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.

Monte Alban

Monte Alban sits just 6km above the city of Oaxaca. It is the site of the very first city in the whole American continent and, not coincidentially, the place where written language was first developed in the Americas. Unlike Chichen Itza (just a couple of hours drive from Cancun), Monte Alban is peaceful and it is easy to imagine the city in its former glory. The big bonus was that each sign on each building is in English and Spanish. We climbed all over the place for hours and really soaked it in. Tony and I went there on public transport (as opposed to an organised tour) and were delighted to find that most of the tourists who were there were Mexican.

The trip up the hill on the bus took us around the houses of the city, then concrete cube houses on the hillside, then what we would describe as chicken coops, but are actually houses, then up to the top of the hill where we could look back down on the town. The houses all have big water tanks, not for the collection of rainwater, but for the storage of water. There is no running water, so it has to be delivered by truck and stored in tanks. The power lines run along the main road, but at a certain point don´t go up to the houses. This means many of the buildings on the road are businesses. If you have a fridge, open a drink shop; if you have an electric light, open a clothes store; if you have a sattelite, open an internet cafe (true,I swear it). Talk about combined and uneven development!

Things we have seen
1. Women so small that when Tony stood next to them they did not even come up to his shoulders, and so old they looked almost like mummies. Of course they were carrying great baskets of whatever they were selling.
2. Young boys with the blackest, thickest, slickest hair ever.
3. Women with two long plaits tied at the back of their heads, wound around with yellow or red ribbon then tied together to make a semi-cirle loop and the back.
4. Barbequed pigs intestines. (Yes I did try them, just a bit mind you, but Tony liked them and finished the plate.)
5. Families who just sit in the main town square on Sunday afternoon, for no particular reason, except to be out.
6. Groups of siblings walking around the town square ranging in age from about 9 down to 6, each one selling a different toy, the littlest one last selling the littlest wooden toys.

Off to Oaxaca

After the boys went to the wrestling (where midget wrestling is the speciality of the arena) we got ourselves on the bus to Oaxaca. The first hour or so of the trip was a voyage through the concrete barrios of the working and unemployed people of Mexico ($6 per day is the average wage if you are lucky enough to be working). The next five hours of the trip was like a filmic landscape version from The Roadrunner, only with a few more cactus plants and some quite gripping canyons. We arrived in the town without bookings and have done as well as we would have with bookings.
The boys are paying $9 (including free internet, breakfast and bike hire) per night at the Mezkalito. Tony and I are about 500 metres up the same street in a nice hotel with potplants and courtyards etc. Fittingly enough it is called the Hotel Antonio. We are all a bit flat today, but I for one am glad to be out of the pollution. The first few times I saw people walking around with face masks on I thought they were dorks, now it just seems like a good idea if you have to live in Mexico City.

Miricles and torture

Trains
On the Metro in Mexico City we saw a blind person with a stick leading a blind person without a stick. So we actually saw the blind leading the blind. The hawkers that come through the carriages only sell one thing each, here is a sample: scissors, (good for cutting hair) for 50 cents, a book light for $1, chewing gum, CDs, lollies. The one mistake I made was to file off a busy train in the following order: Charles, Greta, Josh. (Any idiot would know that the order should have been Josh, Charles, Greta.) Big mistake! Nobody waits for people to get off before they get on. This means that the only way to get off is to push. You really have to push Mexicans (who generally are tall if they are over 5´2¨), so you feel really mean. I had told Josh about it, but I had not reminded him. So he got stuck on the train. I was yelling at him to push, he tried, but looked bewildered. I reached my arm in, he reached out and grabbed it and miricles of miricles out he popped.

The real miricle
Tony decided that even though his stomach was giving him trouble, he would do the trip to the site of the 1968 massacre, the Shrine of Guadalupe and the pyrimids. Sure enough at the shrine he went to the toilet one last time then declared himself cured. People line up to pray for a miricle, but all Tony had to do was visit the little boys room and hey presto. He impressed everyone on the bus with his modern day Mexican miricle.

Torture and Creativity
While Tony and Josh climbed pyramids, Charles lay in the bed in our hotel room making the most of the easy toilet access. In between bringing him Gatoraid, I went out to visit the National Museum and the Museum of the Instruments of Torture. The National Museum was really wonderful and I was surprised by the number of really tender European style portraits. I decided that because I had been to the very building where they held the Spanish Inquisition, that the torture exhibition had some context. It did have context, but I am not sure that I am glad I went. The exhibition had signs in English so I could read all of the information. Apart from the detailed physiological explanations, each instrument had a footnote explaining when it was last used. Of course many of them are still in use in much of the world today. The really horrible part of it was how creative and inventive the instruments are.

