Day 36 - I've found that a good way to discover things to do is to walk around and see what where the local tour groups are going, and then go there on my own.

From San Cristobal a popular tour is to spend a day visiting the large waterfalls at a place named El Chapin, followed by a group of beautiful lakes near the border with Guatemala, named Lagos Montebello. Wanting to visit these without worrying about the afternoon rains, I very nearly signed up with a tour agency's day trip (for $30), until I realized that these sites were 3 hours in the very direction I'm heading out of the country. So I decided to seek these out on my own.

I left the hotel around 11am hoping to avoid the afternoon rains, under a blue sky. About an hour out of town, higher in the mountains, it clouded over and started pouring. Fortunately it only lasted an hour or so.

These rains are very dangerous -- it's quite hard to see the road with all the water on the visor of the helmet. Think of a car windshield without being able to run the wipers. And because the visor is only two inches in front of my eyes, it really obscures things.

In any case, I was able to find my way to the waterfalls at El Chapin, a few hours from San Cristobal. The site has a large number of picnic areas next to a beautiful stream of the same pretty cloudy emerald water I've been seeing everywhere. A lot of families were grilling out and swimming in the gentle pools.

The concrete path is level for a long way, then begins climbing steeply alongside many named waterfalls. The grand finale is a long cascade a couple hundred feet high. See a video of it here. Here the nice concrete path ends and you can continue another kilometer higher along a dirt path to see more waterfalls higher up, which I did of course. Also, there are two ziplines from one side of the gorge to the other, which you can cross for 50 pesos.

While I was at the top of the series of waterfalls, overlooking the whole canyon before me, the rain I had ridden through earlier caught up to me, and it began pouring hard. I headed back down through the jungle to the zipline structure, where I caught a little reprieve from the rain under the overhang. The ziplines were now closed due to the rain. I'm not exactly sure what affect water on the cable would have on safety (none?), but regardless they were done for the day.

The owner was also huddled underneath with his family -- a late 30's-ish Mexican guy who immediately began speaking to me in English. Ugh, I'm getting tired of people doing that. I'm here on this trip to get better at Spanish and this isn't helping! I decided to tell him I didn't speak English and was from an island in the Pacific named Topocunkoonga (don't bother looking for it -- I made it up on the spot!).

"Really?" he asked, "Because you look like you're from the US. Where is it?" "Near Fiji," I said. "What languages do you speak then?" "Topacokoonga-ese, and I'm learning Spanish." This was all in Spanish of course. It was easy to keep a straight face because inside I was a bit perturbed! :)

After waiting out the rain and making it back up the mountain to Comitan, it was now just at sunset, so I found a hotel and will wait until the morning to visit Lagos Montebello, followed by crossing the border into Guatemala!