Small and sleepy, there is plenty of atmosphere and not a lot of action— the way people like it

CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS
Sun

TODOS SANTOS, Mexico — Once upon a time, say about 1972, Cabo San Lucas was a sleepy little fishing town at the southern tip of Baja California . Then came the paved highway, the international airport, the marina, the golf courses, the raucous bars and well-heeled retreats. At the newest and perhaps fanciest, Capella Pedregal, suites start at $ 675 a night.

In Cabo, you just might score the spring break you’ll never forget — or the one you won’t remember.

And then there’s Todos Santos, still small, still drowsy at most hours, wedged between the mountains and sea about 80 kilometres north of Cabo.

Its sugar mills, born amid a 19th century boom, died about 60 years ago. The paved highway didn’t arrive until the mid-1980s, about the time the first American expat artist, Charles Stewart, moved in. With no airport, no marina, no golf and virtually no nightlife, downtown amounts to a few blocks of newish galleries, inns and shops in oldish buildings. Outside town, cardoon cacti stipple the hills, and kilometres of lonely beaches roar under assault by waves so wicked that surfers and swimmers must pick their spots carefully.

Todos Santos, whose population might be as high as 15,000, depending on how many surrounding hamlets you include, is not where you come for action. But if you’re after Mexican flavour, Pacific solitude, desert vistas and fresh food, this might be your place.

“ We close down at Baja midnight, which is 9 o’clock,” said Lisa Harper, former chief executive of Gymboree and now proprietor of the Rancho Pescadero hotel, about 10 kilometres south of town. “ We’re not up partying until all hours. It’s a very calm, relaxed area. Lots of surfers, lots of expats. Lots of fantastic Mexican food, great galleries and artists.”

Pat Cope, who arrived from Los Angeles to open a gallery with her husband, Michael, and infant son, Lane, remembers that “ when we first moved here, all I heard was roosters.” Sixteen years later, Lane is contemplating colleges, and the roosters still greet each morning, Cope said, but “ I don’t hear them.”

Todos Santos, said Paula Colombo, co-owner of the Cafe Santa-Fe, “ is real. Good and bad, it’s real.” Now that the recession has slowed the pace of coastal vacation-home building outside town, Colombo added, “ maybe we can settle down and do what we have to do to keep this place as magnificent as it could be … an oasis in the desert.”

My first stop was at Harper’s Rancho Pescadero hotel ( no warning given, full price paid). Rancho Pescadero, billed as a different kind of “ dude” ranch, has been busy since it opened in November 2009 with 12 rooms, a restaurant, a bar and a pool. If things keep going this well, Harper said, the hotel could add 15 units by year’s end.

To reach the six-hectare site, you turn off two-lane Highway 19 at a Pemex station, drive 1.5 kilometres on a dirt/ sand road and stop just past the green fields of basil. ( The area sits on an aquifer that feeds many organic growing operations and keeps the place rich in chilies, mangoes, avocados and papayas.)

Once on the grounds, you can take refuge in your large room ( the smallest is still more than 55 square metres) or on your mostly private patio. Before long, you’ll be sipping your welcome drink, strolling past the fire pit, through the fledgling palm grove, to the dunes and the wide, lonely beach.

Don’t jump in. Staffers warn guests not to swim at the hotel-adjacent beach because the tide is treacherous. But you can flop on to one of the Rancho Pescadero daybeds on the dunes. Or walk at water’s edge, especially near dawn or dusk, where you’ll get the full effect of the near-empty beach coastline: pelicans gliding above the swells, offshore breezes blowing feathered foam off the whitecaps

It’s a wonder I turned away long enough to spot the handwritten signs for the San Pedrito Surf Hotel, a few hundred metres north of Rancho Pescadero. Beginning four years ago, manager/ co-owner Andy Keller and the other owners upgraded the beachfront site from a camping spot to a seven-unit hotel ( rates are $ 55$ 200, a kitchen in every room), but it remains rustic: tile floors, a few shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks, all at the end of another dirt road.

