It All Started With Asia the Strange

Bus Balls And Well-Dressed Bums

katiedoestheworld — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:31:00 GMT

I just can’t kick the habit. At the end of every day dwells a “bus tale.” Yes, one is not all that different from another. In fact, they’re horribly boring to me on some level yet I feel obliged to recount them on a regular basis to whoever will listen (usually my dog or Saul – and now, you). These experiences never provide me with revelations (except for the time I mistook “catolica” for “Caterina” while talking to a wrinkly, old missionary and fully realized my incapacity when it came to Spanish) nor are they particularly memorable, but I suppose that I must find them sufficiently amusing. Amusing enough that on my return to blogging after a 6-month hiatus it is going to be the first of my 2009 entries…sad, isn’t it?

Let’s say it’s not really about the bus, it’s more that I had an experience today that reminded me of a short scene in Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” where he is seated beside a woman on a plane who seems to be oozing fat and has taken up two seats instead of one. Well, I’ve had that experience too – but on top of the ooze factor, the woman kept on dropping her pen and requested (but mostly required) that I pick it up for her every time. I’m not neurotic but there’s a system…so of course I had my neck craned westward scanning the bus for empty seats from the moment I reached out to give the driver my fare. When I was just a few steps from my desired seat, the man walking in front of me went ahead and took it. There were plenty of other seats but just to make a point, I rushed up behind him as soon as he’d sat down and blurted, “Excuse me!” Excuse me, but I want to sit right next to you since you’ve just taken my seat. So here’s where the problem really begins.

For anyone who has visited/lived in Mexico, you will already understand the Mexican body. Just as Chinese (like myself) tend to have small upper bodies and are of a short stature, Dutch boast gigantic proportions and are typically blond, Mexicans too have a shape. Here in DF, what’s becoming more and more common is that Mexicans are becoming more and more rotund and straying further and further from their long-and-lean Aztec ancestors. Of course, the Aztecs weren’t their only ancestors but they were the group who primarily resided in Tenochtitlan. The general population in the city is short and when you factor in a 3-meals-a-day diet of Coke, corn, cheese, and meat you find that these small people tend to pack on the pounds pretty fast and become quite bloated. However, what’s intriguing is that Mexicans don’t get fat like their white neighbors to the north – there’s no oozing, it’s quite a phenomenon. Instead, the skin becomes tight around the fat, which generally tends to take up residence on the waist, arms, chin and (incredibly enough) fingers. Never the butt and never the legs. That’s not to say that oozing doesn’t ever happen…sure it does, but this cute butterball effect has been more commonly witnessed in my experience.

Seat-Stealer, I noticed, donned a lovely Hitler-esque mustache and a denim-coloured polyester suit that creased in all the wrong places for being a couple of sizes too small – he was definitely a butterball shape. He had just fallen back into the comfortable dip of his bus seat and let out an exasperated sigh when I came along with my flustered words and spiteful intentions (I know, it was wrong but that’s how it was at the time). I watched him tug himself out of his laidback position and move himself into the aisle (this was a privilege, trust you me. People here don’t usually slide over to the window seat when you ask them if you can sit next to them, nor do they stand up and move themselves into the aisle space to allow you in. They simply swivel their knees around so that their legs are in the aisle and prepare themselves for a different kind of “cheek-to-cheek” action than Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald were talkin’ about…) I might also explain that these two seats, in addition to the two across from them, were the worst seats on the bus and they always are: they are the bus wheel seats. I had wanted the aisle – it makes for an easier escape when it’s time to get off the bus. You don’t have to do as long an awkward bouncy bus dance towards the back because it’s right there, nor do you have to “rub cheeks” with anyone on your way out of the seat. All of these factors make for both a better and happier ride and rider in my opinion. But this time, I slid into the window seat. As I tried to come to terms with this terrible position I’d put myself in, I felt Seat-Stealer plop back down and I felt his knee (which were forcing themselves into the seat in front of him considerably higher because of the wheel than they would’ve been had we been seated anywhere else on the bus that fine afternoon) slide towards mine. When the polyester of his suit met with the plastic of the bus seats his knees found themselves moving away from each other – and towards me. So now I had a knee halfway across my leg space. I could deal with that.

But then he started getting “comfy.” It was as though he had been holding his breath for the first 10 minutes of the ride. He had sat there, knees splayed because they were uncontrollably moving apart like two negative sides of a magnet, back straight, everything contained, belly only inches away from the seat back in front of him, his chubby little arms desperately reaching for each other across his belly, holding on in a tight grasp, then losing each other again when he stopped concentrating on them and fell asleep…and then, suddenly! as though his lungs had put up a protest inside of his taut collared shirt, his quick, shallow breathing turned into one big sigh and everything came undone…fortunately not his shirt, but his arms, barely reaching, dropped onto his lap, his knees spread apart some more, his belly strained his shirt, and most noticeably, this “undoing” managed to squish me into just half of a seat.

I don’t mind a big person but I do mind when I’m robbed of my space. I passive-aggressively let out a few annoyed sighs, squirmed around in my seat a bit, and even went to the lengths of pretending to read my book fast so that I would have to turn its pages frequently and my arms would have to readjust – and I would do so obnoxiously. If only I’d chosen a different seat.

On top of my tight situation, we had scored a young, slick-haired teenaged driver who had his “ride” nearly doing side-wheelies every time he swerved between traffic or took corners. The roads are just not a safe place to be in Mexico City – and I would know. I spend about 3 hours a day either walking its streets or sweeping the pot-holed pavement in a pesero. Between the bus drivers who treat their routes like Nascar loops, pedestrians who insist on crossing roads everywhere BUT the street corner, and the hundreds of motorcyclists and bikers who whiz through traffic with ease but wear their helmet on their arm and not their head (no doubt your unscathed elbow will be very grateful when you get hit and killed by one of those raging bus driver) you’d better have that sixth sense for danger finely honed by the time you set foot on these streets.

On a positive note, it seems that the Chapel Bum who lives at the Chapultepec bus station has acquired a new suit. I saw him puttering about this morning at 6:30am in his new get-up and could only suppose that he was on his way back to his little shrine home. There are three regular residents at Chapultepec – the other two each occupy one beautiful stone bench near the main entrance to the park and are harmless. I’ve seen the chubby one, Dreads, on his feet a couple of times, usually with a torta in hand or in mouth, and the other one just sleeps – I’ve never seen his face as he’s usually sleeping and has his blanket pulled up over his head, but I have noticed that he has a decent pair of shoes on his feet. Chapel Bum, though he does occasionally venture out (such as he did this morning in his new suit), resides in a small standup shrine at the end of the benches. How he gets in and out I’m not sure. The slender doorway was only ever intended to provide space enough for a person to slip in a few offerings to Maria Guadalupe, flowers, candles, pictures, etc. so you can imagine how slim this chap is. Whatever the case and wherever his home, I was glad to see that he’d found himself a new suit.

