The Motorcycle Diaries (Part 1)

Being a True Account of Incidents of Travel in Chiapas and Guatemala

by Crow Qu’appelle

Greetings from the Rebel Strong-Hold of San Cristobal de las Casas!

The story you are about is read is a departure from the type of content that Nevermore has published thus far. It is the story of a recent motorcycle trip that I took through the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas, Mexico.

First, who am I? My nom-de-guerre is Crow Qu’appelle, and I am the founder of Nevermore Media. I am a long-time anarchist organizer from Ottawa, the capital of Canada. I started Nevermore to make the case that the COVID crisis was being used as an excuse for an authoritarian takeover, and distributed ten thousand copies of a magazine in English and French, calling for anarchists to resist the imposition of medical tyranny. Alas, my best efforts were to no avail. The culturally obedient Canadian citizens appeared to welcome dystopia with open arms.

At the time, I thought that Canada might follow Australia’s example, where people weren’t even allowed to leave the country. So after the art collective I was part of got evicted for breaking COVID rules, I said: Fuck it. Canada doesn’t want me. I’ll go find somewhere that does.

Eventually I came to San Cristobal, where I fell in love with a both with the city and with a Tzotzil Mayan storyteller named Rocio, whose entire family had been highly involved in the Zapatista movement since the nineties. We’d been together since August. Nine months.

At the beginning of May, we broke up.

I felt like I had screwed up something really awesome. It never feels good to break up with your partner, and Rocio was a big part of my life in San Cristobal. So, for the first time since I had fallen in love with this magical city, I started feeling like maybe I didn’t want to be here. So I thought, why not get out of town for a few days? A bit of time would be good for me to clear my head, I thought.

There was nothing stopping me from taking off on an adventure, and I had a couple of destinations in mind.

My rough idea was to to take a few days to visit Palenque and then go deeper into the Lacandon jungle. Palenque was a good place to start off, because I knew the lay of the land a bit. Then I wanted to go down to Lacanja, where I wanted to visit a shaman that I met years ago.

This was also to be a good exploratory mission. I bought my motorcycle with the plan of traveling through Chiapas visiting Zapatista communities to buy coffee. The larger goal was to export green coffee to Canada, where my brother has a roastery, and then start a coffee subscription business connected to an email newsletter about campesino movements in Latin America.

Lots of people would buy Zapatista coffee if they could, wouldn’t they? And wouldn’t it be great if Nevermore had a source of income that it could pay contributors with?

So I packed up my things and let my roommates know I was going away for a few days, or maybe longer. And then I decided to do something I’d been meaning to do for quite some time.

I decided that this would be a perfect time to go on a media fast, so I let a few people know I was going off line and left my phone and computer behind.

I had been talking about quitting use of my phone for some time, partly just to prove to myself that I wasn’t addicted. I’m highly critical of the way that digital technology is affecting society, but I have also been a heavy user of this very same tech, especially over the course of the last two years.

Sometimes I just can’t stand to think about politics, and this was one of them. Not only that, but my cell phone use was part of the reason why I couldn’t stand to think about politics. Why? Because what I believe that we should be focused on the creation of alternative societies that are self-reliant and exist outside of the logic of Babylon’s system. For that reason I’ve long felt that my use of digital technology is incongruent with my own professed beliefs. We all know that devices are highly addictive, as they were designed to be. I think that we need to think of them as electronically-administered drugs. A really shitty drug that doesn’t even get you high.

You only have to look at a teenager who grew up with a cell phone to see that this addiction is adversely affecting them. Am I the only one who remembers what things used to be like? It’s clear that these digital drugs alter the way young people experience reality. What will the consequences be of an entire generation growing up addicted to devices designed to modify the thoughts and behaviour of its users?

Personally, I’m not stoked to find out where this road is leading, and I suspect that any movement that is serious about liberation will have to address this question of technological addiction. If there aren’t already 12-step programs for tech addiction, there should be.

Perhaps moderating usage is a solution for some, but why not just quit? Maybe not forever, but at least long enough to find out what it feels like not to be addicted. But how can I even write about such a thing if I myself am addicted to these very same technologies? It seemed like a good experiment to quit cold turkey.

So that’s what I did. I set off, leaving my phone behind. I decided to keep a diary of my travels, so I packed a pencil and paper along with some books, a tent, and some juggling gear.

Soon, I was having the wildest adventure of my life, and after narrowing escaping being burned alive by an angry mob and hiking three days into the jungle to climb the world’s largest pyramid, I decided that I needed to write a book about my trip.

Knowing myself, and how easily distracted I can be, I decided that the only way that I would actually write a whole book if I didn’t bite off more than I could chew. So I decided to write it one chapter at a time and release them here on Substack. This is the first chapter.

Wish me luck.