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.

alive alive o

hi i hope there are still some people out there who will read my blog once i have written it.... i am still alive, currently in san pedro, the main town on ambergris caye, a lovely island off the coast of belize, just south of mexico. we stayed with mr computer virus john mcafee who is very nice and has a lovely house as you would expect. lots of books, not sure he's read them all or if they're just for show. he told me i had to get a tattoo, i told him i didn't want to thank you very much. he took me jet skiing and gave me an A as i didn't fall off and he said all the other people he's taken jet skiing always fall in. bert told him it was because i am a triathlete, i said i don't think having done a triathlon nearly 2 years ago technically makes me a triathlete does it.

john has lots of dogs that he has adopted that just wander around the island. one of them had to go to the vets as it's nose was bleeding a lot. he is still at the vet getting better, they said he wouldn't have made it if he'd got there any later. i think it's something to do with tics in his blood which is not very nice. later today we are flying down to placencia in the south to stay with another of bert's friends on a sailboat. i think this is still technically rehab after the mexico bike ride, though it does seem to be a rather long holiday. anyway we are hoping to move out here to san pedro very soon and start the flying business out here, as it is prime territory for it, ie full of rich tourists, and beautiful flying over the reef and the sea. you can see the sting rays and sharks and fish from the plane, the sea is so clear and blue out here it really is amazing. will post some photos soon hopefully.

hope you all had a good easter. we spent it in antigua, guatemala, where it is a very big deal there, they have processions for the whole week, and wear little purple costumes, and they take the statues out of the churches and parade them around the streets with incense which hurts your throat if you stand there for too long breathing it all in. was very exciting but to be honest we were all processioned out by the end of the week and ready to leave.

in other news i hear lance armstrong has stapled his collarbone back together and will be doing the tour de france. hooray. we bought a chess board but don't really know how to play. so far it is 2-1 to bert. a page of my book blew out of my book and into the sea when i was sitting reading on the pier, but thankfully it was a page i'd already read. maybe it will land on a seashore near you soon, if so please post it back to me - page 98 of love in the time of cholera. we saw a stickfish, they are really cute, like little sticks that float around standing up in the water and look like sticks. obviously. oh and i bought a guitar in antigua and am trying to advance on the few chords i know already so i can play some songs.

all for now, more soon xx

hang on in there...

your hands must all be hurting from hanging on to that cliff edge of suspense wondering what has happened to me these last few weeks... here is a taster of what is to come when i have time to write the next blog update which should be within the next week:

8 days in a tent and on a bike! rehabilitating on the beach! non-existent flamingoes! a swiss man! sharks that were really dolphins! cheese hands! an injection! ants invading! the most beautiful waterfall in the world! the craziest coincidental meeting of some cyclists ever! a dog that looked like a bear! a pizza! a poco loco border crossing! a missed bus! AND MORE!

ok enough exclamation marks for now. am currently in xela (quetzaltenango) in west guatemala, where it is cold and mountainous and beautiful and me and bert are going to find some food after a long day of driving. tomorrow we head to antigua (in guatemala, not the caribbean island). i hope i haven´t lost all my blog readers in the meantime. more very soon. xx

big fat fatty mexican feet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

bubble inspectors

i feel the need to for once explain today's blog title (don't get used to it though, i have to retain a sense of mystery you know). it's quite banal - whenever bert washes up he does it the american non-eco friendly way ie keep the tap running the whole time with no plug in thus wasting both water and fairy liquid, then pile up the bubbly dishes in the next sink along, to be rinsed off with more global warming hot water later. i say why not just fill the sink up and wash them that way and the bubbles can go to hell, but he insists that if any bubbles are left on the plates they can mutate in your stomach when you next eat from them and then kill you. i ask if they have bubble inspectors in america. then laugh as i like the sound of bubble inspectors. anyway, there you have an insight into a typical conversation over here.