In and Out of Culture Corner: Oaxaca

katiedoestheworld — Mon, 4 Aug 2008 08:25:00 GMT

Well, unfortunately during our first few days spent in Puerto Escondido, I learned that anger is contagious when I had that particularly memorable encounter with a very tangible breed of anger. But I'm glad to report that the latter half of our week in Puerto showed me that kindness is equally infectious and luckily things picked up for us at the tail end of our time spent at the beach: I discovered the joy that is RENT (thanks to our gay neighbour Juan's fine taste in musicals and his being kind enough to lend us some movies for the week) and that Super Chafa provides the town with at least one good product - goat cheese; we visited old friends and made new ones. Between the intense relaxing that was required of us, I took care of such domesticities as shaving doors, touching up filled-in holes with paint, paying bills, and killing giant ants who infested the place as soon as they sensed a food presence in the vicinity. One of the dateless days during the week, we arranged to meet up with Gerald and Yolani. Gerald is the newly-inaugurated President of the Rotary Club of Puerto Escondido and came to know our family through my Grandad, who, along with my Granny, has been a frequent visitor to this palm-tree-lined paradise. Somewhere in the years that they've been visiting, my Grandad attended Rotary meetings, forming a fellowship with the members of the Puerto club, and initiated an international project to be carried out between the two far-flung clubs. So for some 4 years now, the Ladysmith Rotary Club has been collecting wheelchairs and walkers and sending them to the Puerto Club who then distributes and donates them to people in need. When they first met, German Gerald was not the President but since he could speak English he and Grandad naturally gravitated towards one another and have been in contact ever since. SO whenever anyone from the family makes their way to the sunny shores of Mexico, we make sure to catch up with Gerald and his wife Yolani just to keep the connection open and see how the hand-overs are going with the wheelchairs. Kristen, being the good sport she is, was up for a bottle wine with people she didn't know and so we went and visited Gerald, Yolani, and their dog, Chocolate, one hot afternoon. I was wondering how German Gerald ended up in Mexico and thus began quite the conversation. Apparently Yolani had been visiting Germany at some point, they met, Gerald was bored in Germany and decided to move to Mexico. He had visited Puerto Escondido once before and based on this visit, simply decided to move there with his wife. Though a qualified architect, Gerald ended up building a successful business making wood furniture when he discovered how difficult it was to find what he wanted in what was, at the time, a small town with limited options. The business came to a halt when laws were created to protect the forests of Oaxaca and it became increasingly difficult to find a wood source large enough to support customer demands. We enjoyed a bottle of wine, Gerald's homemade bread, and talked about the adventures of their only child, Claudia, who among other things has squatted in London, been healer to Subcomandante Marcos, sky-dived 30 times, and is currently working on a documentary on desert tribes in Morocco despite being an architect by degree. All very exciting! That same evening we had Juan and Ray over. Ray's our unofficial neighbour from Georgia whose best friend owns the condo and indefinitely lent it to Ray while he made some changes in his life. So Ray had been in Puerto for just 3 months when we arrived and had already managed to get the scoop on most of the town's notable characters (and others) and had networked enough that he already had a pretty decent clientèle built up to whom he was giving physical training. He's a 47-year-old bachelor who's dipped his toes in just about every kind of business, from antique stores to bars, from construction to physical training, which makes him an interesting guy to talk to, his signature phrase is "Daaamn!" which is his equivalent of "Wow," and he is kind to the core. In fact, on our last morning in Puerto Escondido, Ray had invited us over for pancakes and when we didn't turn up (Kristen was still sleeping) he came running over because he had to go and wanted to warn us that he wouldn't be back until later. He handed me a pot of coffee for Kristen when she woke up and said his see-ya-laters. We made arrangements later that day in the pool to have evening pancakes and when we came a'knockin' we saw that he'd laid everything out for the morning: 3 spoons, 3 forks, 3 knives, 3 plates, 3 glasses, and there they were, still in their place. Now I felt bad that we hadn't come over earlier...and even though we were full from dinner, we couldn't exactly say no the pancakes that he'd been anticipating sharing with us all day long...! Juan, whose partner Peter was in Poland at the time wrapping up a few things there, is CUTE and ultra-positive. I just wanted to wrap him up in a little hankie and stuff him in my pocket and bring him out for a giggle every once in a while. Juan's family is from Oaxaca and he had tucked out for the weekend to go visit him mother in the city of Oaxaca, so Ray was quite upset that we were leaving as well and he would be on his own so we left him in the company of some Serrano ham and goat cheese leftover from our party with them. And that was Puerto essentially. Ah, must not forget the massage. Based on Ray's recommendation, we indulged in a full-body massage each down by Zicatela on our last day and I think it's worth mentioning only because it was kind of life-altering. I'm not quite sure what went on in there but I came out with a stupid grin on my face, feeling about 20 pounds lighter, and in no rush to go anywhere fast - all that "bad" that I'd been carrying around was apparently pretty heavy. So, as always, I was sad to leave but at least I left feeling lighter and more positive and I know I'll be back for the surf competitions in November. We'd opted to take the day bus up to Oaxaca mostly for safety reasons, although as we discovered, legions of travelers do overnighters in and out of the city and state without a hitch. The 10-hour ride could've been horrendous but one anti-nausea pill later and I couldn't so much as open my mouth without drooling nevermind lift my arm. Yolani had warned us that one of Oaxaca's most renowned festivals was going to be taking place in the city that week, the Guelagueta, so we should try and buy tickets and go, and reserve a room beforehand. And this was how we ended up at El Quijote. Marta and Emilio are a soft-spoken, family-oriented couple whose son got married two weeks earlier and whose daughter is attending school in Mexico City but was "home" helping her parents out during the busy season. They opened the hostel just over a year ago and with just one mention and a great review on hostelworld.com they found themselves inundated with calls and reservations - and Guelaguetza week was no exception. Even though Marta and Emilio have had enough business that they could easily expand, they haven't because they pride themselves on providing a personal, family atmosphere for their guests and expanding would mean that they wouldn't get a whole lot of face-to-face with their guests. Kristen and I dropped off our heavy loads and jetted out for a bite to eat. The zocalo was beautiful and the whole city center was a zoo in all senses of the word - yes, it was a Friday, but even Wednesday night brought out performers, drew in crowds, housed a plethora of pencil-balloon-selling floor stalls and esquite/elote pots on wheels, and brought the noise factor to an all-time high, but all in keeping with the zoo-ness. At some point we'd gotten stuck on Italian food and so we decided to switch it up and go Mexican seeming that we were in, in my opinion, Mexico's capital of culture. So, we sat under the portales surrounding the zocalo over chile relleno and enchiladas and took it all in...and I saw something that was quite possibly one of the most heart-warming things I've ever seen. Similar to Chiapas, Oaxaca is host to a lot of poverty and it's not unusual to see kids weaving in and out of tables between tourists, slinging necklaces and wool shawls around the necks of older, sympathetic-looking women. While we were sitting there observing a young girl dragging merchandise around, we saw that she was accompanied by her younger brother and toddler sister, both of whom mimicked her by wearing a batch of seed necklaces on their shoulder. I watched the snot-stuffed toddler stop for a few seconds between chairs and look at her older sister. She watched her selling technique, and since the near-baby had few words to work with she set about coping her sister's motions instead, approaching tables and quickly thrusting the batch of necklaces in happy faces without realizing what the goal of her actions was exactly. Then she would let them slide back down her arm to her shoulder which usually resulted in a big mess of entangled necklaces. Her brother would come to her rescue, help her sort them out, then place them back on her shoulder from where they would hang the entire length of her little body. Here she was learning a way of life, learning to do adult things at the age of 2. It would have been easy to forget that they were children...and I was doing just that when I saw an old American guy motion for the toddler to come towards him with a swift flick of the hand. She made way for him, necklaces held high up to his face, then suddenly dropped both arms to her sides still clutching the goods in one hand. The man had a napkin in one hand and had her chin cupped in the other. He wiped her nose and took a good look to make sure she was all cleaned up. Satisfied, he smiled and patted her on the head before she ran to catch up with her siblings. So somebody in the crowd was parent-enough, caring-enough to see a dirty-faced baby who needed her nose wiping and not just an under-aged necklace-bearing nuisance - he took care of her in that moment not because he was probably a parent at some point in his life, but because she was a baby, and it didn't matter where she came from or where her parents were. They weren't there so he wiped her nose. It probably seemed an insignificant act to him, maybe even natural, but I was amazed by it. The next day we painted the town...only to find that it was already painted: with graffiti. On our search to find tickets for the Guelaguetza, now only 2 days away, we ended up climbing a hill only to arrive at the Guelaguetza Auditorium itself. Of course, the ticket booths were closed, but the view was well worth seeing without the chaos of thousands of people in its midst. We headed back towards the center of town noticing all of the stencil graffiti along the way when we stumbled upon a graffiti competition whose theme was "Cultural Liberty and Resistance." There must've been 25 canvases set up against the southern wall of Santo Domingo church, each with a collection of spray paint at its base, and all a point of interest. Hip-hop music blasted from a set of speakers in the sunken part of the plaza and a steady stream of viewers wandered in and out of the zone over the course of the next 5 hours - we would know! We watched blank canvases turn into outlines turn into images turn into messages turn into art, reality. According to one of the artists I spoke with, the contest was the city's way of supporting graffiti as an art but trying to move it away from its valuable building walls. We located some tickets, spent the afternoon sucking into museums between a raindrops, and met new roomies Johanna and Will, both Americans come from Cuernavaca where they were studying Spanish for 6-weeks, and Canadian Nicholas, who was set to be presenting at the AIDS conference in Mexico City the following week and decided to make a vacation out of it. The highlight of the day (sad but true): the spinach and tofu burger I had at Restaurante Flor de Loto. With only 5 full days to dedicate to Oaxaca, we'd ambitiously planned to do everything that we wanted to do to the east of Oaxaca in one day: Tlacolula's Sunday market, Mitla, and Hierve El Agua. So we caught a taxi colectivo to the center of Tlacolula in order to arrive just as the market was setting up. It wasn't an artisan market as I'd thought it'd be, but more for the likes of the locals. Did you need any diabetes pills today? Strainers? Trainers? Rugs? Garlic? Movies? Better yet, pick out a live turkey for dinner. We wandered amongst traditionally-dressed indigenous women, watched some pretty old ones lift two turkeys at a time for assessment, and I picked up a quarter kilo (the minimum) of garlic-and-lime-flavoured crickets, a typical treat, from a shallow dish at a random stall, but they could also be found being carried on top of women's heads. And there were different sizes of crickets: small, medium, and large. Or maggots if you prefer? Kristen was still lacking a gift for her youngest brother, Evan, but eventually decided to go with mezcal and what better place to find it than Tlacolula: where all roads lead to mezcal. It didn't take long to find the blasted drink, and not much longer to get obscenely drunk. I've gotta say, even though I was feeling sleepy by noon because of this taste-testing episode, I was glad to discover that not all mezcal tastes like boot water, and even picked up a bottle of coconut-flavoured crema of mezcal, otherwise known as the 20% better-tasting version of the drink. Our tuk-tuk driver winked at his friends as he took off with the two foreigners in the back of his three-wheeled machine and dropped us off at the "bus station" a kilometer later. Anything is better than China, but this wasn't a far cry from undecipherable. The "station" was a building with a few lines of leftover seats around its perimeter and the only money that was being exchanged was between people with full bladders and an old man at a table covered in neatly folded piles of toilet paper - yep, no ticket booth. We asked some guy when the bus would be here and he just pointed his finger at an empty, dusty parking lot. When a bus finally rolled in, he whistled us over and pointed at it. Wow, those buses...I didn't know this model even existed outside of the Henry Ford museum. The one we climbed onto was a silver-plated, steel-bodied Bluebird that could've been mistaken for being a rocket perhaps? Judging by the color of the fabric, the inside had been nicely refurbished 20 years ago and given a personal touch with the plastering of a Jesus head sticker on the front window. The going rate was 6 pesos to Mitla and we were dropped off at the town's entrance from where we walked the 2km uphill (just follow the tour buses...apart from them, the town was quiet and peaceful). Just as we approached the archaeological "hub" an old man waved me over from his spot on some church steps, so I walked over to him thinking that he wanted to give us directions or offer us a tour but it was nothing of the sort. He grabbed my hand and smiled up at me, then pulled me in and went to put his arms around my neck and would not let go. He grabbed my hand again and pulled it tighter and tighter every time I tried to edge away from him, the whole while keeping polite conversation with him of course. Since he wouldn't let go of my hand, I decided to give him the "sign" that I was leaving now and bent down to give him a semi-kiss on the cheek and he went and planted a big wet one on my cheek - ewwwww. We determined that he was probably crazy, and later confirmed this when we ran into him on our way back when he asked me my name 3 times. The pyramids at Mitla weren't all that impressive but their design was intricate and the underground tombs interesting. Still, we couldn't help but think about Uxmal and Yaxchilan and it just didn't compare. We stopped for lunch at a fly-infested restaurant, and the only one open, in town on our way back and just as I went to put my camera away, we heard the sound of trumpets and drums, and there in the distance we saw this small parade of people dressed in white with red scarves around their necks coming towards us. It was a Guelaguetza celebration, village-style, and a nice prelude to the Guelaguetza we'd be seeing the next day in Oaxaca. From the highway, we caught a truck colectivo that would take us over the mountains and out of the valley to Hierve El Agua. We spent some time waiting for our driver who told us "two more people, then we go" then "10 more minutes, then we go" and again "one more bus from Tlacolula, then we go." An hour later, we set off on an incredibly dusty, hour-long, butt-banging trip in the back of a truck sitting on wooden seats, but when we arrived at Hierve El Agua, we were not disappointed. Besides the spectacular views, the pools, literally oozing with so many minerals that the water appears to be boiling (hence the name: The Water Boils), sit atop a cliff's edge that has turned into what looks like a soft, white, frozen waterfall due to mineral deposits. Since we'd arrived on a Sunday, the pools were crawling with locals come from the city for their weekend getaway and the usual handful of tourists but we did manage to take some time out and enjoy our surroundings nonetheless. It was a long day spent colectivo-hopping in the heat so we rounded it off with noodles in a cup, wine, and an evening chat with Marta and Emilio. Finally the day of the Guelaguetza had arrived, but the show didn't begin until 5pm so we traveled to Monte Alban with Nicholas, Will, and Johanna that morning. Again, I think we were at the rope's end of pyramids and Monte Alban, though the views from this hilltop site were impressive, was not terribly exciting. Although, we might've also just overdone it on the pyramids (which I suspect was the case). However, the company was great and it was nice to have that "cup of culture" first thing in the morning. We'd been advised to arrive at the Auditorium a couple of hours early due to the huge amount of human traffic that would be making its way up the hill and it would ensure us good seats. So we arrived with Will and Johanna around 3:30, settled into our free bum cushions wearing our free cowboy hats and drinking alcohol-free micheladas, a mix of Clamato, lime, and beer (Kristen later complained to me that they "ripped me off of my buzz"). And then the Guelaguetza began. There's really no way to describe being at the event, but the event itself is a 4-hour performance by maybe 20 different indigenous groups of Oaxaca where they get to showcase a tradition, most were of marriage ceremonies or other rites of passage, their traditional clothing, and traditional dance particular to their group and region. I imagine that the Guelaguetza is a proud moment for Mexico, and especially Oaxaca, since they are displaying and preserving some of the traditions that define the country, but also educating everyone else outside of these indigenous groups about them. People in the crowd were singing along to some of the songs and even when the rain came, the dancers kept right on with the routine. To me, it was fascinating (I know Saul is gouging out his eyeballs right now just at the thought of 4 hours of dancing) and we all walked out of the event, post-fireworks, pretty pumped. We decided to spend our final two days in Oaxaca outside of Oaxaca and up in the high hills of Cuajimoloyas, whose 3200m altitude brought us 1000m higher than Mexico City and right out of the summer and right in to a cold fall day. Will, who was itching to do some physical activity, had opted to join us for the day and planned on making his way back to Oaxaca later in the afternoon just in time to catch his 10:00pm bus to San Cristobal de las Casas with Johanna. Well, things didn't really go as planned. By the time we'd arrived at the second-class bus station, following a delicious and relaxed breakfast at Cafe Alex, the next bus to Cuajimoloyas wasn't set to leave until noon - too late for us since it would take 2 hours to get there and Will would have to leave again just 3 hours later which wouldn't leave us much time for a bike ride. So we took the next bus to Tlacolula so that we'd at least be going somewhere, and figured we'd sort something out from there. However, the half-hour taxi from there was grossly expensive and the colectivos infrequent. But for the 60 pesos we'd be saving taking one, we decided to just wait it out and an hour later we were loading ourselves into the back of a truck cab. A man was already sitting in the back so I slid down next to him, Kristen next to me, and Will, thinking that there was no more room, tried to squeeze himself in. After a few attempts to close the door, Will only ended up slamming it against his shoulder and when the man next to me opened his door to move to the front seat, he just plopped out! Then he and the two others in the front spent the next 10 minutes speaking Zapotec, most likely talking about us "stupid Americans." We arrived at the tourist office a short while later - in the rain, in the cold, and in shorts. We waited it out for an hour by talking with a few volunteers from Canada (yay!) and sorting out "tours" ($12 and an educated local takes you off the beaten path), and in the time we were there, a group of Brits arrived back from a hike soaked to the bone and in their sandals. We were getting hungry and it was getting late for Will, and with the rain, we weren't able to do the bike tour anyway, so we ventured out of the shelter of the tourist office in search of food...the pickings were slim, at least when you're in a hurry to find food fast, and we turned up at a woman's house where she had two tables set up in front of her kitchen and a store next door. As we began arranging the tables for the 7 of us to sit together, the woman invited us behind the kitchen where there was a table and a brick stove on top of which she did all the cooking. Over bowls of hot chocolate (literally - they were served to us in bowls), chicken soup and stuffed chiles, we warmed our fingers, satisfied our stomaches, and waited out the rain some more. Everyone was interested in having a go making a tortilla, which amused this poor woman stuck in a 4x6ft kitchen with a bunch of foreigners and their cameras, so there were tortillas on the go for a while, others warmed themselves infront of the tiny stove fire, and I just thought, this is going to be a long night if it's this cold...and remember: I have not been cold for nearly 2 years and I've exerted quite a bit of effort to keep things this way, some measures extreme (i.e. moving to Mexico) and other not so much (i.e. making a habit of drinking green tea). I wasn't about to jeopardize my awesome record of staying warm over a one-night's stay up in the mountains so we booked ourselves into a cabin in the woods with a fireplace. But before we could go to the cabin we had to deliver our promise to Will to do some physical activity with him since he had made the trip up here to do just that. The three of us shared a guide with a German woman, Jill, and did the only option open to us really: a hike. 14-year-old Daniela, who had recently completed secondary school in the village and was preparing for a move to Oaxaca to stay with her aunts while attending high school, was well worth having around. There were no designated paths and it would've taken us no time to lose ourselves here had we not rented a guide, although she didn't speak English and could only whistle at us to get our attention. We traversed daffodil-filled fields and climbed through barbed wire fences, put there to prevent local animals from digging into the place's main cash crop: potatoes. All the while, Daniela pointed out a number of medicinal plants used by the locals - some are used in baths to put a high fever in its place, others are placed between molars to relieve toothache, but the most interesting plant she told us about was maguey, from which the popular drink, and friend to Kristen and I, mezcal is derived. I noticed that there were magueys planted underneath fences, again to keep animal intruders out, and so I asked her if they would be used to collect mezcal later on. No, this depends on the colour of the flower that blooms from the maguey plant. Interestingly, the maguey only flowers once and always at the end of its 80-150-yr-old life. A thick stem grows tall out of its center, the leaves start to turn black as though infected by mold, the flower blooms and the leaves shrivel and fall to the sides of the plant, ending up looking like a skirt. Meanwhile, the stem is cut and of the many seeds that lie below the plant, one will sprout and create a new maguey in the exact place of the old one. From here, the mezcal-making process gets complicated. Essentially, the leaves of the maguey are cut off until all that is left is a pine-cone-shaped core, which is then burned, crushed, fermented, and distilled. I wasn't lucky enough to see all of this but those young guides are pretty knowledgeable! We were out in the fields for nearly two hours, then returned to drop off Will at the tourist "shack" office so he could catch the last bus out of Cuajimoloyas at 6:30pm, and continued climbing uphill to a viewpoint. But when we returned from the viewpoint at 7:00, we were surprised to see a large group, including two of those Brits we'd met earlier at lunch, still waiting. When in Mexico though, you do have to consider their concept of "time" and "schedule" so we figured the bus was just late....but when we returned from our cup noodles dinner back at the place we'd had lunch at 8:00 and found an even larger group of people still waiting we were curious as to what had happened. The last bus back to Oaxaca had broken down and the only other way to get down from the mountains and to Tlacolula (from where buses frequently departed to Oaxaca) was by colectivo. Some guy in town had a truck, ideal for 8 seated passengers, but it seemed everyone was in the same situation as Will and had a night bus to catch to somewhere else and so 14 people and one baby piled into the truck instead. And so there went the truck swaying out of town as it dodged potholes, completely overflowing with people, and with its tail door bouncing open. Jesus (Hey-zeus - NOT Jesus) drove us out into the boonies to our cabin and set us up with some firewood which didn't do a whole in terms of warming the place since its roof was so tall, but it did leave a "fragrant" reminder of our night by the fire on my clothes. The night before we made arrangements with Jesus to pick us up at 7:30am so that we would be able to arrive at the tourist office in plenty of time for our "bike tour." We were half an hour late and though he didn't seem too bothered so we didn't get into apologizing too much, and this is kind of how it goes in terms of "meeting times" and such here in Mexico. And the thing is, just when I thought I understood the phrase "ahorita" ("in a bit"), I got a lesson in Mexican Spanish. Take it from me...when in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Mexico, use "ahorita." We arrived for our 8:00 tour and the entire tourist office was closed. Okay, we thought, no problem. Having lived in Mexico for a year now, I've learned to give people a half-hour to hour flex period in which they can arrive and not be considered "late." So 8:30 passed, no problem. 9:00 was coming up and I thought to ask Jesus what was going on. "Ahorita viene," he tells me. He's coming. That's good. It's 9:15 and the shop keeper across from the office assures us, "Ahorita. Ahorita viene" and pushes his bottom lip up toward his nose and winks at us. By 9:30, I'm starting to worry that if we don't leave soon on this 3-hr bike tour we're not going to arrive back in time to catch the 1:30 bus and will have to wait until 6:30 for the next bus back to Oaxaca. I ask Jesus if the kid lives here in Cuajimoloyas? Yes, yes...he's sleeping (*wink*), there was a party last night, but "ahorita viene." Well, they'd been saying that our guide was coming for over an hour and he wasn't anywhere in sight. Really, in a town of 1100 inhabitants, I was thinking it shouldn't be that hard to get anywhere. 9:45 came and went and we were just about ready to pedal off on our own when Jesus cried, "Mira! Viene!" Thank you Jesus...he had answered our prayer that very moment. The kid, an 18-year-old whose name I don't remember, said good morning to us, hopped on his bike, and that was it. After anticipating the bike ride for so long that morning, I was shocked to hear Kristen saying she was throwing in the towel after climbing the first hill on our way out of town. Just as soon as we'd arrived at the top of the hill she was rolling right back down it, but assured me she would be fine if I wanted to continue. Since that first climb didn't seem too bad - rigorous, but not too bad - I nodded at my guide and we continued. I hadn't done any significant amount of exercise for about a year but I thought, hey, it's just biking. There's downhill, right? This was NOT just biking and I don't recall if there was any downhill because either way I was so out-of-breath I was beginning to think I might be asthmatic. In the first 10 minutes of the ride I decided that I was never going to do this again which was great....but I still had 3.5 hours left, dammit. We rode through narrow walking paths carved into the earth that led us down some steep terrain to begin with. This apparently requires some technique. As I'm sitting there cruising head-high downhill with my right leg straight and the pedal down, my left leg relaxed at the knee, I suddenly come to a halt that nearly throws me off my bike when my right pedal catches on the earthy wall of the path and I quickly squeeze on the front wheel brakes which strengthens my inevitable momentum forwards. Rookie mistakes...a) don't try and ride a mountain bike downhill like its a banana seat bicycle and your Dorothy on her way to Aunt Emma's house, but do act like you've got ToTo out front and try not to launch him from your pretty wicker basket, and b) don't squeeze the front brakes going downhill. It's physics. Duh. My precious guide looked back on occasion to see if I was still alive. Yes, on we go. We made a stop at a waterfall, very pretty, then got back on our bikes then rode through the streams leading to that waterfall. Again, technique. I soaked my shoes, my guide did not. I think I was doing the one pedal up, one pedal down thing again - what a vice if you're going to have one. Okay, so I'm now pedaling uphill with wet shoes and my only thought between breathes during this invaluable moment of pure bliss was, "God, Kristen would've hated this." I can't say I wasn't suffering, but this part of the ride was relatively easy, with regular intervals of up and down, and then we reached a fork in the road. Did I want to take the 5km route that would eventually wind its way up part of a hill from where we would climb to the top? Or did I want to take the shorter route that was just a "poquito," a little, harder? Let me just say that whenever Mexicans tag a diminutive onto the end of a word, it doesn't make the significance of the word any smaller, it just sounds cute. As we learned in the morning, "ahorita" is a diminutive of the word "ahora" which means "now." You make it cute and it supposedly means "in a bit," which then can mean anything from 1 minute from now, to 1 hour, to 5 hours, to 3 days...and so had I not been trying to revive my lungs in that moment I would've noticed his cuting-up of "poco" when he made it "poquito." Now it's not just a "little," it's just "a little bit" which could mean anywhere from a tiny bit harder, to kind of strenuous, to blow-your-temples arduous, for extreme athletes only... The pathless, wet from the day before, grassy uphill was seriously uphill, and that was okay, I like a good challenge (what...?) but when the uphill got so steep that we had to carry our bikes in one arm and pull ourselves up through a leafy layer with the other, I just about threw up from the exertion. My valiant guide carried my bike the final 10 meters, thanks a bunch. And the thing was, it wasn't like we hadn't been talking the whole time, he just failed mention at some point in the conversation that I would be rock climbing with a bike on my arm should I choose option B. At the same time, it was evident to me by now that his perception of time, size, and difficulty was a bit inaccurate, maybe just misinformed, and so perhaps it really was just "a little bit" more difficult for him. Not the case for me. We climbed a rock face after dropping off our bikes at the base of the peak (when we finally reached the hill - the bike-carrying only brought us to a road that carried on uphill for a kilometer) and when we finally reached the viewpoint I was exhausted. We sat there, I shared a fruit bar with my guide that I'd brought with me, and he shared some town gossip with me (note: if you wanna get yourself talked about, have 17 children in a small village). Every cross has a story behind it and the one at the top of this mountain was brought to the peak in the name of San Miguel Arcangel. I reluctantly checked out Kristen's watch, not particularly keen on the ride back, and noticed that it was already noon - an hour and a half remained. There was just nothing easy about this trip - even on the way back down, we slithered underneath fallen boulders in a push-up position...? Down, down, down...after that, that, and that, the only good thing I remember happening was seeing a donkey on the side of the road and using it as an excuse to stop. The real trouble was that with such time constraints I couldn't even get off the bike and walk the thing home, and as 1:00 rolled around the corner, I panted over to my guide and asked him how much was left until we reached town. 15 minutes, so...half an hour. At least. I started to get a rustrated at all the uphill and conveniently mentally blacked out until we reached the highway, which I saw as being "the end," and even my guide was like, "We're here." Where? There's no town here. "Just 10 minutes." Maybe for Lance Armstrong. I was really starting to worry now, the bus should be whizzing right by me any minute...and the work wasn't getting any easier. Up, up, up. And then I heard the roar that only a 30-year-old bus could make catching up to me and it was gone. I got off my bike, defeated in my bid to beat the clock, when my guide told me we'd catch up to it, handed me his Gatorade and ordered me to take a sip and get back on the saddle. Sir, yes, sir, 18-year-old guide. 20 minutes later I saw a brick home, passed a few more and Kristen came into view sitting there waiting. I looked at her apologetically and sighed, "Yeah...it passed me. SO mad right now." If it hadn't been for our tardy guide we wouldn't be in this predicament. She looked back at me with panic written all over her face and shrieked, "What?!? Did I miss it?!?" Oh, the bus hadn't arrived yet. I guess it made a pit-stop in "town" somewhere which gave me enough time to pay for my bike rental, shake my guide's hand, curse him, and collect some change for the bus. Kristen had apparently spent her morning taking pictures of a pleasant, well-mannered and social donkey while I was enduring some sort of punishment for underestimating the sport mountain biking and trusting the Spanish language "a little" too much. When I woke up, the first thing I felt was the heat. Finally, back to my second skin! We arrived back at El Quijote, interrupting Marta and Emilio's private English classes, but they were kind enough to get us organized and had been kind enough to even reserve our exact same beds. For our last night of the trip, we indulged in more Italian (it's not like I make spinach-stuffed tortellini with four cheese sauce at home, okay?) and reviewed our time spent on the mountain while sipping on sangria. Even though I probably should've returned to the hostel and collapsed, I took Marta and her daughter, Marta, up on their invitation to join them while they went and collected tacos for dinner at some taco stand in the north of the city. Nothing particularly interesting, just sights, smells, and sounds, but it was nice getting to know the family a bit better and since I plan on returning with the brother and sister in December, I thought it would be nice create a good rapport. Emilio helped us get a cab to the bus station the next morning at 6am and surprisingly, Kristen told me that she was excited to get back to Mexico City. Considering her initial impressions of the City, I didn't expect such a comment to come from her, even though I was sure it would change as time went by and as we traveled further away from the first place that she got to know and the only place she would be returning to. We had made plans to make just one final stop on our way back into D.F.: Puebla. I'd visited Puebla once before with Saul - and by car. I certainly didn't remember it being so busy and industrial but I did remember it being beautiful once we arrived at its center. It really was a whirlwind tour of the city, but we managed to take a handful of pics, grab some lunch, and visit the Revolution Museum, in fact, the scene of the first battle of the 1910 revolution in Mexico and home of Serdan family. It was a loss on their part, but as a result the street-facing facade of the house is dressed in hundreds of bullet holes and some its remnants inside show signs of having been hit. This is what the guide book says: "Betrayed only two days before a planned uprising against Porfirio Diaz' dictatorship, the Serdan family (Aquiles, Maximo, Carmen, and Natalia) and 17 others fought 500 soldiers until only Aquiles, their leader, and Carmen were left alive. Aquiles, hidden under the floorboards, might ahve survived if the damp hadn't provoked a cough that gave him away. Both were subsequently killed." After nearly missing our bus for being in the wrong waiting room, we were glad to be done with the whole "bus" thing for a while...we arrived back in Mexico City just in time for dinner and I arrived back to one very happy boyfriend! Now I'm just looking forward to traveling back to Canada for a month tomorrow and squeezing in some much-needed but precious-little family time. Especially with my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary coming up at the end of August, there isn't a better time to be going home.

