And so I´m at the end, after a couple of days in Mexico city again and meeting Anne and her family, which was great, I am flying back this evening (Monday), Mexican time and should arrive in the UK Tuesday evening for flat-hunting and work-shoe shopping before I start near Chester on 18th September. I wanted to write a suitably sloppy blog to say thanks for reading and telling you all about all the things I´d learnt about myself and Latin America and the world during the past year. Such things could include my new-found patience (which may or may not [View Full Entry]

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Merida Merida is a nice enough town but when you´ve seen a few nice towns (or, as in my case, many) there really isn´t that much there. Luckily I met up again with Gale and Sara, who I met in the youth hostel in Cancún and some of their enthusiasm for all things new managed to rub off on me as we wondered the streets exploring more cathedrals, murals and plazas. Thanks guys! - it was realy nice to catch up with you again, enjoy the rest of your holiday! In the evening the three of us braved the pushing and [View Full Entry]

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Playa del Carmen Stop one on the coast was the resort town of Playa del Carmen, it used to be a small fishing town but the Cancún effect has now reached it and it really is a tourist town now, but unlike some other ´foriegner´-packed places I´ve been, I actually really liked Playa. Along with the hundreds of American tourists comes a level of clenliness and service which I have actually rather missed, we got a free upgrade in our hostel to a private room which was absolutely spotless and the portion sizes in the restaurants trippled. Unfortunately you do also [View Full Entry]

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San Cristóbal de las Casas San Cristóbal sits high up in the mountains in the southerly state of Chiapas, just a few hours from the Guatamalan border and it´s cool climate so different from other ´nearby´towns in Mexico that it´s like a different country. The overnight bus - 12 hours from Puerto Esconidido - was no where near as traumatic as it had threatened to be, although I am glad it was too dark to see the cause of the winding roads. Actually, despite the near-arctic conditions on board, I slept a lot better than I did the last 2 nights [View Full Entry]

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From the sooty city to the sticky coast. Mary and I opted for the cheater-option and flew (on the Mexican version of easyjet called Click) to Puerto Escondido for Mary´s first Pacific Ocean visit. Honestly, there´s not alot to report from here really. We went out to a bar with some people from our youth hostel, which is sandy, hot and noisy; spent the mornings on the beach going a nice northern-European shade of pink; walked the pretty coastal path to the next beach along; took a boat which made me feel incredibly sick to see some sea turtles (which [View Full Entry]

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Taxco And so on with the travelling. Leaving Mary to explore Mexico city (I fear for my lungs and had seen all I wanted already) I headed to the small, colonial, mountain town of Taxco about 3 hours south of Mexico. The views on the road into Taxco are amazing, as are the views from almost anywhere in the city but on arriving at the bus station I discovered the downside of this. On asking for directions to the centre the replies did not include the standard right / left / straight on, instead, there are 2 directions in Taxco: "arriba [View Full Entry]

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Tapalpa When I looked up from reading my book I was amazed by 2 things, the first was that I was still raeding on an undersuspentioned, slightly pungent, speeding, old Mexican bus on a winding mountain road and somehow had defied the law of physics that states that I should have been spewing my guts up (or at least feeling like I wanted to). The second was that we were still climbing - the road wound up and up forever. Actually, visiting Tapalpa is worth it just for the views as you leave the highway and climb up into the mountains. [View Full Entry]

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Mexican buses really are arguably among the worst in the world. It´s not just that you wait for ages and then 2 come at once (this is, I believe, a world-wide phenomonum) but they are always incredibly hot with half the windows un-openable and lacking in suspension; they leak when it rains and no one ever sits in the window seats first so that you are required to climb over someone just to sit down. This is usually followed by climbing back over someone to stand up again because Mexico has so many elderly people, pregnant women and babies that there [View Full Entry]

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This time last year (I can't believe it was a year ago!), as we drove out of Cambridge with a car full of accumulated rubbish, I really thought my time at univeristy was over; and yet this week I find myself back there, only this time I´m teaching. The really scarey thing is that I´m not teaching anything to do with science - with an engineering degree I´m teaching English! Admittedly it is as a second language, but I never thought I would be teaching univeristy professors anything! The classes have been very different again to the two different schools I [View Full Entry]

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Now back in Mexico and as Cuba had no internet connection (the Cubans are not permitted to use the internet unless they are performing some specific governmental task or studying and always need a license to use it) I wrote a diary to type up now and looking at what I´ve written this may end up as a bit of an epic but please feel free to skip the words and just look at the pictures! 17th June Our journey to Cuba started at 3.45am after an extremely wet evening during which I shivered my way through a piano concert after [View Full Entry]

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