Coyocan

I tell myself that this blog is really just a diary, and that I don't care if people make comments, but I really like it when I get a response or two.

It was all maps and public transport all the way out to Coyacan, fours place to visit and harldy a wrong turn taken. Good on me!

We went to the Trotsky Museum and looked at the bullet holes in the walls and the little guard houses on the corners. It is really a pilgrimage for us. The photos of the couple fishing in Turkey or picnicing on Norway are really beautiful.








At the Frida Kahlo Blue House we read the original letter between Nelson Rockefeller and Diego Rivera, we went strolling though parks and markets, then back on the bus to the Palace of Fine Arts. We decided to finish the excursion with a trip to the mural discussed in the letters. The little reproduction I have stuck in the blog is nothing to go by. It really is one of the greatest pieces of art I have ever seen.

Roads well travelled

Pollution a la Mexicana

The three and a half hour double decker tourist bus around Mexico City was sedate, but did the trick of letting us relax into the high altitude and get a picture of at least some of the city. There are some really beautiful sections, architecture, gardens, lakes, parks, cultural centres stc. The public sculpture is fantastic and Mexican art continues to impress us. It was good to see the highlights of the city. It really is an exciting place and all of us are happy to be here. The bus trip did not explore the underbelly, no surprises there. It took a well travelled path and we are determined that having done that, we need to at make an effort to follow roads less travelled, or at least routes less frequently followed in the next few days. So it is down into the underground Metro, where for 20 cents we can emerge at the other end in the city without having seen the light of day.

There is just so much to see and we have promised ourselves that in the next couple of days we will try to do some major excursions on public transport, without the aid of a tour bus or guide. We are also trying to get just enough sleep and rest to allow us to approach the next thing with enthusiasm, but not so much that we lose momentum.

Today we just gave up trying to sort out lunch, went into Mexico City's only vegetarian cafe and ordered cauliflower soup because we recognised those words, then reverted to our trick of ordering the first four things on the menu because there were four of us. We got a really earthy mushroom soup, three apple dumplings (gordita manzana), some enchiladas and a big tortilla stuffed with what might have been spinach (huanzontle). We were also brought three plates of what can only be described as tamarillo soup for desert, even though we did not think that we ordered it. We had coffee, paid our four dollars each and have vowed to try to remember some of the Spanish names of the foods that we like.

Tony and I had spent the night before in the company of Horaldo the bartender at the Hostel Amigo (you might remember him from such blog entries as Luche Libre Wrestling January 2007). He recognised me from last year and for him that meant we should be given free drinks. Actually, I think the giving away of free drinks by this man is not so special an occasion but who am I to look a gift bar-tender in the mouth.

For the evening, I found a yearning for some quiet time and a copy of the New York Times to enjoy. The muchachos have gone off to the wrestling and will return to the company of Horaldo. Josh and Charles have shifted from Hostel Moneda to Hostel Amigo which is right next door to Hostel Isabel where Tony and I are holed up.

The pollution is getting to me and to make matters worse, our whole street is being dug up. This means that it is a real dust bowl and it is hard to get the smells of Mexico City out of the nostrils and believe me not all the smells are good. Still we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep.

Pulque

Tony and I have done the washing, been to the bank, sorted our junk and done other mundane things. See, it is not all singing and dancing. Of course it took ages to do these things but we managed. The boys have skated and walked around town. We tried to sort out the phones but that looked like it might take hours in a queue.

The President is in town and so is the entire Mexican army and police force it seems. I have never seen so many military-security-protection-security force people in my life. I even saw an armoured guard protecting the beer truck (Corona actually) as it made its deliveries!!! There are caravans of cops, truckloads, processions, tidal waves. Mexicans seem to take little notice, but we are a bit freaked out. They are all armed with very serious weaponary and are wearing impressive protective gear. We, of course, are trying to be very good. That involves crossing with the lights, no spitting, heads down and eyes straight forward.

The boys discovered a pulqueria. This is a tiny hole-in-the-wall bar that sells beer made out of cactus. Traditionally, it is consumed by working people who cannot afford tequila. In the modern world, it is consumed by working people who cannot afford tequila and backpackers who want to be Mexican workers who cannot afford tequila. Nothing wrong with that! Unflavoured, it is thick, sweet, white and most importantly, costs $1 for a huge cup. In fruit flavours it costs $2. Actually it is not very alcoholic, but those who drink it, drink a lot if it. It is, no hint of a lie, also sold in buckets, yes pails, a la Jack and Jill.