“ I’m into the classic look,” Keller said. “ No red lights, no parking meters, no pavement … You have the dirt roads, you have the dogs with no collars … the proximity of the mountains just beyond us here, and the ocean just behind me. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Out on the water — that is, the San Pedrito surf break, known up and down the West Coast — I spotted half a dozen euphoric young men carving waves with their short boards

If you can’t surf like these guys but want to get into the ocean, you drive a couple of kilometres south to Cerritos Beach , which has milder tides and beach gear for rent and the passable Cerritos Beach club restaurant. This beach, long empty, has been busy with development in the last few years. Just south of the restaurant, workers have completed about 10 Cerritos Surf Colony bungalows, being sold as time-shares and rented at $ 125 nightly.

Downtown Todos Santos includes the 18th century mission on the plaza, the galleries, shops and eateries on narrow streets, mostly unpaved. I looked at paintings in Galeria Logan and Galeria Indigo, chatted with sculptor Benito Ortega in his studio, checked out the 1930s mural at the Cultural Center . I picked up a book at El Tecolote bookshop on the main drag, Juarez, and sipped some cool gazpacho on the patio of Los Adobes de Todos Santos .

I drove out to Punta Lobos Beach, where you can buy fresh catch from the fishermen as they drag their boats ashore about 2: 30 p. m. each day.

This is no longer a town I can hold in the palm of my hand, which is what it seemed when I first visited in 1995. Todos Santos has probably doubled in population since. In 2006, local boosters managed to win a “ Pueblo Magico” designation from national tourism officials, even though the label is usually reserved for towns with elaborately restored older buildings. If the highway is improved as promised, the drive to Los Cabos airport could drop from one hour and 40 minutes to one hour.

But even so, there isn’t a lodging here with more than 14 rooms. And though some have Wi-Fi and airconditioning, most don’t bother with guest phones or TVs. I’m guessing that if you put two tourists in every guest bed, the population would grow by 500, tops.

In the wee hours of my night at Holito, a chorus of crowing roosters piped up. They never quite settled down, and neither did I. When I met Armit over coffee later, she told me the farmer across the street had brought in hundreds of the caged birds. If you run a business in Todos Santos, it seems, crises like these come and go.

“ And if you haven’t got a sense of humour,” Armit said with a winning grin, “ you shouldn’t live in Mexico .”

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United Church asks artists from South Africa, Brazil, Italy and Vancouver to provide their interpretations of faith

Tiffany Crawford
Sun

A large religion-themed mural by four artists from around the world will be unveiled in the Downtown Eastside this week by the United Church of Canada.

The four aerosol artists — Faith47 from South Africa, Titi Freak from Sao Paulo, Peeta from Italy and Indigo from Vancouver — were asked by the United Church to paint their interpretation of faith as part of the church’s Paint Your Faith campaign.

The mural will take up 40 metres by four metres of brick wall on side of a shoe store at 55-57 W. Hastings St.

The artists began painting the mural on April 21 after months of collaborative work, said Sandra Severs, a spokeswoman for United Church.

The final art installation will be unveiled at 10 a.m. Wednesday.

Severs said the artists’ collaboration is the starting point for a national program inviting people from all walks of life and religious backgrounds to “paint their faith.”

The program will include a blog and events will be held in communities and churches across Canada over the next year.

“The result will be a collective, national canvas as rich and as vibrant as the beautiful wall now brightening downtown Toronto and the Metropolitan United Church,” Severs said in a news release.

Keith Howard, executive director of the United Church’s Emerging Spirit program, said the idea behind the Paint Your Faith campaign is to provide a dialogue on spirituality and to build a relationship with Canadians who don’t usually attend church.

He said the campaign “reaches out to people in a new way, using cutting-edge urban art in ways that people would not normally expect from a church.”

Paint Your Faith also has an art show at the Ayden Gallery open until May 16 with works by artists from Vancouver and Toronto. Visit www.paintyourfaith.comfor more information on the event.

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‘Exploring Vancouver’ publisher, co-author seeking $100 donations for fourth edition in 35 years

Felicity Stone
Sun

We know them to see them. When we pass them in the street, their faces are familiar, possibly even their names. They are the iconic buildings and houses that contribute as much to Vancouver’s character as do the ocean and mountains.