Don Juan, Ass Monkey, and Other Tales

katiedoestheworld — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:28:00 GMT

By the time the hour finally arrived for Kristen and I to leave Mexico City for Merida I was completely exhausted. She'd arrived a week earlier and I had spent the entire time showing her the sights between finishing up classes at UNAM, writing exams, giving English classes with the company, and marking exams. I can't safely say that I felt much the backpacker as I sat there sipping on a complimentary tequila and Coke in my economy class seat on the way to Yucatan, but stepping off of the plane into 80% humidity and onto a bus two hours later kicked me right into gear!

Earlier in the week Kristen had booked us into a hostel, which as anyone who followed me through Asia knows, I just don't do (RE: Tianjin), but she has used this website throughout Europe when she went two years ago and swore by it so we went ahead and put the charges on her card...however when we arrived at Nomadas, north of the zocalo or center, they had no record of us, thus confirming my seemingly irrational fears about booking hotels on the internet. We sorted things out to the point that we were in the mixed dorms a night early and got straight to enjoying the city. One of our roommates was a very sleepy Chinese guy whose name I never learned because he was either always sleeping or I wanted to rip his snoring head off. Our other roommate was Don: a laptop-toting, jeans-weilding Floridian and hopeless romantic who had turned to self-help relationship books after his failed marriage to a Filipino mail-order bride (and second wife) had gone under. He was in Merida to have his teeth done and after having had soft fillings put in went to eat nachos when the dentist gave him the go-ahead 4 days later, broke the fillings and was obliged to stay another week to have them redone. Shame. But as Don told us wearing a thick southern accent and with one authoritative finger in the air,"Trust me, oooooh, those nachos were worth it." Between talking to Don and sweating like it was in fashion, we managed to hold a conversation with a couple of Brits just come from one of Mexico's best kept beach secrets: Holbox (pronounced Hol-bosh). Just 3.5 hours and a half hour ferry ride from Cancun, these girls insisted we make the trip to this sleepy fishing town of 1800 to at least go swimming with whalesharks if nothing else but only if we could create the time. For me, it was a done deal as soon as I heard the words "island" and "whalesharks."

I'm not going to lie, it was HOT in Merida. After a sleepless night in a fanfull but windowless dorm, we decided to make a day trip out to a small yellow-coated town about two hours east of Merida called Izamal for our first day. We spent a relaxing two hours exploring the pyramids, the nunnery, and those blindingly yellow streets, but the reality literally hit me in the form of a splash of cold water soon after. There really was no better reminder that I was backpacking than climbing back onto that second-class bus and having water pour out of the air-conditioning system and onto me everytime the bus slowed, stopped or turned. It was great to see the countryside and at most times I felt like I was anywhere but Mexico, but this WAS Mexico; the bikes, wooden huts and hammocks on every sufficiently sturdy post took me to Laos; the motorcycles transporting entire families had me in Vietnam; the ornate balconies encroached by lush shrubbery got me thinking about Sri Lanka; and the poorly translated signs, "Please bring one owns" = "Did you forget something?" brought me back to China. Then I'd see a giant Coca-Cola advertisement pasted on the wall of a village store or the side of a house or hear a cat-call and there I was, back in Mexico.

The heat was bad in Merida, and what was worse were the mosquitoes - yes, it was back to swatting bugs away from my butt and living a DEET-filled existence since my Jessica-repellent is travelling the quiet roads of Indonesia as we speak. We were up the next day bright and early, well, more early than bright, to catch a bus out to Chichen Itza - and it was a good thing we were up so early. The pyramids were amazing, just as you see them in the pictures, but by the time we were on our way out at 11:00am, we noticed that the grand plaza was packed and people were flooding the gates by the busload from Tulum, Cancun and Merida. When I noticed a Chinese couple, and another 40 behind them, I naturally looked for a flag and...phew! There it was - at least they were assured not to get lost in the Yucatecan jungle OR burnt -there were of course a plethora of wide-rimmed hats and decorative umbrellas.

For our final day in Merida, we decided to visit the not-so-frequented ruins of Uxmal, about and hour and a half south of the city. We caught the 6am bus, accompanied by Don this time around and pretty much had the place to ourselves. There's really no way to do the site justice using words, but let's just say we spent 3 hours there and I took over 200 pictures (I know, I tend to do this regardless but they were all beautiful). In a way, Uxmal reminded me of Angkor Wat - we would reach the top of some building or pyramid and we'd see another set of buildings hidden in the jungle, or we'd turn a corner and there was a discreet shrine. Don was feeling adventurous and insisted on making a trip into the bushes. Sure enough we found a small structure but just as soon as we stopped the mosquitoes wrestled Kristen into a fit of hysteria and she went a'runnin'! Fully recovered from the attack, Kristen, Don and I made for the main path once again and were back in Merida one combi ride later.

Following a fierce downpour, a group of us went for dinner at a cool restaurant covered with "collections" of cigar boxes, birdcages, and bikes and on the top floor was a colouful 3-D mural, at least the place had some character! Don decided he was Mayan in another lifetime and spent nearly an hour savouring every bite of his Pollo Pibil. Kristen was feeling tired and retreated to the hostel while the rest of us took the party on to the Mayan Pub which was neither "Mayan" nor much of a "pub" unless you consider A beer on tap a pub. Then, hippie Irish-Brit living in Scotland Mark suggested we go to this clandestine Communist bar that was not all that partial to girls entering but played live reggae so off we went. We were greeted at the door by the apparent owner, an old, Confucian beard-wearing but otherwise Mao-ed out Mexican in his plain white button-up shirt and matching loose pants plus green cloth shoes. Between his appearance and gestures, such as only raising his arms when absolutely necessary, the rest of the time they hung limply at his sides, I would've easily mistaken him to be Chinese if I hadn't asked a local who sat with us later. He gestured for us to enter with a lazy swipe of his hand in a random direction which led us to the "bar" run by an extremely baked young guy.

"What is there?"
"Beer, beer...and vodka," he muttered slowly lifting his head to look at the bar that was not then returned to us.

In a few words, he was out of it! We sat in a courtyard plastered with posters and memorabilia of Communist heroes and made polite conversation with a local who had been kicked out of his seat in order to accomodate our group, so we invited him to come back of course. The band was great, the drinks cheap, the company amusing, all in all a good night.

The next morning, we hopped on a bus headed for Tulum, just a four hour drive from Merida. Bye bye Yucatan, hello Quintana Roo. We arrived in stinking hot Tulum early in the afternoon and went straight to Papaya Playa where we'd already booked ourselves a single bed cabin on the beach. The shorty at the front desk gave checked us in and we headed cabin-wards. The cabins, connected by sandy paths and dotted along a 500m stretch of beach, consisted of branches of wood for walls simply placed side-by-side and secured by a cement floor and a thin palm leaf roof. We swung the makeshift door of cabin #53 open and set about "cleaning" the place (ie. covering the plastic table, already covered in a thick layer of bird crap, with the blanket from the bed - in that heat we certainly wouldn't be needing it). That first night was all about getting settled...but even the margaritas didn't help me sleep much. The heat was unbelievable - even with a sea breeze we were in a constant state of sweating which meant sleeping in intervals until your body literally wakes you up because it can't breath.

For our first day in Tulum we decided to rent bikes since the pyramids were only a couple of kilometres away and this seemed the "healthy" thing to do. Again, the setting of this archaelogical zone was stunning but the mass of tourists coming from Cancun and Valla Dolid wasn't so delicious and it made my tastebuds for romanticism and solitude want to gag. Soon we were back on the bikes and on our way into town (=street) via the highway from Cancun. Destination: El Pequeño Buenos Aires for empanadas where we spent half and hour eating and an easy 2 hours talking to one very informative and conveniently easy-on.the-eyes waiter. We were completely done with the bikes by the time we arrived back at the hostel, and so were our asses, but since we had them for the day we decided to go for Thai-fusion food and cocktails further down the beach for dinner. It seemed a pretty normal day...but that night, it rained. And the wind picked up.

