What a friend we have in cheeses

The Borough Market is the place where Georgina and I thought we had died and gone to heaven. For Georgie it was not The Houses of Parliament or The Globe or The Rosetta Stone that is the marvel of London; it is the cheeses at The Borough Market. And, as Annie Lennox said: who am I to disagree. At one stall, I asked to try something unpasturerised: that would be all the cheese they had; something not available in Australia: again all the cheese they had, something really unusual... well, you get the picture. We tried to repress that wierd cross between panic and excitement that we were experiencing but only barely managed it.

Just as we thought we had found some sort of capacity to digest all that we had seen and all that we had tasted, we spied Neale's, a stand alone shop just across from the main market. I recognised the names of one or two cheeses: stilton, gorgonzola, but the rest were new to me. Dribbling, oozing, bleeding rounds of creamy delight. What is a girl to do? We tasted more and more until we become an embarrassment, and then we only thought about stopping. In the end, I bought oat biscuits, raspberry jam, apple relish, balsamic vinegar, fig infused balsamic syrup and cheese. I don't even know the name of the cheese I took home, but that did not seem to matter to him at all. He sat quietly in my handbag all the way home waiting to meet his doom. Georgina left the market with almond croissants and fudge packed in her bag, just in case we needed something to tide us over on the 500 metre walk along The Thames to our next engagement.

The only fitting follow up to the market was The Sainson Poetry Library in London's Festival Hall where we briefly snuck into the members' lounge. I looked up some Yestevshenko and literary criticism on Philip Larkin. The Poetry Library was inhabited by two librarians and two parties of guests. One man sat with his two sons reading and drawing, and Georgina and I grazed through the stacks and compactors. It is a great spot for a quiet retreat and we spied a party of homeless people picnicing on their meagre rations in one of the quiet rooms in Festival Hall. It summed up something about London that those who live a truely wretched life in England's winter, take refuge inside these lovely living monuments to the best the western culture has delivered. We had seen first hand the night before what happens after dark. After our play, we walked down the underpass to the station where people were laying out their sleeping bags in one corner and pissing in another as they prepared to bed down for the night. And a winter's night in London is truely bitter. I don't think they were singing "What a friend we have in Jesus" or singing the praises of the cheeses they had tasted in The Borough Market for that matter. This is England.

Top floor, top theatre, top day

Georgina and I are now in a pattern. We go to a gallery or museum, say the Tate Modern or The National Portrait Gallery. We go to the cafe on the top floor, get a seat against the window and have a hot drink, very, very slowly. We look out over London: St Paul's, Nelson's Column, Westminster, Trafalgar whatever Monopoly acquisition was the favourite- inspecting carefully the gargoyles, statutes or oranmental florishes that decorate the rooves of the buildings many of which were completed well before Australia was even discovered. We watch the London Eye as it turns imperceptibly, then eventually gather up the energy to view the artworks. It is a winner of a plan.

We had followed the advice of one who knows (thanks Grant Exon) and bought £10 tickets to whatever play at The National Theatre has leftover tickets for that night. It turned out to be Gethsemane. We knew very little about it but thought that standing room for 2 1/2hours for £10 might work, anyway we could always leave half way through, we thought. It turned out to be a brilliant play about the last days of the Blair government. It starred the woman from Black Books and a whole assortment of the great English actors whose names I can not remember but who can act and then some. I had my prejudice against Australian plays ie Murray-Smith and Raison confirmed, as we forgot that we watched a play standing up and wallowed in the whole thing.

Tate oh so modern

This relief was in the medieval section of the Science Museum.



Georgina and I are staying in a lovely flat in Notting Hill, or Notting Hill Gate, or somewhere related to Hugh Grant. This means that we get to trawl around London ticking things off the must see list. I went to the Science Museum and the ancient medicine section seemed really ghoulish til I remembered that I had just watched back to back episodes of House at Sandy and Benny's. I really liked an installation that randomly selected chat rooms and set the words to music and visual display.

Today was The Globe: so off we toddle, only to find that because it is an open air theatre and they do not stage anything in the colder months (read half the year). What a stupid idea a theatre with only a partially enclosed thatched roof was. I thought history had already proved that, but it seems the Brits needed to prove it again.

So we went next door to the next thing on the list where we were overwhelmed by modern art. Georgina was taken captive by a fantastic thing made of broken crockery and I was happy to see some Kandinsky paintings. We looked at London Bridge and climbed to the top of St Paul's where we looked back at The Globe and The Tate Modern. We tried to finish off with some West End action, but I draw the line at The Sound of Music, no matter how half price the tickets are. Instead we went to the movies and saw The Reader.