“Buildings tell stories about the city’s development, history and personalities,” says Hal Kalman, a Vancouver-based heritage consultant and authority on the history of Canadian architecture. Kalman has been telling these stories since 1974, when he wrote the first edition of Exploring Vancouver, a guide to public and private buildings of historical or architectural significance. As the city changed, two more editions followed, and a fourth is in the works, to be written this summer by Kalman and former Vancouver Sun architecture critic Robin Ward, who also co-authored the third edition.

Kalman estimates 20 per cent of the 500 entries will be new and the others revised to some extent. Since the 1993 edition “Vancouver’s had a whole remake,” he says.

“The changes in the ’90s were the biggest since the pre-World War I boom from 1907 to 1913, and the ’20s.”

Twenty years ago, Yaletown and Mount Pleasant were yet to become household names. The photographs will be in colour for the first time, once again shot by professional architecture photographer John Roaf. A former architect who now works primarily in Britain, there is “none better at capturing one building and its context in a single shot,” says Kalman.

The photographs will also be available to the public through an image bank being set up by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. To finance the project, which will be an invaluable resource for writers and researchers, the foundation has launched a fund-raising campaign.

A $100 tax-deductible donation will pay for one photograph to be used in the book and the image bank, and donors will be listed in the book.

“The board has never jumped on anything so quickly,” says executive director Diane Switzer. “Our mission is to create a culture of repairing, reusing and reinvesting in the city’s older buildings, and this book extends our ability to reach a bigger audience.”

Like previous editions, Exploring Vancouver will be a field guide small enough to tote with you, but with engaging architectural, historical and social commentary that also makes enjoyable armchair reading. Kalman writes for the “curious general public,” putting buildings of all ages into context. For the fourth edition, he has already written the story of the Olympic Village, including the financial aspect.

Kalman wrote the first book because when he moved to Vancouver in 1968, the scenery was celebrated, but not the buildings. “Everyone said Vancouver was a prairie town with mountains,” he says. “I saw it with the fresh eyes of [a] new Vancouverite.”

He is hard-pressed to name a single, favourite extant heritage building. As an example of high architecture, he likes the Vancouver Art Gallery, designed by both Francis Rattenbury and Arthur Erickson. Built as a courthouse on the city’s central iconic site, it was a “perfect expression of classical government power because you had to climb steps to enter.” In the egalitarian hippie ’70s, the gallery created a ground-floor entrance, and the NDP provincial government decided on a new low-rise courthouse for the people.

“The Socreds had planned a 35-storey courthouse,” says Kalman. “The NDP tipped it on its side and got Erickson to build a new accessible courthouse.”

He also admires the Marine Building, a “wonderful, wonderful art deco feast for the eyes.” In the mid-’70s he escorted some British dignitaries, including writer and preservationist Sir John Betjeman, around Vancouver. Betjeman declared the Marine Building one of the best art deco buildings in the world. As an indication of how things have changed, the group was not allowed inside because the men were not wearing ties.

As “a sleeper,” Kalman mentions the former Convent of the Sacred Heart, a 1912 Gothic revival building on West 29th Avenue and now St. George’s Junior School.

“Everyone’s favourite vernacular architecture in Vancouver is Craftsman,” he says, although he also likes surviving one-storey shops from the 1920s and intends to include some in the new book.

His most aggrieved heritage loss over the past 40 years is the Birks building, demolished in 1974 and replaced by the Scotia Tower. An 11-storey office building with white terra cotta ornamentation at Granville and Georgia across from The Bay, it was “the No. 1 building at the city’s No. 1 corner.” Kalman, who with fellow SOBs (Save Our Birks) Roger Kemble and Ken Terris, tried to save the building, told the Birks family: “Scotia Bank is the winner. You’re the loser.”

The silver lining was that the City of Vancouver responded by putting together its heritage program with incentives to developers to include old buildings in new developments. Recently, for example, developer Westbank received extra density for preserving the Woodward’s corner building and the church next to Shangri-La.

It’s all about compromise, says Kalman. The city recognizes the need for community to have amenities, and heritage is considered an amenity, like art galleries and green space. At the same time, property-owners have a right to make a fair and reasonable profit. Switzer points out that the four editions of Exploring Vancouver reflect the development of the city’s heritage program. The first three editions are out of print (although available at libraries and abebooks.com),but the new one will be published commercially and sold in bookstores and on BC Ferries. To support and be included in it, visit www.vancouverheritagefoundation.org.