The bar is an absolute classic. It has swinging doors, is absolutely packed (but there is always room for one more) and the atmosphere is paplable. On the bar is a bottomless stack of tortillas and salsa to which patrons help themselves. They were playing pretty good music, and because you are practically sitting on the knee of your fellow drinker, it only make sense to introduce yourself and start up a conversation. This is a real plus because it is not so easy to get into conversations with Mexican people. The people in the pub were two lecturers in political science, a young couple in the throes of early love, two other guys I could not quite identify and us. Josh and Charles think they have found the place in the world where they truely belong, so let them at it I say. They have plans that involve pails and I have vinegar and brown paper at the ready.

I could only get through half a cup and then I had to retire to the sidewalk. Now remember that Mexico is at high altitude and that I sufferred a little altitude sickness last time. Then, put me is a seriously crowded bar on a hot Mexican afternoon, give me half a drink (pineapple pulque to be precise), and you have a recipe for trouble. I did make it back to the hotel, but that is because it was only about 100 metres away. I had a lie down with a cold compress and recovered. I still feel a little dizzy and so will take it easy tomorrow.

Mexico City - again - at last

Thanks for the greetings Alex, Michele and Mum.

As I type, Josh and Charles as skating on the world's biggest ice-skating rink. The major of Mexico City has put it here to show that Mexico City is not all about crime, pollution and poverty. So now Mexico City is about crime, pollution, poverty and ice-skating.

Tony and I are staying at Hosel Isabel on Isabel de Catolica, we can probably receive phone calls, but I have not tested it yet. Our hotel is lovely, enormous 20ft plus ceilings, great organge and blue colors, wonderful courtyard and 4 beds in our room. The cost is about $40 per night. The phone number is 55 18 12 13. But you will have to work out the prefixes for yourself. The best times to call are in the morning between about 7 and 8am Mexico City time) or after about 10 at night. If you can work all that out, good on you.

Charles and Josh are at the Moneda, about a 10 minute walk away. They have a shared bunk room which includes free internet, a free tour of the city, breakfast and dinner for about $20. After dinner we are going out for dessert to celebrate Charles' birthday.

Photos

Hi all,
I have stuck a few photos into past blog posts. It takes quite a while to upload each photo so there are not very many. Anyway, you get the picture!

Love from Greta

Three Kings´ Day

Today, by a perfect coincidence is the biggest day of celebration in the town of Merida. It is Three Kings´ Day, the day when the good witch comes and gives presents to children, the birthday of the city (over 400 years), a state holiday and the day before Charles´ birthday. Tonight there will be a huge procession and concert in the main square. I am expecting that it will be terribly crowded, but we will go and see anyway. The main advice is to watch out for pickpockets.

Merida is a small city and our hotel is about 2 kilometres out of the centre. This provides us with a nice walk. Merida is roughly the centre of the site where the meteorite landed and the dinosaurs were no more. The problem is that the indentation on the earth is over 250 kms, so even though we are in the middle of it we would not know it unless we were told.

Merida also has a funeral parlour in our street which opens out to the footpath so everyone can see in. All the proceedings are on public display and the grieving families are provided with a vending machine for comfort. It seemed a bit wierd to be deciding which button to press for coke or fanta while someone lays in a box, but everyone gets thirsty and in Mexico death is a very special occasion.

We did a free walking tour of the city where some interesting information was mixed in with information overload and repetition. After about and hour, Josh made the executive decision that we should just duck into the art gallery. Good decision! Some of the art was okay, but the place was spacious, quiet and cool.

I then made the executive decision that rather than sit in the main square and be bothered by hawkers trying to sell handcrafted toys and novelties, we should go to Cafe Pop. Good decision! The food was okay, the cafe had a pop art theme and it was quiet and cool.

On the way back to the hotel, I impulsively decided to get a Mexican haircut. The hairdresser spoke no English so the whole thing was fun. I figured that at worst I would have a Señor Bigotes story. When he finished cutting, he did a terrible job of blowdrying my hair into a 1982 helmet style. I came back to the hotel and messed it up and it is fine. The best thing is that it cost me the grand total of $6.50. I did actually think about getting a colour as well, but chickened out.

The hotel has a body of water that some would call a fountain and others would call a well. We have called it a swimming pool. The boys say that it is hard to have a good time in such a small space, but it is refreshing.

Piste

We spent one quite night in Piste, near Chichen Itza. True to its name, a huge flagon of beer (six glasses worth) costs abut $2. We ate lime soup and bar-b-que chicken for dinner wiping our plates with the tortillas and soaking up the spicy chili-tomatoe salsa. The flavours were strong and made a welcome change from the limited menu of Cuba.

