into the wild part 2: the return of apocalypto

monday 30 march
today we visited palenque, which we were excited about as the french flamingo couple had said it was excellent. it is the most well preserved mayan site in the mayan world apparently, and is right there in the jungle. we ate breakfast of yoghurt granola and fruit from the ice chest and set off, all excited. a little collectivo truck took us to the main entrance and we spent a few minutes fighting off the offers of guides in english, italian, german, spanish so as to stick on budget plan. we bought a little book with some explanations of the site instead. as it was monday the museum was closed today which was a shame as my guidebook said it was also excellent (though not with a french accent). i asked if we could use our tickets tomorrow for the museum then, and tried to express my sense of injustice when the answer was no, but words failed me as usual in espanol.

remember that by this point in our random mexican adventure holiday we had seen 2 big mayan ruins, tulum and chichen itza and we have seen a fair few in belize, so we were quite experienced ruin spotters and it’s not too unfair to say that once you’ve seen a few mayan ruins you’ve seen them all (though they are in fact all quite unique whilst being generically similar). (sorry just hedging my bets as usual). palenque however took my breath away, and bert’s. you enter the site (only 2% of which is uncovered, imagine the rest!), and on your right immediately is a huge amazing temple rising up into the jungle trees, amazingly well preserved, flanked by 2 other similar sized temples. if you stand looking at these temples, on your left is the main plaza which is surrounded by the palace and various other buildings. there are other sites within the site too, i won’t try to explain in words where they are and what exactly they contain, suffice to say that it was a really gobsmacking place and i could almost imagine decapitated heads rolling down temples right there in front of me. our little book didn’t do the place justice but bert filmed me reading out from it whilst standing in front of the relevant temple, in documentary style. there were some giant leaves by one temple, and we got a funny photo of me standing behind one, which looks like i have a human head and a giant leaf body.

after a while of really heartfelt oohs and aahs we stumbled across a tour group in english, and crept along behind it for a while trying not to get spotted as illegal tour group immigrants. we decided to ask them straight out if we could join, and after a group discussion in a strange language that turned out to be dutch, they agreed. we learnt so much from edgar the tour guide, here is a sample:
they didn’t use wheels or tools or animals in the construction of palenque. one theory as to why no wheels was that this would make the work easier and would give the workers time to maybe wonder why they were spending their lives building these huge temples for the upper classes, and therefore start a revolution perhaps.
there was a queen found only recently buried in a huge sarcophagus in the temple of the inscriptions, she was buried with red dye all around her and is known as the red queen.
nobody knows why the mayan empires died out so suddenly around ad850, but after they did, they went to the yucatan peninsula where there are lots of rivers.
for the first 3 years of their lives mayan babies had their heads squashed with planks to change the shape of their heads. chance of surviving to age of 12 was 50% and from then it was 80% to 40. there was a famous king called pakal who apparently lived to be 80, which comparatively is like somebody these days living to be 150 years old.

there was so much more but i can’t remember it now. there are little information plaques by each temple thing too, one of which had a funny typo which was an h instead of an n so it referred to the humerous mayan tribes, instead of the numerous mayan tribes.

we did a little jungle walk with edgar and the dutchies after this, at the end of which a cute little boy sold us some necklaces, each of which had a different mayan symbol on, like the mayan version of the zodiac signs. he tried really hard to tell us in english what they were but made some really cute mistakes, which were: one of them was the sign of the centre of the university (instead of universe), and one was the queen of the worriers (instead of the warriors).

we went back for another look at palenque as i couldn’t believe how stunning it was, and then walked back to el panchan where we were staying, via a really cool river walk with swimming pools and jungly type terrain. it was hot hot hot but we needed the exercise so walked all 3km without resorting to jumping in a taxi. we went into palenque that evening, which was way nicer than guidebook expectations (perhaps travelling without a guidebook would be preferable, as it would be much more a voyage of discovery and you may end up in places that you wouldn’t otherwise have bothered going to from what they say). there was extensive road mending going on which made driving taxing, but we found the square and watched a little band play pan pipe type music – my favourite, it always cheers me up so much (yes i am aware it is crap and cheesy) – and watched cute mexican children drive round the square in little battery powered cars and do little dances to the music while their parents and extended family leave them their own devices and we giggle in amusement. in mexico there doesn’t seem to be that sense of fear you get in more westernized countries of not letting your children wander around freely and have good old fashioned fun in case of strange people stealing them. there is definitely lots of danger in certain places here from drug related issues, but it’s so nice to see families and children all out in town having a great time from such simple things. brilliant for people watching and giggling. one little kid was trying to make his battery powered car go forward and couldn’t figure out that you have to stand on the pedal, he was kind of rocking back and forward instead, but suddenly he understood it and slammed the pedal down and nearly flew right off the back.

we had a cheap cheap road-side hot dog (when i say we i mean just me, bert has more control over his appetite and we had already eaten tacos), and went back to our nut bombarded cabin and agreed that yes we should carry on down to san cristobal instead of turning back and heading home via chetumal. i’ve never done such an unplanned random trip where you just keep checking your bank account and seeing how much further it will get you, usually i’m a bit of an over organizer, so this was a really cool experience. i had very fortunately got a big tax refund as i only worked a few months of last tax year before leaving, so thank you inland revenue for giving us the chance to be random for a while.

tuesday 31 march
we set off to the next destination, san cristobal, further south and west into chiapas. in 1994 san cristobal was taken over by the zapatista rebels, but the military ousted them quick sharp with a lot of zapatista deaths. the leader of the zapatistas was a guy called subcomandante marcos and basically their point is that the indigenous peoples of mexico should have more rights and more opportunities, and not be exploited etc. they founded schools and health centres in indigenous villages that had nothing, and after lying low for a while after the san cristobal scenario are back campaigning now, but i think in a more controlled and less violent way, though i think the violent association arises from the paramilitaries fighting back at their protests, which my book about mexico says was ‘a sledgehammer to the zapatista nut’. chiapas has the highest percentage of indigenous mexicans, and oaxaca state isn’t far behind, there are around 60 different indigenous groups. i’m not sure how successful the zapatistas have been in terms of changing anything for good, as i’m not sure how much actual politicial sway they have, but the point they are making is one i am very sympathetic to. basically mexico is made up of lots of different levels of peoples, as a result of the spanish conquest and european influence. at the time of the spanish invasion the top of the class system was the pure spanish, who after the conquest became the ruling and exploitative classes, then you have the next level which are those born in mexico of spanish descent, then the mestizos which are literally mixtures of spanish and indigenous blood, then the indigenous people, then the black slaves. today there still exists lots of racially inclined traits in mexico such as assumptions about your wealth, position in society etc based only on your skin colour, and it’s the whiter the better. if you are a blonde haired white european traveler here you will get stared at a lot therefore.

anyway. en route to s.cristobal we stopped at misol-ha, a beautiful waterfall that falls around 30 feet into a beautiful pool which we swam in. a group of school kids were eating sandwiches and potentially doing some sort of project about waterfalls, we said hola to them. perhaps the project was whether your sandwiches taste better when eaten in front of a waterfall, and i would hazard that they do. we saw our dutch tour group again, they must be doing the same route as us, but with a guide and all pre planned. we carried on to another waterfall called agua azul (blue water). bert said in his lifetime he has seen a lot of waterfalls and swam in a lot of rivers (he’s from montana remember, and also lived in florida, arizona, california, hawaii), but this one was far and away the best. i can’t describe how blue the water was without sounding like some over the top travel brochure so i won’t try other than to say it was my favourite turquoise colour, similar to one of my running tops back in its cleaner days. there were lots of medium sized waterfalls all white running over the rocks which if you looked up at them from a certain place looked like a big frothing meringue. lots of sparkly pools in between the falls, then at the bottom some big shallow turquoise pools complete with mexicans floating around the place. we were, in palenque style, gobsmacked, and so happy that we had decided to continue our trip down here.

before jumping in the big turquoise meringue, we spotted 2 boys with touring bikes all laden down with luggage, having their lunch on a picnic table. hmm i said, interesting, they look like long distance serious cyclists, let’s go see where they’re going on their ride. so we went over and this is an outline of the conversation:
me-hi, where are you going?
them-to patagonia
me-wow, etc
[general chat about their ride, which is alaska to patagonia, they set off from anchorage in august 08, and will finish january 2010. they are from australia].
me-i just did a bike ride coast to coast in mexico the other week actually, finished in puerto escondido
them-cool
me-it was with a group of about 50 people, for charity
them-oh - were you wearing green t-shirts
me-yeah actually
them-with writing on
me-yeah, macmillan cancer support tshirts
them-and you were in puerto escondido on a monday night in a club
me-err.. yes
them-we already met you in that club as we were there too that night
me-uh oh i can’t actually remember meeting you i was so completely drunk, sorry

general amusement all round, and isn’t it a small world and how completely weird to meet them again here having already met them there but unknowingly. we swapped emails and promised them a place to stay and an ultra light flight on their way through belize. they were headed to cancun then cuba then down to belize. they told me lots about their bikes etc as i said i am planning to do that same ride, maybe from alaska or maybe from just mexico, not sure yet. they are called max and mike, we gave them a lift up the hill after our lovely swim in agua azul, a pig walked across the road, and then they were off back the other way towards palenque.

before carrying on to s.cristobal we played back the video i’d recorded of bert diving in from one of the waterfalls, it was a good dive, i gave it 9.5 out of 10. he had had to shuffle out along the waterfalls to get to the place he could dive from, which worried me a bit but knowing bert i knew he wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe, he is a multi talented stuntman - remember he was the stunt flier on magnum p.i in hawaii and went to london with tom selleck to watch cats the musical and then had to go shopping with tom’s horrible girlfriend when she came to hawaii.

something amusing we encountered along our way towards s.cristobal was 2 little girls at either side of the road holding up a rope over the road. we immediately panicked and stopped at their little barrier, a little scared as to what was going on. they then ran to the car and shoved a bunch of bananas and biscuits in the car and demand we buy them. we did of course as the girls were so cute. they looked around the car a bit, enquired about the granola that was on view, for some reason the granola attracted a lot of attention, they all wanted it. we asked them their names etc and thanked them for the biscuits (which were utterly disgusting), then drove off. then realized that although that was a really cute thing to do, it could easily have been a front for an ambush from the hills above the road, something you definitely hear about. this wasn’t just us being paranoid, it does say in my guidebook that this area is a target for tourist robberies.
the scenery was beginning to change from jungly and humid and hot to pine forests, and gaining altitude. beautiful twisty roads, big tall pine trees, little villages with donkeys, crisp cool pine scented air, manicured farmland, every lowland field ploughed, and even some of the really steep hillsides were being used to grow corn – amazing how they can farm almost vertical land. people all in their traditional mayan dress, sitting doing traditional mayan things like weaving, carrying things with amazing balance on their heads. you can give them a wave as you go past and they always wave back and smile. a little vw beetle was in front of us for a while, its roof loaded up with brightly coloured brooms and brushes, obviously off to sell them at some market somewhere. we found it interesting the range of landscapes you can have in the space of 2 days driving, not even covering that much distance – we had gone from the hot arid flat burnt uninteresting brush of the yucatan, which just as you’re approaching palenque turns into hilly green hot humid low-lying jungle and you’re weaving up and down twisty mountainous roads, then a few hours south west of this and you’re in the beautiful pine forest farming highlands, and it’s cold and dry. these highlands carry on into guatemala and become their western highlands, which is for me without doubt the most beautiful part of the country and i wished we could have spent more time there – definitely a place to return to.

for lunch we had some tacos and beer as usual, these were tacos dorados though which are tacos rolled up and i guess cooked again or something as they are hard and crunchy. not as good as soft tacos we thought but still ok. we also got confused about why every other table had nachos and sauces on except ours but i didn’t want to ask as i think the waiter had asked us if we wanted them but i hadn’t understood him at all so just said no to whatever he was asking me. bert got upset as he saw all the nachos going past thinking they were coming to us then seeing them go off to other people. then i felt bad but i couldn’t bring myself to ask the waiter as i had found it so hard to understand his accent that i was worried of a total misunderstanding occurring. silly really, but it gets kind of tiring continually trying to understand and make yourself understood in another language. it’s like being a child again and not having the language to describe anything or speak in any kind of sophisticated way, whilst being super aware of everyone else so able to do it. often it’s amusing though and someone the other day told us how when she was in spain she’d got in a taxi and asked the cab driver to take her to her hotel which was just ‘cuatro cuadernos’ away, she meant to say ‘cuatro cuadras’, which means 4 blocks, but had said 4 notebooks away. the cabbie had turned round and said look lady i lived and worked in new york for a long time and i know for sure that you don’t want me to take you the distance of 4 notebooks to your hotel.