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Private homes give way to walking trails and significantly increased park space

Sarah Ripplinger
Sun

The District of West Vancouver’s Ambleside waterfront is slated for an overhaul that will see the removal of the floral clock and the decommissioning of the boat ramp.

A massive project that covers several city blocks, it also involves demolishing homes to expand public parks and walkways.

“We’re at a very exciting place in the future of the Ambleside waterfront,” Bob Sokol, director of planning, lands and permits, told council at a recent meeting.

“I think we’re prepared now and on the cusp of seeing some significant changes to the Ambleside waterfront that will build upon the dreams and visions of the West Vancouver community.”

The bulk of the changes are aimed at the waterfront area between 13th and 18th Streets, beachfront property that was largely occupied by private residences in the 1980s. Now only five homes are outside of district control, Sokol said, down from 32 private homes along the shoreline in 1988.

Two publicly owned homes at 1488 and 1528 Argyle Ave. will be removed to make way for a significantly larger 15th Street Park, at the corner of 15th Street and Argyle Avenue, which the district plans to connect to John Lawson Park.

The expanded park “will create a wonderful large, really significant park in this area,” said Anne Mooi, director of parks and community services.

Part of this yet-to-be-finalized process would involve removing the floral clock — a large clock made out of flowers, dirt and granite — from Millennium Park and reducing the height of the hill it once occupied to about waist level, Mooi said.

The clock commemorates Marie Moscovitch, the 2001 West Vancouver citizen of the year. Parts of the dismantled clock will be used to create a seating area, and a plaque will be erected in the park to honour Moscovitch’s memory.

Another change will be the decommissioning of a boat ramp next to the Hollyburn Sailing Club in the 1300-block of Argyle Avenue. In its stead, Sokol said the district is proposing to install a temporary seafood stand and bollards marking the area for kayak, row boats and other marine vessels that aren’t motorized and don’t require a boat trailer.

Sokol said the move was prompted by the number of pedestrians and cars along Argyle Avenue, combined with the narrowness of the approach to the ramp and number of boat trailers pulling in and out of the spot, which created a dangerous situation — and the thousands in capital funds required to keep the ramp functional.

The boat ramp is tentatively scheduled to be decommissioned in conjunction with the planned construction of an artificial turf field at nearby Ambleside Park later this spring, which will also result in the removal of boat ramp parking.

The seafood stand at the boat ramp, to be located at 1366 Argyle Ave., would be allowed to operate for five to six years, Sokol said. At the end of that time the district would decide its fate and the future of that location.

Another commercial development is being earmarked for 1756 Argyle Ave., the area adjacent to Lawson Creek and John Lawson Park and on the lot of a home owned by the district. Here, Sokol said, the district would like to see a food and beverage establishment open for business.

An extended Spirit Trail shoreline path along the waterfront in Ambleside, touching the water in some places, is part of the plan to create more access points for pedestrians and cyclists in the district.

There are also plans to encourage commercial activities, such as bicycle and kayak rentals, along the waterfront to provide services for the greater number of people making use of the improved shoreline access.

North Shore News

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Graeme Wood
Sun

The city is contemplating pedestrian-only zones on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver this summer. But trolley buses will be back in service on the street by Labour Day, according to the City of Vancouver.

Routes that have been diverted from Granville since April 2006 include the No. 4 Powell, No. 7 Dunbar, No. 10 Granville, and No. 17 Oak.

The biggest task in restoring trolley service will be to install new overhead wires, which will be done throughout the summer months, according to TransLink.

Granville between Smithe and Hastings will be open to buses once the wires are installed.

The street has undergone major renovations while also accommodating Canada Line construction.

During this time mature trees were cut down and replaced with 160 smaller ones, new LED light fixtures were installed, and sidewalk parking stalls were created from Granville Bridge to Smithe.

The city has also put in new street furniture to make the area more pedestrian friendly.

Included in the upgrade are seven special light poles between Georgia and Robson with two seats and glass canopies attached.

The city said it is interested in testing pedestrian zones on Granville for special events this summer because it was so popular during the Olympics.

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Canadian study finds bigger visible minority population means more social interaction

Shannon Proudfoot
Sun

New Canadian research suggests that, contrary to previous thinking, rising diversity doesn’t erode trust and social ties — and in some cases it might enhance them.