So Kristen has this tendency to take things to the next level, worry-wise. For example:

Mosquito bite = West Nile (Merida)
Fireworks at night = Zapatista attack (San Cristobal)
Checkpoint = robbery (Palenque)
Hotel mattresses = bedbugs (Merida)

So obviously, rain = flood and wind = hurricane. Midnight arrives that night and I hear some rustling. Initially I thought, "Well, Kristen must've gotten hungry and she's eating something." Then I feel her sit on the bed and she shakes me a bit and says, " Katie, there's something wrong." I was perturbed by this statement and wondered if she wasn't feeling well or something like that. "What?" "Well, I think there's going to be a hurricane." "Kristen, it's the rainy season, it rains and it rains hard. And we're on the ocean, so the wind is really strong. Don't worry." I reassured her some more and went back to sleep. But I soon woke up to the sound of more bustling of plastic bags and so I sat up and I noticed that Kristen was rearranging things in the cabin. I asked her what she was doing and it turns out that she was so freaked out that we were riding ontop of a hurricane that she was hurridly packing her bag! So I asked her, "Kristen, where are you going to go even if there is a hurricane?" "I don't know, anywhere but this cabin. What if we have to run??" "With 20 kilos? I'll be damned if I'm running away from a hurricane with my towel and a pile of books on my back...and seriously, where are you going to go?" But she seemed determined to get everything packed in the case that she should feel the need to evacuate in the eye of a storm which would clearly be safer than staying inside of our cement-floor cabin. In the meantime I texted Saul to see if he'd seen anything on the news...nope. But this wasn't reassurance enough and Kristen eventually worried herself into a coma-type sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, I opened the door to our cabin, the wind still strong, and it was nothing but clear blue skies for miles. I looked at Kristen's bag sitting there on the chair all packed and ready to go and just started laughing - then waited eagerly for her to wake up so that she would see the state of all things around us and laugh with me. It was The Hurricane That Never Was.

We ditched the bikes this time, took the advice of the waiter that we'd talked to the day before and visited a couple of cenotes on our own. The first one we went to was called the Gran Cenote - an impressive cavern of fresh water, stalactites, stalagmites, turtles, and fish. The Yucatan Pennisula is littered with cenotes which were apparently formed like so: a meteor hit this part of the planet 65 million years ago leaving a pockmark in its place measuring an astounding 284km in diameter. A few million years later, cracks began forming underneath the limestone surface of the massive crater, fissures followed, and rainwater began to fill them. Eventually, the thin layer of earth between the water-filled fissures and the fresh air above crumbled "revealing the intricate vascular system of underground rivers and cenotes that lay beneath"...some parts of the pools are so deep that one-tank diving is a common activity but snorkelling is equally as entertaining if you're not so much into dark corners. The other cenote that we visited was called Casa Cenote. We had the combi drop us off on the highway about 10 minutes from Tulum and walked down a long sandy road flanked by bush on one side and beach houses and B&Bs on the other for 20 minutes until we spotted a modest looking swamp and a tent next to it. What was unique about Casa Cenote was that it connected to a river which led to the ocean so it is a saltwater-freshwater cenote and, as the Cenote Guard told me, for a long time this cenote was home to two manatees who fled about 3 years ago as the place gained popularity. Because it was connected to the sea there were only a handful of fish to be found, so we hopped back out pretty soon after arriving and talked to the Guard (well, he collected money from visitors) for a good chunk of time just to make the trip worthwhile. On the way back, we ended up catching a ride by a beer-sucking local on his way into town in his air-conditioned Explorer so we gave him the thumbs up when he silently asked us if we wanted a ride through the car window and before long we were back at San Francisco's Supermarket and 15 pesos the richer.

After feeling so utterly helpless in China for not being able to communicate myself, I've been talking to anyone who will respond to me here - and this is the most practice I think I've had all year! There are, as we know, always stories to be told and information to be found. For instance, what's the real price for market items and not the Gringo price? I think that the people here really appreciate the effort anyhow - anyone who's been to China will remember how similar to salvation it is to hear one precious word in a language that you recognize! But sometimes, you end up wishing you'd never started the conversation...

When we returned to the cabins, I realized that I'd left my phone to be charged at the front desk, since we were generally without electricity (save for a single lightbulb in the cabaña which was only switched on between 7:30 and 10:00pm). I asked Shorty for my phone and we got into polite conversation about Canada and Mexico, etc. However, when his comments turned into things like, "So, are you married?" and "You're beautiful and precious, very precious" I made a verbal run for it making all sorts of excuses for why I had to go. But the truth was, it was just back to the log on the beach infront of our cabin to join Kristen for some drinks for San Francisco's and I have to say, though it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, rum and coke in a can is quite revolting.

The next day, I packed up (you might recall that Kristen had been packed for two days already) and just as quickly as we'd arrived, we were gone. To Holbox! (Pronounced Hol-bosh).

It was a stuffy 4-hour ride to the seaside town of Chiquilà in a bus that sported out-of-service air-conditioning machines and picked up villagers and their baskets of food along the way. From Chiquilà we then took a tiny passenger-only ferry over to Holbox where a fleet of "taxi" golf carts awaited us at the land end of the pier. We paid the 10 pesos to have a golf cart drive us 500m down the sandy main strip and into town (rowshacks and an unassuming church facing a plaza, host to a run-down basketball court). It was almost 5pm by the time we arrived but we managed to locate a central and well-kept hotel run by nice family - and it had air-conditioning. Holbox is a sleeeeeepy beach town whose sprawl reaches maybe 30 blocks and is home to under 2000 residents. Its roads are sandy and only frequented by golf carts, bicycles, the occasional motorcycle and of course good old fashioned flip-flops: life is all but rushed. At least here we had a chance at sleeping since golf carts don't have horns and we were surrounded by four sturdy walls should a hurricane swallow the island up.

Early the next morning we were awoken by a short dude with a funky toe - initially I thought, "Shark bite? Accident?" but a closer examination later indicated to me that it was nothing more than a boring deformity, no tale to tell, just that he should have had two pinky toes and now he just has one giant fused one with two heads. He summoned us to the dock 200m away for our 7am departure - right, we had booked a whalesharks tour last night...the 10 of us sat back and enjoyed the hour journey from Holbox in the Gulf of Mexico, past the Yucatàn Peninsula, and out into the middle of the Carribean from where there was no sign of life or land. Until a whaleshark started nosing its way towards us! Two at a time (plus our guide) we jumped into the sea and snorkelled with the whaleshark, usually following it, just like the hundreds of small fish below it, for a few minutes until it changed direction or swam too fast. It was truly an amazing experience - the whalesharks were enormous, but friendly and curious above all, and my favourite part was that the entire tour was really controlled. An environmental guard boat even came out to check that there were only so many tour boats, each with a maximum of 10 passengers, everyone had snorkels, etc. The whole point is that the touring will only go on so long as the whalesharks stay in this region and if they're scared out then the area would lose one of its defining sea-creature features and a valuable market. We stopped to snorkel in the reefs closer to Cancun on the way back, had lunch on the boat, the whole thing was extremely well-organized and, I'm happy to report, worth every single peso. The rest of the day and most of the next was spent relaxing on the beach (i.e. sitting on a couple of beachfront hotel chairs without paying), taking pictures, eating, and sweating. Thus concluded our trip to Holbox and the entire of the Yucatàn Peninsula. So it was from Chiquilà to Cancun and then to Villa Hermosa on the overnight bus.

There were 24 blissful hours of air-conditioning but it was, in general, a restless night. The constant background noise switched from Spanish-dubbed movies to the hum of the jungle: Palenque. We decided not to stay in the town proper of Palenque but in the small cabin-filled community, and backpacker hot-spot, of El Panchán. Having not booked ahead, we were lucky to find a couple of beds at Margarita & Ed's for just $20/cabin and the cabins were not only clean but totally Jessica-friendly - by this I mean literally mosquito-net covered, they're pulled tight over every window and even across the roof!

So El Panchán is simply a collection of 4 or 5 guesthouses which don't offer houses to anyone, just cabañas, campsites, and a place to sling your hammock if you like. Although the place is well-known to Palenque residents, the only sure sign of its existence from the road is a post with a string of hanging wooden name plates. The man who started it all? Don Moises. Don Moises, a man now well into his 80's, is a knowledgeable local who was among the first to discover Palenque's main draw: the pyramids of Palenque. He was contracted by the team of archaeologists who arrived soon after its initial discovery to help them understand the culture of this ancient civilization and its people, and with the money he received after completing his work on Palenque's revival, Don Moises bought a piece of land, built a cabin, and set out to live happily ever after. When a couple of inquisitive backpacker's wandered up the dirt road to his house and saw the hammocks outside of his house, they stayed for a while. A couple of cabins and a lot more backpackers later and the rest is history.

Margarita & Ed were also among one of the first to set up a guesthouse in El Panchán when Margarita and her American birdwatcher husband moved into town seeking jungle property because, no surprises here, the birdwatcher wanted desperately to birdwatch and nothing else. They too have received many off-the-beaten-path backpackers over the years and business has essentially boomed. The nice thing is, however, that Margarita's prices haven't exploded nor has El Panchàn lost its sense of seclusion. There are still only 4 or 5 guesthouse groups, a couple of restaurants, but trust me, it's still jungle enough that the bugs are aplenty!

We grabbed our packs and followed a series of wooden signs on short posts reading "Recepción" which led us right into Margarita's kitchen.

Two of Margarita's four children were visiting here at this time, plus one grandchild, 8-year-old Gahdiel. Omar, the rap-loving, gun-toting, semi-Texan baby of the family and uncle to Gahdiel, was kind enough to explain to us how it worked: "Water's there if you want it...it's free...the room'll be ready in an hour or so...I've never been to _________ but here's a guy who gives tours..." Our Jessica-friendly cabaña was perfect. Omar suggested to us that we drop by a restaurant nearby called Don Muchos where the servings were Jurassic -size portions and the food delish. I have never seen a calzone so freakin' big before in my life, but I've also never enjoyed so much a day later!

We went to Palenque (the ruins) the next morning which were amazing but unfortunately, the hundreds of vendors lining every path and blocking every bridge and view made it difficult to imagine the antiquity and romance of the site at its fullest. But it was, like I said, a unique site for a civilization; it's where flat Mexico meets mountainous Mexico, where Mexico starts spitting freshwater off of new heights and into shallow opaque pools. The setting was nothing short of breath-taking, and the outrageously loud sound of howler monkeys in the morning screaming from somewhere in the misty mountains was something else, but Uxmal still had my archaeologically-obsessed heart in it's lonely hands.

Later that evening, Omar invited us to join him and his nephew for a cool down at some river so we went. I kind of expected this river to be something quiet and local...it was local, but it seems some hotel claimed this bend in the river and so we had to pay a small entrance fee. Typical music blared from some unknown destination, Mexican parents sat on the rocky enbankment watching their kids slip and slide on the mossy rocks below them in the water, and yet others swam across the river back and forth...in their jeans? Okay. We had a great time cooling off, but I did make the mistake of lending my snorkel to Gahdiel which kept us there for over 3 hours. In the meantime, Omar got talking to us about some of his tales, most of which had to do with how he is the hard one in the family who does all the spanking and hitting, others were to do with his job - he wouldn't tell us more than "let's just say, I've got a price on my head." None of them, however, had what I suppose was the desired effect of impressing us and making him look like a REAL man. When Gahdiel finally became cold enough that he had to get out, we headed back to El Panchán where we met up with Omar and his nephew for dinner at Don Muchos again - it was that good.

By the time we arrived at Don Muchos, the place was packed and there wasn't a table going to be available for another hour or so...things were looking grim (imagine one starving 8-year-old in your vicinity and me) when a man who Omar had been talking to invited us to sit with him. This was how we ended up meeting Jonny Duracell, as I like to call him. The Jonny part's his, the Duracell part's mine - he don't stop! Canadian Jonny, a middle-aged high school teacher of history and sociology AND an intense tree-hugging vegan más astrology nut who attaches the word "beautiful" to just about everything that comes out of his mouth and meditates like nobody's business, had freshly arrived from Guatemala so of course we got talking, but this conversation couldn't begin until he knew my sign. Turns out we're both Scorpios, which explained the passion spewing out of us as soon as we got talking, and this apparently meant that I had to go visit every place that had water in Guatemala (Scorpios also fall under the water sign). It was a long, overwhelming converstaion, but it was seriously refreshing to run into someone who was as passionate about Mexico and life in general as me - he just got it.

Early the next morning, we took off with 8 other girls on a day trip close to the Guatemalan border but specifically to the archaeological zones of Yaxchilan and Bonampak: 3 Spaniards, 3 Frenchies, 2 Dutch, 2 Canadians, and 1 fearless Mexican driver. Yep, the drive there officially qualifies as the second most death-defying ride of my life (next to the one to LiJiang for anyone who might recall our fearful overnighter through the hills on a sleeper bus driven by a man with a serious death wish?), but I can say this much - the guy was in control despite his need to spend approximately 70% of the time driving on the other side of the road. Once I got my head around the "thrill" factor, I could better see what exactly we were driving through and here are some of the mental snapshots I took along the way:

* Zapatista pride: enormous wooden placards at regular intervals, all wearing grandiose portrait of Emiliano Zapata
* young girl, maybe 3 or 4, walking along a long stretch of road at 8am and relatively far from any village in either direction - barefoot and alone, save for a thick woolly blanket. I was reminded that I was in one of the poorest states of Mexico if not the poorest
* kids, kids, and babies. And the weird thing was, alot of them, mostly toddlers, just walked along the highway as trucks and combis sped by and they hardly blinked. Where were they going?
* baby slung to his mother's bike while she talked to a neighbour wearing the world's smallest cowboy hat, I'm sure of it
* Grandma walking uphill from the village to the road, heavy bag in hand and a flock of turkeys and chickens in tow!

There were more but there always will be. So this was the fantastic part about the tour - it wasn't a tour. There was nothing tour about it. It was basically a ride to an otherwise dangerous and difficult part of the country since it's almost on the border and rarely sees public combis (and good luck trying to pick out the public ones from the more frequent tour colectivos) and once there, we were left to do our own thing, none of this flag-following business.

Yaxchilan: this deserted civilization sits on the banks of the river that now separates Mexico from Guatemala and one of my favourite things about it, apart from hour-long boat ride up the river in order to reach the site, is that there have been very few restoration efforts made. The place is organized with information plaques at each building and the pyramids well-taken care of, but, for instance, the first building that you encounter and main entrance to the plaza requires that you feel your way through an unlit labyrinth screaming with bats, stinking of their waste, and teeming with 10-inch-long spiders which can only be seen if you're lucky enough to have a light on you. Even though the plaza grass has been trimmed, the rest of the buildings are covered in green and red moss and somewhat hidden by the thick, overgrown jungle. On top of all this, monkeys swing from tree to tree, nature and all of the creepy crawlies that it has to offer us are abundant, holy MOSQUITOES...in a place that was abandoned over a thousand years ago, it amazes me that it can still be so full of life. And it was here that I heard one of the most spine-chilling noises I've ever heard - and I'm still unsure of what it was that made it. I know that they're bugs, but by the thousands, they emit this off-tune buzzing/humming noise that reminds me of the most lonely moment you could imagine in the most secluded part of the deepest jungle in the most unreachable place on earth. I don't know if I've ever heard it before and I don't know if I'll hear it anywhere else, but it definitely added to the ambience of Yaxchilan.