we got to s.cristobal and found a really sweet hostel and so cheap, a few notebooks away from the centre. s.cristobal is cobbly, on the smaller side of big, crispy (cold at night as it’s high up), and full of quaint and cool shops selling zapatista related artwork, dvds, books, good coffee etc. my kind of little city i thought as we wandered around, there are lots of spanish schools, and hence also lots of foreign travellers out here learning spanish, lots of churches, a square with a marimba band playing to celebrate the birthday of the town that night. not sure who s.cristobal refers to, it’s not cristopher columbus (that would hardly make sense in the most indigenous state of mexico). we watched some hippie traveller types playing guitar and flute and drums and singing and dancing around. it was cool and i’m pretty sure the guitarist was a boy me and sarahbullock had met in guanajuato who was french and called jeancristophe who was a friend of a boy we had met in san miguel de allende who was also from france but living in ireland and was called bousmaha which is the weirdest name i’ve heard. but i didn’t ask him as he was busy playing his guitar. plus it would be too weird to have the maxandmike on their bikes coincidence and another one all in one day. weird how this happens, i had in fact seen a lady from my oaxaca spanish school in zihuatanejo in january, and another i would see in antigua next week (both times too far away to say hi to), and the dutch tour group leader we would meet again tomorrow. obviously we didn’t know these last 2 things today, but i am writing this with the benefit of hindsight, which is a very useful thing, it’d be good if you could apply in advance for hindsight so you don’t make the mistakes that with hindsight you wouldn’t have made.

wednesday 1 april
lovely cold crispy morning. breakfast and a bookshop. i absolutely love bookshops, i go crazy in them and no matter what budget i’m on i have to buy at least one book. so we left with a second hand guatemala guidebook, such a useful purchase which if we hadn’t bought i would be cursing my lack of hindsight knowledge. we were planning to cross into guatemala tomorrow and be there a few days, so were thinking we could do it randomly with no info as the price of the book wouldn’t justify the short time there. but it being us and our non ability to stick to a plan for longer than it takes to turn the page of the map, we figured that we may end up being in guatemala longer than a few days and that hence we should be fore-armed so to speak. isn’t everyone forearmed, as long as they have arms? we also bought a book called the history of new spain, by a man called senor bernal diaz and written in the 1500s. diaz was one of hernan cortes’s crew members, hernan cortes was the main leader of the spanish conquest. this book is his description of the spanish invasion and conquest and occupation from a spaniards point of view, and is apparently a classic, and nearly didn’t get written as he was old and didn’t think he would be able to do it. he settled in guatemala and became one of the spanish ruling classes there. bert has started reading it as i have to restrict myself to just one book at a time – he says it is factual and descriptive, more a historical account than a story, but very interesting despite the writing style. i think it’s amazing that this book exists at all and can’t wait to read it.

today we also climbed a hill to look at a church and the view, and found some gym equipment in a kind of park there at the top, so did some exercises on it. which was strange. we alsonsaw an arch, went to the post office, bought a cheap chess set, had a falafel for lunch (the owner complimented bert on his cowboy hat and asked him if he was from texas), visited a coffee museum and bought coffee beans, saw a really big cumulus nimbulus cloud gathering over the museum, went to the market and bought some presents (some for me some for other people), bought some mangoes and apples from a food market, and some honey. whilst buying some coffee, we wanted to make sure we were buying beans and not ground coffee, but i didn’t know the vocabulary so i asked estan frijoles – are they beans, the lady said no, es café – no it’s coffee, i said si, pero frijoles o no? – yes, but beans or not? lady – no!- café. eventually she realized i meant granos, which means beans in this case, ie coffee beans. frijoles means eg kidney beans, or black beans, or refried beans, or baked beans. it was a coffee shop, so she must have though i was pretty mental asking if a bag of coffee was a bag of refried beans.

that evening we had the choice between mexico versus honduras world cup qualifier on tv in any of the various taco places or bars, or palenque rojo, a show with dancing and mayan costumes and fighting and mythology and history. we chose the latter. perhaps unwisely as the match was potentially exciting, though mexico took a beating in the football. the show was actually really cool, but took a while to get going, after 20 minutes bert whispered – it’s a bit slow isn’t it? – shhhh i said, that was a loud whisper. there were lots of cool mayan costumes and we’d read the story in advance so we vaguely understood what was being portrayed. there was a cool dream sequence in the underworld which involved a big skeleton and a giant centipede in glow in the dark costumes like you’d wear to halloween parties when you were little. there were jaguars, monkeys, crocodiles, sometimes they appeared from behind us and the girl on bert’s other side screamed and jumped out of her seat whenever this happened. like she never got used to it and the fact that they were just actors, it was funny. bert thought she just wanted to jump into his lap.

on the way home we saw a poster for a dwarf bullfighting show. then we stopped at a shoe mending shop to get bert’s shoe glued back together. the shop was a crazy grotto of shoes, mending equipment, pictures of the virgin mary with aged candles burning around her, old tins of paint, bits of leather, a calendar from 1995, every single bit of surface was covered with old faded things. crammed in the back behind the counter amongst the shoes and tins and shelves was the owner’s grandson and a few other mexicans watching some film on a fuzzily tuned in tv. there was a framed black and white photo on the wall of the owner taken by a friend of his, an american, we asked him about the photo and he was very proud of it. he looked at our dvd recorder and asked some questions. he invited us in to watch the film with them. it was like narnia in that shop and i’m sure it didn’t really exist and if we went back we wouldn’t be able to find it again.

thursday 2 april
left s.cristobal and headed to the guatemalan border, stopping at a small town called comitan for coffee etc en route where they had supposedly run out of small change until they got back from the bank so basically they didn’t give us our change which was fine as it was only a little bit but we thought they were lying because you don’t go to the bank to get small change. perhaps they weren’t lying and we were being paranoid but these things do happen. we got to the guatemalan border a few hours later. which was slightly troubling as we hadn’t had our passports stamped at the mexican border yet. so we turned round and went the other way to ciudad cauahtemoc which is the mexican border town. i presume the 4k in between is noman’sland. we got stamped out of mexico then went back to the guatemalan border, i think this is a place called la mesilla. it is the craziest border town ever, 2 little dusty ‘roads’ crammed with stalls selling clothes, food, cds, even a man singing karaoke in the midday sun. there is absolutely no signage so it is impossible to know what you are supposed to do to cross with your car and in what order. we asked a vaguely official looking man. they vague officials sit around on empty beer crates watching the backpackers trot across the border from their collectivos, and the karaoke man singing karaoke and the stupid white people in their car not knowing what to do. we figured it out little by little, the first step being that you drive up to some cones where they spray your car apparently to fumigate it, but really i’m sure it’s just water they spray it with and your fee lines the vague officials’ pockets. then you go to passport control then to the car customs place where you fill in more forms, pay a fee, get a sticker and put it on your windscreen. we realized that we had taken our car into mexico without doing anything official at all about it, and we should have had a sticker on the window for the whole time but didn’t. oops.

this process was stressful and we were hungry and hot and dusty. this was not a highlight of the trip. we stopped to cool down and distress in a river once on our way in guatemala. the river looked blue and sparkly and clean from the road, but was actually dirty and cloudy and too shallow to swim in, so we submerged ourselves into it and lay there for a few seconds while the murky river flowed over us, me with the usual river panic in case a sting ray got me. we carried on the journey, through beautiful pine forest highlands, just like in chiapas, but now complete with the totally crazy guatemalan chicken buses which overtake lorries on blind corners just for an added bit of excitement. we weren’t sure where we were going, but it became obvious we wouldn’t make it to antigua today, so decided to stop in quetzaltenango, also known as xela, as i had heard it was nice. and nice it was. after some initial annoyance at not being able to negotiate the tiny cobbly one way streets and nothing in the guidebook matching up with reality, we found a place to stay that was very clean and had free internet and a friendly lady who talked really fast and took advantage of the fact i couldn’t fully understand her to basically con us into paying more money than the room was worth. at this point after crazy dusty border and driving annoyance and not enough energy to investigate other options we didn’t bother making an issue out of it. after all guatemala is dirt cheap even if you’re overpaying. their currency is the quetzal, which is also a bird, their national bird i think, or belize’s. though if you ask a guatemalan they would claim belize is part of guatemala, they don’t really take belize seriously as it’s own country it seems, and are always coming over the border illegally to steal horses, and chop down trees there etc. given the level of poverty in guatemala i actually don’t blame them, and it would certainly make life easier if belize just merged into guatemala, belize is so small it could only do it good. mind you try telling the same thing to the welsh or scottish or irish…

we did the usual thing you do in a new place – wandered around, filmed the lovely square, and exclaimed at how pretty it all was. apparently after the spanish left xela the germans arrived (not sure why exactly but lots of the coffee plantations in guatemala are german owned, i guess something to do with the war), and there are bits of german-gothic architecture in the square. there is a cathedral whose original façade remains, but with a new interior, built in the 1900s. xela is a beautiful place, high up in the highlands, and i promised myself i would return one day and spend some proper time here. we had a beer and a burger, the beer went to our heads as we were at altitude (about 2300m). there is an elegant shopping arcade in the square, i think built by the germans, but over half the shops are empty as nobody is into elegant arcade shopping in guatemala.

friday 3 april
had the best latte i’ve had since leaving england in a beautiful coffee shop in town – accompanied by a croissant and jam – i really miss things like that, although it’s hardly good for the health and weight, both of which are now slightly worse off since not exercising after the mexico cycling shock to the system. we did some post breakfast wandering then set off for antigua. life becomes a cycle of driving, eating, and wandering when you do a trip like this, and i love the adventure of finding all these new places and being able to go wherever you like. the downsides of it are it’s annoying getting lost driving in new towns that have no signs and not knowing where to stay or eat etc. having said that it really is worth it, and i don’t think there’s any real risk involved. i wouldn’t consider doing it alone however, it’s always good to have a montana cowboy ultralight man as a co-pilot. i think all the things you hear about this part of the world being dangerous has to be given some consideration but ultimately taken with a pinch of salt when you weigh up the things you would miss out on if you didn’t take the small risk. the only time i was worried was when the 2 little girls put the rope over the road and sold us those awful biscuits, because in hindsight that could have been really dangerous. anyway, we soon arrived in antigua, which i will write about in the next edition of pickles does south america, which i think i should retitle as in fact only 6 weeks of my whole trip (which is now 9 months) were actually spent in south america.

until the next time comrades – adios.

pesky pigs

hello everyone

just to let you know we are alive and well in belize, where swine flu doesn't seem to have arrived yet. i'm just updating myself on all the news online, i have to admit i knew nothing about it until an email from casa pepinillo, as we are kind of out of touch with the news to say the least. it seems we are not to panic even though the WHO (the WHO?) are on code red. i am panicking. we are concocting a survival plan. bert said we'll go into liquidation. i didn't understand, so he clarified - we'll sell the truck. ok. then we'll come to england with disguises on and scrub out the bits in our passports that mention mexico and america. bert can get a job on a building site as he's strong and i just interviewed him and he said he's good with saws and hammers and all that kind of thing. i will help mum around the house as i'm good at sweeping and tidying. it will be like the war and we'll all pull together and everything will be ok. we won't eat any pork at all, not even bacon for breakfast.

in other news i found this online and had to post it here as it made me giggle

Fir Tree Found Growing Inside Man's Lung
Artyom Sidorkin, 28, from the Urals region of Russia, is believed to have inhaled a seed which then sprouted inside him. Doctors were convinced he had cancer after he came to them complaining of agonising chest pains and coughing up blood.
An X-ray showed what was believed to be a tumour, and he was rushed to the operating theatre.
"We were 100% sure," said surgeon Vladimir Kamashev from Izhevsk in the Urals.
"We did X-rays and found what looked exactly like a tumour. I had seen hundreds before, so we decided on surgery."
Before removing the major part of the man's lung, the surgeon investigated the tissue taken in a biopsy.
"I thought I was hallucinating," said Dr Kamashev.
"I asked my assistant to have a look: 'Come and see this - we've got a fir tree here'."
"He nodded in shock. I blinked three times as I was sure I was seeing things."
The 2in (5cm) spruce, which was said to be touching the man's capillaries and causing severe pain, was removed.
Mr Sidorkin, now recovering after the op, said: "To be honest I did not feel any foreign object inside me. But I'm just so relieved it's not cancer."

