This was a squeeze to see how much of the Western United States we could visit in two weeks. Ben thought we could make it all the way to Mexico, but the more realistic route took us down the Pacific Northwest Coast, and across as far as Las Vegas before heading back north via Death Valley. Working our way around the Olympic peninsula, we encountered our first cultural highlight of the trip. Wandering into a hardware store in deepest Washington, we stumbled across the gun aisle and were horrified to see rather large assault rifles lined up against the wall, with [View Full Entry]

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We've been a good 4 months or so in Canada now, so its probably time for more musings on life in Canada. One truly North American custom we've had the privilege to endure is "Wings". We were taken by friends to a local establishment specifically for this purpose. I've never eaten so much chicken in my life. The wings come cheap and by the plateful, covered in delicious seasonings. The only other accompaniment seemed to be beer and possibly meatballs. This is great for those on the Atkins diet, but it definitely has adverse effects on your digestive system. I'm not [View Full Entry]

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Some pics from November. [View Full Entry]

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Here are some more pics from around and about Victoria. Can't say we've actually been doing much. Ben has been studying, me working and in my spare time trying to deal with the kilograms of apples we picked from our neighbour's tree. [View Full Entry]

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We've been in Canada for 6 weeks now, and a number of things have struck me about the place. The thing we Kiwis have found most alarming is the sheer ruggedness of the wildlife here. I thought it was odd that our flatmate instructed us not to let the cats out of the house during the day. Being cats, they spend most of their day in respective baskets snoozing, but I figured they could probably do with a good run around the yard. At the very least, the cats could use the garden rather than making a mess of the litter [View Full Entry]

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The story as told by Ben: "Both me and Kat did our 8km race today. We both had a great run but neither of us positioned ourselves very well so spent the first few minutes elbowing children and old people out of the way. Not very smart with a crowd of 2000 runners. Felt shattered at about the 5km mark when this chick came up on me and I decided to keep pace. Eventually she broke me, took off and finished 2 seconds in front, next time I'll leave the hardcore girls alone. Came in feeling pretty knacked at the finish [View Full Entry]

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The rest of Mexico passed in a blur. We had about 5 days left to get back to Mexico City in time to catch our flight to Canada. We stopped in Palenque just long enough to catch the next bus to Villahermosa. There, we wandered around till all hours of the night trying to find a hotel that still had space and wasn't going to charge us super large sums of money. We stopped by one hotel that was straight out of a horror movie. The door handle just about fell off as we opened it. It had clearly been jimmied [View Full Entry]

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Our entry into Belize marked the first of a number of battles with border guards. First up was the exit from Mexico, where the guy tried to get 100 pesos out of us for the privilege of leaving and being able to return again. Who knows what the real story is, but we refused to pay as we were roughly aware that it should be free to come and go. We mentioned this down the line of other travellers but they all paid various amounts based on their personal circumstances. Some people from France paid US$25 each, all of which I [View Full Entry]

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They call the stretch of land down the east coast of the Yucatan peninsula the Mayan Riviera. It is a great spot on the carribean sea with white sand beaches, the most amazingly blue sea bordered by jungle. Ben was dreading the thought of ´beach days´ but I really wanted to stop here and enjoy the coast. Our first stop was Tulum, and we picked up an overpriced cabaña on the beach. Cabaña sounds reasonably romantic, but it was little more than a concrete floor (some were just sand), some sticks for walls and a thatch roof. We walked in to [View Full Entry]

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We said goodbye to San Christobal at some ungodly hour of the morning, and set off for Palenque, the first of our Mayan ruins. The road was hilly, windy and full of speed bumps on the strangest stretches of road. Beside each was a group of children that would jump up and try to sell us coconuts, fruit, chewing gum etc. We stopped off for a swim at Agua Azul, and admired the waterfall at Misol-ha before arriving at the ruins at about 2pm. We decided to get a guide in order to understand the place a bit better. I´m not [View Full Entry]

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