Oxford and the Cotswolds

In College
Here is a partial list of names: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Charles Darwin, WH Auden, Charles Dodgson, JRR Tolkien, TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, CS Lewis, William Golding. It is hard to go anywhere without tripping over these guys. They all came here and lolled about with the gargoyles, sundials, giant quads and the dining hall at Christ Church College that was used as the dining hall at Hogwarts in Harry Potter. Benny tells me that it is possible to walk from Oxford to Cambridge without ever leaving college grounds. There are over 30 colleges and less than 20,000 undergraduates. To look at the colleges you would estimate that they house tens of thousands instead of just hundreds. One college (All Souls) only admits 4 undergraduates per year and the entrance test is a quiz on table manners involving difficult questions about what to do with cherry pips, another college does not have any students at all.

Poaching
One of the colleges owns a herd of deer, but Benny and Sandy tell me that I am not allowed to go poaching. I really like Danny the Champion of the World have been given a talking to about my plans to reenact it. I am also not allowed to herd, claim or kill a swan because they belong to the queen, yes, every last swan in the UK. I don't know what she does with them, but every year she sends out an army of people to count them, so she will know if I have been messing around with them.

Rambling in the Cotswolds
On Boxing Day we drove off to the Cotswolds (a series of towns that looked at Oxford and decided to be ever cuter). Famous people live in these tiny towns, Kate Moss, Coldplay etc but we didn't see them. We did exert our rambler's rights over hill and dale. There is no such thing as bush walking, because there is no real bush, but it is the tradition to wander about along fence lines and rivers across the paddocks and fields of tweed wrapped farmers. One such farmer explained the details of how a hedgerow is made and the importance of instilling these traditional skills in the youth of today. Apparently hedgerow making will ward off the tendency of the English youth to join nasty gangs and commit unseemly crimes against the unsuspecting folk who live on council estates.

For rambling you need: boots, gaters, a scarf, a map, a hat and most of all a walking stick. People set out like they are going off into the wilderness and I refrained from telling them that they were never more than 5 miles from a pub. (We only had wellies and beenies, not real high tech spring loaded sticks, so did not get a proper welcome at the pub.)

Christmas in Oxford

Christine, Ganeal, Rapheal and I have been installed at an apartment up the road. It is a very new large apartment with two large bedrooms, bathrooms and a very sleek finish. We are pretenting that we are young lawyers and that we have well paying jobs thus enabling us to live in an apartment with a heated towel rack, an invisible (built into the cabinetry) fridge and beautiful wall paper. Ho hum! When we were quite rested we walked down the hill to Sandy and Benny's and they fired up the baby Gaggia and that little darling takes care of us all.

Christmas Eve was a big walk along the Thames over the bridges, across the locks and along the tow roads. Christine thought we might find a body and was prepared to call Inspector Morse or Miss Marple, but this proved unnecessary. We picked up the seafood at the covered market and the fruit and vegetables at the uncovered market. I kept an eye out for Prince Charles possibly selling the organic veggies that he grows himself, but was disappointed. I branched out and went off to a few op shops because the second hand books are great. James has pointed me in the direction of the best secondhand bookshop in Oxford. God help me when I get there. Eventually, we all wound our way back to the house for oysters, aoli made by a French man, gammon (smocked baked leg of pork), figs and sweet wine.

Christmas day was a late start with us guests emerging from the gatehouse strolling down to the mainhouse for coffee, then more walking along the Thames. The extended family and workmates arrived and the topic of conversation involved really complex mathematics whereby the amount if time it takes to cook a turkey the size of a three year old, the amount of time it takes to prepare potatoes to be cooked in turkey fat, and all the other variables had to be calculated. There was no fighting but you know how it is when people like me try to relate to numbers. Presents were unwrapped, party hats were donned, bon bons were pulled and glasses clinked all around. The highlight was the delightful company, Sandy's cousin and family proving to be champion conversationalists.

Then the real tradition began: the watching of the Dr Who Christmas special. The hierarchy of the seating arrangment was announced and everyone piled into the loungeroom to watch. Luckily Katerine Tate was not on screen, so I coped. Somehow we missed the queen's Christmas greeting.

Lesson of the week

Ryanair are just fine. And a free (yes I told you before; free: I only paid the taxes) airfare is a wonder to behold. But getting to the airport at an ungodly hour when no public transport is unavailable and taxis cost a fortune (multiplied by 2.5 for euro conversion) equals getting up at 2.45 am to catch the backpaker bus.
So the trick is to really think abut the logistics of it all before booking. If I ever move to the UK, I will move right next to an airport. Then I will dash off to Spain on a whim.

