Agua Azul Cascades

Agua Azul was a tourist attraction, three bus loads came and went while we were there. It is a cascade down the mountain side, lots of water, lots of tourist things to buy. Very high prices.



Environmentalism is the key word here now. One vendor had some mandarin oranges to sell (at 5X the normal price). Thinking that anything having to do with technology was anti-environmental he said they came from trees native to the jungle, had not been grafted.
Agua Azul is more kin to Guatemala than Mexico. Here, for the first time we saw girls carrying baskets on their heads, hands free. It is standard in Guatemala, I have never seen a guy doing it. Some of them had little pads to help, others just put the basket directly on the head. It surprised even Angela, who has seen the practice often but always with a hand stabilizing the basket.
To get into Agua Azul we had to pay at two different pay stations. Edwin asked about it at the second and I never completely understood, except that we had to pay twice.
The area around is steep mountain, maybe 45 or even 60 degrees. They practice slash and burn agriculture. The tourist trade probably provides a lot of income for them, even if the goods they offer are of limited variety and are not the type that generates repeat customers. I think that they could make more money by harnessing the falling water to provide hydroelectricity like Niagara does during the period of non-use.
Most of the people here, tourists and natives alike, speak Spanish as the second language. The cars we saw all had Quintero Roo or Mexico City plates on them, probably rented cars. The goods are typical Chiapas goods but there are hundreds of places with identical goods and nobody makes a good living.
- Grandpa



I really liked Agua Azul. It was astounding – layer after layer of falls over travertine rock. The agua wasn’t really azul, as I can say, now that I’ve seen a real sapphire blue jungle pool. It was more a standard green.



The well-paved trail up the course of the water way was lined with more tourist booths than one could imagine, mostly selling the same things. I think the area is an ejido, meaning the people live there and work it for all it’s worth, and it’s the only income for that group. The fresh orange juice was exquisite, though the buñuelos that I was so excited to see were cooked in slightly rancid oil. We ate them anyway.




I walked up and up, and finally came to the end of the tourist booths, where the trail became packed dirt. I could see the village off to the side, and a girl washing dishes at the edge of the stream. Something compelled me to keep walking. After I passed the village, I came to a junction of two streams. The one nearest me was that same surprising blue as the jungle pool. But this water, clear as it was, had an old tire in it, and the native people consider it just an arroyo, not the money-making cascades that it becomes further downstream. Where it met the other water the blue disappeared.
- Naomi