to begin at the beginning of where i left off

wednesday 25th
went on a bike ride. and a walk. saw some birds with tails like this /\ like swallows. i think they are called frigate birds. there are loads of different types of birds in belize, and lots of bird watching goes on. didn't see any gibnuts sadly. bert spent the day with marius the lithuanian photographer, trying to sort out things like his phone and his computer, which he can't do his photography without. the verdict was the computer was broken, so marius would have to return to miami to the apple shop to get a new one tomorrow. marius has previously made a photo book of lithuania, called unseen lithuania, which has drastically improved tourism to the country and the profile of the country in general, and he got the equivalent of an obe from the prime minister at an award ceremony recently. his book is
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=unseen+lithuania&x=17&y=20

thursday 26th
we took marius to the airport with his sidekick darjius. we stopped at a roadside coconut stall on the way and drank some coconut water which was nice. there were some sugar canes there too which you can chew on, but we didn't. and also the coconut man tried to sell us some marijuana which we didn't want either. after dropping him off we went to brody's again, and this time i bought some pesto! some chocolate buttons! a kitkat! i looked at some shorts too in the clothes section, and asked the lady there how the sizes worked, and she helpfully explained that small was smaller than medium, and medium was a bit bigger than small. well, perhaps i asked a stupid question.. then to the bike shop to stock up on energy gels for my bike ride. they were all out of them as there are lots of events going on like bike rides, and there is also the ruta maya, which is a 150mile canoe race (which starts tomorrow in fact and goes for 4 days - people come from all over the world but they aren't able to beat the belizeans yet). the bike shop is proving to be a little bit stupid, but with it being belize you have to forgive them i suppose. the amount of times a day that i have to excuse belize for being a little bit stupid ... it is a hard place to live sometimes, and not very straightforward. but it does have beautiful birds and now kit kats too.

we came back with darjius and went to sit around at the pool up the road at mick fleming's resort, chaa creek. this is a really beautiful eco lodge place, mick and his wife lucy have been there for 32 years, at first it was a little farm, and they canoed their produce up to town to sell it - read more here in this daily telegraph article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/centralamericaandcaribbean/belize/4296025/Belize-Just-the-spot-for-an-idler-Indiana-Jones.html

they have just built the pool recently and it is proving very popular. if we go there when it's a bit cloudy it's great as nobody will be in it and i can do lengths, as it's 60 feet long (around 20m). it's an infinity pool and the water splashes off the edge when you swim fast, down into the kiddy pool, haven't managed to drown any kids yet though. the only problem is the tiles around it get a bit slippy but some of the workers were sweeping the water off the tiles this time.

friday 27th
darjius drove back to the airport to get marius who had successfully bought his new computer from the apple shop. he had also bought us an i-tripp which is a device that means you can play your ipod in the car, so now we have more choices than the scratched phil collins, eric clapton and steve miller band cds. on their way back to san ignacio we had asked mariusdarjius to stop at pepperland, which is a place with a very well manicured lawn, which is locally famous for it's peppered chicken. we had excitedly ordered our chicken 2 weeks ago and had been counting down the days until we could have our pepperland chicken. but in typical belize style, they had no recollection or record of our order. i had even gone to the trouble of writing them a letter for mariusdarjius to give to them in case of any confusion regarding our order, but maybe this confused the matter more. anyway, thankfully there were some chickens left, so mariusdarjius successfully procured one for us.

meanwhile we went to the pool again, then walked back home as we were carless. i despaired that this was going to take us hours, and in the midday sun was envisaging us being burnt to a crisp and almost dead, but in the end it was a really nice 45 minute walk. we played animal vegetable mineral on the way. i introduced the extra categories of country and fruit. a typical round goes like this: bert-are you an animal?me-no.b-are you a vegetable?me-yes.b-are you a potato?me-no.b-are you a carrot?me-no.b-are you a red pepper?me-no.bert you are meant to ask other questions to narrow down the options of which vegetable i am, like are you green, rather than just guessing all the vegetables one after the other.b-oh. are you green?me-no.b-are you an onion then?etc etc.