Bonampak, our next destination, is situated in the Lacandon Biosphere Reserve of Chiapas. This settlement was significantly smaller than Yaxchilan and generally less impressive but the frescoes here were unreal and told of rituals and history. Some indicated that marriages were arranged between the people of Yaxchilan and Bonampak, others of trade and process, but all were perfectly preserved and brought to life with blues and reds and greens. Somehow the ride back wasn't so freaky. We finished up our visit to Palenque with G&Ts and tortellini - classic Mexican dish - and were off to San Cristobal de las Casas the next morning.

At the end of 5 hours, we were 6000 feet higher, surrounded by Hotmail-background blue skies, pine trees, and our water bottles had taken on a new shape entirely. We'd arranged to meet Jonny Duracell at a hostel named Tana Inti - he hadn't known the direction, therefore we didn't, and so there was little in the way of finding it. But we trusted that we'd locate it with a bit of taxi-driver asking and so we flatly turned down the crowd of guest-recruiters outside of the bus station and walked into town. After an hour of wandering and some 10 "I don't know"s we just went to the closest place to the zocalo and decided that we'd go on a proper search later. The hostel we stayed at was called Hostal Plaza Central, and I'm just going to go ahead and say it now, don't stay there! They'll be waiting outside of the OCC bus terminal with flyers (that they will later request back from you because they reuse them) and just say NO. I'm just going to get this out of the way...apart from the central location, the 24-hour hot water is more like 24-minutes OR 3-showers worth, the beds are filthy, the computers are out-of-service (unless one of the employees is bored), they charge you if you want to leave your luggage with them after check-out, and in addition to all this, they wouldn't return our cash when we told them 3 hours after paying in advance that we only wanted to stay 3 nights not 4! If you can avoid it, pay a couple dollars more and stay somewhere else, no good.

Okay, onwards and upwards. We did eventually find Tana Inti, but no Jonny, as he warned us though, he would find us if it was meant to be. Instead we discovered a great wine and tapas place called La Viña de Bacco and stayed there for two hours - in which time Jonny did indeed walk past us! All in all, it was a good start to our stay in San Cristobal - I'm not sure it gets much better than olives, blue cheese, serrano ham, and $2 glasses of red import (which subsequently helped me to get through a pretty chilly night in our attic room).

The next day was all about museums and eating. Kristen has been dying to have coffee and considering that we were in coffee central, it seemed a good idea to hit up the coffee museum in the morning where we could pick up some hot brekkie at the same time. Not far from the coffee museum was our next stop: Na Bolom (meaning Jaguar House in Tzotzil, a language spoken in the Lacandon jungle). It was home to a couple of Swiss anthropologists (and one a photographer also) during the earlier part of the 20th century. They did an extensive amount of research on the surrounding hill tribes and cultures and the documentation is incredible. They were lucky enough to be among the first outsiders to integrate themselves with some of the indigenous cultures and their photos portray something real. The whole exhibit, including work from other local artists, was amazing and all non-profit!

Next we headed north for a kilometer through the wooden shack outskirts of San Cristobal to the Museum of Mayan Medicine where at the end of the 4-room exhibit we learned watched a graphic video on the birthing process and rituals of the indigenous hill tribes. Strange nevertheless informative, and just a half hour later we were back on the street. We faffed around during the afternoon...but the falafels we had for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant are worth mentioning, wow. And never had green lemonade before either, both were delicious though! Like I said, we faffed about for most of the afternoon until we went to Yik Cafe to meet up with Jonny since we'd planned on joining him and his hippy crew back at Tana Inti for a communal dinner. When he didn't show however, we took dinner into our own hands and retreated back to that same wine and tapas hole-in-the-wall where we'd enjoyed ourselves so much the night before, plus, should Jonny wander by like he had the day before, then he should be able to find us. Even though I'm not much one for the whole destiny spiel but I do think the succession of events that evening, beginning with being stood up by Jonny, led us into an even better night than we might've had at Tana Inti. And had I not ordered a third glass of wine then Big Omar (I have to say, I've never known an Omar in my life, and all of sudden I knew 3 in two days - just wait, there is a third...) wouldn't have had a chance to invite us to play dominoes with him and his 3 friends: brothers Oscar and Adrian (both doctors of the same speciality) and cousin to the brothers, Little Omar, Omarcito. All were friends in highschool, all were American-Mexicans living in Texas, and all were 30 and still single. Curious.

As I swished the last drops of a Chilean variety around my mouth, I picked up my empty glass and pondered that age old phrase "timing is everything" - having now joined the Omars and the brothers at their table with their wine, I wouldn't be without a full glass. I suspect that Big Omar was already pretty into the wine, and trust me, the wine was well into him, because he warned us that he was a lightweight. I'm not sure why he decided to tell us this but okay. The place quickly darkened as the sun went down and took on a whole new persona, very Casa Babylon. Big Omar swooned between his glass, the bottle, and the table, we laughed at him, the brothers bickered some, and Kristen, though on drunken par with them, managed to kick their asses at a game she'd never played before. I got tired of sitting and watching the game and made a break for the bathroom but go tangled in a conversation with two American girls living in San Cristobal instead. One worked at the University but had been here for 7 years after falling in love with an Italian, getting pregnant, and breaking up with the Italian who was "a great father, but a sucky boyfriend." She had just sent her 3-year-old little girl with her blond curls to Italy for hte first time alone to see her dad and was trying to distract herself. The other girl was teaching English and was halfway through writing her first book, so we exchanged book recommendations. Kristen decided at some point that she needed to go pass out in our attic room so she left, and I followed after closing. It was a rude and thirsty awakening the next morning.

So we'd had some payment issues, like I mentioned earlier, but I won't go into it much. Let's just say that we had been shuffled between people and told that we needed to talk to some guy who conveniently was never there when we were...and in the end those three hours between paying for our room and requesting one night's pay back turned into three days and it looked pretty unlikely that we'd get our money back. Anyways, we spent the morning waiting for this nameless man who eventually turned up and told us that all he could do was hope that someone would take our esact room (out of 30) tomorrow night otherwise we would not be returned our money. Whatever. We wanted to get out this funk we'd been left in after spending the morning waiting on someone and to no avail, and made way for the hills.

Our first stop was a town called Zinacantán, a tiny village whose church and women wearing traditional garb are all that there is to draw a crowd. There is a small market that sells everything from cheap strainers to corn to school shoes and every women and girl here wears a beautiful ensemble of black shawls embroidered with royal blue yarn over fur skirts and babies strapped to their backs. We only spent a half hour here taking pictures and visiting the church, where I met 9-year-old Juan who loved writing so much that he snatched the ticket pad from his father when he saw us entering and wrote down our names, nationality, and the date then returned the pad to his father.

We took a taxi to the neighboring town of San Juan Chamula where we had to get dropped off a bit above the town center because a parade was on its way up the main artery that leads to its famous church. Turns out, we'd arrived on none other than El Día de San Cristobál hence the celebration. Similarly, the women here wear fur skirts, but their blouses are instead made of silk and are colourful. The men wear a distinctive white fur throwover that extends down the their knees and is worn with a leather belt at the waist. How they don't get overheated, I don't know...they walked up the road past us tooting horns and playing music from the backs of the trucks AND making sure no one took photos, even coming up to Kristen and pushing her camera downwards. When the parade had passed we walked beneath the hundreds of striped umbrellas shading stall after stall in the plaza before the church. We weren't aware that we needed entrance tickets, so just as we turned around to go buy them, rejected from the church by its vigilantee, we saw who else but Jonny! We sat and talked with him for a while, but I found myself rather caught up in the swarms of kids running around us - unfortunately they've learned to ask tourists for "un peso...un peso..." wearing a pout and all the while saying it with this sad downwards tone, others even ask you for the food right out of your mouth! Yet others stick to you like glue and just ask you to "buy it...buy it..." with that same sad tone. "No niño, I already have one." "Buy another..." I realize that these kids need to eat but they also need to laugh, so when Roberto and his little toddler brother Juan (yep, Juan is the name of about every other kid in this area) came up to us and asked Kristen for her water bottle, I asked Juan about the toy motorcycle that he had in his hand, this led to tickling, which led to a game of hide-and-seek, me being the scary kid-eating monster of course. And 10 minutes later they were off holding their hands up to newly arrived tourists and putting on the pout once more. When we finally did make in the church, renowned for being host to mixed religions, we were stunned. Barely lit, the space was full of families chanting and praying on their knees - no pews - and the floor was covered in pine needles from the surrounding hills and candles, candles, candles which provided the church with its only source of light. It seemed more like a place where indigenous ritual was being held, but there were, infact, crosses bearing Jesus on them at the head of the church and shrines flanking its sides. It was incredible, never seen anything like it before.

We weren't that keen on making a "night" of it, especially since we hadn't racked up too many hours of sleep since arriving in the cooler heights of San Cristobál so we took it easy and the next day was that much easier. I went market crazy buying these gorgeous leather bags for anyone and everyone, very typical of the area, and a few bits and pieces. We saw a few more sights around town then met up with Jonny for a few glasses of wine and an in-depth chat (he doesn't do superficial) before we got on the overnighter to Puerto Escondido that evening. It was an insanely long night, considering that I was awake for every single one of the 13 hours it took to descend from the high hills of San Cristobál along windy roads at 60km an hour (take my word for it, it's way too fast to be going around sharp curves) until we reached the coast. But by then I was too excited to sleep!

Precious Puerto was a'waiting us just as it always is - hot, sunny, sleepy, quiet...we loaded into a taxi and took ourselves home. On with the fuses, the air-conditioning, the bathing suits, and into the pool! Since we arrived, it's been easy going, just spent swimming, drinking at the beach, watching the sky-high waves at Zicatela, meeting the neighbors, sorting out domestic details...ah, and then there was the fight with the old dude at the 69.The 69 is a simple store that has internet service and is the only place that offers these services along the entire stretch of Benito Juarez in the Rinconada. For this reason, apparently its owner doesn't have to be nice. He doesn't have a great reputation, is the kind who doesn't generally smile or respond to "good morning"s or "good afternoon"s but we've never had any issues before. Whenever the family's been down here, the 69 is where we go to buy random groceries and use the net, so of course, when Kristen and I were here we would be going to the 69 regularly with it being the closest place. A couple of days ago, we left after using the computers and about 200m down the road, we noticed the 50-somethings man huffing and puffing his way towards us and yelling something. When he reached us he muttered something about "virus" and "yesterday" so we humored him and followed him back to the store to see what was up. When we got back this is what happened:

"Okay, so what's the problem?"
"There's like a million screens when I open up Explorer. You put a virus on my computer."
"What? Why would I put a virus on your computer? I just used Hotmail and Facebook."
"Yeah, but it happened yesterday too. After you left, a million screens come up when I open Explorer." Hence the reason he had been hovering over us while we used his computers that afternoon. Vigilantee.
"Well, if there is a virus, I didn't do it on purpose, sir. I haven't had any problems anywhere else I've been, in San Cristobál, in Tulum, in Mérida..."
"Yes but yesterday and today, well..."
Then Kristen pipes up and says, "What do you mean? Are you saying that she put the virus on your computer on purpose??"
"Well..." Meaning yes.
"Señor, why would I want to put a virus on your computer? Seriously?" But after this experience, why not?
"Well, I don't know. But yesterday..." he runs inside and reappears dragging the old computer with him, "see, this cost me $300 yesterday and now, today you do the same thing."
"This is not my fault! How could I possibly know if there was a virus!"

He goes back inside with the old computer, I guess trying to guilt me into paying him the $300 which he didn't need to pay in the first place because he probably could've just fixed the damn thing if he'd gone to the right person. So that was it: he accused me of sabotaging his internet business and tried to scam me into paying for something that was not my fault.

I left, hopping mad, and vowed never to return there. Kristen did go back, however, for an emergency Skype call and some cranberry juice but similarly returned seething with rage passed on by this (as I later learned) alcoholic, self-admitted crazy wife-beater who won't crack a smile to save his life. Ass Monkey strikes again...

So we've got a few more days of beach bliss ahead of us and then it's on to Oaxaca - no expectations this time, we're just in it for the joy for travelling! Hope this finds you all well and sucking on a gin'n'tonic with the summer in full swing hopefully :)

Love Katie

"Are You Catholic?"

katiedoestheworld — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:13:00 GMT

I have been taking Spanish classes at UNAM for the past 4 weeks but have found that in my attempt to bring myself closer to the Mexican people by getting a firm grasp on the language I have incidentally landed in an international haven, a refuge for foreigners who find themselves suddenly living among greasy tacos and concrete skies: they call it CEPE (Centro de Ensenaza Para Extranjeros). So I have been in fact mingling with those mostly of the European and Asian variety for the past month. That’s not so say that I’m not still getting plenty of “Mexican” at home though.

Last weekend we celebrated Saul’s dad’s birthday and had anyone and everyone over including 5 of Lucia’s 9 sisters and their families over; everyone arrived late, as expected, and in waves. There was a lot of drink involved and by the end of the night, I found myself sitting in a wire-mesh chair talking Saul’s vainglory aunt’s ear off. In my drunken demeanor I shared with her my most “favorite question” to ask other foreigners and my biggest frustration about being a teacher. Note: she was not my only audience on this matter. I also discussed this particular frustration of mine with Guadalupe’s neighbors (when I said anyone and everyone this is what I meant) and I have to say, they were rather insightful.

In case there’s any interest, my favorite question to ask other foreigners is “Why did you come to Mexico…?” It’s especially interesting when they come alone because Mexico City isn’t the safest place you could go in the world when you’re on your own. I mean, I know why I’m here but I feel as though I’m pretty invested in Mexico in all realms of my life so it always intrigues me to know what the “pull” is for others.

As for my biggest frustration about being a teacher? Hands-down the attitude that it is entirely the teacher’s responsibility to teach you English and you have no responsibility to study or read in your spare time. This frustration mostly grows the experiences that I’ve been having with my girls at Pepsi. I’ve been with them for almost a year now but by the time I made my way into their lives they had already been taking English classes for two years and neither one of them could have a basic conversation. They were obviously fed-up with taking classes and making no progress - and I soon realized the reason for their lack of progress.

Several times this year, we’ve discussed what they want out of the classes and they’re even told me exactly how they want the class to be laid out, and yet every 8 weeks they come to me complaining that they still don’t feel like they’re making progress. And every time I tell them, “Well, you guys, this is the thing: we are designated 3 hours of class per week - you collect me from reception half-an-hour late everyday, which whittles our actual time down to 2 hours. It’s not much. On top of that, you’re not living and working in a English-speaking country so you have to be more realistic about your expectations. And the final thing is it’s not easy to learn a language…you’re going to have work hard outside of our two hours a week if you really want to see progress.” Duh, right?