The study looks at how diversity and city size affect social capital, a sociological concept that refers to the connections between people and networks — ties that help people fit in and find jobs and places to live.

The findings fly in the face of previous research that suggested social capital declines as multiculturalism and visible minority populations increase, and they spell good news for a nation facing a future of unprecedented diversity, says Ravi Pendakur, an associate professor of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa and co-author of the study.

“If what they’re arguing is that as diversity goes up, all those things associated with social capital go down, Canada is in trouble because we have no choice but to see greater and greater diversity,” he says. “A lot of the work in the past has really suggested a negative impact on social capital based on minority status. We’re not finding that.”

Last month, Statistics Canada released projections suggesting that by 2031, at least one in four people in this country will have been born elsewhere and nearly one in three people will be visible minorities.

Researchers have mostly focused on diversity and social capital on the United States and concluded that as diversity increases, trust and social connections decline, Pendakur says. But based on his own research, he believes the effects of multiculturalism were masked by the realities of big-city life.

People who live in large cities teeming with strangers are less trusting than those in small towns, he says, and big Canadian cities are where the diversity is. Previous research in the field didn’t separate the city characteristics from the effects of diversity, he says, but when he did so in this study, he found the impact of multiculturalism on social capital is minimal — and sometimes positive.

Pendakur’s study looked at three aspects of social capital: trust, measured by asking people questions such as how likely they think it is that a lost wallet would be returned to them; interaction, or the frequency of contact with family, friends and neighbours; and participation, or membership in organizations and clubs.

He found that those of French, East Asian and Latin American background are least trusting, and people of Southern European, South Asian, Chinese and aboriginal origin are less likely to participate in groups. But overall, the differences were small once he took into account the effects of city size, Pendakur says, and he found that a bigger visible minority population means more interaction among citizens.

The study was released by Metropolis British Columbia, an immigration and diversity research centre.

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Retractable dome was a deal breaker for gambling facility, cabinet minister says

Jonathan Fowlie
Sun

Liberal insider T. Richard Turner personally warned cabinet minister Kevin Krueger that his company would back away from its plan to build a $450 million casino and hotel project next to BC Place if the government did not proceed with a retractable roof for the stadium.

Turner — a Liberal donor, government-appointed chairman of the Insurance Corp of British Columbia and a former chairman of the BC Lottery Corp — placed the call last year on behalf of Paragon Development Ltd. Last week, Paragon was publicly named to build the $450 million multi-hotel and casino project.

On Thursday, Turner confirmed he is a director of one of Paragon’s Canadian entities and a minority shareholder in the Edgewater Casino, though he ardently defended his call to Minister of Tourism, Culture and the Arts Krueger.

“I didn’t try to influence any decision,” said Turner, adding he made the call after Paragon had been picked for the project.

“What I recall saying is … if the roof doesn’t go ahead, that’s fine, but we can’t build what we said we’d build in the bid because we’re counting on synergies between BC Place as renovated and the new development,” he added, recalling the conversation with Krueger, the minister responsible for BC Place.

“If you cannot proceed with the roof, no problem, but we’ll have to downsize what we said we would do in the bid package,” Turner added, recalling what he told Krueger during the call.

In Krueger’s recollection, Turner had characterized the issue as a “deal breaker.”

“He wanted to make me aware that was the fundamental consideration to Paragon and that their bid wouldn’t proceed at the same level if it wasn’t a retractable roof,” Krueger said Thursday.

Neither could recall exactly when the call took place, though Turner said he thought it was late last fall or early last winter.

On Thursday, the New Democratic Party raised serious concerns about the call, questioning if it was appropriate for someone with such strong Liberal ties to be making a personal pitch on behalf of his private business interests.

“It smells and raises concern when you have a B.C. Liberal insider, who’s also the chair of ICBC, calling up the minister directly to try to argue for his company’s interest in a particular design,” NDP critic for tourism, culture and the arts Spencer Chandra Herbert said Thursday.

On Thursday, PavCo president and CEO Warren Buckley said Turner was not directly involved in any of the negotiations, but did say Turner had helped to arrange a meeting between the principals of both Paragon and PavCo.

PavCo is the Crown corporation that operates BC Place.