what a story, somebody should make that into a film. perhaps i have some fir trees growing in my toes.

we watched frida and catch-22 the other day, both very good. a great adaptation from a book i thought re catch-22, which is unusual. and i should stop moaning about my feet i thought after watching frida. selma hayek is very cool.

i made macaroni cheese the other day but it turned into a kind of concrete block. i think i didn't make enough sauce, plus the cheese over here is hardly what you would call good quality. i would call it bad quality. we ate it nonetheless as times are hard, but we treated ourselves to pecan pie and ice cream for pudding.

we found a praying mantis praying on our doorstep the other night and brought him inside. i didn't want to but bert said he was our friend. he changed colour when he got on the table to become table colour. it was amazing. he probably got eaten by one of the many geckos that inhabit our house with us. we watched the neighbouring farm workers and their families all bent over in the fields by our house, and wondered what could they be doing. i asked one of them when we were giving them a lift to church at the weekend (we'll get points for heaven that way), and she said recogiendo frijoles - they collect the leftover beans that didn't make it in the combine harvester and replant them when the next planting time comes along, in the wet season. which seems like it is still going on now, it is supposedly the dry season in march, april, may, but so far has been raining all through those months. must be those pesky pigs.

i will (b)log off now as i have another very long blog to post soon and you will all be very sick of me i'm sure.

cuidales y no come los puercos amigos! xx

public health announcement

hi blog fans

the moment you've been waiting for and just in time for the weekend. 3 whole blogs all waiting to be absorbed by you. the bike ride, the rehab session afterwards, and week 1 of me and bert's trip to mexico/guatemala (i'm not sure if that should say mine and bert's trip or bert and my trip, does anybody know? if it was just my trip i wouldn't write mine trip, nor would i write me trip, but in this case it was the one that sounded most correct).

anyway, just before you start, i want to apologise for the text formatting, it's gone a bit strange, one blog is normal, one is half normal half squashed, and one is big and fat it seems. as you know this sort of thing really upsets me, but i haven't got the patience or time to try and sort it out right now as i have to buy some parcel tape to wrap up some boxes, and go and eat some ginger snaps at home. i do apologise though and hope it does not affect your blog reading enjoyment.

also, bert mentioned that my writing style is perhaps a bit too factual on these last blogs - he didn't use the word boring as he is very diplomatic, but i think if pushed he might have done (i did push him a bit but not too far as he might have fallen out of the ultralight). if you find this is the case, please accept my apologies and go and do something more interesting like checking the weather forecast or weeding the garden.

all my love from hot belize which is now also in the non rainy season for 2 months uh oh. xx

into the wild part 1: my left foot (and right foot too in fact)

monday 23 march
after breakfast we went to find an orthopedic clinic our doctor in cayo had recommended, to look at my feet. i always confuse podiatrist with paediatrician, one is someone who looks at children and one is someone who looks at feet. what is someone who looks at children‘s feet then? anyway we found the clinic and found the foot doctor and he looked at my toes and felt them a bit, told me the toe joints were swollen, and asked me things in spanish which i tried to answer, then sent me next door to have them xrayed. we sat in a waiting room for 2 hours then i sat in another little room for a few minutes with an xray machine and then we went back to our foot doctor with the xrays. he looked at the xrays and um’d and ah’d and i could tell there was definitely something going on. he then asked me if i drank coca-cola. i’m not sure if that was because he wanted to go and buy me one or whether it was relevant to my foot problem. more likely the latter as he would hardly be asking me out on a date when bert was there with me. i think there is uric acid or something in fizzy drinks which can affect your bones, by leaving deposits? ironic as i really don’t drink fizzy drinks, they tend to make my right shoulder hurt, maybe to do with my shoulder bones, plus we were never allowed them as children except for that traditional lemonade from asda because it looked wholesome because it was cloudy. anyway i told him i don’t. what i managed to glean from the consultation was that there is something wrong with the bone structure in my feet, more so in my right foot, i suppose because it is the dominant foot. seems like it is a combination of a high lateral arches and longer than usual metatarsal bones and the arch that goes at right angles below my toes being fallen and becoming a weight bearing area, resulting in pain in my 2^nd and 3^rd toes after cycling and all over my feet after walking/running for anything longer than 30 minutes or so. my spanish in this medical scenario was direly lacking, and i really would have liked to have a translator as there were so many questions i had, and other things i should have told him like how my right leg is shorter due to that hip being more eroded than the other, and how i got tendonitis in my right ankle and have backache a lot, as i’m sure all these are problems that arise from the coca-cola foot problem. amazing how interlinked everything in your body is, and how important the health of your feet is. someone the other day was telling me that 75% of women have uteruses that are out of place and in most of those cases this is related to your feet too. anyway he wrote out a prescription and told me to go up to merida (north west yucatan, and the capital of the yucatan state), to get some insoles made which would support my lateral arches and hopefully help the situation. this was fine with us as we were planning on going there anyway. we thanked him and trotted off to the chemist to get my prescription, which was pills, a gel to rub on my toes, and an intra muscular injection in my bum! i have no idea what exactly was injected into my bum, i suppose some sort of anti inflammatory solution, all it seemed to do was make my bum sore for a few days, maybe a psychological device to take my attention away from worrying about my feet.

during all this excitement, whilst in the xray waiting room, bert mentioned that oh i forgot to tell you but i nearly died while you were away on your bike ride. oh really i said, how? bert isn’t one to exaggerate, or be a hypochondriac, he is very level-headed and unflappable, so this was a big announcement for him. he explained how he had been out on his friend kerry’s island, off placencia in the south of belize, and something bit him and he went into anaphylactic shock. he got tunnel vision, really sweaty, was covered in hives, was vomitting and his throat was closing up. he managed to wake up kerry who threw him into the boat and went full throttle back to the mainland, which is 18 miles, so around a 45 minute journey. bert being bert he had logically told himself not to panic whilst all this was going on, as panicking would make the reaction stronger and then he really wouldn’t be able to breathe. by the time they got to land he had mind over mattered himself back to almost normality, but they still found a nurse and he had a rest and got an epi pen in case it happens again. gosh i said. yeah he said it was kinda scary. then celine dion came on tv in the waiting room and we had an argument about whether she was canadian or french, and forgot all about the near death experience. he doesn’t know what bit him as there aren’t any scorpions out there, so it must have been a poisonous spider, or maybe a bee, as he once had a similar near death bee sting reaction years ago where he was emergency driven to hospital by a man working in a ford garage, and got lots of adrenalin injections and an epi pen and a bee sting necklace. apparently with bees, the more you get stung by them the more likely you are to become allergic, not the other way round ie you don’t build up immunity. interestingly i have never been stung be a bee, nor have i ever had a filling, nor have i ever bought a can of coke.

we set off to tulum, up north on the coast, about halfway from chetumal to cancun, but with it being late in the day and we were tired by the foot drama and killer bee stories, so we stopped at a town called felipe carillo puerto. our hotel was called el faisan y el venado, the pheasant and the deer, the region must be known for them but we didn’t see any. we went to a piano bar for a beer, there was no piano it was a lie. we ate street tacos which were amazing as usual and so cheap, the best dinner when you’re on a budget trip as they really do fill you up. we found a bakery and got breakfast things. we watched tv and learnt about lance armstrong’s broken collarbone disaster.

tuesday 24 march
to tulum. noted that the road was nice; roads in mexico are really good generally, and the ones that aren’t are quickly being upgraded, as mexico is well aware of the money in tourism and the necessity to make driving and bussing around the country an enjoyable experience. there are also lots of little vans that drive round the roads, called goddesses i think, that come and rescue you if you break down, again an idea they came up with to make driving the country a more safe option. the only thing i find not pleasant about driving in mexico is that there are a lot of military stops in certain states, they don’t actually do anything normally other than look vaguely threatening from their little sandbag lookout stations, and make a point of having their large machine guns pointing right at you in your car. sometimes they ask where are you going or where are you from, or on one occasion a few more random questions which bert explained afterwards was because i was wearing a skirt so they asked more questions so they could look at my legs for longer. and of course you have to be super polite to them and answer all their inane questions and smile and thank them. surprisingly we didn’t have to offer any bribes on this trip.

we found some cool cabins to stay in right on the white sand beach right by tulum. the town of tulum is nothing special but did have a nice market where we bought fruit and stocked up on ham and cheese etc for our ice chest which was in the back of the car. bert had brought a camcorder to record the trip which was good as we are both camera-less at the moment, though i don’t like having a video recorder stuck in my face whilst having breakfast, so it did vex me somewhat at times. we sunbathed then had picnic lunch at the cabin, then visited tulum (mayan ruins in case anyone doesn’t know), which was really stunning mainly due to its position right on the coast overlooking amazingly turquoise sea. we watched little mexicans jumping the waves and having a great time, and pelicans dive bombing in to catch fish and groups of vultures floating around above us. apparently tulum isn’t so great in terms of architecture or carvings etc compared to other mayan ruins, but it was definitely worth a visit.

wednesday 25 march
8 month anniversary from leaving england!
after breakfast in town and laughing at a funny little dog (though i can’t remember why now), we set off to chichen itza, another mayan ruin inland from tulum, halfway to the other coast. it is supposedly more important in terms of what it tells you about the mayans lives and beliefs etc. there is an amazingly well preserved temple as you first go in, the temple of kolocan i think, which on the summer and winter solstices, the position of the sun shines little triangles onto the steps and it looks like a big serpent is slithering down from the top to the bottom. one of the solstices had just taken place a few days ago and the place gets super busy around those times. it was a hot hot day, and the wind blew little dust devils up, which are swirly clouds of dust, which if they get bigger can turn into hurricane type things. i always thought it was those tiny little hoovers you can clean the inside of your car with. our favourite building there was the astronomy/observatory, with a large round dome top where they would look at the stars, just like we do these days. there was a market area, a temple of 1000 pillars (didn’t count them but will take their word for it), a beautifully carved church. i think the general perception of the mayan world is that there were generally very brutal, and they decapitated people and sacrificed victims, often who tended not to be just prisoners of war, but important royal persons from neighboruing mayan cities, because these people would have more worth with the gods. but you can’t forget that alongside these brutal practices, they were very sophisticated in other ways and had huge knowledge about cosmology and maths and calendar systems, and other things, they aligned their buildings with constellations, which is why you never see symmetrical or orderly layouts of buildings around the main plazas. all the temples you see and palaces etc today are where the important ruling and upper classes would live, they built them up high as they considered themselves closer to the gods that way. the working classes lived elsewhere, on ground level in shacks i suppose. they had a game of ball, which is why the mayan sites always have ball courts, and if you were the losing player you would often have your head chopped off and rolled down from the nearest steep temple to a huge round of applause and general amusement. we wondered why would you risk playing ball if this was the punishment? if you haven’t seen the film apocalypto you should, as it is all about the maya world, but be warned it is hard work due to its gruesomeness, which is what it got criticized for.

there were lots of mayans selling things they had made like little replica temples, or chess sets in the style of mayan architecture, so the castle is a temple etc. we didn’t buy anything as were on a budget, but we did share an ice cream as it was so hot. there was a steam bath building but no steam bath left in it.

we then carried on to merida which was busy and congested and small streets and too much concrete and very hot, so we drove through it for now and carried on to celestun, a small town on the coast that was highlighted in yellow on my map, meaning it was nice. we stopped en route to eat some ham and an avocado at the side of the road from our ice box which made us feel like real travellers. we had a mango too but the bigger ones leave stringy bits in your teeth which stay there for hours and you get obsessed with trying to get them out. the smaller mangoes don’t do this so much. we got to celestun just before sunset and drove straight to a little hotel, hotel gutierrez, on the beach and got a sea view room, and sat on the beach to watch the sunset. if there are no clouds in the sky when the sun goes down into the sea (where as we all know it sleeps for the night until its alarm goes off the next morning and it gets up again), then you get this phenomenon called a green flash (like the tennis shoes), where there is a green glow throughout the top of the sea which is the sun shining through the sea. we didn’t see this, bert said he saw it a bit but he was lying. a dog came to sit with us, and every day in celestun after that she sat with us on the beach and went crazy barking at any other dogs that got within a 50 metre radius of us. even one night when we got up at 2am to check out what was happening in the square, there she was waiting by our hotel and walked with us into the town. weird, because we didn’t feed her or anything. after the sun had gone to bed and it got dark some lights appeared right on the horizon, quite equally spaced and in straight lines. hmmm can’t be a town we figured as there wasn’t one there when it was daylight. we asked arturo, our super lovely hotel owner, he said it is night time fishermen, the lights are from their boats.