Well, they came back to me with the same complaints about their lack of progress again this week. They would like to do conversation classes once a week and grammar once a week, which would suit me fine if they would actually make an effort to try and remember what I taught them. But the fact remains that these conversation classes don’t evolve into much when we’re constantly stopping to translate because these girls don’t know basic words and phrases used in conversation and don’t bother finding out. So, to prove my point about them having to take initiative, I conducted an experiment on Wednesday. One of the girls had asked me to translate from “mientras” in the middle of a very choppy sentence. I told her that it meant “meanwhile” and noted that these kinds of words are things they should know by now and make an effort to remember. They nodded their heads and we continued on with the class. At the end of our hour together I asked them what “meanwhile” meant and they just stared at me blankly. Thing is, I know I’m not a bad teacher - I’m starting to think that they’re just bad students. If only we could learn languages at the click of a switch, hey.

So that was that. I’m sure that The Vainglory Aunt loved listening to my quirks and rants, but let’s move back about five irrelevant paragraphs now. So my life isn’t devoid of all things lovely and Mexican, and I know that having more linguistic ability will make discovering Mexico a bit easier, but as it stands, things are pretty regular. Just rushing from early morning classes where I’m teaching in the north west of the city, down to the south of the city where my classes at UNAM are, dancing to the tune of “la musica nortena” twice a week, and making it home in time to plan for the next day and do homework. Sounds quite dull actually, but amazingly, my days are feeling a lot fuller nowadays. There’s something to said for being around people your own age I guess! And another secret is that I think I miss school. I even spent a couple of minutes scoping out Journalism Masters programs on the internet the other night…forget I mentioned it, for the time being Mexico beats school kind of like rock beats scissors.

The reason why I even came a’blogging today was because I encountered a character, as you might say, the other day on an otherwise regular Metrobus ride home. We had 10 seconds to load into the bus at Doctor Galvez and as everyone rushed to find a seat on the bus I found myself seated next to a harmless old woman. This was favorable because I wanted to be able to read my newspaper slowly and discreetly but without drawing attention to the aspect of my “foreignness.” She plopped her side-bag on her lap and we were on our way, she with her bag and me with my fantastic front-row view and newspaper at the ready. I had barely plugged into my iPod when I felt her in my periph. I pressed pause and noticed her smiling at me as though she’d just said something to me - which she had. I said, “Mande?” and she repeated for me, “Eres Caterina?” I could only come to one conclusion comprised of two thoughts: she was some sort of psychic or visionary who had a special message for me (the thought alone made me excited - at least someone knew what I should wear for my Grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary party in August) and the fact that she just uttered my name was downright creepy.

But I was in the mood so I responded, “Si.” Of course I’m Katherine and you know it, you old kook, now tell me the good news. And then I saw it and literally everything that I had been dreaming up about her warning me of what was to come in my future unwound in my head in one disappointing second. As I watched her wrinkly old hand slide out of the front pocket of her bag, I noticed a shiny pamphlet between her thumb and forefinger and realized my mistake: she had, in fact, not said, “Are you Katherine?” but “Are you Catholic?” My eyes widened with realization - unfortunately probably not the kind of enlightenment she was hoping to introduce me to. Before her fingernails even had chance to appear from within the front pocket, I corrected my initial answer and shouted at her, “Oh! No! No, no, no! No soy catolica!” In retrospect, it was probably a little much but I really didn’t want to mislead her never mind waste a pamphlet so I made it clear that I was not Catholic. But I was Katherine and this was where the confusion had stemmed from.

She didn’t seem moved really and with an understanding smile, simply slid her hand back into its pocket and turned to face the front of the bus again. Apparently she took rejection in her stride because just a few seconds later, she quietly leaned forwards, tapped the girl sitting in front of her on the shoulder, and asked her The Question. She performed this ritual for the entire duration of the bus ride as long as I was on it and though she was absolutely innocent and cute as a button, I found her determinedness and planning amusing. Her hand made the pocket its home and, like a snake, would only start sliding out, pamphlet clenched, whenever she spotted potential “prey.” If she got a negative reaction, her hand would discreetly slide back into place where it would stay until someone new came into view. Positive reactions were responded to with an enlightening comment and a pamphlet; her hand, desperate to feed their hungry spirits, would whip out of its hiding place to deliver the goods then immediately resume its position there in the bag on her lap and her eyes would continue to dart around the small space seeking out unassuming but ultimately interested Catholic riders.

And that was just one less normal than normal Metrobus ride. Well, I’ll be spicing things up here in just a matter of time…Kristen will be making her way Mexico City-ward in two weeks and after a week here in the City, we’ll be flying to Merida. From there we’ve made a tentative plan to explore Chiapas and Oaxaca (I’d love to squeeze Quintana Roo in but we’ll see) for 4 weeks. The only thing I’m sure of is that we’ll end up in Puerto Escondido one way or another! Even though I’ve already traveled a bit here, I must admit that I’m a little nervous and it’s not what you might think. I’m not nervous about my safety or money, nothing standard - I’m actually nervous about our experience being way less social than Asia was with Jess. In Asia there’s definitely a backpacker’s community and it’s comforting, but judging from my experience in what I like to call the State of Friendly People, Vera Cruz, backpacker’s here are kind of on their own and there aren’t many. More Mexican tourists than anything. The other thing is that Jess is in Asia again as we speak, either reliving our experience last year or overwriting them with better ones. In her case though, I’ve got to say that I’m more nervous for her safety and belongings…here’s hoping she doesn’t lose her camera, sleeping bag, passport, $300, credit card, and souvenirs this time. I’m going to stop being nervous now, start being excited about the upcoming adventure, and get some of this homework done.

A Little Local Flavor In Araro

katiedoestheworld — Sun, 1 Jun 2008 05:31:00 GMT

Let’s put it this way – it’s taken me the entire week to fully recover from last weekend. I am on antibiotics for a throat infection and I am recovering from this also, but I’m actually referring to our trip to Araro last Saturday. Saul’s friend, Luis, came down from Los Angeles last week, spent a night in the City with his brother then went to visit his family who live in the state of Michoacán and invited us to come over on the weekend. So we did. We took the bus from Mexico City’s Observatorio station (all buses heading west depart from here) and even though the journey was a bit long at nearly 4 hours, we were “entertained” by the not-so-well-known Christmas tale, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.” When we arrived in Acambaro, Luis was there waiting for us. From Acambaro, Araro was some 20 minutes away so Luis’ cousin had kindly offered to pick us up. I don’t know why I try to apply Canadian laws to every – as I perceive it - illegal situation here but I’ve got to put a stop to that. As I stared at the small cab of the cousin’s white pick-up truck trying to figure out the logistics of fitting four into a three-person space, Luis grabbed three over-sized bottles of beer from the back and Saul pulled me onto his lap and we were off. Country life is something else here. Just as Mexican hippies are not comparable to Canadian hippies (instead they hark back to their Aztec roots and incorporate this into their “look”), Mexican rednecks are not quite like our redneck neighbors to the north. I’ll show you what I mean. It’s a touchy topic and I don’t to appear classist or ignorant, I’ll just tell it as it is. Mexican rednecks aren’t really rednecks. The closest word that there is to “redneck” is “naco” which basically translates into “uneducated or tacky.” Better yet, a combination of the two. Because of the booming, and apparently legal, piracy industry here, nacos can generally afford to buy rip-offs of almost anything which is why I say that they don’t resemble stereotypical toothless, overall-wearing rednecks as we imagine them to be. They, along with millions of other Mexicans in all walks of life, tend to use excessive amounts of gel, men and women alike, and sport dress shoes along with jeans and a collared t-shirt of some generic pattern. So in fact, your standard naco doesn’t stick out based on his appearance – he sticks out based on his behaviour and this is especially true when it comes to the men. Catcalls, whistling, sometimes touching, muttering sweet nothings under his breath as he passes you, other times making outrageously sexist comments outloud. Even though I consider the naco to be classless (in terms of lower, middle, and upper classes) most of the nacos that you’ll run into belong to the middle to lower classes of society here and have not had the opportunity to be educated at school, nor in the home. I just want to make it clear that the term “naco” is not used to describe only people of lower classes. If you behave in a disrespecting way, you are a “naco,” and trust me, nacos exist in the multitudes in both middle and upper classes too, you’d be surprised to know how “naco” a man in a suit can be. I remember having a chat with one of my students in November of last year because that morning I had experienced my first “violation” on the metro and I decided to share my frustration with Francisco about not being able to do anything about it. As I was walking up the stairs on my way out of the metro, I felt this nasty skinny finger quickly creeping up between my legs. I was severely grossed out but couldn’t think of much more to say at that time with my limited Spanish than “Ewwww!” and I flashed a disgusted look at my violator, a young 20-something guy who seemed to be in no rush to get out of my sight after what he’d just done. Had I been better equipped language wise, I would’ve given him my two cents and a loud warning to all of the other women moving between the throngs of men to cover their asses. Understandably, docile Francisco was perturbed by my experience and tried to explain to me how some men think in this country and why by recounting an experience he’d had at work. Once he had been asked to conduct an informative meeting at one of the Proctor & Gamble factories, specifically the one in Naucalpan which is a neighborhood littered with factories and close to the border between the Federal District and the State of Mexico. With all of the almost entirely male staff collected in the auditorium, the meeting commenced. The first guest speaker was a woman who was dressed in a knee-length skirt, heels, and a modest blouse. As soon as she made way down the central aisle for the front of the room, the entire auditorium erupted into whistles and dirty comments. Francisco was appalled and made a statement before the group that before there would be any meeting there would be manners and education about how to receive women and not just professional women. Obviously I could get stuck on this theme alone…back to Araro. Well, it was a shocker to me to find myself seatbelt-less (even after a year of living here) and more so, seatbelt-less and drinking Leon beer, driver included. But they were long, bare countryside roads and in under half an hour we were at Luis’ doorstep safe and sound. Araro had a population of 15000 in the winter and just 5000 in the summer so you might imagine how small this town, stradled between a hill and a lake, is. Luis’ house was just 2 blocks from the “center” (a church and kiosk). Were I anywhere else I would be thinking, “Wow, prime location. Must’ve cost a bundle.” but when the town sprawl is only about 8 blocks long and 4 blocks wide, almost everyone lives conveniently close to the zocalo. We unloaded our things and entered the house. From the outside, it was a blank canvas – an ivory white wall shared with both neighbors and with two barred eyes and a metal door. But once inside we entered an outdoor living room with couches, a TV, pictures of the kids, and even their degrees were hung on the walls. Both of Luis’ brothers were there with their pregnant wives, two other couple-friends of Luis’ from Mexico City, and of course his parents. His dad was up a ladder picking limes and oranges out of the lush trees in their courtyard garden and his mom was cooking up a storm in the kitchen. With oversized beer bottles (and a tequila + Squirt) in hand, we all sat at a large wooden table in the garden underneath a tree and feasted on mole, pork, rice, tortillas…a fantastic traditional meal. We drank and talked and drank and talked and drank and talked, then drank and danced. And then there 6. Saul went to bed early which wasn’t much of a problem especially since it evened out partners for dancing. Federico, one half of one of the couples, showed me how to dance salsa and then it was time to eat again. Luis’ mom started up the stove again and had us eating pork, cheese, and mole again. We decided to let the house have a rest and walked the two blocks to the center where we all sat at benches around the kiosk and talked until Luis decided it was time to dance again. And then there were 4. As we wandered the dark, empty streets a few blocks to the north of the zocalo we realized that we’d lost a couple (Mauricio and his girl) on this massive journey but followed the music anyway. Araro is not the kind of place that would be host to a bar or club of any sort – it’s just not big enough and half of the population are older farmer types or families who have a tradition of living there, while some of the younger types do their business in drug-trafficking. It’s a strange place in terms of demographics and in economics but it’s still standing on its feet. Anyhow, I would say that this place was kind of like a dance hall, but it was “naco,” very tacky. Essentially, it was a warehouse that had a small bar set up in one corner near the door, which was a large piece of cloth used to cover the gaping hole that was the warehouse entrance, and a DJ had set himself up on top of boxes at the back of the long building. We passed a group of sketchy individuals hanging out in the back of a pick-up truck parked infront of the dance hall and as is the case with any small town since there are picking are slim, there was a crowd of men hanging out on the street checking out anything with long hair. I latched myself onto Luis and we pulled back the curtain door to enter. The music was booming and all around the perimeters of this end of the warehouse men leaned on the curved metal walls of the hall in their cowboy hats and collared shirts either waiting for their chance to dance or enjoying the spectacle and watching with desire. Some were like hawks, just waiting for some lone girl to walk through that curtain so that they might sink their hungry claws into the small of her back and have a dance, twirling and hopping to the beat of norteño music. I call it clown music. After an hour we were all sweaty and drunk and Federico and I were tired so we left Luis to dance with his girlfriend while we did some yoga and wall-flowered through the rest of the song. It was nothing more than a hop, skip and a jump back to Luis’ and just a blink of the eyes before we were awake again. When I woke up, Saul wasn’t lying next to me in our huge communal bedroom. When I left the room, I discovered him lying on the couch outside. Federico’s sleeping had kept him up so he moved himself outside for the night. Curiously the snoring didn’t seem to bother anyone else. I wouldn’t say I was KO’ed but I didn’t hear a thing. Luis’ dad had picked some oranges for us and our hangovers sucked them dry then threw the peel away. Meanwhile his mom was busy in the kitchen again and presented us with tamales, leftover pork, mole, chicken, and freshly squeezed papaya-orange juice. Broaching 9am, we decided that we best get going again so that we would have enough time to get back to the city. So the guys went and collected more beer to quench their hangovers with and loaded an ice bucket into the back of Mauricio’s car. All seven of us squeezed into the car and drove 10 minutes to the nearby lake where cattle and wild horses ran amuck. The lake itself was nothing particularly stunning, but its stillness was beautiful – wish I could say the same for the water, however, on my way between a boat near the shore that we boarded and the sandy land I spotted a dead fish floating its way towards my feet. Starting to feel the burn of the sun sans contamination, we retreated to the car which was parked in the middle of cowland for that beer we’d brought and just had a chat out of the boot of the car. On the way back, we stopped at the railway tracks to take a picture of us all head to toe across the tracks. Mauricio had volunteered to take the pictures since he’s camera shy but when he started looking over his shoulder we got a bit nervous and craned our necks around his body to see what he was looking at. There in the distance was the brightly burning headlight of a train. There was some mild panic because everyone wanted a picture taken with their individual cameras but also wanted get off those tracks ASAP. So we don’t look incredibly relaxed in the photo but who would be when a cargo train is just 500m away. But from the sidelines, we screamed with excitement and gushed like 5-year-old boys about how thrilling it was that a train was whizzing right by us. Luis had put 5 pesos on the tracks but we couldn’t locate the flattened version after the fact so we jumped into the car and raced to another part of the track in order for him to try this stunt again. Luckily for us, the train had slowed down and was now chugging its way towards us. With the coins in place we waited patiently for the train to round the corner, anticipating its coin-crushing ability, and when it finally appeared it was moving at a snail’s pace and stopped altogether about 10m from the coins. Luis was convinced the conductors were just being jerks and kept whipping his head around to check if they were moving again the whole way back to the house. I think it was something mechanical. We decided to make one last trip into town to collect some cheese and elote and when we reached the plaza, we saw horses everywhere. Within the church gates but outside of the church itself, men were parading around on their dancing horses holding tall flags bearing saints on them. We didn’t quite figure out what was going on but it was something different and definitely local. Pictures were taken, horses were watched, elote was eaten, and cheese was bought, but the most interesting part of the whole ceremony was probably when the men began loading their horses into the back of their pick-up trucks. They simply opened up the back so that it was leaning on the raised sidewalk next to a corner store and lead the horses up some steps (usually for pedestrians) and past the store then into the truck. I guess I’m a simple person with simple pleasures but I enjoyed the innovation of the horse owners. Forget buying all of that expensive equipment and machinery, we’ll just find a raised sidewalk and walk the horses into the truck. Why not? We bid our goodbyes to Luis and his family as they lit a gas balloon up that floated into the sky marking the end of another good weekend. We caught a ride with the other Mexico City two couples but this time I got a seatbelt. It was Mauricio’s girlfriend who didn’t. It was long drive back along the straight and narrow highway from Morelia and more so, it’s difficult to sleep when you’ve got a stranger on one side and glass on the other so I just didn’t. And I’ve spent the entire week trying to pay back my sleep debt! Oh well, onto the next adventure sleepy-eyed but happy.