Toledo

This is the "Youth Hostel"/Castle where I stayed. Amazing heh?

I think they made this place up just for me. Last night I went to an artisan market. Not hippies selling handcraft, but real old fashioned artisans who were part of a guild or whose parents had taught them the trade, or who were hippies with a sense for commerce and looked like authentic artisans. In the market was a troupe of musicians. The had drums and a bagpipe made of a goatskin. They wore ballet slippers, white stockings, knickerbockers and sashes over puffy shirts. They skipped about as they played their music and most people just seemed to ignore them as part of the usual background.

For sale was lots of stuff, but I had no idea what it was. I tasted everything on offer including the a salami the likes of which I had never eaten, until I tried the salami next to it. (This is a bit like the Madrid handsome waiters thing.) I decided on olives, but they would not sell me a little bag. After pleading my tourist status, they sold me 2euro worth. I am trying to imagine life without these olives and feel sad about it.

Toledo is a dream. It is the pictue of Spain that I had in my head, only better. The streets a tiny and winding, there are castles, churches, museums everywhere and stories abound. About half the stories go like this: There was once a a) Christian b) jewish c) muslim prince who fell in love with a a) Christian b) jewish c) muslim girl (the story only works if the first choice is different to the second choice) blah, blah blah. The story ends badly and this is how we get a) bridge of the decapitated lovers b) the war of 100 days c) the great cliff where they threw themselves to death. There are churches, mosques and syngogues all built on top of each other and some where they just changed the insignia because it was a lot easier that way.

And to my delight, today I learned that Ei Cid actually stayed at the youth hostel where I stayed. Only it was not a youth hostel then. I did not know El Cid was real but now I am going to read all about him on Wikipeida and pretend that I knew all along

Look up Toledo on Google earth. You will see for yourself.

Wait for me

In the jazz bar in Madrid that I found, one of the fellow tourists I was with asked for food. The waiter said that they did not have food, just really good waiters, and indeed it seemed to be true. He even pointed to himself as the proof. In a bar near the Rasta (Euorpe´s biggest flea market) I stopped to have a coffee and each waiter was more handsome than the next. Eventually I gave up dignity and took a photograph.
These guys are not students with a part-time job, they are career waiters who know exactly what they are doing and perform with just the right balance of efficiency and cheek. They shoo away the pests trying to sell flowers or Chanel No. 5, watch carefully for the right moment to take away the dirty plates and offer you another drink, and they move with grace and style. The food was delicious too.

Albergue Juvenil en San Servado

This has got to be the best thing yet! I am staying in a castle, a real live castle. With all the old trappings; giant carved wooden furniture, huge wooden shutters, works of art just sitting there on the walls, sweeping staircases with brass bits and pieces and lots and lots of velvet. I have never seen anything like it. It is a youth hostel, but for 3 euro more they let people over the 30 stay as well. That means the cost to say here is 13 euro (less than $35). It has two full sized soccer fields and a 25 metre swimming pool, sitting in the terraces. It is perched on the hill over looking the little own of Toledo which is an ancient town with mosques, synagogues and Christian churches, built by whoever was winning the war at the time in 1058! I was not even born yet. In the morning I will explore.

What´s more they have had the good sense to renovate and introduce all the mod cons. In fact it is immaculate. I have my own room with en-suite, two desks, heater, everything a gal could want. The lights come on automatically as you walk through the oversized corridors, which saves the bother of the servants having to light all those candles each time. There is an assortment of lounge rooms, dining rooms, TV rooms, bars, patios, terraces and more. To really give it ambience, the place seems deserted.

The chef is standing at the bar chatting to the waiter who serves the diner. The guy on the desk has this set expression on his face that he must have developed over a period of time from greeting the newly arrived guests who just can´t believe their luck. Right now I am having a moment where I wish someone I know was here with me to pinch me and tell me that it is real. I love Madrid, but had I known about this, I would have been here sooner. So do me a favour, all of you out there who are making a list of places to go and things to do, put this right at the very top. I will take photographs, I will upload when I get back to Oxford.