we wandered round the town which was quiet and small and very mellow, no other non mexicans here that we could find. a little square as always and then dusty sandy streets going off from it. we found a taco place and had a few antojitos (that means things like tacos, sanbutes, quesadillas, ie little mexican bits of food). when we got the bill it was 24, and 16, and 8 which the lady had correctly added up to be 48. she came running back over and crossed out the total and wrote 56. we asked her why? maybe she’d left off an item? she didn’t explain herself at all, just pointed at the new total and said that was it. we went through what we’d eaten a few times, and it was definitely 48 pesos, but in this case 24 plus 16 plus 8 equalled 56. must have been a last minute tourist tax.

thursday 26 march
woke up and looked at the ocean from the room and thought what a find, basically a whole hotel and beach to ourselves for hardly any money. had pancakes granola and yoghurt and fruit from a rooftop breakfast place by the square. breakfast is far and away my all time favourite time of day. sometimes when i’m having breakfast i’m already excited about tomorrow’s breakfast. whenever you have a not particularly great breakfast bad things happen. most important is to have a good milky coffee (also known as a latte) and to have 2 cups of it. if health and becoming a big fat fatty wasn’t an issue i would every day have pancakes with banana and walnut and maple syrup and butter on, and also yoghurt with honey and granola and some melon and papaya, 2 cups of coffee and some fresh orange juice. we sat on the beach next, our lovely hotel people brought us sun loungers, an umbrella, a table. our little dog came and guarded us. we called her huckleberry as we were having a conversation about huckleberries, they actually do exist in montana. i thought it was just the name of huckleberry finn. bert says they’re amazingly tasty. we looked out to sea with our binoculars and read our books and swam. the locals swim in all their clothes here (to stay out of the sun so much or to save on washing, who knows), so bert copied their technique and kept his tshirt on to go swimming, though he had no chance of looking like a local mexican even with his new mexican hat on. the hotel boy came over to tell us they’d just seen some sharks right by the shore, oh my god we thought, shark attack. after a while he admitted that actually they were just dolphins.

we washed our clothes in the shower in our room using a bar of soap, then hung them out on the washing line on the hotel roof. there’s something really cosy about washing hanging out, i guess because it means that is your home and it’s nice to know you’ve got clean clothes coming soon. they dried in about 1 second as the sun was so hot. we did some exercises in case we were getting too fat with all our inactivity. the best exercise to do is the plank where you lie down on the floor and put your elbows below your shoulders and push yourself off the floor by your tip toes and your arms and hold it for as long as possible. it is better than doing 1000 sit ups even. i could only hold it for 15 seconds at first, but now i’m up to 50, but i go all shaky and have to lie still for 2 minutes to recover afterwards.

we went for dinner at a place called casa peon which is owned by peter, a man from switzerland. it is also a hotel but at the moment has only 1 room, but will have 15 eventually. very good food, - we had fish and banana curry - sand nice to chat in english to someone. peter told us he doesn’t like belize, he thinks it’s a cheap version of the real caribbean, and that the people are rude and unfriendly and he didn’t have a particularly pleasant time when he was there. this is an opinion you will encounter a lot from people you meet when travelling in mexico and guatemala, and it isn’t too far wrong, but it does depend on your experience of belize, and of other countries etc. i think that the more money you have the better time you can have in belize, it isn’t set up for backpacking type traveling i don’t think. you can have a really cool time traveling in mexico and guatemala with hardly any money as there are good bus networks, lots of hostels, interesting things to see for not much money like museums, art galleries and all that kind of thing. belize is firstly around twice or 3 times more expensive, much less friendly, much more backwards in terms of getting around, and the towns are pretty dire, so your best option is to head to an island, or swanky resort somewhere which is bound to be more expensive. there are beautiful eco lodges, and the francis ford coppola places etc, and you can do trips in helicopters and soon in bert’s ultra light, but obviously these are not budget options. i love mexico and guatemala, there is so much to see and learn about, and i love that you have to speak spanish, and i love how friendly everyone is - once you can speak enough to have just a little exchange with them it’s great, they are so warm and welcoming and so pleased you are in their country. belizeans don’t seem to care either way, they certainly don’t go out of their way to welcome you or be very customer focused. but belize does have amazing coast and blue blue sea and as you will soon read about if you can bear to read my ramblings any longer, we are going to be living on a lovely island which is actually so far my favourite part of belize, and also the most expensive, oops. it has a library, hooray, beautiful sandy beaches and blue sea, a reef to explore, isn’t too busy, and has lots of nice food places, which again is not an easy thing to find here, especially where we are at the moment in cayo. anyway, these are my small observations so far.

anyway, there was a fair in the town square we went to look at it, arturo gave us a free shot of mezcal from some mezcal that some of his guests had left him, he also let me take a book from his book exchange without exchanging it, it was wide sargasso sea which i read years ago and is very good. it’s a re-writing of jane eyre, by jean rhys, a caribbean writer, or at least it is set in the caribbean, i think, in fact i’m not sure at all but i do know it involves the sea, as you could guess from the title. you wouldn’t think i had an english degree would you ha ha. we watched the sunset again from the beach with huckleberry and bert told me in all seriousness that in fact he has a phenomenal memory, which made me laugh out loud as it is so far from the truth, i think this was in response to me teasing him about something. his other response to me being nasty to him if he’s being particularly rubbish at something is to say well i can’t be good at everything, i’m really good at flying which you can’t do at all, so shut up. by the by, i have been trying to teach bert english phrases like taking the p*ss, or i can’t be arsed, but he gets them all in a muddle and tells me to stop giving him the arse.

friday 27 march
we had to go into merida today to get my insoles made from the instructions that senor coca cola had given us on my prescription. we figured it would be easier to get the bus as we might stress out trying to find parking, and have to pay loads of pesos for it too. in hindsight i think this was an error but it’s all a learning curve when you’re traveling, and a constant weighing up of decisions and what will be the best/easiest/most enjoyable thing to do in all these places you’ve never been to before. first we breakfasted - pancakes and yoghurt again and good coffee - then we watched some little children dancing in the square while we waited for the bus, they were dressed as bees and fairies and elves and lions etc. not sure what the premise of the activity was, but lots of townsfolk had gathered to watch and the usual loud blarey music was playing. first up were 3 really tiny super cute boy and girl couples, the girls in their shiny ball gown type dresses, the boys in tuxedos, they started wiggling around kind of awkwardly to the music and spinning each other round in quasi grown up dancing styles, while looking cute and sheepish and probably wondering what this was all about. i think the middle boy and girl were king and queen or something, she had a tiara on, which unfortunately got knocked off in one of their twizzles and one of the mums ran to help. after these couples left the dance floor some mini human bees and fairies took over, but we had to go at this point. suffice to say the whole thing was really really amusing and so cute, as anything involving mexican children generally is. i think i have only ever seen about 2 mexican children actually crying or looking upset in all my travels here.

we got our pretty sub standard, smelly bus to merida. it took 2 hours. the road from celestun to merida is just one very straight long road, the scenery is nothing to speak of, it is dry, arid, lots of dead or dying trees, lots of land being burnt, presumably for construction work? there are lots of tyres in trees along the way, hanging from various heights of branches. we thought when we first drove it that this might be some strange voodoo custom, and we asked swiss peter but apparently there is nothing to it. he was somewhat pragmatic and sensible though and maybe has just never thought about it enough to go and discover the truth behind the strangeness. we asked a man on the bus how to get to the address i had for the orthopedic shop, and he told us our best option was to take a taxi, so we did this, and it was fairly far away and out of town in a big mall. how odd to be in a big mall with all those shops and food stalls all wanting you to spend all your money. interesting how malls are all white so you think you’re in heaven, there’s no clocks so you think you’re in some alternative universe and there’s all stalls in the middles of the aisles you walk down so you have to veer round things and then you notice other shops. i don’t like malls for these reasons. however, all went smoothly at the foot shop and they told us to come back at 6, so we left again to wander round town. after a few little bus related wild goose chases we got the right bus and were back in town at a much reduced rate than the taxi.

we soon realized that we were out in the midday blazing heat and were fast getting heat related anger at not knowing what to do or where to get something to eat or anything. some random man came and gabbled at us for a while then marched us off to a market where we could buy all sorts of traditional trinkets, then told us he had an aa meeting to attend and left. we ate some food and cooled down then wandered to an english bookshop listed in my guidebook but it closed at 1pm, so that was no good. we wandered the same stretch of road for a while, i’m not sure why now, but there was a reason at the time. bert lets me be tour guide most of the time as i have a book and can speak a bit of spanish, but i think he was wondering what the hell was going on. then we found a bank which i needed to do but the queue was too long so we left in a huff, then bert wanted an ice cream, then we wandered that same bit of road, then tried to find a park, then thought about returning to the mall but that would be pretty gross. merida is basically quite a nice old mexican town, but very very hot and narrow and busy, and not particularly enjoyable, ie i would never go back there, nor would i recommend it to anyone to visit. but if fast busy small hot mexican towns with not really anything worth seeing are what you love then please do go there. we cheered up as it cooled down a bit and also when we found a really good bookshop. we had been searching for a world atlas for the last few months as it is so interesting to see where countries and oceans and islands are and wonder about more traveling, and this shop looked like it might have one. it didn’t, but we got a book about mexico and bert got touching the void as i told him he would like it as it’s an adventure up a mountain involving injuries and against all odds survival, things which generally boys like reading about, especially boys like bert. then we got the bus to the mall and got my insoles which i then wore, and they hurt my feet but in the long run have helped a lot, just have to get used to them.

we went down to the bus station in the really nasty part of town -why is this always the way? - for our 7pm bus back to celestun, we had read in our guide book that the last bus was at 8pm, so all should be fine. the bus station was not a pleasant place to be, but in fact the people waiting for the buses were nice, and helped us when we were trying to figure out which was our bus, as they generally are not announced, there are no notice boards, the people that work there don’t give you the right information, and the buses themselves don’t really have their destinations written on them - sometimes they do if you’re lucky, but i wouldn’t believe it was the right information anyway. all of which meant that anytime a bus arrived that was of the company called oriente, i got in the queue got on it and asked se va a celestun por favor? all the replies were no, some had an extra sentence too, about which platform they thought that bus went from or something. the old ladies with baskets of food or material or who knows what else old ladies carry around were also helpful and wanted to know where we were going, it seemed we were quite a novelty at the bus station. by now it was 710, so i asked in an ‘information’ looking booth, and a while later a lady came back saying the last bus to celestun was at 8.30 and the previous one had left at 630. great…. another hour and a half to wait in a really horrible part of town, all our own fault for not checking the bus times properly (i did ask in tourist information earlier but he obviously got it wrong too). we went for a cockroach infested taco and got in bad moods. proportionately this really wasn’t that bad, but it does upset me not knowing what is going on and it makes me remember the hassles of traveling, lugging your stuff round trying to find the right bus, asking people for information and not fully understanding the answers, being tired and hungry and wanting some comfort food and all you can find is some local dive where you don’t know if you’re going to contract e-coli from just even looking at the food.

we got back to lovely celestun at 11pm after a smelly sweaty bus ride, complete with weirdo with loud horrible mobile phone mp3 music blaring out the whole way. we had managed to sleep most of the journey but still the horrendousness of it had seeped into our brains through our veil of bumpy economy class sleep. we went straight to our nice breakfast restaurant for a beer and burgers all round to recover, then to bed and vowed to never ever return to merida ever again.

