paul wayne mccartney

hi di hi campers

i have returned once again to belize, the land of the tiny ants and much bitier mosquitoes, and am at this moment fighting the urge to itch my bitten feet right off. i think i should receive a telegram from the queen to congratulate me for traveling back and forth the most times in recent history between mexico and a former english colony. which reminds me how strange it was on one of my many mexican bus journeys last week to be watching helen mirren in that film the queen – i felt like standing up, singing the national anthem, and announcing that this was a film about my country. i’m sure my fellow mexican passengers would have been too preoccupied playing games on their mobile phones, or snoring loudly, or eating their bus lunch cheese and ham and obligatory jalapeno peppers to take much notice. my conclusion was that tony blair is much more acceptable in spanish when you only understand about every 20th word he says.

wednesday 21

location – morelia; t minus to rod and sarah bullock’s departure – 2 days. we decided (or rather i did, in an apparently rather hitleresque way) that we would go on a day trip to some surrounding areas, as morelia doesn’t have too much to offer in terms of fun or culture. it is a nice place, and like most of the central area of mexico, is a unesco world heritage site, but knowing there was an interesting lake (lake patzcuaro) not too far away i figured we should explore this. we got a little bus from our hostel at 10am, then picked up some mexicans in the square. our first stop was a little town called quiroga, where they make lots of wooden things, like jigsaws, toys, spoons, and guitars. i also found a cello hanging up all on its own behind the guitars. i fought the urge to impulse buy an amazingly cheap guitar, as we only had 40 minutes in the town and i generally like to dither for at least a few days before making any sort of purchase, or decision in general in fact. i looked longingly at all the guitars hanging up as our little bus drove away.

our next stop was tzintzuntzan, near lake patzcuaro. tzintzuntzan means place of the hummingbird. i didn’t see any. not sure if rod or sb did, if so, they kept quiet about it. perhaps they got some wildlife photographer of the year winning hummingbird pictures that they wanted to keep under wraps. anyway, the native people of this area are known as p’urepeche, they still speak the language of the same name. when the spaniards came in the 16th century they brought some olive trees with them, which still live in the garden outside the 2 main churches there. the church on the right was for the natives who didn’t believe in jesus as much, it has more gruesome imagery. there are some outdoor altars there too, which is because the natives thought that the spaniards’ main aim in getting them to go to church was to trick them into all being inside one place at one time and therefore a sitting target for being massacred. so the spaniards made outdoor altars so the natives would more likely worship their god jesus in a non threatening place, and thus convert to catholicism quicker. the natives were one step ahead, and hid little images of their own deities behind the jesus figures, and worshipped these instead, whilst looking like they were worshipping jesus at these altars. they didn’t think to pass this wise trick on to future generations however, and thus their children did actually worship jesus. still they have both religions though in this area, the original p’urepeche one too.

from here we went to patzcuaro, which i would bet my bottom peso is a unesco world heritage site. we wandered around its 2 plazas, both very world heritage site-y, then had lunch with our fellow passengers. we had a comida corrida, which means a set menu of 3 courses, and a drink, all for around 40 pesos, which is about 2 english pounds, or 2 euros, or 8 belizean dollars, or 30 guatemalan quetzals, just to put it in geographically relevant context. our tour guide read out the list of choices for each course, and sb asked if there was any meat in the vegetable soup (she is vegetarian, and you never know quite what vegetarian or vegetable soup means out here, often it means it is full of chicken and bacon but no steak). tour guide said no there wasn’t, but was she ok with cheese and milk too as a vegetarian? yes, she said. not like paul mccartney then?, he replied. has paul mccartney done this tour? sb screamed in excitement. no, tour guide replied. oh. what would you like for the next course, said tour guide? we’ll have whatever paul mccartney had please, we all replied.

over the paul mccartney lunch, we sat next to a man called wayne, from canada. we think his name was wayne as we had seen it on a list of passengers when signing up for the tour, and all the others were mexican and i don’t think any mexicans are called wayne. he told us a story, which went something like this:

i’m not sure i should really tell you this, not while we’re eating [our ears pricked up, sensing some pretty exciting death defying adventure story from the hitherto mundane pedestrian wayne from canada]. i used to live in mexico for a year, in queretaro, teaching english. once i got a bus to morelia for a holiday. i got off the bus at what i thought was morelia. it seemed too small compared to what my guidebook had said. none of the places that were supposed to be in morelia seemed to exist in this town. i asked a taxi driver to take me to a cheap hotel for the night. i asked him where we were. we weren’t in morelia, but a small town nearby. when i checked my guidebook that night, the town we were in wasn’t even in it. the curtains on the bus had been closed when i got off. perhaps that was why it had happened.