Museo Del Prado

It starts with a huge sculpture of Velazquez mounted on his mighty charge then gets going as one of the best galleries in the world. If you like blood, dismemberment, gashes, slits and cuts deep in human flesh, disfigurement, cannibalism, classical gore and all things Goya, then this is the place for you. There are also naked fat babes, court portraits and rooms upon rooms for various biblical scenes. I think I saw the same bible story of Judith bathing about six times. I really liked the mythical stuff: very beastial and dark. They all really like Jesus and seem to like him best either half naked with slightly blue/grey skin in some tortored, dead or nearly dead pose or as fat, sweet baby Jesus. Me, I prefer fat, sweet baby cheeses; so what ever your preference Madrid has it for you.

There was a special exhibition of Rembrant and I saw some of those pictures that are in the public psyche, but you don´t realise it till you see them. The texture was really arresting. The ones he painted at the end of his life seemed more simply composed and reflective, but perhaps I've overdosed on gallery jargon.

My favourite for the day was Las Meninas, a portrait of a brat with blonde hair and her courtisans. Finally, I staggered out into the last of the daylight and chatted to a lovely young Indonesian/Singporean/Canadian guy who bubbled on full of life's offerings. It was a very healthy debrief.

I tried to go to a flamenco club last night but the 20 euro ($50) cover charge stopped me. Tonight, I have my eye on a jazz bar. Ham is everything and everywhere. I found a produce market and became overwhelmed with the assortment of types of ham. I will go back tomorrow and try to point at something in a meaningful manner. I am pleased with myself for managing to buy a little bag of olives, huge green, almost, crunchy with bits of lemon rind in the mix. I am telling you these things not because I want to make you jealous, but because I know that want to hear about all things I eat. The beer is lovely and I even drank sangria and enjoyed it, never thought that would happen!

Guernica

When I was in Italy, I thought that you could be excused for thinking that during World War Two the country was decidedly anti-fascist. Apparently everyone was a partisan. The same goes in Spain. Everyone was anti-Franco, if you judge by the art, the street names, the public culture. It is not that I want a celebration of Franco, but a little honesty in history would help.

The gallery (Centre de Arte Reina Sofia) was wonderful. There is one huge room with just Guernica in it and several even bigger rooms with the sketches, photographs and lead up. It is a huge work and you have to stand right back from it to get the scope. One wierd coincidence is that I am currently reading Slaughterhouse 5 (a surrealist novel about the bombing of Dresden) . The painting and the novel sort of entwined.

There is also several rooms with the photos of Robert Cappa including the really famous one of the partisan at the exact moment a bullet hits him. In the temporary exhibition was a really masterful collection of works by someone motivated to protest against the thousands of disappeared people in Chile. There was lots of political art in addition to this, and you would get the impression that the Spanish have always been very sensitive to torture and war. Nobody, it seemed wanted to deal with Spain in the Americas or Spain in Iraq today, or even the recent bombings in Spain.

The gallery Centre de Arte Reina Sofia is right next to the Atocha railway station where 191 people died in the bombing in 2004. Such is the price for the Coalition of the Willing. Checklist: USA, England, Spain, Australia. All bombed (if you count Bali as an attack on Australia). So it was Slaughterhouse 5, Guernica and the Atocha Railway Station all within my view at a single gaze.

The gallery itself is really terrific, and unlike most of the world's first class galleries does not contain an assortment of colonial plunder. Perhaps they are all in one of the other galleries in Madrid. Most of the works I saw today were actually Spanish.

Madrid itself is quiet, it is about the same size as Melbourne and many people leave for Christmas apparently. The shops do not open til 10am and no one seems in too much of a hurry to get anything done. It reminds my of Italy except that it is cleaner and less chaotic.

Hola Espagna

I have impressed myself by getting from Oxford to Hackney to stay the night at Lynne's, then to the London City Airport, to Spain, then to my hotel all on public transport. I need accomplish little more in my life. The cheapest leg of this journey was London City Airport to Madid Airport, yes the flight!

I have done little myself worth reporting and because I doubt you want a blow by blow account of every train interchange that I had to made I will present a summary of the things going on in the world as I know it.
1. Woolworths is closing on 6 January. Every single last store in Britain will shut its doors and tens of thousands of people will be unemployed.
2. Interest rates are extremely low and could get down to zero, but this is not good news.
3. Some people are sick of Nigella Lawson but it is universally agreed that Jamie can cook.
4. Everytime something bad happens to a child it is the fault of a social worker for not being vigilant enough.
5. Football is really important.

I will go and eat tapas, drink wine and be merry now.
Hi to those who have commented.

My five special minutes

Yesterday was the first in a series of days were I managed to get into places that I am really not supposed to be. The included the print room at the Ashmolean Museum, Bodlien Law Library, a post-graduate college for lunch and the main law lecture theatre. So far so good.