Pharmaceutical Frauds & More Metro Headline Lovelies

katiedoestheworld — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:33:00 GMT

So Saul did some “spring cleaning” this weekend. There’s a space at the back of the house that pretty much resembles a 3x3m cage. It’s on the top floor and contains all the stuff that his parents didn’t want in the house while it was a hostel. Anyways, it’s not exactly built to be much of a weather shield what with its wire-mesh fence walls (the kind you see around a baseball field) and soggy cement floor. And what’s more, now that the rainy season has arrived, it’s obvious that the ability of this storage space to preserve its contents is moot. Save for the boxes, those precious contents have no hope of making it through the summer winds which bring layers of dust and dirt to all open spaces and then there are those heavy, torrential hail showers.

Saul was asked to bring down some seat cushions that were drying in the storage shed-without-walls. He got distracted, no surprise there, and begin picking through some of the soggy and misshapen boxes and was surprised to discover that all of the family photos and albums were inside, piled carelessly, very much so tossed in there last minute (he was even more distressed about his Superman comics but we won’t go there). So he pulled out the photo box (and the comics…sigh) and we began going through some of the pics.

What can I say about the 90s…tasteless trends and neon colors must have been a global epidemic. I thought that it had been contained within Canadian and American borders, but no. It made its merry way to Mexico and in full heat. Though Saul is more of an athlete these days and tends not to stray much from spandex and sweats, once upon he apparently swam with the trend. There he was stuck in "Hammer Time": eye-burningly-bright purple MC Hammer pants, his hands deep in their pockets, with a purple and black striped shirt to match, and the icing on the cake? His MC Hammer buzz cut and the smirk on his face that said he was “all that and a bag of chips.” Speaking of chips, there was one of my carb-hungry guy at 5-years-old passed out with 3 chips in his mouth. They were literally half-in and half-out when he fell asleep. How, you ask? One word: typical. Not much has changed really, he has an absurd relationship with food. You might recall that Tim Horton’s commercial where that guy is dancing with a doughnut because he loves them so much? Yep, Saul in a nutshell – better yet a doughnut hole.

We moved through the strays and we ran into a pile of photos of what appeared to be nothing more than building. By the time I reached the sixth one of this building I took a closer look and there was Saul’s dad smiling proudly in his crisp, white doctor’s coat, as he leaned with his hands pressed firmly on the front counter of this….pharmacy?? In the top left corner, a sign read “Milenium Farmacia.” My first thought was “What the #%$*…” Saul’s dad didn’t finish highschool at 18, however, he did return to highschool and went on to complete law school because he couldn’t hold a conversation with his new girlfriend’s friends (Saul’s mom, Lucia) since she was a professional, a doctor. That makes him a lawyer by profession. So what was he doing standing there in a doctor’s coat as the owner of a pharmacy?

Once he had attained his degree, he quickly got bored of it and shortly after, began printing t-shirts for extra business, owned a snacks and beverages pit-stop in San Andres, worked on political campaigns in Timilpan, and opened up two hotels: one in Timilpan where Don Silviano lives, and the other was a hostel hosted by the house we’re in now in Mexico City. One was successful, the other wasn’t. He’s a man who likes to take risks and doesn’t like to be bored, put simply, and these such businesses are what keep his boredom at bay. One day, he decided that his next project would be a pharmacy chain. I have no clue why this occurred to him or even remotely interested him considering that he’s not a certified pharmacist, nor did he know anything more than the internet and his wife’s medical texts told him about pharmaceutical drugs.

It sounds bizarre that pretty much anyone can sell prescription drugs here but the truth is that’s the way it works. You are your own doctor. For example, I went a pharmacy just around the corner from our house to get another bottle of Bactrim after having had the flu. I asked the “pharmacist” for the generic brand (this is why prescription medicine is so much cheaper in Mexico) of Bactrim and she had a fiddle on the computer then went to the generic brand pull-out shelves. She searched and searched but came out with nothing. She asked her “pharmacist” friend at the other register, then was back to the shelves, and finally pulled out a yellow box. She presented it to me and asked, “Does that look like the one you had before?” Uhhh, I’m not the doctor. But then, for 23 pesos, I guess it’s worth the risk.

Another time, Saul had bad acid reflux and went for some Malox. Since they don’t give you dosage instructions when you’re buying your medicine, and there are no instructions on the boxes or bottles of the generic brands since you’re supposed to get the prescription and directions from your doctor, Saul bought it and eagerly took a giant gulp. Turns out he had downed nearly half the bottle and since the bottle didn’t tell us of any side affects we were left to call his mom. We’re working on his need for instant gratification.

My point is, it’s a scary thought, thinking that a lot of the people who work in these pharmacies handing out prescription drugs everyday are not certified to do so in other countries or are minimally educated on this stuff. Another scary thought? One of last week’s Metro headlines read “Only Seven Dead!” I don’t see how that is every a good thing but whatever. And yesterday’s read, “For Some Pesos” – a man didn’t want to pay a “Viene Viene” and the “Viene Viene” killed him. “Come Come” is the name given to the people who think they own a chunk of the sidewalk then “help” you to park your car on the street by telling you to “Come Come” with their voice and to “Come Come” with their hand incase you can’t hear them, then they guard it until you return. And since they “own” the street, they demand that you pay them for their extra hard work. I’m pretty sure it was public property last time I checked…more so, it’s supposed to be a free world but nowadays your average Joe looking for a new cell phone can claim part of the street, any street, and charge money for people to park there by reserving these spots with crates and buckets full of concrete. There approximately a million stupid slash illegal jobs here in Mexico and once I feel up to the challenge of listing them off, I’ll make sure to post ‘em.

In the State of Mexico With Don Silviano

katiedoestheworld — Wed, 7 May 2008 03:15:00 GMT

It was back to good ol’ gorgeous Malinalco last weekend where we stayed at Jesus’ place with him and his girlfriend, Dayana, her cousin Queztalcoatl (incidentally, he shares his name with one of the most famous Aztec deities of all time), his girl, Claudia, another “couple,” and Priscila. Priscila realized her seventh-wheel circumstances and subsequently paired up with a man named Brandy who she found sitting on the counter amongst his friends Vodka and Rum, but this wasn’t until much later in the night. At first he was shy, you might even “closed,” the kind of guy who was the last to be invited to a party and even when he was, everyone ignored him most of the night anyhow. But Priscila took a chance and it was then that she discovered how great Brandy really was on the inside.

Last year Dayana gave Jesus a dog for his birthday, a Labrador, who he named Remo (“rowing”). At the same time, Dayana got herself a Dalmatian who she called Florentina. Now when they came to Malinalco for the weekend, they brought along with them the dogs. Dayana had driven them here this time, just as she had many times before, but took a different route on her way westward out of the city. As she winded her way around hairpin curves up to Ajusco she soon realized that Florentina was capable of being carsick and so her dog ended up vomiting all the way to La Marquesa.

In all frankness, Florentina is a bitch. And not the dog kind. As soon as we arrived, she jumped on me and bit my leg. While I nursed a bleeding wound, Remo discovered that he was now big enough to jump through the window from outside so Jesus spent every other minute of the weekend dragging Remo out of the house by the collar.

That afternoon we ventured down the town’s cobble-stoned streets to the tiny, colourful, market at the Zocalo in search of The Tlacoyo Lady. The original Tlacoyo Lady wasn’t there, but her set-up was in the same spot and who ever it was that was replacing her made sure to wear the same apron and hairstyle (two long braids) as the original Tlacoyo Lady so as not to confuse returning clientele such as ourselves. I bought some dominoes, the ever-exotic cow bone variety, then the nine of us climbed a seemingly unclimbable egg-shaped mountain with the help of some poorly welded holds and sketchy ladders (me in my skirt and sandals) in the hopes of reaching a set of crosses that could be seen from the valley town below.

We had pizza at a place where Jesus had been going to since he was a kid then Priscila, Brandy, and I stayed up until 5am playing Jenga and sitting with Dayana while she waited out the spins.

8am: Saul and I filled up on tamales at the market, then made way for San Andres Timilpan, all the in the north of the State of Mexico about 3 hours from Malinalco. What was the reason for this ludicrous act when we should have been sleeping? It was Saul’s Grandfather’s 79^th birthday and “everyone is going so…” Okay, fine. So we went to the ranch.

Don Silviano is a cowboy-hat-wearing traditional Mexican who stole his half-French wife from her wholly-shocked parents when she was just his girlfriend then married her. They moved to Mexico City as soon as Saul’s dad was set to begin school and where Don Silviano took up position as a street cop in the Zocalo all those years ago. Even though his backwards way of thinking probably caused him problems when he was younger and built up a lot of tension between family members as he got older, I quite enjoyed watching and listening to him on Sunday.

Now, in his old age, he rambles on about things and everyone just kind of ignores him or laughs at his comments. And trust me, he ignores them sometimes too. While his 3 sons fried some fish, he overlooked the whole process then as it came time to cook the steaks he told his middle son, Salvador, to put lots of oil on the cooking plate. Salvador said that they didn’t need to use oil. Don Silviano disappeared, reappeared, shuffled over to the fire and silently let the oil flow generously from the lips of a bottle then turned around to place it back on the bench as though he’d never heard a peep out of Salvador. Once upon a time, he was a strong man, able to carry pigs. He’s lost some strength for sure but he’s still a handsome fellow and doesn’t he know it…he’s had the latest girlfriend for almost a year now.

The second youngest of her 7 children came to live and work at the house in Mexico City when it was a hostel back in the fall. At just 15, Manuel was a good worker and a nice kid. When he announced that he was going to be returning to Timilpan after just two months of being with us I was a little disappointed, although not all that surprised considering that he’d been express-kidnapped earlier in the month when he went to meet some clients at the end of the street to deliver their coffee and change to them. They pushed him into a taxi, drove him two blocks, took the money from him, and left him back on the sidewalk to walk home. They did it to the newspaper girl at Alvaro Obregon the same day. For a kid who had never experienced the city before, this did not make a good impression on him and I completely understood why he was leaving.

However, when the water wasn’t reaching the upstairs bathroom the day after he left, it was because the water pump had been stolen. Saul’s dad had someone in Timilpan check Manuel’s backpack and there it was, along with a collection of tools. Then when we received the cable bill the next month we saw that he had been ordering adult films every Tuesday night for 5 weeks. Just like Britney Spears, he was not that innocent…

The youngest kid was and still is helping Don Silviano around the ranch, feeding the pigs, cutting wood, and cleaning up.

Satisfied to finally be eating his oily steak, Don Silviano started spouting out things about how he wanted to be called Don Silviano by everyone, etc.…this resulted in all the grandkids giggling and the adults rolling their eyes and flapping a hand in the air, condoning his commentary with a, “It’s his birthday, just let him…”

Though he’s still strong in his opinions, it seems to me that Don Silviano prefers nowadays to just stir the pot, even be the one who starts the fire with a single comment, then sit back and watch his work unfold. I don’t remember what he said during one conversation in particular, but as his three sons argued about politics with increasing intensity, Don Silviano sat in his chair patiently eating a piece of cake and intermittently, but impatiently, calling for Saul’s mom, Lucia, to bring coffee: “Lucia! Café!” God forbid she arrived 30 seconds after his shout…

As the arguing continued, Don Silviano sat across from them with his fingers intertwined and hanging between his legs. He looked strangely comfortable watching all of this, but I suppose he wasn’t really listening. In fact, it appeared that he was possibly even bored when amidst the noise he turned his head towards the table, then gently raising his arm pointed at the cakes and said, “I liked the chocolate one best.”

It was a good day for him. He had literally his whole family there, with the exception of his now deceased wife. Lucia, in her usual manner, had invited one of her nine sisters, Guadalupe, along. In keeping with typical Mexican fashion, Lupe then invited one of her daughters, Erica, along. Naturally, Erica brought with her her three children and all of Lucia’s guests rode with her out to Timilpan, baby on knee and all.

Erica’s youngest, Eric, is three years old and was eager to show me the cows then the pigs, then the pigs again, and the baby cow…his sister Andrea tagged along and told me, as if I hadn’t noticed, that Eric loves animals. Saul came to my rescue when he walked onto the field with a bow and arrow. Every time he shot it, Andrea and Eric raced to collect the arrow and one time Saul shot it across what seemed to be a freshly-turned patch of land. We followed the kids across this patch as they ran towards the arrow and that’s when we noticed that Eric was running on top of a massive pile of cow shit and didn’t know it. It was relatively dry so he wasn’t getting grossly dirty, but depressions in the dung made by cow and horse hooves got him stuck and he desperately called out, “Andrea, ayudame!” Andrea, help me! So there he was: he didn’t know that he was standing in a pile of cow crap but got stuck in it anyways then called out to his sister to save him – this scene was a fine mix of cute and funny as you might imagine.

We were well sick of driving when we finally made it back to Mexico City that night and aren’t set to hit the highway again for two more weeks when we go to Patzcuaro with our friend Luis. To be posted in the near future…

Shake Me Up, "I Love You!"

katiedoestheworld — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:55:00 GMT

As I was sitting at the computer last night, post-blog, I was thinking about something else that happened in Puerto Escondido. One day, we walked on a plot of land where a dirt path had been cut out of the grass on our way up to Benito Juarez. At the end of the path was a sidewalk and across from the sidewalk was a building site where some 20 young men were working on the exterior of a modern-style, three-story apartment block. I had anticipated some whistling or uneducated comments, but what came to me was something different.

I was wearing a wide-rimmed hat and did what I do in Mexico City – kept to myself, eyes straight-forward, all very low key. Mum told me I was being a snob; I told her it was self-preservation.

My general experience has been that if you react, it just perpetuates the behavior. Although, once when I passed a bus stop where a small group of guys were waiting, they turned at the nod of the one guy facing me, said the usual, “Ahhh, que bonita eres…” clucked their tongues in approval, and leaned back to view the object of their attention. Instead of pretending it had never happened, I stopped and looked at them and told them, “Ten respeto.” They all responded in opposition to this with their own comments, most likely derogatory and intended to offend, and waving their hands in the air all the while but I couldn’t hear what they’d said because I was already half way down the street. Really, I was in Condesa, a safe, well-vigilated area for all the cars that pass through so it was unlikely that anything would happen, I just scared myself talking back to them in my second language. I was definitely not sufficiently equipped to defend myself in a real conversation at this point.