we didn’t know quite how to respond to wayne’s story other than with feigned shock and horror. we weren’t sure why he felt he shouldn’t tell us this whilst eating. perhaps he feared we may have choked on our food in disbelief at his mistake? please make sure you never make the same mistake, readers, of ending up in a town that isn’t in the guidebook, or you could end up just like wayne. bless him.

we then went on a little boat across the lake, to an island called janitzio. there are 5 islands on this lake, which is the most important lake in the state of michoacan, even though only 1/3 of the lake is technically in michoacan. you can’t swim in the lake, as it is dirty, and fishing doesn’t really happen there anymore, just tourism. on janitzio there are 260 steps going up from the boat stop, to the top of the island. then there are 144 more steps that go up inside a huge stone statue of a man. this man is jose maria morelos y pavon, he is something to do with the revolution/independence. ie, one or the other, not both, as they were 150 years apart, but i can’t remember which and have therefore merged the 2 events into 1 - it makes life much easier, and i’m sure the mexicans won’t mind. jose is holding his hand high in the air, a la statue of liberty. you climb up inside him right from his feet through his legs and stomach and i suppose large and small intestine, to a smaller staircase inside his arm up to his upheld hand. the arm and hand bit is up some health and safety regulation defying stairs, where if you were to slip and fall you would plummet down to somewhere around his shoulders where the stairs widen again. at the top you poke out of his hand through a tiny head sized gap (luckily i have a small head), to view the lake from ahigh. great views in fact but slightly sick inducing. rod and sb removed their flip flops for the descent incase of flip flopping over down the stairs. after all this excitement and the 808 stairs altogether down and up, we got on our boat back to our bus back to our town. the driver/tour guide was playing the beatles love album which was a welcome change to mexican radio music, and would partially explain his lunchtime paul mccartney comment. there seems to be only a few variations of essentially one mexican pop song, which they never ever tire of playing on their never quite tuned in radios.

nb: sb had noticed that one of the mexicans on the tour looked a bit like sean connery, and tried to take a sneaky photo of him by placing rod near him and pretending to be taking a photo of rod.

thursday 22

t minus 1 day. departure from morelia, capital of michoacan, to return to mexico city. on arrival at the bus station, we had a bit of time to wait, so had some coffee, which was quite a debacle as they only had latte flavoured with vanilla, cinnamon or chocolate, but not just plain coffee flavour. instead we got a piping hot black instant coffee in a polystyrene cup. yum. i found a height and weight machine, and for only 2 pesos had the delight of finding out that i am now 0.3m high, and weigh 69.2kg. i thought this can’t be right (mainly it was the height i was disputing, as i can agree with the big fat fatty weight). for another 2 pesos, and on removing my shoes, i discovered that i am in fact 2.03m high and weigh 68.8kg. i’m pretty sure i’m not 2.03m high, and on the 3rd go it told me i was 1.58m high. i suppose i am somewhere between a hugely overweight dwarf and an underweight giant. not sure which i prefer.

on arriving in mexico city, i went to stay at hostelhome, which in full circle style was the hostel me and sb had stayed at on our first 2 nights here over new year’s eve (and the one we had slept on the pavement outside). rod and sb stayed in a very cool boutique hotel round the corner, called condesa df. (df means distrito federal – the centre of mexico city is called mexico df, and for short they (ie people in the know) call mexico city el df). this hotel had a very nice roof bar/sushi restaurant so we sat up there for the evening, on a bed, randomly, and drank and looked at the view. there was a photo shoot going on with a mexican girl dressed in a silver shimmery mermaid type outfit standing in front of the roof top jacuzzi/shower area. she was very skinny and probably very cold too. we on the other hand ate lots of sushi and kept warm under some blankets they gave us. topics of conversation were – what trilogy would you have if you could only watch one trilogy forever – sb said rocky 1, 2 and 3 i think, rod said lord of the rings. i didn’t know my answer, and need to watch more trilogies. also discussed how good the news magazine the week is, and rod promised to post it over to me every month – i hope he keeps to his promise. sb filled us all in on the state of the economy and how economies in general work. as usual, i found i pretty hard to understand anything she said as she is super clever at these things i know nothing about, but i nodded and asked intelligent sounding questions like if you could only have one currency for the rest of your life, which would it be. i didn’t actually ask that, but i really wish i had, as i think it would have stumped her.

