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 3rd best place in the world for surfing, the first is hawaii and i don’t know the 2nd, maybe it’s 2 different places in hawaii that are 1st and 2nd 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.
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