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.