so that was the end of the rod and sarah bullock visit to mexico to see lucy pepinillo pixmania pickles. they flew back the next day, apparently with no free upgrade can you believe it, and are now in quesadilla and avocado rehabilitation clinics in england. thanks for coming it was ace fun, and thanks awfully for bringing out the various things i had demanded, this is much appreciated, especially the ribena which is still unopened due to me still getting used to its sacred existence and not wanting to get too close to it incase it turns out to all be a dream in the end.

friday 23

boring and long bus journey to tampico, in north east mexico, on the coast. at this point here is some background information as to why i did this. robert, who i have taken to calling bert, which he disapproves of, had last week flown up to america to collect 2 more ultralights, from the sky gipsy complex, the arizona desert ultralight playground, set up by john macafee, of virus fame. [nb: i have now touched john macafee’s ultralight which is in the hangar here in belize, does this mean i am now infected, or completely virus proofed?]. robert drove from arizona to the border town of mcallun, which took 2 days. his travelling companion for this bit was called john and talked incessantly, and claimed to have been in the mafia somewhere. then robert and denis, a belizean who drives between belize and america as his job and has done for the last 20 years – imagine how much driving that is – hung out at the border for quite some time, filling in all the forms and going through all the paperwork and bribes they needed to do to get into mexico. i, in the meantime, armed with just the name of the hotel i was supposed to be meeting them at, had got a taxi to altamira, just north of tampico. not a single taxi driver had heard of the hotel, nor was it in any of the phonebooks they consulted. so i went to a different one where robert later found me, by the medium of mobile phone. very clever, if somewhat annoying. altamira, incidentally, is not in the guidebook – i certainly won’t be recommending that it is, nor will i be visiting it again. wayne, if only i had taken your story more seriously.

saturday 24

we leave altamira and drive all day to a place called cardel, just north of villahermosa, a coastal town in the state of veracruz. the day was mainly uneventful other than driving. some stories from/about denis – he drives up to the states to buy cars that insurance companies have reclaimed eg from hurricane ike damage, drives them back to belize where they get reconditioned and sold on to car hire companies etc at a large profit. he has also driven around 150 of the ex school buses they use in belize as public (chicken) buses down from america and sometimes from canada. last year he drove 100,000 miles. he has been shot at in guatemala, there were 17 bullet holes in his van, but he was ok. he had numerous stories about mexican police trying to get money from you – they will stop you and ask to see your licence then confiscate it and you have to pay to get it back, or fine you for not having the right paperwork even though you have, or anything else at all they can think of. best thing is to not stop for them when they try to flag you down, or just drive off if they are asking stupid questions, or shoot them. obviously i don’t condone the latter option, but it is a different life over here.

that night we stopped for some food in a small town that was, no doubt, not in the guidebook. denis and david (his brother, driving a jeep down plus another jeep that it was towing), and robert ate fresh red snapper, complete with its whole head and eyeballs. denis ate the eyeball but i think he was just showing off. he also said that the girl that worked in the restaurant was one of his 4 wives. i wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. i ate chicken and chips. i think i will become vegetarian again soon. we also had 2 boys travelling with us, one america and one belizean, they were driving to belize from north carolina, and had met denis at the u.s border and were now in our convoy as they didn’t know how to do the journey otherwise. they were very grateful. robert thought maybe there was something suspicious about them as their stories about whose car it was didn’t seem to make sense, but the american was wearing an obama hat so i think he was above board. it’s quite easy to start thinking there’s something suspicious about just about everybody here, and usually it is the correct thing to think, but not always.

some local children came to sell us some little wooden bird sculptures they had made, i bought one as they were totally cute, both the children and the birds. i didn’t buy a child i hope you understand. one of them, ricardo, was 7, i asked him if the older man was his father, he said no, his boss. i hope ricardo gets to see some of the 20 pesos we paid for his bird, but i’m sure he doesn’t.

we stayed in a hotel that smelt funny but had a cool palm tree outside it complete with flashing christmas type lights.