when the car and mariusdarjius returned we set off for blancaneaux lodge, up in the pine ridge forest. well, down i should say as it is south of us. bert and marius flew there (there is a runway there) so they could do photos en route, and me and darjius drove with the luggage and extra fuel for the ultralight. it's a 10 minute flight, and around a 1 hour and 20 minute drive, through san ignacio then up a pot-holed road with pot holes big enough to lose your whole car in. this then turns into a dirt road and goes through some nice little mayan villages, one called cristo rey which means christ the king. driving here is quite something, in villages there are speedbumps which spring upon you with very little or usually no warning, and can be very steep; out of villages the roads are riddled with the aforementioned pot holes and people and dogs/cows/horses. you have to keep your wits about you. after a while on this road you come to a little gate where a man pops out of a box and asks you nicely where you are going and you write your name and origin (i wrote england, but i wonder if i should have just written san ignacio) on his list, then he opens the little gate for you and you carry on. this is the beginning of the pine ridge forest so i suppose they want to know what you are doing there and for how long. then after another 20 minutes of dusty road and lovely pine trees you arrive at blancaneaux lodge. i have been here before, it's the francis ford coppola place with the apocalypse now fan.

we all had pizza for dinner, it was really good pizza, maybe even as good as the one we had in placencia last week. i looked in the gift shop as is my wont, just so i know what my options are, and in case there are any good maps we should stock up with. i like having maps around me and one day will wallpaper a whole room in my house with them, though i am aware this is quite a cliched idea. we went for a mini swim after the pizza in the horseshoe-shaped hot tub. there was one stray leafcutter ant at the side of the horseshoe pool, walking up and down with a little piece of leaf on his back, i didn't know it was possible to feel sorry for an ant until i saw him there all alone. the nights in the pine ridge get very cold, and the mornings, as we are higher up there. i enjoyed this sudden return to actual fluctuating temperatures and wished i lived in the mountains. though i'm sure i'd find a reason to not like it, like it would be too hilly or there'd be too many trees. the next day at breakfast there was an american couple like this, they ordered the fruit plate but only with melon and papaya please, the waiter said oh it comes with pineapple, bananaIONLYWANTPAPAYAANDMELONISAID. oh yes ok that's fine - the staff are all trained to be very friendly and polite, but bert and i decided that if that was us we would have brought them the whole plate and told them to shove the pineapple and banana. ANYWAY. then they discussed how they had much preferred the bread at their last resort, he said wasn't it great that last bread we had, it was kinda fat bread wasn't it, you know, kinda fat. she agreed it had been great, and yeah kinda fat bread. i can't picture what they meant by fat bread and zoned out of my eavesdropping as far as was humanly possible which wasn't really possible as they were those kind of people. anyway, such is life. i had 2 soft boiled eggs for breakfast, with hash browns. and didn't complain about any of it, other than that the egg white was too white, the egg yoke was too yellow, the hash browns weren't actually brown and my orange juice was orange.

saturday 28th
was a well deserved day of rest, like lots of my days seem to be these days when not driving on bumpy roads. i sat on the balcony of our villa and read my book, and some of my newsweek magazine which i had bought at brody's. i learnt about the russian, iranian and venezuelan petro-czars potential falls from power, and how the price of oil is $37 compared to last summer's high of $148 a barrel. luckily i only need small amounts of oil for my bike chain, so this shouldn't affect me too much. i also learnt there are some riots in moscow due to unemployment, and that sarkozy wants to let french people work as many hours a week as they want, and that north korea has made a multistage weapon that could reach the west coast of america, which seems quite scary to me.

then we swam in the river a bit, it's a really clean and clear mountain river, so i didn't freak out about not being able to see the bottom as this time i could, and i could tell there weren't any sharks or crocodiles there. then we had a cup of tea and got bitten by lots of little bugs because we were sitting outside. in the villa there was a burst pipe and water had poured all over our lounge from behind the fridge, it was hot water though which makes no sense to me that that should be coming out of a fridge. then bert and marius did more flying/photographing, and i went for a run on the appropriately named runway. i learnt an important lesson which was don't go running until you have digested your cup of tea properly otherwise it will give you cramp and also slosh around in your stomach. i managed to run for 30 minutes though with a few minutes rest in the middle. that night we had pasta for dinner. there are some things on the menu there called things like mrs coppola's famous chicken, which sound nice, and i wonder if they really are her recipes? incidentally the much-feted pepperland chicken did not live up to its reputation and we left it in the villa fridge on leaving.