I told a very long story at the Ashmolean Museum about what I wanted to see: classical sketches of mechanical things where the image implied movement and especially if the sketch also showed human interaction with the machine. I was particularly interested in Italian drawings and like it best when they had something to do with architecture. The reason I wanted to see this was because I was interested in fabric printing and was looking for some ideas. I had to present this explanation four times to get in. (The only way to get in is to describe exactly what you want to see and why.)

When I did there were only three people in the room viewing the sacred stuff and three people working there. The attendant got out a huge felt mat, put on cotton gloves told me where to sit, got a special viewing frame, then went and got the print I had described. It turned out to be a Leonardo de Vinci study for a bigger painting. It was of course the original (this is of course Oxford). It was really beautiful. She then told me that I was now allowed to get out my sketch book and begin. I got out my diary and started pretending and then she gave me a folio of all the things written about this sketch.

Anyway for about 5 minutes I had my very own da Vinci. It was very special. I took some photos without the flash off course and will upload the images as soon as I work out how.

Everybody loves Greta

I have very quickly gone into that holiday time warp where it gets to be 10 o'clock just 5 minutes after if was 9 o'clock.

I have appointed myself Benny and Sandy's wife. They love me for it! My duties consist of reading their recipe books, making suggestions, conducting an inventory of the pantry, acquiring supplies and providing a meal. Last night it was sundried tomato ravioli with roast butternut pumpkin, pine nuts, goat cheese and deepfried sage that I picked from their garden, followed by lemon delicious pudding and cream. Tonight it is pea and ham soup with sourdough bread followed by rum and rasin ricotta tart (the raisins are soaking in the rum as I type). Sandy and Benny are drawing me up a very specific list of the ingredients that I am to bring back from Madrid. So far I have giant green unpitted olives in a lemon and chili marinade, chorizo (there will be very detailed specifications later) and the list has just started. My instructions are to take the biggest bag possible with nothing in it, and return with not a gram less than the onboard luggage limit will allow. No wonder they love me!

My domestic duties are enjoyable and really quite engrossing. It gives me a reason to go into various supermarkets where I stand staring at all the types of butter from Sussex, or Surrey, or Cornwall or Cardiff and wonder who cares. I have had discussions with butchers which go something like this:
Greta: "What is that?"
Butcher wearing a funny white hat: "Pheasant love."
Greta: "What is that?
Butcher wearing giant blue and white striped apron: "That would be a goose love"
Greta: "What is that?"
Butcher with giant hands: "It's a Mallard love."
Greta: "What is that?"
Butcher with apple cheeks: "It's a Christmas haggis love."

And on it goes. The only conclusion I can draw is that everyone here loves me. This has been confirmed by the woman on the checkout, the bus driver, the mobile phone salesman, the girl who sold me a coffee and the very grumpy, snarly woman in the Tourist Information Centre. They all called me love, so it must be true.

Touchdown in Oxford

The flight
The trip was really pretty good. I lucked out and managed to get an aisle seat next to two people who did not want to climb over me to get to the toilet even once, they sat very still and kept entirely quiet. This left all the wriggling and getting up and down to me. We flew low over western China and Afghanistan when it was light. It was a most amazingly beautiful scene.

The money
So far I have spent
£25 on the bus from Heathrow to Oxford
£30 on a mobile
£2 on a coffee
£8 on a taxi
That is about $150
Exactly how it is that people manage to live here is one of the mysteries of the world. And don't go thinking that the wages must be high.

Benny and Sandy manage by both having good jobs, never, (really never ever) eating out, rarely buying take away, walking whereever possible, riding push bikes to work and the boys ride or walk to school including during the depths of winter, not eating meat very often, investing in a baby Gaggia so they can have coffee on a daily basis, buying the daily paper on campus where the usual price of £1 is subsidized so it only costs 30p.

I walked around Oxford a bit and saw an add for a job at £6 per hour which Sandy and Benny say is really good money for a waitress. I think I might apply.

The last word

I have uploaded photographs that we took all the way back through to Cuba. So if you want to back track and see more of Senor Bigotes, or drenched people at waterfalls, or Old Havana architecture, then just go back through the blog.

Adios (look back to January 17 2007)

In the bar, a young woman from New Zealand was also spending her last night away from home before the marathon journey back to the other side of the world. She tried to sum up how she would explain Cuba to people, how she would remember her New Year's Eve, how she had changed. It was a neat conversation because that was what we were dealing with as well.

An yway, our friendly bar tender decided to stand on the bar and pour tequila down the boys throats and we figured that that was about as good as it was going to get.