sunday 25

up at 5am…. not my favourite time to get up but we had a long way to go today, all the way to chetumal on the belize border. i slept for a few more hours in the van – i wasn’t driving at the time – then took over after breakfast and coffee so robert could sleep, which he didn’t. the road at this point was a good toll road with lots of lanes, but i kept getting told off by robert for not quite being in any of the lanes. i always think its better to not be too specific about things like what lane you are driving in, but apparently not. i was amazed at how infrequently we were allowed to stop for either some food or a wee, 2 things which are quite important to me. i suppose if you do this much driving you get used to it and you have so much distance to cover that you can’t allow yourself such luxuries. we got to chetumal at 10pm that night, which is 16 hours on the road, maybe the longest i’ve spent in a van at any one time. we had had a chicken sandwich at a roadside café earlier, where there were some policemen busily eating and watching the football game on tv, and probably wondering how much more money they would make in bribes that day. it was a really good chicken sandwich and the french fries were the best i’ve had in mexico yet, so i will make sure i always eat where the police also eat, they obviously have good taste in roadside food. we stayed in another strange little hotel where there were lots of mexicans outside having great fun watching their photos slideshowing on a big screen and drinking beer and generally being quite mexican.

this hotel didn’t smell as much as the previous one.

monday 26

hooray so we’re at chetumal, which is only 3 hours from san ignacio where casa bert is, so we were looking forward to being home soon. how wrong were we. you get to the border, do lots more paperwork, pay duty on your cars, and other things you are bringing from america, wait around in a queue of other cars, do more paperwork, drive to the next bit of the border. here there is a huge belizean customs hall, where there is basically a big tv playing some crap which all the border customs workers are loving sitting around watching, and a big car park where you park your car, and wait for a random belizean to come and inspect it. denis disappeared off with some paperwork to sort out, then came back saying they were disputing the value of the ultralights and wanted more money, ie a bribe to accept the low cost of them and therefore the lower duty we would be paying on them [we should have pointed out that john macafee has just donated a million pound boat to the belizean coastguard and we shouldn’t be having to pay bribes to the belizean ‘government’ for his ultralight to come here]. denis went back to sort it out. you can pay up to 75% duty on a foreign car you bring over the border, which is a huge amount, but still in fact cheap when you have bought a jeep worth $20,000 for just $7,000. we sat around, ate rice and beans, went to the free zone, which is basically a load of belizean clothes shops and restaurants, selling the usual crap, but at a slightly cheaper price. it’s a little walk from the car park, and a nice man picked us up to take us there. we introduced ourselves, and he introduced himself as the president. we presume he meant president of the free zone, as he then went on to talk about something to do with the shops there, but you never know, perhaps he was the president of belize. if he was, i would recommend he doesn’t drive around unescorted in future. we could have been axe murderers.

we then sat around back at the car park. we tried to name all 52 states of america to pass the time. we got up to 51 by the end of the day, i checked later on the computer, and we had missed out just delaware. sorry delaware, it was nothing personal. i also read national geographic, i had found it in english at the bus station in eldf. i read an article about north koreans fleeing from their country and their journey through china, and laos to thailand, which is the only country around there which will help them. they then go on to either south korea or the u.s or europe to start their lives again. it’s a long, terrifying journey, and they have to save up for ages to afford it. there are various humanitarian groups along the way which help them out, and offer shelter and food and advice. it made me think, once again, how privileged we are to come from england, or the u.s or any country where you have freedom of speech and fair human rights, and can go anywhere and pretty much do anything you like. then there was an article about mustangs in the west of america, and how there are too many of them and what they are doing about it over there, as the land has to be shared by the mustangs, other ranch animals, and used for oil and gas leasing too. mustang comes from mestengo, meaning stray. i inadvertently discovered an answer to an old blog question i had, which was where do horses come from originally. it is generally agreed that the genus equus (horse) appeared in north america about 5 million years ago, from where some of them wandered across the bering land bridge (now the bering strait) to asia africa and europe. these horses disappeared from north america around 12000 years ago, but the spaniards brought them over with them in 1519 when they came to conquer them. i don’t quite understand the bit about horses appearing 5 million years ago – from where? there was also an article about charles darwin, as it’s the anniversary of his birth or death or something, but there were no concrete answers in that as to how a horse just appears 5 million years ago. anyway it was all fascinating and i will subscribe to this magazine soon, and aren’t there a lot of things in the world to know about.

