 'Girl Games' talk to be one of the best, and some of the talks on internet based games to be interesting as well. At a management level I have had many books recommended to me. Many people have the same game production problems as me, but they have solutions which I haven't known of. I've lots of thinking now on this area and will probably merge it with my Game Developers Manifesto. At a financial level, this is apparently one of the most difficult years for games companies, being a transition year between DOS and WINDOWS, single player traditional markets and multiplayer markets. Financing is there, but the traditional markets are taking a pounding as intense competition fragments market share. There is a still not full awareness of the potential of the internet at the venture capitalist level, and general financing level of mass market games companies. At the Microsoft Party they had a lion in a crate cage with widely spaced metal bars of some bumpy black metal, gorgeous beast, baleful golden eyes, the creature having pushed itself up against a corner as far from us as possible. Mexico City. A troupe of federales with guns, shotguns. I follow them onto the subway downtown, then wander the streets for a couple of hours, waiting for my connection. Museum of Anthropology. A quarter kilometer on a side, walking endless hours through Olmec, Mayan, Egyptian, Chinese, Ukranian, American Indian, Eskimo. The text being entirely in Spanish, I simply wandered without reading, drifting slowly from room to room, my eyes like hands touching each piece lightly, feeling the surfaces, the lines, edges, textures and patterns of a dozen different cultures. The museum was free, yet mostly empty, and every third or fourth exhibit area was closed for one reason or another. I know all the words already, the little words to encapsulate creatures entirely alien. In the air, on the way to Villa Hermosa ("Via"). I'm trying to sleep, to ignore the people around me. But the pilot announces 'Eclipse' in Espanol. I jerk up, to find the moon, and in finding it also find myself in conversation with those people around me. It's a great eclipse although I missed the best part of it. A young lady and I get to talking. It's great to be able to talk to people without them thinking you're trying to take them home. I always hate talking to strangers because people either presume I have an agenda, or I find they have an agenda. Calgary is particularily bad for this, people are frigid and fearful. But as I found out, Villa Hermosa is something of a small town, with strong religious roots. The people here are able to converse, in a way Calgarians cannot. Luckily she happens to be a translator, we talk alot about our respective relationships, and work, and Mexico in general, and as it turns out I get an invitation to dinner with her and her boyfriend - who just happens to be a journalist! So we (or I at least!) have a great time at dinner, asking about the Chiapas situation with free translation as a go-between. Thus ends my first day in Villa Hermosa. Next day I'm on the bus, the entire day. Travelling from town to town, each new bus is a bit smaller, a bit more rickety. Each town a bit poorer. By evening I find myself trudging through a field with a couple of barefoot farmers, a bag of eggs and pick-axes. My magic mantra 'Casa de Ruben, Soconosco, Pueblo Nuevo, YerbaBuena' has worked, and I've had the fortuitous luck to meet a few people in series who actually know Ruben. By good luck Taco shows up at Rubens place! Yay! And I'm off to the caving base camp. One thing strange along the way is that none of the people I talked to knew english, nor I Spanish, yet in my recollection of my conversations with them, I recall unhindered conversation - yes with gestures and pictures - but nevertheless not nearly as difficult as I'd anticipated. We talked about the community, the people, the difficulty of finding work, the crazy cavers, made jokes... I recall in my sign language class that my teacher was so good at communicating, that I felt she must be telepathic...this was like that. The town of Soconosco is in the highest part of the Mexican state of Chiapas, full of caves, and cash impoverished. Our camp is like television for the inhabitants. Off we troup in our weird caving gear with jangly metals and bright fabrics, followed by a cloud of at least two mostly naked children. Many caves. Aire Fresco is a grand cave, flooding yearly but having a giant open internal space with an actual beach and its own river. One of the big goals is to connect this cave to the Soconosco cave, a rather imposing cave with a 100+ meter entrance pitch and a dead horse at that bottom. Unfortunately I wasn't able to help with the expedition itself much, I was more of a tourist. I felt that part of my role there should be to help survey or de-rig, but I just didn't have the time or the experience to do that. Homer was another of the caves in the area, I descended with Dan to help Monique and Andy derig. We managed to meet them right at the tightest spot, and help pull the rope out while they wormed their way through. It was great fun to see the joy on their faces at having some help after slogging through the mud and passage for endless black hours. It's really something to be all alone in a cave system and then suddenly see a light ahead of you. The funnest cave was definately Eh Cherchedero. It's a water cave, descending through a mountain in a series of cascading waterfalls punctuated by snaking river in deeply carved passage. This system also floods yearly so we don't have to worry about leaving footprints. It's the only cave I know which ends in a restaurant, being at its bottom a small local resort for the Tuxla area. We entered in the morning, wet suits and cave gear, and soon found ourselves totally soaked, plunging off fall after fall, or climbing or roping those that were too dangerous. This system was first mapped by Ian Drummond, who must have had a hell of a time rigging the entire thing for re-ascending - given that he didn't know a through trip was possible. It comes out in a river passage with a waterfall cascading into the tourist resort. Apparently some of the tourists started running away when they first saw us emerge from the water; black wetsuits dripping muck, carbide cyclops eyes. We all changed and sat down for beer! This was also to be one of my last caves, from there I returned briefly to do Soconosco's first pitch and then left to accompany Theo on a whirlwind tour of San Cristobol, Palenke, Agua Azul. It was here we started to hit the Zapatista Rebel roadblocks...and their oppressors. Continued in Spring Trip Part deux