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Published on: 1/1/2009
Last Visited: 2/7/2009
Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods: Christopher Shaw
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Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods: Christopher Shaw
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Christopher Shaw, an American writer and canoeist, makes a journey down the Maya's "watery path," reporting his sightings from this broad stream of "pale jade shot with turquoise and slightly clouded with silt."
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The Usumacinta has always contained a liminal world; Shaw describes the fluid boundary between Guatemala and Mexico as "an unruly no-man's-land inhabited by political refugees, fugitives and foreign adventurers."
Shaw's travels took him through Mexico's Chiapas region not long after the Zapatista uprising (a little more modern political history earlier in the narrative would have helped novice readers immensely, especially since Shaw slips back and forth between the main journey and one undertaken in 1989, before the uprising).
During his river run, he encounters rebels, wayfarers and, in the book's most exciting sequence, drug smugglers.
He also confronts exhilarating danger in the river itself ("the boat leaped forward onto the crown, and the world dropped away").
In describing the remote, rugged landscape, Shaw comes down heavily on the side of ecological conservation, bemoaning the loss of the surrounding rainforest to loggers and chicleros (workers who harvest sap from the chicle trees to make gum).
A gifted travel writer, Shaw evokes the Usumacinta's territory with startling clarity, though his chronology is sometimes confusing.
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