Mexico - the big issues

The church
The Virgin of Guadalupe really runs Mexico. She is everywhere! Mexico is one of the world's most religious countries in terms of those who practise. We have seen taxi drivers and pedestrains cross themselves everytime they pass a church, wealth is installed in the churches and bells ring to let you know just when to say a prayer. We are quite over it.

I have seen more blind people than you can poke a white cane at. Every train trip I have taken a blind person gets on and sells CDs. Sometimes they are accompanied by a son or daughter who collects the money. But sight is a health issue and praying to the virgin wont make it better. (Comparisons with Cuba are just too easy to make.)

Women
In Mexico the population is increasing. All over Mexico women walk, and work and shop, and run stalls with children strapped to to them. Talk about encumbered! The only people we have seen with a pusher are tourists. But in the whole time I have been here I have only seen one man carrying a child and he did not have the child strapped to him.

There are shoe shine guys on every corner, but I have not seen a woman getting her shoes shined, very few women drive cars and perhaps it is my imagination but when I see couples in public, the women seem to be tending to the men.

We heard many truely terrible stories from tourists about being extorted by the police, but the worst one of all was a Filippino woman who was raped by the police, she realised a few weeks later that she was pregnant and so went to the doctor. From there she was taken straight to jail where she was imprisoned for three months in order to prevent her from having an abortion.

The connection between the church and the position of women could not be clearer.

Little boxes on the hillside

Only old people will recall the 'little boxes' song but that is what Taxco is like. Charles, Josh and I (reunited in Mexico City) took a day trip out to Taxco. (Tony stayed in bed being sick.) It was a great trip to do. The town really reminded me of the Amalfi coast in Italy, but that point of reference only works if you have been to the Amalfi coast in Italy.

We walked up the hill to a beautiful pale pink church, were once again amazed and annoyed at the oppulance and gold installed on the internal walls and ceilings, then wandered around this maze of a town. Taxco is famous for trading silver, so we looked at silver stuff till we quite got over it. I liked a armadillo bracelet that bit its own tail to do up. Charles liked the little fat mariachis and Josh tried to have some taste.

Having taken so many different types of transport on this trip, I figured we may as well finish up with a cable car ride. It was every bit as panoramic as promised. I managed not to be overwhelmed by vertigo. We saw houses cut into the mountain side with only steps leading up. The question of how they get their groceries etc up was answered when we noticed a sort of basket-pulley system.

It gets dark between about 6.30 and 6.45pm. Our bus pulled out at 7, so when we left the town it was all lit up and glowing - just for us.

When it rains....

It rained. Not the polite domesticated rain that we are used to, or the so called "flash floods" of Mebourne or Sydney, but real wild jungle rain that started late one day and did not stop. We had already bought our tickets to see the water falls, so figured that once we were wet through, we were wet through. Now Mexicans try to sell you everything. You can be walking on a jungle track and a little girl will appear from nowhere with a broken plastic colander containing some bananas and biscuits, but just you try to buy an raincoat or umbrella. Anyway we got soaked and stayed soaked for hours.

The photo to the side is of Misol-Ha (used as the location for the film Predator). The only problem is that the picture is from the internet. This photo was taken on a nice clear day. By the time Tony and I got there it had been teaming for almost 18 hours. The water was torrid and the sound was deafening.

We went on to Agua Clara (English translation: Clear Water) and it was far from clear. The next stop was Agua Azul (English translation: Blue Water) and it was not blue. The day before some other folk had been swimming in the pools and enjoying the water. We just stood back in awe and the water tumbled by with the occassional tree bobbing up and down. Eventually we found a place we liked and settled in for a long lunch.

When the bus dropped us back at our Cabana (4 km from town) the priorities were to get dry and have a nap. We woke a few hours later to find that the internet was down at the hostel village, some bridges were flooded and the busses has stopped running. This morning the cook at the hostel told us that this was the best time to visit Palenque because it is the dry season!

One thing to be said for hippies is that they have some idea about food. In the middle of the jungle, they have built a real Italian pizza oven, someone taught these Mexicans how to make pizza and they paid attention. Tony declared his dinner to be just as good as iCarusi in Holmes Rd Brunswick. High praise indeed!

At about three in the morning Tony realised that it had stopped raining. He got up to find the source of some very loud non-human sounding snoring. He was convinced he was going to find some kind of primate in a tree, I was convinced he was going to find a drunk backpacker. He found nothing so we will never know.