by about 5pm that day (8 hours later!), all the necessary bureaucracy had been dealt with in the car park and we went off in our vehicles to the insurance company to get insurance to cover them for the rest of the day. at this point me and robert realized we hadn’t had our passports stamped – we had had all day to do this but now when we were finally about to leave border control we only just remembered. we ran off through a few official looking belizean fences (ie full of handy holes for walking through) into the back door of the departure hall and then through an official looking corridor to the arrival hall. we tried to explain to the passport control man what had happened and how we had forgotten, but our explanation got all in a muddle and it looked like we were making it up on the spot, and he probably thought we were terrorists. for which reason he happily stamped our passports and let us officially in to belize.

we got home at 10pm that night, through the dark and the rain, totally exhausted, with not even enough energy to pick up a pizza on the way through town.

tuesday 27

recovered mainly and did some food shopping and washing. watched slumdog millionaire on dvd – there’s a great dvd shop in town that sells totally illegal burnt dvds of totally new films, for only 10 belize dollars, 2.50 pounds. good film i thought, india looks kind of smelly and poor and dangerous, but quite enticing too. the van with the 2 ultralights in came and dropped off the ultralights at robert’s hangar in the morning which was exciting, and meant that robert got to do manly things like unscrewing screws and carrying heavy things around, mainly ultralights, which aren’t actually that ultra-light.

wednesday 28 and thursday 29

more recovering. i have decided to write a book based on stories from robert’s life as there are a lot, and they are very interesting. the laptop i’m writing this on has the letter b missing so it takes a while to write words with b in as you have to hit the missing b key in just the right place. this could prove annoying as he is called robert and lives in belize. we watched notes on a scandal too which was I thought very good, especially cate blanchett, and it’s not often you see judi dench in such an evil role. as always she was mega we thought.

friday 30

nothing interesting to report today other than i had my first visit to a doctor’s in belize – dr sanchez, who was really lovely and not at all like the doctor in the simpsons. and as a totally unexpected and pleasant surprise, and very much against the belizean norm (ie slow and circuitous), any tests you need to do are done there and then and the results given back to you within the hour, so you can take your little result sheet back over the road to see dr sanchez with it again and he can diagnose you. not like in good old london where they send you off from your doctor's surgery on a crowded rush hour number68 bus to st george’s hospital to take a little ticket (like you do when you’re waiting to be served at the meat counter in old school delis or supermarkets) and wait in a big open waiting room to be stabbed in the arm and then pass out in front of everyone and wee yourself. you then have the pleasure of waiting at least a week to call your doctor for the result of your blood test, which they have lost as it wasn’t labeled properly in the first place, so you have to go back for more stabbing and weeing yourself. anyway, you will be relieved to learn (or not, depending on whether and or how much you like me) that i have neither diabetes nor a kidney infection.

in a topical turn of events robert’s computer has also died from being infested with viruses, including the infamous trojan worm. yes, i will be having words with john macafee, as rumour has it that these virus companies also infect your computers with the very viruses they protect you from, otherwise they wouldn’t have any business would they.

various addendums (i know the correct plural is addenda, but i prefer addendums):

mexico would be the richest country in the world if you included all the drug and corruption money in its gdp.

the american couple we met in queretaro had a friend called lucy bland, i wonder if if i met her we would self destruct as her surname is the opposite of mine.

i watched wonderboys with michael douglas and tobey maguire the other day, it’s really cool.

what does fm and am, as in radios, mean?

the temperature on the celsius and farenheit scales where they are the exact same is -40

sarah bullock thought magnum pi was called magnum pr, which would be magnum public relations. robert was a stunt double on magnum pi.

for the last 5 or 6 days of my travels i had been wearing my smartest black dress, as all my other clothes have disintegrated. not quite the appropriate outfit for a roadtrip through mexico. some jeans have been posted out to me here in belize but i fear as an overweight dwarf that they won’t fit.

robert has just informed me that you shouldn’t eat melon either before or after solid food – a handy way to remember this as he keeps telling me, is: melon – eat it alone, or leave it alone.

we had some green tea flavoured cake in eldf. i didn’t like it, but rod and sb did.

me rod and sb are planning a bike ride from mexico to patagonia in the next few years. we need ideally a 4th person so let us know if you are interested.

and finally, my favourite ever bit of mistranslated english, from our hostel room in guanajuato:

if you remain lodged, please go out before 12.00pm. in addition, it returns after 2.30pm. since it is the hour of the cleanliness, in opposite case i do not know it was cleaning your bed.

adios over and out for now.