“At one point we were bogged down in what I would call legalese. It was just too much lawyers going back to lawyers,” said Buckley.

“He facilitated some meetings. He never attended the meetings, he just facilitated them,” Buckley added.

“Rick Turner was never involved, at all, with any discussions on commercial terms,” he added.

Naomi Strasser, a spokeswoman for Paragon Development Ltd. confirmed that Turner was not directly involved in negotiations.

“Turner is a minority investor in the Edgewater Casino and he does not have any involvement in day-today operations,” she said in an interview.

Turner, who said he didn’t recall arranging any meetings, said he feels he did nothing wrong.

“I’m just one guy. I happen to be the chair of ICBC but I look at that and say what does that have to do with BC Place and a business interest I have?” he said.

“There’s all sorts of people who call cabinet ministers,” he added.

“I did because I’m a director of a company and that’s my duty as a director.”

Krueger agreed.

“I did not think it was in any way inappropriate for me to receive a call,” he said.

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Jonathan Fowlie
Sun

The revenue B.C. gambling casinos take in has nearly tripled since 2001, the year when the B.C. Liberals came to power, promising to scale down such activities throughout the province.

“Stop the expansion of gambling that has increased gambling addiction and put new strains on families,” said the Liberal party’s New Era document from its 2001 election campaign.

Since then, the revenue taken in by casinos in B. C has shot to $1.34 billion in 2008-09 from $492 million in 2000-01.

On Friday, the Liberal government announced yet another expansion.

Vancouver‘s Edgewater Casino will move into a new building next to BC Place Stadium, where it will double the number of slot machines and tables it has now, said the minister in charge, and eventually the numbers could triple.

Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman said the new Paragon Development Ltd. casino could have as many as 1,500 slot machines and 150 tables once it is fully up and running; the Edgewater now has 493 slots and 65 tables in operation.

“They’ve done a market study that says the size to market with two hotels and an entertainment complex attached to a major venue like BC Place, with restaurants and all that, we think this is the size it should be,” Coleman said.

“Basically, you’re not adding a casino to Vancouver as much as you’re letting it modernize.”

It’s a far cry from what now Kevin Krueger, now the minister of tourism, culture and the arts, said in 1997, when the Liberals were in opposition.

“Women in British Columbia will die because of gambling expansion; that’s the prediction of our experts at UBC,” Krueger said during a debate in the legislature.

“Some 37 per cent of the spouses of pathological gamblers abuse their children. So children may die as a result of gambling expansion, and their blood will be on the heads of the government that expanded gambling and of the MLAs who voted for it,” he said.

“This is a serious, serious issue.”

New Democratic Party critic Shane Simpson said he is in favour of moving to larger casinos from smaller ones, mostly because it encourages people to have dinner and see a show in addition to gambling, while people go to the smaller venues just to gamble.

But Simpson was highly critical of the Liberal expansion of gambling since taking power.

“There’s been a serious expansion of gambling under the Liberals and they’ve done it in a way that I think has been pretty hypocritical,” he said.

“When you consider the comments of the premier and Mr. Krueger and others in the 1990s, where they couldn’t have been more outraged about the notion of expansion of gambling in those years, of course now they can’t embrace it fast enough because of the money it makes.”

Since 2001, the number of casinos in B.C. has stayed roughly the same, but the size of the establishments has grown astronomically.

In 2000-01, there were 2,399 slot machines and 392 gambling tables in B.C. In 2008-09, the numbers had swelled to 8,818 slot machines and 485 tables.

Coleman said Friday the changes were needed to modernize the industry.

“I don’t think when we came into office we necessarily knew how bad the infrastructure of gaming was,” he said, adding that by upgrading the facilities, B.C. has gone from having “some smoke-filled dingy place where there might be some machines” to an “adult entertainment opportunity.”

Coleman said the government saw a need to run the gambling business properly.

“If we don’t size to market, and we don’t let [the BC Lottery Corporation] do its job we’re just going to continue to fail on the file,” he said.

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Richard Overall
Sun

It’s not every day that you see a steady stream of taxis adorned with everything from balloons to Christmas lights madly honk their way across the street in front of you. Leaving the relative calm of a rundown Internet cafe, I emerged into the chaos of the Real de Guadeloupe, unprepared for the racket the procession of vehicles was making. Each driver seemed to consider it his sacred duty to out-honk his neighbour, and the line had long since coalesced into a shouting, roaring, tangled mass of man and machine that slowly inched its way along the crowded one-way road. As I stood there gaping, one of the balloons on the nearest taxi escaped its tether to slowly float away.

