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Published: September 21st 2010
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An easy bus ride south and we arrived in Campeche, a beautifully restored walled city on the coast of the gulf of Mexico. Our plan was to chill out in a nice hotel with a swimming pool etc, this was our last few days of our holiday and we were going to enjoy it 😊 We had a lovely time in the Ocean View hotel, we enjoyed lazing around the pool and even had a couple of workouts, which my body continually reminded me about. The Mexican bicentennial holiday period was in full swing now, lots of free festivals and a great party atmosphere, things were going well then….
As we were catching an overnight bus to Mexico City Sharon checked online for any government warnings, I didn’t mention it in previous blogs but a few night buses have been hijacked (sensibly we caught a day bus in the troubled spot). Whilst reading the website she happened to notice a Mexico airline had gone bust, hold on a minute! That’s our airline to Los Angeles, f#ck, why didn’t our travel agents inform us? Ok, email them. Finally they get back to us confirming it was true and they gave us
details of a new flight to pay for. I easily beat their price online and booked it, time was running out as with the bicentennial holiday things were getting busy. They then emailed again 8 hours later with a more expensive flight with an excuse that the previous flight was a paper ticket only so we couldn’t have that, strange how I had already got it online then. We also got an urgent email from them informing us about visa requirements for the US, luckily we had done our own research and had got that all covered otherwise we may not have been allowed in anyway. Needless to say we are very unhappy with their service and won’t be using them again, I won’t mention their name though as I need them to assist in recovering money from my cancelled flight. 😊
In the meantime the festivities were in full swing and we were having a lovely time joining in. One evening we sat in a marquee drinking beer and enjoying a very funny drag act until he spotted us two lone gringos, he said something, everyone turned to us and laughed. We smiled and said nothing, then he
told the crowd that we didn’t speak Spanish and said something else, of course everyone then really laughed 😊 We didn’t mind being part of the entertainment and we had a few people come up to afterwards saying he was crazy, we even got a couple of free beers from a generous slightly drunk Mexican cowboy who didn’t believe we could speak Spanish 😱
The big day arrived, the main bicentennial celebration, we had planned to walk 20 minutes along the boardwalk to the major events that were scheduled for Campeche, then, Karl arrived. For the last week Hurricane Karl had been following us and typically he arrived now. We had no choice, with the Palm trees at near 90 degree angles and rain lashing in we changed our plans. Thank god for KFC!, it was luckily next door to our hotel so with a quick sprint there and back we retreated to our hotel room with a bucket of chicken and enjoyed the TV coverage of the celebrations in Mexico city, Karl wasn’t paying them a visit.
We travelled to Mexico city the next day, seeing first hand the destruction of Hurricane Karl, flooding seemed to be
the worst effect with many houses under water and a few roads unpassable. We had splurged on this bus trip and had gone executive class, it was worth the extra money and it was a very comfortable ride, all be it a very long one, 17 hours.
We spent a couple of nights in our original Mexico city hotel, Hotel Del Principado, repacking our packs with the small backpack we left with them all those weeks ago. Sharon decided we had some space left in our bags to fill so we spent our last few hours in Mexico, wandering downtown and checking out the shops. The bicentennial celebrations are still lingering, we have been very fortunate to have experienced such a monumental time in Mexico’s history.
After what seems like forever travelling home we have finally made it back to Sydney and we are thankfully recovering at our friends house, Nicola and Owen. We have had another great adventure, full of fun and full of memories. We hope you have enjoyed our little travel blog, now it’s time to decide what happens next……
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