saturday 28 march
after breakfast we went on a flamingo boat trip, this area is very popular for flamingoes and you can see thousands of them. on our boat was a french couple who were very nice and a mexican couple who were a bit chubby and she chewed a lolipop for the whole trip and they didn’t look very interested. we stopped and looked at various other birds sitting around on the shore on the way to where the flamingoes would be. before we got on the boat the flamingo trip manager man had said to us listen friends this is an adventure, this is nature, you might see flamingoes, you might not, we can’t control that. we didn’t see any flamingoes, not even one that had got lost from the others. they must have gone elsewhere to feed. the flamingo manager knew this as when we next saw swiss peter he said oh by the way don’t do a flamingo trip because a few days ago they came round and told me that if i’m chatting to anyone who is thinking of doing one to tell them not to as the flamingoes aren’t around at the moment. so obviously they knew the flamingoes hadn’t been around for a few days. anyway, we stopped at a cenote, which is a sinkhole, which is where freshwater comes up from underground and meets saltwater and goes a bit bubbly and swirly. you get very big sinkholes, like the blue hole off the coast of belize which is very famous for diving etc, and you get very little non eventful sinkholes, all over the yucatan. they aren’t particularly exciting and i’m not sure i got the explanation right of what they are, but anyway we swam in it for a bit and ooh’d and ah’d.

we went back to the beach, flamingoless. we looked at some frigate birds on the way back, they have tails like swallows and bert told me they aren’t able to land on land or water, but only on branches, due to the shape of their feet. we saw an eagle and the boat drove through some mangrove trees too. once back we went an bought a little wooden flamingo as a souvenir instead of seeing a real one, and also bought some other things from the jewellery stalls on the beach. they’re really not pushy the sellers, like they can be in lots of beach places, it’s much more chilled out here. we really felt we’d discovered some really unknown place in fact at celestun as it was so peaceful and chilled out. sadly some more tourists had arrived by now as it was the weekend, which i didn’t like, how dare they.

that night was earth hour, where from 830 to 930pm wherever you are on the 28^th march you are meant to turn off all your lights and not use any electricity for the hour, and think of how great the earth is and how we should preserve it. so we did this, we went to sleep listening to the ocean from our hotel window and thinking about how great the earth is. we were woken up at 2am by some crazy loud distorted music. i tried to ignore it but it just never shut up, i looked out of the window to find out where it was coming from, not that that would help. i couldn’t figure it out so made bert come with me to town to see what was happening. sure enough there was our guard dog huckleberry, waiting for us. in the town square was a huge stage with some crazy crazy loud awful dancy techno music blaring out, and seemingly all of the youths from celestun, just loving it. the taco stalls were still open, there were old people and children around too. jesus i thought this is the craziest thing i’ve ever seen, i wondered if my watch was wrong and it was still only 9pm or something. everyone was acting like it was still daytime, families wandering around having a great time. this went on until 430am, and the next morning we decided to move on to our next destination, which we would have done anyway either today or tomorrow but the crazy dance show and influx of tourists to our peaceful little town had made up my mind that i needed new scenery.

sunday 29 march
the french couple on our flamingo trip had said how amazing palenque was, so i had called a meeting with bert as to whether we could feasibly continue down to there, which is much further south than we had intended to go on this trip. we had planned to return back from celestun to chetumal then on to belize, ie in a sort of round trip of the yucatan. but we knew the yucatan scenery isn’t very exciting to drive through, and we had nothing in particular to rush back to belize for, and palenque sounds amazing, so let’s just carry on, and we’ll be even more frugal with our budgeting. we had breakfast at swiss peter’s place, filled out flask up with coffee for the long drive, then set off. palenque is in chiapas, a little state that is the most indigenous mexican state. i have heard vaguely bad things about chiapas so wasn’t sure how safe driving would be, this is where the zapatista rebel problems were fairly recently. there were quite a few military stops, but just the usual sandbags and machine guns and questions. at one of them, they got some weird little antenna attached to something like a radio or electrical equipment, and walked it very slowly up and down one side of the car. it seemed like something you’d do if you’d set up a fake military stop with your mates to try to look like you were doing something clever that would make people believe you were for real. like what could the little antenna be picking up from our car? surely not drugs? or immigrants? perhaps weapons was the only thing we could imagine, but i really don’t know how.

anyway we got to palenque and stayed in a cool cabin place in the jungle, called el panchan, a few kilometres from the ruins. every so often you’d hear a thump on a roof, sometimes your roof, which would be a large nut falling off the trees. which reminds me of a story meg had told us in huatulco of how her parents had made them wear helmets if they walked down a particular path to the beach in case coconuts fell on them, as it can kill you if they land on your head.

we had a really really good pizza at don mucho’s then listened to some cool live music then went to bed.

cheese hands

hi again hope you enjoyed the bike ride update, here is what happened next..

tuesday march 17
got up and attempted to swim off my hangover. sat around and packed and tried not to be sick. el grupo left on a bus to acapulco around lunchtime and me and siob stayed in our hotel waiting for meg, siob’s friend, who lives near to puerto escondido. we were sad not to go with the group but it would have made no sense to do that just for one night in a place that is apparently a big dump (remember from previous sarahandrod blog we were advised by everyone we met to never go to acapulco but rod still wanted to go just so he could sing going loco down in acapulco). me and siob found a shop for a fanta and an ice cream, i got a magnum ice cream and had to hold it with both hands like it was a hot dog, because my fingers were too numb from the cycling to hold the little stick bit.

after a while meg and her friend larry turned up to get us. and thus started part 2 of our adventure, which was basically 5 days of luxurious relaxing rehabilitation in meg’s amazing house right by an amazing beach in a place called huatulco, which is around a 90 minutes drive east along the coast from puerto. she lives in a complex of 37 houses which are owned mainly by canadians who spend the winter there, or sometimes more than that too which is why meg was still there. meg is a friend of siob’s from when siob studied in toronto for a year during university. here are some other facts about meg: she speaks fluent spanish, she has lived in mexico for 3 years, she is from calgary in canada, she used to teach english at the university of huatulco, she has 2 sisters and one of them is a yoga teacher, she is learning zapotec which is the local indigenous language, she goes out with a mexican boy called romeo who has a little brother called luis angel who took some cheese into the shower with him because he was still hungry but didn’t want to get caught eating more food after dinner (he is a mini big fat fatty already), she had a dog in mexico but once when she got home one of the other canadians had sent it back to canada as a favour for her, she is moving to france soon, she had lots of biscuits in her house which we ate with jam on. at the moment meg is working as property manager for the houses where she lives. there is a lady who has a house there who is english and used to be a dancer on the benny hill show, she is called trish. she brought meg a box full of reading glasses to donate to the local health service. i wonder where all the other benny hill dancers are now and what they are doing?

i tried not to fall into hungover sleep on the drive to meg’s from puerto, as that would be rude as i’ve never met her or larry before, but i couldn’t help it so i fell asleep. i think she already thought i was a bit strange as she’d mentioned mushrooms in a passing comment about something else, and i got really excited and started shouting about mushrooms and asking her where you could get mushrooms as you can’t get them in belize anywhere, only in tins. i would have thought that mushrooms can grow anywhere in the world, especially somewhere humid and hot like belize. any mushroom pizza you get in belize it’s mushrooms from a tin which just isn’t the same. anyway after that and the sleep i felt marginally better. then i felt even more better when we arrived at her house, as it’s amazing, like something from a film. and incidentally the beach from y tu mama tambien was the beach right by her house, so technically her house is almost from a film. it was all white on the outside, with a deck and sun loungers and an amazing view of the ocean, and a giant turtle and a lizard on the wall made out of mosaic stones. inside is really lovely stone floors, and paintings by her mum who is an artist, and some yoga mats which must be her sister’s. although me and siob could have had separate rooms we decided to still share as we had been sharing a tent all week anyway. we went out for a drive on the mule (a little 4wd vehicle very useful for driving around dirt roads and suchlike, they have one on our little farm in belize), and walked along some beaches and found some little restaurants but nobody was there just the lady who owned it was sitting in the dark and she explained there was no light and therefore we couldn’t eat there either. she seemed quite happy sitting in her hammock in the dark in the middle of nowhere. we carried on to a hotel and had some food there instead. it is probably a drug money laundering hotel meg said as there is never ever anyone there to stay. i drove the mule back which was totally ace, through some little rivers and through villages and dirt roads. me and siob were pleased that we hadn’t gone on an 8 hour bus ride to acapulco just for one more night, which i heard later was rubbish anyway and some people got robbed, and acapulco is awful don’t forget.

wednesday march 18
hung out in the morning at a beach club while meg did some jobs around huatulco. they had to interview some people to take over her job as she is leaving soon. i swam in the pool at the beach club and got an injury from swimming into a little underwater wall. siob told me how she is going to india in may to buy mangoes for her job, which is a fruit buyer for innocent smoothies (do i get a free smoothie in exchange for the advertising siob?) what a cool job. we ate some lunch there which we gave 5 out of ten as the chicken was a bit stringy and you got a small roasted potato with your chicken fajitas and tortillas which we thought was unnecessary. i gave siob my midnight’s children book as preparation which thank god i had finally finished. it’s a good book but it’s quite something to get used to his style and you have to concentrate to keep all the tangles in order in your head. i’m now reading love in the time of cholera which is making me wish i hadn’t watched the film already and realize agains what an amazing writer he is. we had a pizza for dinner with meg, in huatulco which is a cool town. there is a church there with some psychedelic style jesus pictures on its ceilings. the artist that did them is a friend of meg’s and is part of her festival that she has organized for easter day when artists come and paint pictures while musicians make music, i think on the beach by her house, which sounds cool. after the pizza we went home, then siob and meg went to get the night bus to oaxaca where meg had to buy material for the festival. oaxaca is the nearest city to huatulco, and takes around 8 hours overnight, you can get the quicker bus but it goes on a really wiggly road that always makes everyone vomit. i have already seen oaxaca and preferred to hang out so i stayed at home instead. i had bought some ham and tomatoes and bananas for the day as it’s not near any shops, especially if you don’t know your way around all the little roads.

thursday march 19
quite weird waking up in someone else’s house, but i managed it. basically i spent today reading, sitting in the sun, or shade when the sun was too hot, though i feel better able to cope with the heat after the ridiculousness of cycling all day through it for 8 days. i ate 9 tortillas with ham and tomato in them, and drank quite a lot of decaffeinated coffee. i sat on the beach and read my book and wondered why when i put suncream on on the beach it always has sand in it and i get covered in sand instantly and look like a piece of sandpaper, but other people are able to put it on without this happening to them? also does it affect your suntan if you have sand in it, like do you get a mottled suntan? i got in the sea to cool down every now and then, you can’t really swim in the sea here due to the waves and the current but you can just sit in it and cool off, like a seal. i wondered if i was going to pass the entire day without speaking a word to anyone, and whether this would make me feel a little bit insane, and whether i should go and knock on one of the canadian’s doors and say hello just in case it is too scary to have not spoken all day, other than to myself which doesn’t count. on the way back to the house i said hola to some local mexicans, so felt slightly less insane, but also slightly more insane that perhaps hola would now be my only word of the whole day. obviously after having a whole group of people and leaders for the bike ride, and then having meg as our new tour guide for the last 2 days, it was slightly strange adjusting to my own little world so i decided to start writing my blog on meg’s laptop she’d let me use for the day, as that would make me feel productive and therefore normal again. i couldn’t get it to work as i didn’t know the password. so i decided to cook some pasta and put some ham and a tomato on it. i lit the stove and 3 seconds later it went out. hmm. i lit it again, a different one this time, but the same thing happened. i had another tortilla with ham and tomato in it, and went downstairs to go to the loo. uh oh the whole floor downstairs was moving, what was happening? giant ants with legs so long they looked like spiders had invaded. i looked outside while standing on tip toes in the middle of the tiles as they ants were only going on the grouting bits like they thought it was a road system or something. the whole patio and walls were moving with ants too. they had found a way in through the window/door where there was a gap where the snake made of material that stops the draught coming in (what is the technical name for this snake please?) had moved away from the window/door a bit. i tip toed along the corridor a bit to check the situation, and the ants were there too, on the road bits between the tiles again. i went back upstairs and made a coffee and thought about my options. which were – 1.ignore the ants and sit in the kitchen reading and drinking coffee, then reassess the situation in an hour. 2. if they don’t go away, sleep outside. 3. or flood the house to get rid of them. 4. be a grown up and somehow deal with the situation properly. i pondered these options for a while longer, then noticed there were some ants on the kitchen walls too and a few on the floor. i wasn’t sure if they’d just got lost from the roads downstairs, or if they were the beginnings of phase 2 of the attack. i tip toed downstairs, and it was getting worse so i figured it was the latter. i tip toed back up and took my phone and went to find phone signal somewhere around the houses in the dark. i found a nice lady who was sitting outside on the pavement using internet signal from one of the houses to check her emails. i asked her where phone signal was and she told me to be quiet as she wasn’t supposed to be there as she was illegally using the house’s internet connection. then she chatted to me about who i was and who she was and then pointed me in the right direction for phone signal, which was on top of a roof of a small building, right in the far corner, so you almost fall off the roof making your call. i called meg who was getting back on the night bus back from oaxaca to huatulco with siob and romeo. she said to spray the ants, which is what the nice internet lady had said too. so i went back to the house. i should have thanked the ants really for making a situation which meant i had to go and talk to people, but instead i sprayed them and they all curled up and died, and i went to bed paradoxically happy that they weren’t there anymore, but sad that i had had to kill them all.

