05 Jan Day 23: A last minute contributor
Before we head back to San Cristobal we organise a visit to meet one more possible contributor, a Simojovel native who’s an artisan and merchant and has shops both in Simojovel and San Cristobal. Alicia and I go to his house in the morning and have a revealing chat with him, he has strong views about the amber trade and would like to introduce measures to prohibit foreigners from buying raw amber or miners from exporting it, so that it can stay in the region for small artisans for himself to work with rather than the poorer quality, telling us that the best amber is leaving the country. He has a meeting tomorrow about all this. He talks about having been the first to achieve a few different things, even finding a famous crab trapped in amber which is now in a museum in NY. We ask him if he was ever a miner, but he says no, it’s not for him, craftsmanship is where is at for him, the miners merely find rocks covered in dust, the artisans discover the amber. We arrange to film him in his shop in San Cristobal.
We make our way back, under the most foggy skies, bend after bend, back to San Cristobal. Food and rest.