1st August. I didn't get married today. I went to the Chichen Itza instead. It was great. :D We awoke and showered, amazed we had ever managed to sleep. breakfast was slim pickings - although our hostel was big, safe and had a swimming pool, brekkie was a cup of coffee and a slice of toast. Ah well. Just as we were being picked up to go to Chichen Itza, and then onto Cancun, Sandy and Lucy arrived. They were the girls on Bamba we had met on the Sumidero Canyon trip, and were meant to be on the Bamba bus [View Full Entry]

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Awoke suddenly, feeling like was being pulled up through water, sudedn sunlight breaking the surface. Sudden realisation was in a hammock, in a garden, sun high in the sky and music playing somewhere. Merida. Ahh, right. And it must be nearly time to check in. Nursing the bites sustained in the hammock in the hours we had slumped there, we now slumped in the Reception, waiting for our room. When the owner, a big, jolly man, came back from buying coffee (Starbucks, Damn) and found us still waiting he laid into his Reception staff who were blithely chatting away and had [View Full Entry]

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Palenque then. Our last daytrip of the Chiapas, this was our last stop before we hopped on the nightbus to Merida. We'd already visited Agua Azul and Misol-Ha waterfalls over the day, accompanied by Sergio, the friendly Meridian, and Agnes, a Dutch tourism student having just done her exams in Cuba (why not?), who tagged along with us sharing stories. Palenque itself is just a town built to acommodate the growing amount of tourists who come to the area to see the Palenque ruins, and these were our goal of the day. this is another maya site, special because of its [View Full Entry]

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So, Chiapas. Unstable, possibly full of guerillas (certainly full of bullet-holed road signs and armoured military police) and Swine Flu. As you may have guessed from previous post, we were not exactly over the moon with our first City, San Cristobal. I shan't name and shame the hostel. I shall leave that for the official review. But one nice thing in SC was the shopping; so much local craftmanship was on show that we were rather spoilt for choice, and had to buy nice things for nice people there...until some other horror occurred that I forgot to write about - oh, [View Full Entry]

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San Cristobal: Horrifically brightly-painted churches in lurid pastel. So many beggars. Hippies. Bongos. Hippies with bongos singing ´No Woman No Cry´all night and not talking to us. Cold weather. Hippies. One shower between twenty hippies.... which is surprisingly always free. ( Surprisingly? ) Stomach bug. Being sick, over and over again, for hours. Having to walk around for hours just to escape hippies. Having to go back to the hostel. Full of hippies. Hippies keeping Jasmine's Versace sunglasses hostage as some kind of protest against [View Full Entry]

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The night after dolphin-watching we had a big communal barbecue, at Jas and carol´s suggestion. In the afternoon, everyone seemed to go out and buy something, then that night we got to work on all the little jobs: making salad, starting the bbq going, getting beer and music sorted (my job). Javier, who had been a resident for about five hours, was immediately posted on BBQ duty because, as it was put, "he is a man". Osmond gravitated toward him and they made manly smalltalk, while lots of women busied about making food and mixing drinks. It was a great success. [View Full Entry]

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It´s a bit boring postingall of these entries without any pictures, so I´m going to find somewhere very soon that will let me upload a couple. In the meantime, to try and keep your interest, here´s a little map of our trip overall. I tried to use the ´make a map´function, but on trying to save was told ´error a la pagina´, so have saved it and uploaded it instead, as a little experiement before adding photos I guess. Here´s the breakdown to try and explain it... ...and the phot´s uploaded, but piddly-small. Ho hum. Pictures to come. Our round trip: [View Full Entry]

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I´ve just got back from a brilliant way to wake up - a breezy boat trip to see the local dolphins. Despite both feeling pretty incredibly sleepy having got up before sunrise for once, we still managed to enjoy the morning, and arrived to see the sun coming up somewhere inland, casting a purpley haze over the beach, where ten or so men were pushing fiswhing boats into the water. We were chatting to a man called Shaun, who asked us first if we had our wallets, then if we knew Carol (I have discovered it is withoute -e) - she´d [View Full Entry]

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Don´t you just hate it when Belgians are right? We took the bus from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido on Tuesday night, arriving quite early at the bus station, but managing to check in and check our baggage with minimal fuss. To while away the time before departure, we had a delicious Oaxaqueno hot chocolate - they heat the milk, break the special chocolate in and whisk it, and it´s beautiful, chocolately and spicey and just the think to get you thinking about sleep. While we drank it, we marvelled at the guy opposite who had a moustache the went from his [View Full Entry]

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Ok, this makes up for the piddly little space I left myself to explain two of the particular wonders of Oaxaca... Mitla was indeed another beautiful site, opposite another very religious symbol - a colonial church (no division there!) - with some exciting tombs underneath that I surprised myself by scrabbling around in. It was dark and damp but exciting, and you could clearly see the three main burial chambers and the marvellous stonework that had carried on below ground -very exciting to be nuder a pyramid! I also managed this time to get up the steep steps, a whole flight, [View Full Entry]

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