friday march 20
meg and siob got back from their night bus around 9am. i updated them on my day without them. siob slept in a heap on the patio floor, exhausted from 2 night buses in 2 days (nights). then she slept on the lounger. we ate some biscuits with jam for a while. then i slept too. we moved to the beach and slept there for a while, me like a piece of sandpaper, then got in the sea like seals. meg was busy doing proper things like having a job. that night we went into huatulco for pizza again, with romeo too. you don’t pronounce it like romeo in romeo and juliet, but with the accent on the e, like rome the place, then eyo. they had successfully got the things they needed in oaxaca, but the night bus had been so cold that siob nearly died. romeo had met them there on his way back from mexico city where he was sorting out studying there (internation relations) – i think that was the thing but i might have got that wrong. he is cool, and told us swear words in mexican. he couldn’t pronounce siobhan either and his pronunciation made it sound like he called her giovanni, which was her second new name (and we found out that chibu which was her first new name, means goat in spanish, so i guess her anglicized new name is john the goat). their friend eden came too for pizza, he works in a hotel. we overate our pizza and had stomachache. then we went to a town called santa maria el huatulco which is nearby to huatulco, there was a fiesta there with a castillo which is like i described when i was in oaxaca that week last year where they make a big wooden structure with fireworks on it which are in the shape of traditional things like bulls and maybe the virgin mary etc. this time they were in the shape of a dolphin, a squirrel, and tweety pie the cartoon character, who they call piolin. then the top bit of the castillo spins around and writes something in fireworks which i can’t remember what it was this time, but some bits of firework flew off and hit us on the head. all a bit strange, and probably in honour of something like it’s the saint day of the patron saint of that town or something, but who knows? anyway the locals enjoyed it, lots of cute children around as usual, a few drunk men who tried to start a conversation with us in drunken broken english, and lots of taco stalls and a huge huge long market selling clothes, kitchen goods (including a bin with 2 eyes who looked cute and i took a photo of with siob’s camera as mine was absent from day 2 cycling incident), pot noodles, pirate dvds, watches, in fact pretty much everything you could ever want at 11pm on a friday night was in that market. that was the end of that day, there were no ants waiting for us when we got home.

saturday march 21
meg was busy again with various property related matters like where is our internet signal, here’s a receipt for some water that i’ve delivered, please can you make those workmen stop banging nails into our roof as it’s 8am and we’re still asleep (that last one was me and siob). we sat around and ate biscuits with jam on. then some official looking men from the immigration department turned up, they wanted to check some of the canadian’s visas and passports etc. meg was the intermediary as she is bilingual, and they got their bits of paper out and meg talked to the immigration men. turns out they were really friendly and a bit dopey too like they didn’t even know the place existed for ages. when meg told them about the art/music festival she was organizing one of them knew someone who composes zapotec music and he was going to get them involved, and he gave meg his memory stick to download some zapotec music from it, which you would think maybe an immigration officer shouldn’t do as it might contain top secret immigration documents, but this is mexico after all and isn’t it cool that that’s how they are here. nothing is ever actually official, which is sometimes a hindrance and sometimes a help, depending on the situation.

after a while we left for puerto escondido from where i was getting a night bus to mexico city and siob to acapulco, for our flights. in the car i sat on a plastic bag as there was somehow some diesel on the back seat which leaked into my skirt and then the plastic bag which was purple leaked onto my skirt too, so i had a big purple diesel stain all over my skirt. we went to a bakery which was mispelt and was actually a backery, and had coffee and pastry things, then to a hotel with a nice view where they gave us some left over chocolate cake from someone’s wedding, then we went and overate for lunch in town and felt really sick. siob pointed out the club we’d gone to and the place we’d eaten burgers last week on our final day of cycling, but nothing looked at all familiar to me. we did impressions of mexican men when they roll their tshirts up and sit there with their stomachs out to cool themselves down, which they also do in guatemala, and probably all of the central and south american world, with no shame at all, and why not. siob got a small crab on her leg when we sat on the beach. we discussed the mushrooms again, and meg had presumed the reason i had got excited about mushrooms on that first day i’d met her, was because i was talking about magic mushrooms, so when i explained now that it was just normal mushrooms i was so excited about, she thought that was even weirder. we looked at people surfing, puerto escondido is supposedly the 3^rd best place in the world for surfing, the first is hawaii and i don’t know the 2^nd, maybe it’s 2 different places in hawaii that are 1^st and 2^nd place.

i got my bus at 6pm which was a bus company called omnibus cristobal colon, or occ for short. i hadn’t been on these buses before, but they were up to my mexican bus standards. and did you know that cristobal colon is christopher columbus, we have just englishised his name. the currency in venezuela is the colon, named after him. and i presume columbia is named after him too. they showed films on the occ express from the instant the bus set off, in fact probably when the driver turns the key to start his bus it is connected to the play button on the video machine. they showed a film about a little boy with a brain tumour whose only wish is to go to the jungle to find a butterfly called a blue morpho. there is some trite love story between his mum and the man explorer who leads their expedition, and finally they find a blue morpho after falling in a big hole and the boy has to save the day, and after some supposedly deep conversations and some rubbish musac music, they all survive and miraculously the boy’s tumour has disappeared. must remember to tell macmillan to try this curative technique. there were only 3 other people on the bus, but you always have numbered tickets, so i was sitting by the window next to a mexican, and then there was nobody else anywhere other than 2 people next to each other at the front of the bus. it stopped in about 6 places en route but it never got fully full so i didn’t understand the logic in the ticket numbering, not that it matters as i was engaged with learning cheesy spanish from the cheesy blue morpho film’s subtitles, and then preoccupied with looking out of the window and sleeping.

sunday march 22
happy birthday papa pepinillo, and happy mother’s day mama pepinillo. i wasn’t aware of the last event until late in the day, over here i think mother’s day is in may sometime. probably somewhere between day of the postman and day of the student and day of the lion tamer.

arrived in mexico city around noon, flight was at 6, chose the lesser of 2 weevils which was to just go and hang out at the airport rather than go into mexico city with luggage and no real reason to go into mexico city other than it could be vaguely more interesting than hanging out at the airport. turns out there are some really good bookshops at the airport and i love bookshops so it wasn’t too boring in the end. i bought a jd salinger short stories in spanish book and read the first story with the help of my dictionary, which i was very proud of myself for. there is a shoeshop at the airport called georgie boy which is amusing as george is papa pepinillo’s name, and he used to call james jamesy boy when he was little and still does now when he wants to be super annoying. sadly no camera otherwise that would have been a good picture. but now it can be a communal mental picture for us all. i went on the internet to kill some time, which also killed some money as it was 70 pesos for half an hour which is crazy money as it is normally 15 pesos maximum for one hour. i ate some food in a restaurant and watched a crackly football match on tv. my flight didn’t get a gate until the last minute which obviously made me panic that there was something wrong with my aeroplane, but i think it was because the flight had started in oaxaca which was in fact where i was going to get on it but had changed my plans which in the end didn’t make too much sense but these things happen. all was fine, and i didn’t see the giant stone dog this time, but i did have a whiskey. when i arrived to chetumal i didn’t recognize bert as he had grown a beard and was wearing a new cowboy hat.

el grandisimo

finally, you can all breathe a sigh of relief, the blog is back. i write this on the 4^th april from our little hotel room in antigua, guatemala, on the laptop with the letter b missing, so if there are any strange discrepancies involving words with b’s in them, that is the reason why (sorry it's taken me 20 days to actually post this blog, it's hard to make it to an internet in this part of the world sometimes so it's been stored on my memory stick). me and bert are here on our way from mexico back to belize, and it just happens to be semana santa, the most important week in the catholic calendar, and antigua just happens to be the 2^nd best place in the world, after seville in spain, to witness this. totally unplanned by us as we weren’t ever intending to go to guatemala, only to the yucatan to see a few ruins, but how exciting and fortuitous things are sometimes.

rewind almost 4 weeks to mexico city on saturday 7th march where i had spent the day wandering around, waiting for the arrival of el grupo that night for the macmillan mexico coast to coast bike ride. in preparation for this ride i had done approximately no serious training, so i decided to top it off with a big mexican hamburger from a stall in a park that evening. as usual it was totally amazing, as most mexican street food is. i then watched some mexican men playing chess in a park near the diego rivera museum which was unfortunately closed so i couldn’t go in. i had decided not to go up the tower earlier as i had found an english national geographic magazine and the budget didn’t allow for both things, and i figured i had already seen mexico city from the air when flying over it (remember the gigantic stone dog?). anyway, the macmillan group were meant to be arriving around 9pm so i checked into the hotel and went to post-burger sleep for a while. obviously it was hard to get to sleep i was so excited about meeting them all. er, not really true, but i was excited at seeing mi amiga siobhan (who i met on a peru macmillan bike ride 2.5 years ago) (known as siob from now on), especially as she was bringing a camping mattress for me and some other important things like afterbite, and of course her amazing wit and fascinating chat and random stories.

sunday march 8, day zero
after hotel breakfast and brief briefing, and most people probably wondering who i was and why i hadn’t been on the flight from london, we set off on a bus to alvarado which was where we would start the ride the next morning. i have to say that this bus was not the usual high quality i am used to from mexican buses, there was no toilet, no air conditioning (usually there is too much), and no brakes at one point – the little bus driver got underneath to examine it in his smart pinstripe trousers and it seemed to work after that. i hope his trousers were ok as they did look very smart. the journey was long, we stopped for lunch somewhere who knows where, and then were dropped off by a hilly (undulating…) field by the side of the road, in view of the atlantic ocean but not near enough to go for a swim, what a tease. our lovely discover adventure leaders fiona and kenny did a tent demonstration, after which me and siob attempted to put our tent up on top of one of the hills so we would have a nice view. ha, everyone else down in the valleys will be so jealous of our sunset view tent we thought. then a huge gust of wind nearly blew us into the faraway ocean so we decamped to a safer location down below with the clever people. probably a good thing really as we didn’t want to ostracize ourselves immediately from the rest of the group by camping miles away from them.

monday march 9, day 1: flat all day
i can’t remember how i slept that particular night, but overall i slept amazingly well in the tent every night, which happened to be the smelliest tent i’ve ever slept in, from the very beginning of the trip though which doesn’t make too much sense to me. in fact it seemed to get less smelly as the week went on which is probably just that our noses became desensitized as we became less and less clean. after getting up, we took our tent down. this seems like an obvious and pointless comment, but in our list of how this trip compared to our peru one, it is an important issue. in peru they put up and took down our tents, brought round hot water in the morning to our tent door for us to wash with, and had table and chairs in the evening for eating our dinner at. those were the days…. and we made a point of pointing out the comparisons on all possible occasions. what, no waiter service for our dinner? tsk, this would never happen in peru. our mexican crew were great though and made us amazing food, one night we had salmon with some sort of creamy sauce, and every morning porridge with yoghurt and fruit and granola, which always makes me happy, so please don’t think i’m seriously complaining, i wouldn’t dream of doing something like that.

the riding today was flat all day, as the title of that day’s map suggested. it was long, around 94k, and it was hot. we passed lots of trucks with sugar cane on them, and later a sugar cane factory. we ate our bodyweight in nutrigrain bars and bananas and mangoes along the way. it was nice to start the whole ride with a long flat day to get used to the bikes, and for me to get used to the concept of cycling for longer than 2 hours then giving up and eating a pizza and collapsing on the floor for the rest of the week and hoping that some divine intervention would somehow get me through the 8 days to come.