I later found out that it was the anniversary weekend of Santo Cristobal, the region’s patron saint of taxi drivers (as well as bachelors, toothaches and flood prevention among other things), and the noisy procession had been on its way to the local church to be blessed.

I was in San Cristobal de las Casas, a charming colonial town nestled among the mountains of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Bordering Guatemala and the Pacific Ocean, Chiapas is one of the poorest states in Mexico and perhaps best known for the infamous Zapatista movement that champions indigenous rights. The movement culminated in the brief 1994 rebellion and subsequent occupation of San Cristobal and several other townships by armed revolutionaries. While the situation has long since stabilized, the region has retained its revolutionary reputation and the Zapatistas remain a powerful, if primarily non-violent, presence in rural areas of the state.

San Cristobal itself is a bright, friendly place that manages to maintain its small-town authenticity in the face of a growing tourist presence. Aging cars ply the one-way cobblestone streets blasting advertisements for purified water from mounted loudspeakers and crowds of giggling children scramble for candy from fallen pinatas outside local churches. The town is home to numerous picturesque colonial churches and several interesting little museums, notably the museum of amber, a specialty of the region. The recent influx of foreign tourists has resulted in an abundance of cheap accommodation, including several excellent hostels.

I stayed in San Cristobal for two weeks as a Spanish student at the Instituto Jovel, a highly recommended language school that can also arrange accommodation with local Mexican families. The school offers group as well as private lessons and the prices were quite reasonable, between $120-195 US for 15 hours of instruction a week.

I opted to live with a Mexican family for the duration of my stay, and while it was initially quite intimidating as they spoke little to no English, I was quickly won over by the mother’s amazing cooking and the entire family’s enthusiastic friendliness. They were patient and encouraging with my halting attempts at Spanish and while two weeks was too short a time to become truly proficient, I was able to continue my travels through Mexico with an improved confidence in my ability to communicate.

My classes themselves were split into two 90-minute sessions a day, the morning emphasizing grammar while the afternoon was mainly spent practising my spoken Spanish. Both of my instructors were trained professionals and excellent teachers who tailored their lessons to my individual needs.

Weekends were spent lounging around the town, or day trips to the surrounding countryside which ranged from a high-speed boat tour through the awe-inspiring Canyon del Sumidero to bringing out my inner Indiana Jones in the sweaty jungle ruins of Palenque, a short, (but not for the faint of heart or stomach) bus ride away.

San Cristobal is a great base to explore the region, study Spanish or just kick back, unload your bags and take a siesta. “Bienvenidos a Mexico!”

To learn more about studying Spanish in San Cristobal, visit the school website at http://www.institutojovel.com/.

Richard Overall is a UBC student who lives in Vancouver.

Postcards provides an opportunity for Sun readers to share their travel experiences with other readers. Send your Postcard, in 500 to 700 words, with one picture, to [email protected].

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Doug Ward
Sun

Walk BC is launching an interactive online map that provides information on walking routes across the province.

The map, located on Walk BC’s website, provides a description of each route, including its location, distance, level of difficulty, safety and access to amenities.

“It will be a one-stop shop for information on walking in every community in the province,” said Eva Robinson, manager of the BC Recreation and Parks Association.

Robinson said demand for an online map came from recreation departments and from walk leaders trained by the two-year-old Walk BC organization.

“Walking is the safest and easiest way to get people to include exercise in their daily lives,” Robinson said.

“Anybody can walk so long as they’re mobile, whether it’s your 80-year-old grandmother or your five-year-old.”

Walk BC is a joint initiative of the BC Recreation and Parks Association and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of BC &Yukon.

The map, located at www.walkbc.ca,already includes data provided by a hired researcher and by walking groups.

But Walk BC is urging walkers across the province to contribute information on routes in their areas, by entering data into a survey included on its website.

“This is a push to get members of the public to detail their favourite walks,” Robinson said.

The map will be powered by Google and will be able to help people find routes that fit their physical abilities.

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