Right now I am in a laundry-internet cafe, what a good idea. I had to thow my shoes away and my leather sandals are in a poor state anyway. Further, they do not stand a chance of getting dry. So my mission will be to get something to eat and find some shoes.

Palenque

Palenque is the site of a city of 15 square kilometres, but archeologists have only uncovered part of it from the jungle. Some of the ruins are really well preserved and a lot of work has been done on them. Other sections have been partly uncovered and still have huge trees growing out of them, other sections are still covered in jungle. This is certainly the most open of the ruins, you pratically have free reign to climb and explore, so we did. We would slowly crawl up, sit for 10 minutes or so and survey the magnificence, quickly plop down the steps and onto the next edifice.

We went into sections that were only partly uncovered and there was nobody bar us. It was eerie. This part of Mexico has the highest rainfall, so the jungle grows quickly. I think if you stood still and stared you really could see it growing. We sat really quietly in one part and brilliant gold and black lizards emerged from the leaf litter. As soon as the city of Palenque was abandoned, the jungle took it back. It is humid and wild.


At night we could hear howler monkeys and wierd animals calling to each other. I did sleep pretty well, but I woke a few times and was glad that we had shut the door firmly. Indeed our hostel is called The Jaguar and you can just imagine the whole place coming to life with animals.

In fact, the whole place does come to life with animals, ferals to be exact. We don't have tattoos, piercings, dreadlocks, fisherman's pants, equipment for fire juggling or bare feet, so we are just a little bit passe. At night, in the middle of all the jungle hostels, all manner of counter cultural types gather. The food is good, the booze is cheap, the music is live and the company is friendly. Do I really have to come home?

Cabana in the jungle

This is a photograph of the cabana that Tony and I are staying in at El Panchan, near Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico. The 5 hour bus trip was amazing. No more cactii and dry grey wasteland for us, just verdant jungle, wild cliff drops, soaring mountains. Out of nowhere the land is cleared, a series of shacks appear and the roadside stalls go up. For a while it was children on the speed humps selling corn and whole coconuts with a straw in the top, then it was clothes stalls selling garmets that were either sunflower yellow or white, no other colours, just yellow or white, then it was barbeque chicken, whatever.

We are staying out of the town in a wierd place that is really just a collection of hippy-feral backpacker jungle hostels. It is easy to meet people, at the bar and there are plenty of folks from all around the world who have been making their way across the planet. The exchange of stories is great fun. We even met an Aussie called Dale from Nathalia wearing a Carlton Football Club top. He is on his way to Cuba to do some boxing. Sure enough he went to Mowbray College for a while, and of course we knew some of the same people.

Tenejapa and San Juan Chamula

Tenejapa

In the morning, (after the best spinach quiche ever) Tony and I went out to the market at Tenejapa, not on the $17 per person organised tour, but on the $4 per
person round trip on a Collectivo. A Collectivo is a taxi or a car that has a set route, ie San Cristobal to Tenejapa. Everyone who wants to get from one place to the other knows where to catch a ride, but tourists don´t usually use the Collectivos. When the driver has a full load, he goes, sometimes you might wait 5 minutes, rarely more than 10 I think. It is a terrific system of public transport. The problem was that to find the departure point we had to walk to the edge of the town, enter the entrails of a market where everything was pitched at Mexican height and I kept hitting my head on the tarpaulins or clothes on display, and out the other side of the market. The trip was beautiful and the town amazing. All the main town officials (maybe 30 of them) were lined up on plastic seats in front of the town hall, all wearing their ribbon hats. They look like the sort of hat that a goat would eat in a funny story about a naughty farm animal. The minor officials sat at their side and hoped for the day when they would get promoted to ribbon hat status.

A seemingly never ending procession of identically dressed women came out of the church in single file accompanied by some important looking men with fearsome big sticks. We were told to stand still and not to take photos. The only explanation we could get is that it all had something to do with the new year.

San Juan Chamula
In the afternoon we went to the slightly scarey town of San Juan Chamula. This town keeps its distance from the world, a tradition that began with resistance to the Spanish in 1524 and continues with gusto. The indigenous people of the towns speak an ancient language, they all wear clothes that identify their family, community and village. The idea of individuality has not really caught on here. They have ancient supertitions and unique religious rituals. A group marched around the square playing some kind of drone music, stopping at crosses mounted at various points, raised the bowl of smoking herbs to the cross then proceeded to the next cross. All the while explosions are going off, because what sort of a celebration would it be without some explosions and it seems fireworks are cheap.

Many of the vendors were primary school age children, and my impression is that many of the children who live in these towns do not go to school.