the last 10k today really dragged so it was nice to arrive at camp and jump straight into a muddy mosquito ridden river to cool down. we then panicked in case it was quicksand, and in case there were some stingrays waiting for us on the riverbed. neither of these things happened. the campsite was long grass and thick with bugs, like a horror film, you open your tent door for one second and they’re all inside swarming around your head. me and siob developed the airlock tent entry technique which involved entering the porch bit of the tent, closing the front door, then getting in the main bit of tent, obviously making some sort of spaceship beeping noise during this procedure. we were quite proud of our invention and will apply for a patent in case any of the others who saw try to claim intellectual copyright to it. i think today was the salmon dinner day. i got eaten alive by mozzies even through my long sleeved jumper and trousers tucked into socks method (won’t be patenting that as it didn’t work, weird how some people just do get bitten and others don’t).

topics of conversation today were: would you rather have a fox that picks locks, or a dog that can predict fog? (for me it was the dog as it would be useful for bert and his flying business); why do they pronounce c and z without the lisp in non spain spanish speaking countries? (steve who used to live in mexico city and speaks spanish properly said it is something to do with a king of spain who had a lisp); kim used to be a goth; barry reminded us of simon cowell.
marks out of ten: 8, so nice to be on a bike all day, but loses points for bugs and stingrays.

tuesday march 10, day 2: into the foothills
started the day as every day from now on, with a warm up from rick, one of the many fitness trainers on this trip. (nb: the general level of fitness on this trip was very high, which scared me and siob, and now we are determined to get super fit for our next ride in central smerica in november (more to come about that later)). rick goes out with nick, and she is an elite athlete pentathlete, it said so on one of her tshirts. they have the best how did you meet story ever – they met on one of the heats for gladiators the show where you go and fight against big strong gladiators. after the warm up we have a briefing from DA fiona who also gives out maps for the day. helpfully she had marked them not to scale, otherwise who knows what sort of confusion that could lead to. other things of note regarding the maps were one day some radio masts were marked on there, but we never saw them; one of the roads she had noted was new tarmac! from 2002. which siob pointed out was actually 7 year old tarmac and from then on we wondered what vintage the tarmac was we were cycling on was; one day it said cross at side of road which we think meant we were supposed to stop and be cross at the side of the road. which happened fairly frequently anyway so no need to highlight it.

we set off with our mosquito bites, today was more undulating (a favourite word of DA, which can mean anything from totally flat to practically vertical). today it meant a bit up and down but nothing too strenuous. there was a bridge with a big queue of traffic due to road construction, lunch was by a river which we swam in and with rocks to jump in from which me and siob didn’t dare do but george who was 73 did, he was our hero and has run 7 marathons already too. there were hammocks to swing in and a mexican came to try to sell us strange medicinal products. we set off again, a truck went past spraying the road with water which sprayed us too which was nice as it was really really hot. when i’d done the little cycling i’d done in belize as training, i had only gone out towards sunset when the hot sun wouldn’t get me, but really i should have gone out at noon to prepare myself for cycling all day in the massive heat as it is exhausting. this was also the point at which i realized i had lost my camera around 2 hours ago, when going over one of the speedbumps. i heard something at the time and figured it was something from siob’s little shopping bag which hung from her handlebars and had suncream and camera and who knows what else in (i don’t think you’ll see lance using one of these, nor had it been tested for aerodynamics in a wind tunnel, but it was a useful cycling accessory and didn’t slow us down any more than the pig in my back wheel which was also the pig which had done land’s end to john o’groats with us, what a pig).

we stopped in a small town for some beers that afternoon, only 4k from the campsite, in an area called valle nacional, ninjasteve said can you believe they nationalize the valleys here, blimey. (there were 3 steves on the trip, ninjasteve because he was thin and wiry and had some cool but ultimately ironic ninja moves, guitarsteve who played the guitar really well, and handlebarsteve who had a slightly pornographic handlebar moustache which someone had sponsored him extra for if he had it for the whole ride). anyway after 1 corona i was very drunk, i tried to drink a 2^nd one but i really couldn’t drink more than half. perhaps due to the altitude, which i don’t even know if we were at, and why isn’t the opposite of altitude deeptitude we wondered? the bar was a small concrete room, with a juke box behind very strong metal bars and padlock, and some asleep and drunk mexicans in hats, one of the more awake ones tried to get me to dance, i tried to explain that i smelt and couldn’t dance anyway. the next and last 4k that day were up a hill, i suppose DA would call it an undulation but it was like scaling a cliff face after those beers. the campsite was in the grounds of a mexican family’s house, by another really nice clean river, no sting rays. we went and washed in it like in a timotei advert. loads of little children crowded all around us at the campsite and offered to put our tent up, which we let them do and then they charged us, fair enough, as it was probably the best it was put up for the whole trip even though one of the long poles was where the short pole was supposed to be so the airlock technique became a bit more tricky. the children couldn’t pronounce siobhan’s name so renamed her shibu. after dinner we were briefed about the next day, day 3, the challenge day. 58k uphill, going from 250m altitude to 3000m. oops, when i had originally looked at the trip profile i thought that day went from 350m to 2000m, which would be hard enough, but suddenly it was all seeming ridiculous. robin who has done this trip 4 times before gave us a team tactic talk about it too, he was going to try to beat his record of 3 hours 50 minutes to the top. err, that’s about how long it takes me to eat my porridge before setting off in the morning. went to bed slightly worried.

other things of note: ocelot does not rhyme with foxtrot, jason…
marks out of ten: 8, for beer and rivers, loses 2 for me losing camera

wednesday march 11, day 3: ellie and the minstrels
hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill hill. there wasn’t much else happening in my head today. every 10k there was a water and food stop, the first 20k were actually fairly ok, some bits crazy steep but i felt quite positive, though also slightly in denial that it really was a whole day up hill. i cycled next to small siobhan (not siob) for a while who had sailed around the world for 6 years which is super cool. my toes were hurting quite badly today so i took some cocodamol at 20k which made me quite spaced out and a bit dozy, not the best mental state to climb a huge hill in and not a wind tunnel tested lance approved approach i’m sure. still not sure what is wrong with my toes but more to come on that scenario later in the blog, basically all you need to know now is that they hurt a lot when i cycle. 20-30k was hard work, as was 30-40k, but we got a bit excited as we seemed to do those 10k considerably faster than the previous ones. DA marco assured us it was definitely 10k we had just done, so we set off happy for the next 10k. i cycled with guitarsteve most of the rest of the way and he had his first ever chocolate minstrel, from lovely ellie from macmillan cancer support, at around 2750m, what a cool place to have your first minstrel. minstrels taste amazing after a hardcore 30k uphill ride that’s for sure. at one point i noticed a cute furry little caterpillar that looked like a pipe cleaner and guitarsteve cycled back to look at it, which i thought was insanity to add 3 metres down and 3 metres up hill to an already massive amount, just to look at a caterpillar. perhaps the minstrel had gone to his head by this point though. 40-50k went on and on and on and kind of defeated me into a delirium, every corner you were hoping there would be the next fuel stop and it never came, the corners just went on and on and on and you keep pedaling and you’re going slower than you’ve ever cycled in your life and you can’t imagine how you will even keep going, but you do somehow. times like that is when you remember why you are doing the challenge, and you think of the fact that it isn’t as challenging as having cancer or losing someone to cancer, and that thank god you are fit and healthy and no matter how hard this is you should be grateful you can do it, and grateful to all the people that have sponsored you to do it and help continue macmillan’s work. all that is what keeps you going mentally. and also some sort of internal competitiveness that comes from growing up with an older brother who was really good at everything and had a better bike than me, and he could cycle with no hands and when i tried it i fell into a rose bush and got all scratched; or another time me and him and dad went riding and i had a crap old bike and couldn’t keep up with them and threw my bike on the floor in a tantrum. so thanks james and dad for instilling in me the need to prove a point to the world.

on arriving at 50k DA fiona told us that actually yes that last 10k was in fact 13k and the one before it had been slightly under 10k too (the one we had thought we had done really quickly). at least we weren’t going mad then, and good news as that meant there were only 5k left to the very top instead of the 8k we thought it would be. we refueled (with food you understand, not petrol), and set off. it took me 1 hour 10 minutes to do this last 5k, which makes it a speed of 4 point something k per hour which makes me want to cry even thinking about it now. this was the hardest and steepest hill i have ever cycled up, way tougher than any of the days on land’s end john o’groats, and much harder than day 5 in peru which was the challenge day there and was 5 hours up hill on a dirt road with big rocks. i had to stop every 200m or so to rest and swear a bit, and it was getting cold and cloudy as i was nearing the summit, though i had no idea how much further away that was. i was going so slowly i was practically going back in time by this point. guitar(minstrel)steve was still with me but i had had to resort to listening to my ipod to occupy my delirious brain. finally there was a sign saying el mirador (viewpoint) (not really a view to see as we were inside a cloud by now) which i knew meant the top, and there was one of the vans and inside it was siob, ninjasteve and simear, who had been there a while and were equally delirious. i threw my bike on the floor, downed some boiling hot coffee and collapsed in a heap.

there was 8k or so left to the campsite, but mainly downhill and euphoric knowing we had conquered the evil hill. i cycled the last bit with siob and ninjasteve and we crossed the finishing line together. all the tents had been put up by people already at camp, hooray, and robin had beaten his record and done it in 3 hours 45 minutes, hooray. it had taken me from 7am to 6pm approximately, i don’t think that breaks any records and i certainly won’t be returning to see if i can do it any faster. ate dinner and went to bed just a bit exhausted.

marks out of ten: 10 for having finished it, but downgraded to 7 for it being so horrendous and making us cry.

thursday march 12, day 4: 20 questions
thank god it’s not day 3 basically was what characterized day 4. my legs were totally powerless, and we had a big long climb in the morning can you believe it. not too steep thankfully and lots of nice pine trees to look at along the way. lunch was by another river where we did some more timotei advert moments, and threw rocks at other rocks – why is that always so entertaining? me and craig found some swings to swing on and craig told me he used to be a professional footballer until he broke both his legs, which was interesting, i think it was dundee united he played for. we had a strange and very bland fruit as part of our lunch, you put lime and chilli on it to make it tasty, but it still wasn’t. after lunch was loads of downhill, ellie nearly fell off into a ditch but managed to hold it together, and nick from gladiators flew over a speedbump and got loads of nasty road rash injuries on her arms and legs which the docs bandaged up. the speedbumps (topes in spanish) appear with absolutely no warning in mexico which is not good when you’re going down hill fast. you always have to be on the look out for them, generally if there are houses or villages around there will be topes, but sometimes they just appear in the middle of nowhere to catch you out.

me siob kim and jason played 20 questions to pass the time going up the long hills. we thought of more animals with special powers that also rhyme, like a gorilla that’s good with polyfilla or a wood louse that could build you a house. other interesting things were that jane and jeanette got renamed french and saunders, and kim lives on a houseboat near london. the campsite today was rocky and really thorny with funny little plants with spikes everywhere. there were no bugs though as we were still fairly high up, probably around 2600m. we tried to bang in the tent pegs with rocks but this mainly just bent the tent pegs. tsk, this would never happen in peru. nor would the toilets we had, which were long-drop toilets, ie a hole in the ground that you do your stuff into and then shovel a bit of dirt back over it. which is fine if you are one of the first to use it, but it quickly fills up and becomes the opposite of a hole. me and siob chose to just wee right by our tent if we had to get up in the night, or in fact in the morning behind a little spiky bush and it turned out everyone was watching – we thought they had started the warm up already and were busy doing that. perverts.

interesting facts: ann who is a pilates instructor studied stage management at guildhall which is where i used to work.

marks out of ten: 7, as i was tired from day 3 still.

