big fat fatty mexican feet

sooner than expected here it today´s blog - trying to get as much blog done before the bike ride starts so i don´t have too much to update on at the end of it.

yesterday was day 1 of the ruta maya canoe race. apparently the belize bank team won the first stage, which was 45 miles i think. we were going to get up really early to fly over the start of it at 7am and take photos of it, but it was raining and misty and you can´t fly in that weather, which was a shame. so yesterday afternoon we drove up to chetumal just over the mexican border. we sang along to the white album on the way which was fun. some of the songs are harder to sing along to, like helter skelter. birthday makes me laugh as does rocky raccoon. we went out for tacos at a place bert knew from a previous trip here, then walked along and ate an ice cream, which bert squashed onto my face which was funny. we found a oaxaqueño market (ie selling things from oaxaca), and looked at it, bert bought some chocolate covered raisins, and the man at the stall let me take a wiggly worm sweet too, i said senor, es posible solamente un grusano por favor?, and he let me have it free which was pretty exciting. but it did make my teeth a bit fuzzy so i´m glad i only had the one.

chetumal is a nice clean mexican town, by the sea, but not a really nice bit of sea. there was the usual band practice going on in the local square (trumpets and drumming, almost in tune and tempo), lots of children around with their families having a well behaved friday evening time. i find it amazing that in a country so seemingly well-behaved and proud (there are monuments to national heroes absolutely everywhere), and so family and community orientated, there is also such a huge problem with corruption at every level of society. i think the corruption gene must be deeply imbedded in them to the point that it doesn´t even register as a wrong thing to do. i read this week that the president has sent in 7,500 troops to ciudad juarez, the border town which is in complete drug cartel madness at the moment. there are 6,000 murders a month - which seems so ridiculous i feel sure i must have mis-remembered it, but i´m also sure it is in fact true. the police chief there has had to resign as the drug gangs murdered a police officer every 48 hours until he did, the mayor lives over the border in el paso in the states for safety. calderon, the president, sent the military in as he has said that the police on municipal, state and federal level are so corrupt that he can´t use them anymore. the police force here is riddled with organised crime, and often the policemen join the drug cartels in the end. this isn´t true of police in all of mexico, but certainly in the border towns. i hope calderon gets somewhere near sorting out the mess anyway.

anyway no need to panic as i´m the other end of the country for the bike ride. i am in mexico city now, drinking some mango juice as i write this. my flight was fine, i looked out of the window for most of it, very brave, plus me not looking out of the window won´t mean that the plane won´t crash, so i figure i may as well look. now i know more about flying it doesn´t make me panic like it used to. i had seen the little mexican pilots getting on the plane, one of them had a wheely suitcase with a sticker that said i heart flying. that´s good i thought because if you didn´t you might feel inclined to just turn the engine off halfway through the flight. it was beautiful weather, just right for looking out of the wndow. coming into the airport here is quite amazing, it´s right in the centre of the city so you feel like the plane is going to land on someone´s house, then suddenly you see the runway. we flew over the velodrome (still nobody riding in it, probably that grumpy guard man has padlocked it up even more) and some nice parks, one of them had an absolutely massive stone dog in it, and i mean massive, like you could see even each separate dog toe from the plane. mind you maybe it was just a normal dog and we were that close to the ground. i looked for what it was in my guidebook but there wasn´t an entry under massive stone dog in a park near the velodrome so now i´m thinking my breakfast-starved brain imagined it. one thing i didn´t understand at all (well, other than the just-mentioned dog) was that most of the flight was over the sea - chetumal to mexico city looks fairly inland to me on the map... i started thinking maybe i´d boarded the wrong flight but there is only 1 terminal in chetumal and there was only 1 aeroplane leaving from it, so i didn´t entertain this thought for too long, especially when the huge stone dog appeared.

it´s nice to be back in mexico city, and stepping of the plane into lovely cold morning (9am) weather was the best bit about it. it has since got quite hot, but i have learnt my lesson and didn´t sit in the midday sun like a mad dog or english man. i am definitely feeling the altitude, not that it´s that high at 2400m, but you feel it going up stairs a bit. i decided i would rather travel with other people in future, i have only been here for today and only have to wait until tonight when the macmillan bike ride group arrives, but it reminded me how tiring i found it by the end of all my travelling here before. it´s much nicer to share experiences with people and be able to laugh when things go wrong rather than panic, and just have someone to talk rubbish with. this is by the way my 6th time in mexico city since coming here for the first time on the way to ciudad guzman in october.

i went to the hotel where the group will meet me later. they didn´t know much there, but i know it´s the right place and will return later. i left my bags and went to sit in the park and read a bit of midnight´s children (still going, but very nearly finished). after a while a bird poo´d on my rucksack so i thought it best to leave. i went for a coffee and some breakfast and sat pondering some things for a while (yes, the huge stone dog was one of them). then i went to a bookshop and saw a really good atlas and bemoaned my current poverty and lack of space in rucksack. i stumbled across a strange outdoor art exhibit of cars covered in pottery and sculpted into arch shapes with bicycles going up them. which reminded me of the bus me rod and sarah bullock had seen on our last time here, which was totally covered in knitting - jo molloy you would have loved it, i will email you a photo. i found the main post office which is golden and art deco and beautiful. then i went to the palacio de bellas artes and looked at some murals, by rivera, siquieros, orozco, and camarena. their murals are to be very political, mainly seeming to be socialist with slogans like give us work not charity, and also sometimes quite gruesome and explicit, with people trying to break free from chains, or with knives sticking in them, or animals with freakish faces that represent politicians, or the whole of mexican history in one fell swoop in fact. they are pretty impressive, as was my still existing spanish knowledge when i read the little bits of information at the side of them (there must be one handy word which refers to these little bits of information, does anyone know it?). then i went to see the architectural exhibition on the top floor, lots of architectural plan drawings which i love looking at, perhaps because papa pepinillo is un arquitecto too. this exhibition was all about vicente mendiola quezada who lived from 1900 to 1986. there was a watercolour he´d done of big ben too with a red london bus in it, which was a nice treat. it was probably a routemaster, back in the good old days before over the top health and safety regulations kicked in and bendy buses started appearing. talk about a cycling hazard, and apparently they spontaneously combust, is this true?

that is the news for now. i will go up a tower now to look at a view of the city for a while, then maybe eat a quesadilla then hopefully be able to check in to my hotel so i can sleep before meeting el grupo this evening. i have realised that perhaps the reason my feet hurt here in mexico city is due to the altitude, because i haven´t even walked that much, not as much as i do some days in belize, so i think this must be the reason. it must make them swell up and therefore feel too big for my shoes and therefore hurt.

another thing before i finish that i just remembered is that we got some vegetables from mick fleming´s vegetable garden near chaa creek recently, and we thought one of them was a courgette, but it seemed too big, so we showed it to mick and he says it´s a loofah, and if you leave them on the tree they eventually dry out and become loofahs. we are going to see if ours turns into a loofah, i asked him if it would, and he said it was already a loofah, stupid. i said i know, but i meant an actual loofah you can clean your back with. i always thought they came from the sea, like from a coral reef of something. i will keep you updated.

also, in midnight´s children, he refers to the kolynos kid on an advert on a billboard in india. kolynos was a toothpaste, and i know papa pepinillo was in a toothpaste advert once, so i checked and sure enough he was in a kolynos advert. i´m not sure it would necessarily be him that salman rushdie is referring to, there may have been other kolynos kids, but i thought that that was quite exciting.