These are people for whom the next town is a threat, so we were careful. Some might see these places as quaint or authentic or charming. Tony kept uttering the word "backward".

San Cristobal: hippy capital of Mexico

Wow, Indian food, jazz clubs, wholemeal bread - Tony wants to move here. It is certainly the prettiest town we have been in. It is high in the southern mountains and just so much the image of Mexico at its best.
On the other hand, it is the home of the Zapatista uprising and the killing of 45 people, mainly women and children in 1997, when the Mexican police and their friends decided that they had had enough of the indigeous people demanding their rights. (A little reading is in order if you want to know more about this.)

We went to the theatre tonight and saw a dance/play about the prehispanic history of the area. I was terrific and we tried hard to follow the story line. (A little reading is in order if we are to understand this.)

You take the high road, and I'll go to Tehuantepec

Charles and Josh have gone to Puerto Escondido and Tony and I have hit the road again. First we made it Tehuantepec, where few tourists venture. We went to the market and each stall holder called to the next "Hey look at that woman". It seems they have never seen a gaintess before. Many of the old women and some of the young wear the traditional dress of a full length huge skirt with a velvet embroidered top, they tie ribbons in their hair and look really great. Of course, they are lucky to be over 5ft, so I looked like a freak. The means of transport, which we did use, is a three wheeled motor bike with a tray on the back. You just stand on the tray and off you go. What a good idea!
It happened that our hotel was opposite the university of foreign languages. I happened upon two young Mexican women about to sit an English exam. We spent the evening together and they told us a little about their lives. It is hard to grasp. They were beautiful and confident, in no real hurry, and under to real pressure to acquire boyfriends or husbands. Quite independent in thought and behaviour in many ways. They enjoyed a joke and were sophisticated in so many ways. But, like all Mexicans who want a tertiary education, they have to pay full fees. This means that they are supported by their families and thus are obliged to their families. They both spoke with great admiration and reverence of their parents, their desire to do the right thing, their sense of a really strong tie. They also spoke of the desire to live their own lives and make something of themselves. It was a delightful evening and a little insight into the importance of the family.

Prehispanic Mexico and Primitive Mexico

Prehispanic Mexico

We wandered around Oaxoca through galleries and museums. The museum of prehispanic art was my favourite. The ceramic figures all seem just a little bit comical to me. Many Mexican artists (including Rivera and Kahlo but many others as well) made a point of collecting prehispanic art. They are the ones who really saved a great deal of it for the people of Mexico. The figures are expressive and animated. Some were made for funerial puposes, some were made with domestic function in mind, and some celebrated the natural environment.
My personal favourite was a collection of really fat dogs. These dogs were an important source of food, so the fatter the better! So far intenstines, maguey worms and fried crickets have been eaten, and we do have plans that involve armadillo, but I don´t think I will go for dog just yet.

Primitive Mexico
Oaxaca is a relatively rich town because so many tourists come here but the poverty is just woeful. Many people are homeless, whole families sit on the street begging. Yesterday Tony and I saw a woman with a girl of about three begging. Finally the girl had enough and threw a tantrum. It was just too much. A young european backpacker couple were walking by with their dinner in take-out boxes and they just handed over the food. It was heartbreaking, the only problem is that just a few metres up the street was another woman with a child, and on goes the story.

Outside every church are piles of dirty rags, inside the piles of dirty rags are even dirtier people who seem to live on the church steps. Just a few doors from our hotel a whole family live in their car. Josh and Charles had a man expose his swollen, possibly gangenous, but definately blackened leg from ankle to knee in an effort to win a couple of pesos. Some are enterprising, and play a tune or try to sell peanuts, but the vast majority are beyond even that. The really old beggars try to get a spot at the church door because it seems they can hardly move. The markets are full of tiny wisened old women who do things like shell peas, or remove the spikes from cactii or peel fruit. I feel reluctant to take photographs, because it seems like an intrusion, but I think it is something everyone should see.

But Don't Stop Reading Now
Slim Carlos is the richest man in the world and he is Mexican! His company Telmex (built with tax-payers' money) controls 90% of the Mexican landline telephone market. His wealth is equal to roughly 8% of Mexico's GDP. Even Rockefeller never got above 2.5% of America's economic output. Slim makes an average of $27 million per day.
The Twist
While I type this, this very second, right now, Slim Carlos is making money from me. Mexicans pay 270% more for broadband than do Americans, and I am sitting in an internet cafe about to press ¨Publish¨ then go up to the girl at the counter, hand over my pesos and make Slim Carlos just a little bit richer.