friday march 13, day 5: eat my dust
uh oh friday the 13^th. lots of people had had strange dreams, due to the altitude i think, and from the strange cow noises that went on during the night. jeanette heard the cow right by her tent and thought it was going to eat her and jane. jane told her to be quiet and go back to sleep. jane is very caring like that, i wondered if she was a nurse she had such a compassionate nature. in fact she makes evening wear, or so she says – she didn’t manage to rustle up any ballgowns for us despite constant pestering. today was a really nice long 17k ascent to a place called la cumbre which means the summit, with a good view and a few little shops, but no ice creams. my muscles were starting to hurt less by today and the up hill was becoming about 1% easier finally. then we had a 30k downhill to oaxaca, really nice swooping corners, good vintage of tarmac and nice views. some of the boys went crazy fast which scared me a bit as you never know what the traffic is going to do, often you see buses overtaking lorries on blind corners here. thankfully nobody died. there were lots of potentially rabid dogs along the way but if you pretend you are throwing a stone at them or kicking them they generally run away from you. we regrouped and cycled through the outskirts of oaxaca, which could have been my hometown if i had taken the job at the berlitz school in december but isn’t. it was busy traffic but mostly very polite and didn’t mind waiting for us all to go past, which would never happen in london. i had a wee at the side of the road. we undulated along in the heat until the lunch stop in zaachila, which was a cute little town with a square and a large clock and a market but nowhere to get a good coffee. would have gone and prayed for one in the church in the square but that was closed too. inigo (mexican bike crew man) told me a shop i could get one at but when i went there it was selling only coffee beans and i didn’t happen to have my coffee bean grinding machine or kettle with me on the bike so that was no good either. sat and ate my lunch in a minor depression at all this hardship and wondered if i could cycle to the nearest airport and fly to the beach instead.

after lunch DA decided to change the route a bit for a short cut as there wasn’t too much day left and we still had a way to go. so we then had 10k along a dirt sand track which was cool but hard work as you really wiggle around if you get in vaguely deep sand and then fall over. at least you only fall into sand so it’s not too painful. it feels like you have a puncture as you can’t control where the bike is going very easily. i cycled with graham who is robin’s friend but isn’t insane like robin who cycles at least 50 miles every day in his normal life in preston. graham had a cool compass on his bike handlebars. after the dirt road there was lots of long flat-ish road to the campsite which had a pool which we all jumped into in our cycling clothes. really nice treat after long hot dusty day, as were the (freezing cold) showers and proper toilets. me and siob hung our clothes out to dry in a tree which became known as the clothes tree. we put our tent up and yet again wondered how come we were so crap at putting our tent up. we put it right next to one of the swimming pools and hoped we wouldn’t forget in the night and walk into it. drank beer and ate dinner and talked to jamie who works for open university which is interesting as i did one of their music courses a few years ago. he told me about one of their other courses which he referred to as t189 but i don’t know what that means now as i am not fluent on all my open university course codes and it sounds like something to do with robots like r2d2, and consequently me and craig laughed quite a lot, i hope jamie wasn’t offended (my music course code was a214 fyi). peter who is a doctor and lives in the lake district did an impressive trick with a broom which we tried to do but weren’t bendy enough. it involves kind of bending yourself around it in a yogic way, hard to explain in words, maybe peter has a video of it he can share with us?

interesting fact: when siob met me on the peru bike ride she thought i was a good at negotiating corners on my bike despite not being able to drive which is strange as i could drive, perhaps she had mis-overheard some conversation.

marks out of ten: 3 at midday, but 9 by dinner time thanks to clothes tree amusement and beers.

saturday march 14, day 6: shift f7 (thesaurus)
today was the 7 year old tarmac day, and there was no note on the map saying not to scale, so we could only presume that it was to scale. DA fiona used the word soporific in a briefing which really impressed us and also proved that she is a bit posh too, otherwise she would have said sleepy. me and siob got our tent down super fast and stood around waiting for our prize but it didn’t appear so after that we regressed back to doing things slowly. this morning was some truly undulating undulations. i got carried away and cycled as fast as i could as it was so much fun, and then completely ran out of energy and thought oops you wouldn’t catch lance doing that. we regrouped by a few shops and ate some really strange little bananas that dried out your whole mouth, perhaps they had loads of potassium in? there was then a quite hardcore 10k climb to lunch. as usual, robin did the climb in about 1 second so he cycled back down to encourage people who were struggling and to update us on how much further there was to go – what a nice man. but still mental. at the lunch stop there were lots of hungry looking dogs, we gave them some nachos. one of them looked a bit like a dog crossed with a bear so we called him dogbear.

after lunch was a load of downhill, we had been looking forward to this, but sadly it was into a headwind so wasn’t that much fun. what a let down, the reason you do the up hills is to get a good load of down hill so it’s pretty disappointing when it doesn’t deliver. we stopped at a café bar in a town next to a bike shop and ordered some coffee which turned out to be hotter than the sun and all i managed was one gulp and third degree internal burns and then we were off again. 18k up hill was not a nice prospect at this point so i also downed an energy gel and ate 5000 nutrigrain bars to get me started. i cycled with siob and ellie (no minstrels today), and we called ourselves team womb as that was one obvious thing we had in common i suppose. someone pointed out that it could stand for women on mountain bikes which was rather clever. there was also team mabob which was middle age birds on bikes, which was ann (jamie’s wife who also works at open university but didn’t throw strange r2d2 acryonyms at me), little siobhan who sailed round the world, and marion who is from Ireland and is a nurse in walthamstow. we asked her which famous marion she’d rather be and she said maid marion. the up hill seemed to get longer and longer, and the sun was beginning to get lower in the sky and we started panicking that if we didn’t step on it we’d get ‘swept up’ into the van and driven into camp. there was no way that was going to happen we decided, and stepped it up a gear. ie we went at tortoise pace rather than snail pace. my strange toe and foot issue became an issue again at tortoise pace, but we had to get to the top so we could have the 15k downhill to camp. thankfully we had miscalculated the distance left, and what we thought was 4k left was more like 2k and we turned the corner and there was the top, and DA fiona and some others shouting encouragement. i weed behind someone’s small wooden house, put ninjasteve’s bright yellow lollipop lady jacket on as it was cold and getting less daylight, and then off we went down the hill. for me this was really the best moment of the whole ride, the sun was almost setting, there was amazing huge vast mountainous scenery, clouds with sun behind them that looked a little bit like heaven and i’m not even religious, lovely tarmac and sweeping corners, and we’d put in a lot of effort all day and there was nothing more left other than this downhill to enjoy.

camp was a lay-by at the side of the road, the first and nicest lay-by i’ve ever camped in and very much undersold by DA. rocky ground, but we put some of our guy ropes round other people’s pegs so we didn’t have to strain ourselves too much putting pegs in the impossible ground. sneaky. sheila had fallen off her bike at the bottom of the downhill, and had been bandaged up by doctor helen and doctor derek. doctor Derek was on our trip in peru too, he is from scotland and has done loads of cool trips since we last saw him in peru. doctor helen had a good joke about daz and how it stops colours from running. drank some beers in our lay-by and went to sleep hoping none of the mexican lorry drivers would drink or sleep drive over our little campsite during the night.

interesting fact: ellie’s mum mrs whitfield teaches maths at the school i went to for my a-levels in bradford.

marks out of ten: 10 for the amazing downhill and the novelty of camping in a lay-by.

sunday march 15, day 7: injuries
i can’t remember much of today’s cycling, but the notes i made say: ‘downhill. 30k uphill. craig’s bike squeaky. long climb to lunch. military stop. simon off edge of cliff. simon cowell cut foot open in river. drunk boy at lunchtime’.

so there was some downhill, from which simon flew off the edge and fell 25feet into a ravine. amazingly he was ok, perhaps it was the strength of his tattoos that saved him. there was a very drunk boy at our lunch stop, ninjasteve told me he was the son of the owner of the little restaurant there. the drunk boy told me he loved me and would i come and see his room. ninjasteve said maybe i should, i could stay and marry him and would inherit the restaurant. tempting as it was i declined. i think he told some other people he loved them too, so obviously i was fairly heartbroken. i think today was the lunch stop that on the way there me and siob commented to each other, oh we’re doing ok today, seems like nobody’s gone past us for ages, we must be somewhere near the front. turned out we were right at the back and there was nobody left to go past us. very amusing.

that night we camped by a river which doubled as a bath as usual. we quickly drank the bar dry as it was the penultimate day of cycling. simon cowell barry stood on something sharp in the river and had 3 stitches in his foot. it wasn’t a shark or a sting ray. we sat round a campfire by the river and guitarsteve played his guitar and robin played the harmonica. we looked at the stars for a while. feels like something cheesy out of dawson’s creek now that i write this. to bring it back down to earth kim challenged siob to a fight, and siob laughed in her face. siob’s wrestling name is giganticos, she is very tall and once she nearly broke my leg in one second in a leg wrestling match. so watch out kim you don’t know who you’re messing with.

interesting fact: some of the group (i’m not sure exactly who) had had a sweepstake on how many days i would wear my stinky dirty cycling top, and i had outdone even the highest bid….. in my defense, i’ve not got too many clothes left having been away from england for around 7 months now so you’re lucky i didn’t wear just one cycling top for the whole 8 days.
marks out of ten: 9 – closest i’ve ever come to marrying into money.

monday march 16, day 8: not flat all day
el dia ultimo. long uphill from the dawson’s creek camp, which felt like one of those dreams where you’re expending all your energy on trying to get somewhere and you’re hardly moving. i guess that is what happens when you do only 6 hours training for a huge massive strenuous bike ride, i literally did not have any muscles, like that mr man character, mr jelly. my favourite was mr bump, i liked his bandage round his head, and when my brother fell off his bike into a brick wall a few years ago and we went to get him in hospital he looked just like that which made me laugh (not at the time as i was quite worried, but definitely afterwards in hindsight). anyway i digress. we took photos from the top of the bit we had come to, and wondered when we’d be able to see the sea, as we were now very close to puerto escondido, our final destination. we carried on on some great undulations and you really noticed the heat as we got closer to the coast and lower down towards sea level. we regrouped for our final regroup, at a small bar that probably wondered what the hell was going on with 50 sunburnt english cyclists turning up on a monday morning. we had celebratory coronas, hard to hold when your hands are so numb (as i write this my 2 last fingers on my right hand are still numb at the ends), and generally rejoiced that it was all over and hadn’t we done well. from the atlantic coast we had cycled 650 kilometres - via huge vertical mountains, swarms of mosquitoes, lovely toilets, one shower in 8 days, nutrigrains galore, confusing maps that weren’t to scale, bananas that dehydrated you, dogs that tried to trip you up, campsites in the most unlikely of places – to the pacific coast, all still alive (some less so than others). we cycled that last few k to coco’s beach club which was our last lunch stop, and ran straight onto the beach and jumped into the sea. then pretty much jumped out again as the waves and current are pretty strong here, and instead sat safely where the little waves were. would be quite ironic to drown in the celebration waves after all that hard work. was quite spectacular sea and waves and rocks and all felt quite poignant as i realized what we had achieved. you don’t think about it whilst you’re actually doing it, you just get on with it and think about the next nutrigrain stop and chat to whoever you’re cycling next to, and take in the scenery and the moment, and then before you realize it you’ve finished and you’re celebrating and you know that you’ll have to think about returning to normal life again soon which is a real bummer. so you start planning your next ride of course, which is central america from panama to nicaragua, for macmillan again, in november, (depending on whether i can fundraise enough for them and whether they have spaces left). and then somewhere in the future after that is from mexico (or Alaska, still in discussions, mainly with myself) to patagonia. more to come on this later.

anyway after the poignant sea, we drank pina coladas, ate our last pasta with spam lunch, swam in the pool, drank more pina coladas, then were told to get back on our bikes and cycle to our hotel up the road! fat chance, not up that hill. i pushed my bike this last bit and checked in to our amazing hotel, which looked like a turkish mosque, was all painted white with arabic style décor and arches, and a swimming pool. i hope nobody out there that sponsored us for our ride will hold it against us that we had this one night of luxury after all our hard work for the last 8 days, i really feel that we deserved it after everything. it was such a relief to get in a proper bed and a proper shower, and unpack our things and make ourselves look human again and not like smelly tramps. we had a celebration meal at the coco beach club, where there were cool swingy chairs round the bar, and ellie made a big speech about how amazing we all were. well i presume that was what it was about, but i can’t remember too much of the whole night, sorry ellie. predictably and in typical pickles style i lost most of my possessions throughout the night. we went out into puerto escondido too apparently, but i can’t recall much about that either.

interesting fact: if you order a shot of tequila at the coco beach club, they automatically bring you the one that costs 95 pesos, ie the most expensive.
marks out of ten: 10! despite, and because of, the above fact.