sunday 1st march
white rabbits white rabbits. we packed up and left to go up north to a place called gallon jug. apparently it was named that because they found bits of jug type pottery in the region when they started working there on the mayan ruins. we first drove back to our runway here (i took advantage of this stop to get some chocolate buttons from the fridge at home), then carried on to gallon jug. when you look at gallon jug on the map it is only a short distance north east of us. but then when you look at the roads, you see you have to go to belize city on the east coast, then up north to orange walk, then back down a little road at the end of which is gallon jug. we thought blimey this will take around 6 hours and it really isn't very far away (kind of like driving from leeds to manchester but having to go via london as there is no connecting road between leeds and manchester). but a friend of bert's had told us there was in fact a forest road that goes directly there but isn't marked on the map and only should take 2 hours. hooray. but it is prohibited to use it without a permit. uh oh. but he had procured us a permit. hooray. but we also would need a guide to show us the way. uh oh. but he had a guide sorted to go with us. hooray. so we went to pick up melvin, who is originally from guatemala, but used to work at gallon jug and now works in san ignacio for this friend of bert's, who was our guide.

a few more pot-holed roads later, you get to the beginning of what is called the yalbac reserve, which is the protected forest you need the permit to pass through. although technically we had a permit, we did not actually have it with us after some standard belizean muddle that afternoon. uh oh. it took 15 minutes of melvin talking to the gate keeper man, who only spoke spanish, in order to get in to the yalbac. we offered money but he said no, no, tengo un sueldo (i am paid) - what a good man, uncorruptable in such a sea of corruption. i think it's technically the first time i've offered a vaguely official person a bribe. we explained how important it was we got to gallon jug as we had the fuel for the plane for the photoshoot for the belize photobook. he didn't really care about that, but eventually he gave way as he knew melvin and knew the names of the people we were talking about who had granted us the permit. hooray. then lots more dirt road with lots of holes and trees overhanging, but darjius drove this bit. hooray. i had been thinking along the way that it seems like the beginning of a joke, but i couldn't think of a punchline - a lithuanian, a guatemalan and an english person were driving through the forest in belize...

gallon jug is a little village and a farm and ranch and it has a coffee factory, and a saw mill. it is owned by barry bowen, the richest man in belize, who also owns the belikin beer brewery, and a shrimp farm in placencia, and the distribution rights for coca cola, fanta etc in belize. he has a runway and a little aeroplane. he owns 370,000 acres of land, all mainly thick jungle, but also this bit and the chan chich resort. chan chich means little bird, and that was where we stayed for 2 nights. it was beautiful, and the food there is the best food i've had in belize, and maybe in the whole world. i guess beautiful surroundings and jungly noises and a bumpy forest road adventure all add to the taste, like when you are camping and you make beans and egg on toast for breakfast on your little campfire but it tastes like the best thing you've ever eaten because you're outside and you've managed to cook it on your little gas cooker in the wild after a night in your tent. like ray mears would, except he would have done it underwater in the arctic whilst also building a house out of ant poo and with only one arm because of surviving a grizzly bear attack in the previous series.

me and bert went to tie down the glider in case of wind or rain overnight, but on the way to the airstrip the weather cleared up nicely and became blue blue skies so we decided to go flying. i had a skirt on, and sandles - not ideal flying clothes, but we found a sock in the car and i put a cloth bag on my other foot to keep it warm. we didn't have headsets so couldn't talk to each other either. it was really cool flying around over the jungle and over a little village called sylvester where they were out playing sunday evening football. everyone looked up and waved. we flew low over some little lakes with waterlilies in them and birds flying along them.

