The rest of Mexico...

---

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 or forced open by some angry man in the past. The bed head was carved with all maner of Spanish obscenities and pleas for help. The flourescent lights flickered and the curtains billowed in an ominous way. Ben was struck by an instant feeling of dread and was out the door and down the stairs before I could even turn around. He figured it would be better spending the night next to the guy with the kooky eye on the street corner than it would be staying more than a few moments in that place. The lady at the front desk didn't blink and eye when we said we would give it a miss.

We were aware that Hurricane Dean was on its way and the forecasts were for it to go right over our heads. We planned a quick visit out to see some carvings from Olmec times (one of the oldest mesoamerican cultures). While we were there, the edge of Dean arrived and it bucketed down. In our infinite wisdom we had only packed our little broken umbrella and we huddled under it on the side of the road trying to flag a taxi to get back into town. I was drenched and my clothes were more than a little bit see through. I managed quite a few toots, but little in the way of rides. Finally we found a collectivo to take us there and we kindly left them matching puddles on the floor.

We had a brief dalliance with Puebla, yet another colonial city, before finding our way back to Mexico City and onto the plane. Since this is probably the last travelblog for a while, I thought I would put down some of the stats from the trip:

154 days travelling
10 countries visited
7 plane trips
46 intercity bus rides
372 hours on buses (!)
55 different hostels and hotels
16 boat trips
20 days tramping (not enough, according to Ben)
1 attempted mugging
24 day tours
16 border crossings
19 ancient ruins
28 museums
and a frightening number of ATM withdrawals...

---

Photos

Snake at Templo Mayor, Mexico City
This site was buried under a church for years and years. It was the heart of the Aztec empire.