Piste is a sleepy town where the population is very Mayan. The people are especially short and have the classic features of Mayan sculptures. The babies are really cute because they look like Yoda. In contrast to the open sexuality of Cuba, Mexico is deeply conservative, especially this part. The women wear a long white petticoat with a lace trim at the bottom. On top of this is a white smock dress with embroidery around the neck. This outfit was especiilly designed by the priests to hide all of a woman´s curves.

We are having a quiet day today and are more than ready to stay in one place for a while.

Chichen Itza

The place it beautiful, but not as big as I imagined. Our guide was very old, (80 in fact) could not really hear and was incapable of answering a single one of our questions. He told us everything several times. Things like ¨just stand here now¨,or ¨do not lose your ticket¨ not interesting things like how the sport with the high rings on the wall was played. The guide´s main aim seemed to be to get from one bathroom to the next. We guessed prostrate problems, the more generous on the tour suggested that he was used to tourists with upset stomachs, either way he showed us all the toilets on the way and in the ruins.

Amyway, we read the guidebook, and listened in on other tour guides a bit. I hate to admit it, but the Mel Gibson film Apocalypto, really does well with the setting and the story. There were special places for the chopping off of heads, the storage of bones etc. The main pyramid is seriously impressive, and it was wondrous.

The tourists were everywhere and the Mexican hawkers line every path. I can´t blame anyone for that, but it did take away from the ambiance.

From one extreme to the other

Cancun is awful. Now, I knew that, I expected it, I had read all about it, but nothing on earth could have prepared me for how awful it is.

It is just an abomination. The only thing I can think of that is in anyway similar is the Gold Coast, but that does not capture it. Rich touristis, mainly Americans come here. Travelling from the airport to the hotel zone, you see nothing of Mexico, especially not the actual town of Cancun itself.

I will just describe our dinner. Tony had a bath and would not go out (probably a wise decision). I went out with the boys to Jimmy Buffet´s Margaritaville. I was seriously depressed and tried to convince them to leave. They argued that I had to see every horrible thing in the world, and this was an important thing to behold.

The place was all a glitter and service staff ran around attending to our every need, and needs that we did not even know that we had. The services we rejected included
1. a girl with a coconut shell bra who would pour tequila down the throat of anyone who asked while blowing her whistle
2. hats made out of balloons
3. the opportunity to get oversized sombreos and have our photo taken
4. Beer bought to the table by a waiter who delivered it balanced on his head
5. the conga line
6. the volcano alarm
7. The chance to yell and applaud in response to such questions as ¨Is anyone here from America?¨or better still ¨Does anyone here speak English?
8. the guacamole cart

The nachos was enough to feed two or three people. We were frowned upon because we did not drink up. I spent my time glaring at the world´s most horrible drunk woman who plonked her fat American backside in the lap of any male she could find (including Charles).

We just could not get out of Cancun fast enough. Perhaps Dante´s Inferno needs an addition, there really is another circle to hell. I can´t describe this place without biblical references to the end of the world.

Goodbye Havana

Our last full day in Havana was wonderful. We woke to look out our hotel window and see a storm lashing the waves up against the sea wall of Havana´s most famous street. We wandered around a mainly closed city (New Year´s Day). Tony and I had lunch in a nice small place then walked for about an hour.

In the evening we wandered around trying to find an off-the-beaten-track cafe for dinner. In the end all the places we had in mind turned out to be closed and we went into an Italian place. They had two things on the menu, lasange or canneloni. It was okay. The best thing was that we were the only people in the place and the guy with the guitar made a special effort for us. He organised a sing-a-long and even coaxed Josh to play. He was a real classic old Cuban guitarist.

We made it into Old Havana where we saw our favourite band. When that was done, Tony and I ignored the sense God gave us, as well as the advice of the Cuban population and walked home along the sea wall, getting drenched and loving it. Charles and Josh went out with the guitarist and did what young people do in Cuba.

What young people do in Cuba is catch a Cuban taxi. Apparently they are really just cars that run on set routes and they cost very little. If the passenger wants some air, the driver passes them back the one and only window winder. They met up with friends and sat outside a club with music. No Cuban can really afford to drink at clubs, or even much outside of clubs, so they listen to the music, dance and talk. Josh and Charles said that they had to really reach to keep up with the general knowledge and intellectual level of the conversation. (This is especially impressive given that all of the people they were with were talking in their second, or third, or fourth language)

The last thing we did on the day we left was visit the Museum of the Revolution. It has the boat Granma, tanks and weaponry etc. It was a fitting end to the trip and I at least left with a list of things that I want to do and places I want to go next time.