monday 2nd
another relaxing day for me, while bert and marius flew and photo'd. they get up very early to fly, like from 6am to around 9 or 10, as that is when the light is best for photos, as there are more shadows on the land because of the angle of the sun, which adds to depth perception in the photos. then they come back, and fly again around 4-6pm when there are shadows again. during the day we read our books, then went cycling along a forest trail which became a bit too foresty and there were loads of tree roots to negotiate, and one of us fell off but i won't say who. it wasn't a serious fall and he will still be able to fly ultralights. oops that gave it away. i went for another run, without a cup of tea first, and it was much nicer than the blancaneaux run. during the afternoon marius also photographed lots of the people that work at chan chich as he is including portraits of all the different types of people of belize in the book too. i had to get them to fill in release forms, and write their names big so they could hold them up in the photo so we know who they are. this was fun, and they enjoyed it too. my favourite was veronika from the kitchen with her blue headscarf and only a few front teeth still there, i spoke to her in spanish. i hope her photo gets in the book.

bert and marius went for the evening flight and took photos of the lodge, and the lakes nearby. i went cycling for a while on a mountain bike, down the road from the resort back to the farm area where the airstrip is, this turned out to be a 30 minute ride alone, and i managed to spook myself out by wondering what were all those strange jungly noises, there is dense jungle at either side of the road. i kept looking with my beady eyes (or at least with the one long-sighted beady eye) to my right and left, but didn't spot any man-eating jaguars. i cycled around the ranch/farm area, through some more jungly paths, saw lots of deer, and lots of wild turkey with amazing iridescent feathers. they landed - bert and marius, not the turkeys, they don't seem to leave the ground actually - and we drove back to the lodge and had more amazing food, and a swim, and heard some howler monkeys howling throughout the night. they sound like dinosaurs, their howling is so loud and eery, but the swishing of the branches as they swing through the jungle so soothing like waves.

tuesday 3rd
banana and walnut pancakes for breakfast. then we pack up and leave, me darjius and melvin in the car still without the punchline, bert and marius in the glider. i drove the bumpy road this time, and on arriving at the gate man, we gave him a little bottle of rum and a packet of cigarettes that darjius had brought with him. he had no trouble accepting our gifts which was reassuring after the strange rejection of our monetary bribe. the rest of the journey passed uneventfully, we dropped off melvin at his little wooden house then i dropped darjius at their hotel in town, then went home for some more chocolate buttons. then back to the hotel to help with the photoshoot of the people. we had rounded up a family of mennonites who are friends of bert's as frank, the dad, is also a pilot, they live up at spanish lookout and are lovely people, really friendly. there are 6 children altogether but only 4 came for the photoshoot, plus the mum. also my spanish teacher (though i still haven't had a lesson yet) came along in her mayan (not lion, mum) costume. and some others too, including the champion unbeatean ruta maya canoe race canoist, armin lopez. he had muscly arms. more flying for bert and marius then a business meeting and that was the end of that day.

wednesday and thursday 4th and 5th
i shall merge them into one as i am tired and there isn't too much to say. mariusdarjius left back to lithuania on wednesday. i unpacked and half re packed for mexico, whence i fly on saturday. i'm not sure that is the correct usage of whence but it seemed the correct word for what i wanted to say and it's not often you get to use whence especially on a blog. we cleaned the car and my bike. bert got upset when some dust blew back onto the super clean car. i had asked at some point in the rather military car cleaning proceedings what the point was of polishing it so earnestly when we live on a dirt road and dirt would get straight back on it. i took particular delight in reminding him of this question when the dirt blew back onto the car after around 1 minute of driving along. at least we know it was once super clean i suppose. we watched mama mia which is quite a bizarre musical film based around abba songs and set on a greek island. my first reaction was oh my god i can't watch this drivel, but i became hooked after the first few abba songs, and was so into it i nearly cried by the end.

so i fly to mexico city on saturday morning very early from chetumal, the town just over the border, to meet the macmillan bike ride group that night for the ride which starts on monday. i'm not sure when i will next have chance to blog, but given the length of today's blog you are probably pleased to hear that.

over and out from pepperland pickles xx