Today was our first "festival" day. We went to a town called Tenosique where they have been having this very bizarre festival for hundreds of years. It's a bit hard to describe. It takes place every Sunday starting in January and ends with lent. A few select people dress up as jaguars - they paint their body orange, use a Coke bottle to make black spots on their skin, and drape an actual jaguar pelt over their back. We got access to where some of those people were preparing to get some good pictures.
The majority of the participants dress up as someone called Cojo. They dress mostly in white, wrap banana leaves around their ankles, wear masks, capes, and hats with tall pointy leaves in them. Our guide said that the story that they're enacting is a little vague, but supposedly it has to do with Cojo drawing out the evil jaguar and taming it. I don't really know. He said that people generally think that the Cojo character represents a Spanish conquistador, but David pointed out that they look more like a giant ear of corn.
We waited along the street for the action to heat up. The Cojo characters have small boxes with holes in the top. They will come up to you, shake the box and grunt at you. This is a sign that they want you to drop a couple of pesos in the box. I learned early on that I should not pull all of my change out of my pocket and pick out one small coin in view of the person demanding money. They will not be satisfied with one measly peso! Several times, David went to buy a piece of candy and ask for change to give the Cojo people. It's sort of like Halloween. Most of the people dressed as Cojo are kids.
While we waited, a small kid (about 10) stopped by and started talking to us in very good English. His name was Alessio. He often came up to us later in the day to talk to us. He was holding something in his cape that David noticed a little later. A giant phallus. Our guide warned us that there were going to be some sexual/suggestive elements in the dance. I guess I wasn't expecting kids to be walking around with large phalluses. I tend to think he was hiding it in his cape when he talked to us because he knew we would think it was weird.
We hung out with a group preparing and then went into the festival. There's a moving dance that is somewhat controlled by a drummer and a flag waver. The dance moves very slowly through the town and stops to go through a dance cycle periodically. I couldn't figure out the stages of the dance, but the drummer would change the beat and everyone would slow down, scatter, form a circle, or speed up.
What makes the day REALLY fun is that while the dancing is going on, they throw flour at you or squirt you with water. For some reason, most of our group was pretty much left alone, but David and I were pelted with flour. I'm still cleaning flour out of my camera bag.
After following the dancing for a couple of hours, went to a restaurant for lunch. There were a couple of guitar players and singers that played for us while we waited for our food.
After lunch, we went back to festival. It had moved into the public square and was at full force. They upgraded their arsenal from simple fistfulls of flour to hollowed out eggs full of flour. I took one on my jaw that exploded all over David. I was trying to be a man about it, but it really hurt! Things were really chaotic by this point. We ran into Alessio and he was clearly exhausted. It was clear that young women were the targets of the flour. The prettier the girl, the more covered with flour she would be. David and I decided that we should be flattered that we were the only ones in our group to be targeted. After about a half hour, we got to the van and rode back to Palenque for a shower and a quiet dinner.