So we walked past this group of workers when I heard someone yell, “Hey lady!” This could have been followed by a “You dropped your sunglasses!” – even a “You’re pretty” would have been tolerable. My mum thought I was rude to be ignoring his equivalent of “Hello” but I kept on moving forwards. He then yelled “I love you!” I shook my head and smiled under the brim of my hat. I guess it is an important phrase but if you’re going to learn one phrase in another language how about a conversation starter, not an expression of love! Mum did bring it to my attention that that was it. He was probably never going to fall in love again, never find a love like ours again, so I should at least respond to him. If just the top of my hat made him fall in love with me, maybe there was a chance that I could fall in love with him with a quick peek at the soles of his shoes…but I just wasn’t ready to take that chance. I do wonder, though, how did he expect me to react? With a passion-bent “I love you!” before clambering up the scaffolding in my dress to meet him for the first time with an enormous kiss as a sign of my instantaneous but undying love for him?

Even though it was funny, I was grateful for the 3-storey difference between us. At least it wasn’t as awkward as the time that Jess and I met some young monks in a Buddha Park outside of Vientiane in Laos and upon parting ways one of the monks told us that he wanted to come with us because “I love you.” We smiled and told him not to throw that around too much. The phrase wasn’t all that inappropriate - again just funny - but I’m pretty sure that his being with us, having pictures taken with us, putting his arm around us, was completely inappropriate.

The enamored construction worker never did call out to me again. Apparently he moved on, although judging from his quick ability to fall in love it didn’t surprise me the rate at which he fell out of love.

Small digression as usual. So there I was sitting at the computer with my head resting on my hand, my elbow resting on my knee, and my knee pulled up with my foot on the chair and I was thinking about all of this. Suddenly, I started to feel this swaying and concluded that I had finally worn myself out from being on the computer too long and was going to faint. In a mini-panic, I planted my feet firmly on the ground just to check that I was in fact feeling dizzy, then pulled my foot up onto the chair again to see if the feeling would reoccur. It did. So I called to Saul to come upstairs, the great plan being that he would be there to catch me when I fainted – which to date I have still never done. The hypochondriac that I am, I had convinced myself that I was near collapse but got up in one last dramatic effort to call to Saul.

As I heard him coming up the stairs, he was yelled to me, “What?” Then as he got closer, he asked me, “Did you feel the earthquake?” to which I responded, “Oh…yeah. Crazy. That’s what I was going to ask you.” Of course it was an earthquake…duh, what else would it be…like I didn’t know.

I probably should spend less time on the computer regardless of my now irrelevant near faux-fainting experience. On that note, off I go.

Lucky Number 4

katiedoestheworld — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:55:00 GMT

On my way to Bosques today, I was reading this article about luck and so far I’ve had some pretty clear signs and definitive experiences that lead me to believe that I’m not a naturally “lucky” person. Not that I’m not lucky to have the life I have, but I’m not lucky in life so to speak. We all know someone who dip-dahs through life, almost unaware this concept we call decision-making because they generally don’t have to take part in it – it’s as though things just fall into their lap. I was thinking that maybe it’s because they let things happen and therefore they just do, unlike someone like myself who is constantly measuring the good and bad outcomes of every situation. Maybe that’s part of it but I’m under no impression that my “luck” status would be otherwise if I wasn’t the way I was.

Anyhow, last week my mum dropped by Mexico City for an overnighter en route to a favourite destination of ours, Puerto Escondido. Come Saturday morning, we made way for the massive artisan market in Buena Vista via the Metrobus of course. As we passed Durango, we stopped at the subsequent set of lights, as you do (or some do here). A mass of bikers came rushing across Insurgentes, west to east, as our light turned red and continued to pass through another set of lights. Obviously it was some sort of organized “parade” of bikes, and among the ugly, low-rider types, there were police on their trikes, skeleton-mask wearing dudes, dudettes, and even kids on four-wheelers. As we sat through two sets of lights the cars behind, who couldn’t see or suppose what was going on to cause such a hold-up, began honking their horns.

I noticed a gold car impatiently nudging its way through the bikers as a means of regaining control of the path and getting where it wanted to be which was obviously more important than letting this group have its day. What choice did they have? The bikers slowed down enough to let her pass when they saw her crawling through them and when the driver realized this, she blew on the accelerator. Just as she saw the front of her car saw the other side of the road, a biker came flying around the side of the group, unaware of the car, and was impacted by it so strongly that his motorcycle ripped off the entire front fender of the gold car, his bike went flying into a tree, and he flipped twice before landing on his stomach and sliding under a car parked on the side of the road.

The incoming group of bikers immediately surrounded the gold car, like mosquitoes to my sister, and started revving their engines in anger. Luckily our injured biker was wearing a helmet. Luckily there were police scattered amongst the riders. Luckily there were paramedics in a van driving parallel to them. A crowd quickly drew and, though I will never understand it, there, within 30 seconds of the crash, was a photographer with his 300mm lens poking his extended eye between officials, bystanders, and paramedics. How was he there?! Unless these magazines have photographers stationed at posts on every corner of the city…how…it’s a phenomenon.

As police worked to move those angry bikers from the center of the road to allow traffic to flow south to north, I caught a glimpse of the driver, sitting with her legs swung around so she was at the wheel with the car door open. I can’t describe her attitude as anything else but indifferent. She was talking with an official and didn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed by what had unfolded. Whatever she was rushing to get to would be a lot further in distance and time from there and now.

So, do we chalk it up to “bad luck”? Or just another stupid driver? Some call it “fate” but I think I’m going to go with bad luck. Not that he was an unlucky person, but he did happen to have terrible luck that day. I wasn’t around on Sunday to pick up the Metro to find out what had happened to the biker but even if I was, there’s a good chance it might have been booted from the cover story in favor of a good and gory one anyway. No blood, no story apparently.

That was a Saturday morning shocker. But we had business to attend to. The market was more of a warehouse and even though it was stocked with plenty of tacky tidbits, there were treasures to be found and find them we did.

Mum had arrived with one too many suitcases to begin with and I was well into two, so as I caved under the weight of a box full of hand-blown glasses and watched mum balance herself with two long packages (one containing three rolled canvases, the other, all of the wood pulled apart that would make the frames), I wondered.

We loaded ourselves into the taxi with a grand total of 5 suitcases, a computer, 2 hats, a duvet bag packed with curtains, books, and a purse, 2 large side bags, and an 11x14 inch envelope containing photos I’d developed at Costco. Luckily the plane was only half-full, but unluckily, the airline was particular about its weight limits on baggage and there was a hefty fine to pay. In fact, it was cheaper to return to Mexico City to retrieve the luggage then fly back to Puerto Escondido than pay their fees. Ni modo. We had to get there and we had to get there with everything.

When we arrived, Ryan, the guy who we (I say “we” like I took part in buying the place, but I didn’t. They. They, my parents, bought it) bought the apartment from, informed us that the electricity bill had never been delivered to him and so since he hadn’t known that there was a bill to pay he hadn’t paid it. So when he went into the apartment that morning to check that everything was in place, he discovered that the AC was out, the lights didn’t work, the fridge was hot as the days there…no matter how much you prepare here, Mexico time is a fighting force that will undoubtedly disappoint your plans. The best advice is to just not make plans. Unluckily, our electricity was off and it was the weekend so there wouldn’t be any help until the work week arrived. Luckily, the apartment below Ryan’s was empty until Monday so we took an overnight bag there each and set up shop.

First thing first: we took a dip in the unreal ocean-view pool. Fresh out of the shower, I patted myself dry and thought about eating as I pulled a shirt out of my bag, a pair of shorts, a bra, uh….no underwear? I didn’t bring any underwear? Well, save the pair I was wearing when I arrived. Okay, bathing suit bottoms would suffice for the time being. We decided on dinner at Los Tugas that first night just to avoid collecting food at our “host’s” place. Delicious Portuguese cuisine!

Surprisingly, I relived the same shock I had already experienced during the “no underwear?!” incident earlier that evening when I went to get into my pajamas. “What? No pajamas?!” Unluckily (or simply absent-mindedly?) I had failed to pack both underwear and nightwear for my 6-day trip to Puerto Escondido, but luckily, I had brought with me two bathing suits and we discovered an over-sized t-shirt of my Grandad’s that he had packed into a box to be delivered to our place the following day.

Gerald, a kind German man and Rotary Club member who my Grandad befriended on one of his many trips to the small coastal town when he was doing Rotary work there some years ago (and continues to do as President of his local club), came on Monday. He delivered a slew of numbered boxes that my Grandad had organized, complete with inventory list before he and my Granny left a month earlier. He unloaded those into the apartment and we loaded our unbelievably sweaty selves into his truck. Being a well-doing, modest, bit beyond-the-hump kind of a man, we stuck to small talk with Gerald, inquiring about his Mexican journalist/insurance broker wife, Yolani, and thanking him repeatedly for taking us out today, especially since we didn’t have a car. To this, he always answered that he was retired, “It’s no problem,” then fell into a happy mumble about how he’s not too busy to help us out, retired something, something else…all the while smiling slightly under his light-gray, but heavy mustache.

Beds. We found beds at Ramon’s which wasn’t called Ramon’s but Ramon was a friends of Gerald’s and so that was how we knew the store as. Unfortunately, Puerto’s meager - colorful but meager - center was a bit lacking in the furniture department. There were plenty of papelerias, cerrajerias, farmacias, lots of –ias, but furniture styles didn’t really differ much between stores and tended not to stray far from primary-colored, metal-framed designs and cheap, flamboyant woodwork. I understood this, but with its rapidly growing real estate market aimed at foreigners willing to delve into their accounts at a single glance, a new market in furniture had to be growing up somewhere between the –ias and shacks.

Luckily, we were with Gerald. Our longtime resident friend located a carpenter who had a few nicely stained, cleanly cut items on display and we simply asked him to make a couple of side-tables, a dining table, two chairs and a bench based on the coffee table design that was on display. So it was done. Well, it’s been paid for, but we won’t know how it all turned out until Gerald returns to pick it up and pay the other half of the bill in three weeks. He was at some point drawing out sketches and measurements on the lady’s desk however, so I’m thinking that he will take his standards with him and measure their work up when he does return. On the ride back, we discovered that Gerald bakes his own bread and he likes bratwurst.

One day, while we were having a “business meeting” in the pool overlooking the ocean and sipping on rum and cokes, our neighbors approached us. Of the 6 apartments, they were the only neighbors of ours who were there at the time and some things needed to be sorted – boring things, like electricity bills, gas, shared patio buys, etc. We never did find out what the wife’s name was. Maybe it was the rum distorting out hearing, or maybe it was because she responded to both Dina and Lina when we tried to find out which one it was. So we decided we would just do this when we called to her: “Dlina!” She didn’t notice the difference and so neither did we.

Harvey, the hubby, was talking to us about house numbers one day after mum inquired about our address: we were number 1, he informed us on the second to last day of our stay. Not that it was his obligation – it was completely ours but we’d never bothered to find out so we had asked him what his number was and figured it out from there. As he told us his address, number 4, he stopped and stewed in his thoughts for a second. Then he looked down at us in the pool (yes, we were there again – business meeting) and said, “Isn’t the number 4 unlucky in China?” Since I’d just spent some time in China, I thought back to what I’d learned while I was there, and indeed, the number 4 was unlucky, Harvey. So if the number 4 was unlucky, then what number was considered lucky in China? 8, the number 8. I don’t know if the lightbulb moment I was experiencing lit up my face but it sure inspired me to take a hearty gulp of my drink. Now that I thought about it, that explained my sister’s uncannily close relationship with luck. Date born: 8/8/86. I guess the only way you could be more set-up to travel with Lady Luck would be to be born on this date in 1988, nevertheless, she has luck aplenty to deal with. My dad says she was born under lucky stars, that’s all, but I’m starting to think that this “8” business has something to do with it.

Here’s her story, if she doesn’t mind its being told. When she was 15, she got a job at a seafood restaurant waitressing. She decided one day that she didn’t like it and chose not to return nor to inform them that she was quitting. Not only did they not punish her for this behavior but offered her a job there some years later again. She didn’t take it of course – tigers never do something they don’t want to do.

When she decided that she needed to work, she went to stay with a friend at his house on Orcas Island for the summer and together along with another buddy, they did odd jobs around the place, like fixing the patio. The local Sherriff and town tiler offered her a job working with him doing tiling when he saw the three of them working and so she did a bit of work with Mr. Clever.

The next summer, she returned to Orcas and took up an unexpected apprenticeship with Sherriff Clever and ended up doing work for both Warren Miller and Richard Bach. Incidentally, Richard Bach and his wife didn’t have children and took a real liking to my sister. I would even say that Richard took her under his wing. That summer, he taught our thrill-seeking Jessica how to fly a plane, since it happened that he had a couple of things lying around a hanger on the island.

The next summer, she set-up her own tiling company at the ripe old age of 19 thanks to wandering into an apprenticeship.

As some of you will already know, Jess and I traveled to Asia together. During this time she decided that she wanted to be a vet – we all breathed a sigh of relief at this realization because she’d always loved animals but farted around at UVic for 2 years instead of getting her act together to do what she loved. She put out some feelers and applied to schools in the UK and Australia while we were in China. When she returned, she signed up to do Science courses for semester in order to bring up some of her grades and take other necessary old-haunt courses that she had evaded in high school. Granted, she worked hard for 3 months and sent in all of the requirements. By December, she’d received a couple of “no’s” and hadn’t heard from other schools so she’d accepted that she wouldn’t be going to vet school this year. Besides, she had already booked herself a ticket to Perth to go traveling for another half-year.

We were all together in Puerto Escondido over Christmas and New Year’s. She left on January 3^rd and when she was waiting at an airport somewhere in the US, she checked her email on a whim and discovered an email of acceptance into the one school she really wanted to go to and where was it? Perth. She had 3 weeks to prepare her things before she was set to go, and would arrive there 2 weeks before school started. So she started trying to find a place to stay – and ended up chatting with one girl who she got along with really well. Her and her two roommates had been contacted by a lot of people and would be holding interviews this weekend. But Jess wouldn’t be there…oh well, you have to let some things go right? Wrong. She arrived and noticed an email from this girl which told her, in essence, that her and her roommates decided that they wanted Jessica to be their fourth roommate because they just had a feeling it was right. A week before school started, she was settled into her new house and was informed by the school that they had reviewed her profile and had decided that she could jump straight into the 5-year program instead of doing the 6-year program, usually recommended for students without a strong background in sciences.

So if that’s not someone born under lucky stars, then what is it? That said, she is very deserving of the luck that she does have and I will, one day, ask her to apply for my jobs when I decide to have them, ask my bank for a loan when I decide to re-enter the real world, and pick my lottery numbers when I decide to exit it again.

I don’t know how Harvey felt about being “unlucky” number 4 of the condo block but he did say something about putting a one in front of it and making it 14. Perhaps he is superstitious – the reason why we’re superstitious is because those superstitions are usually knee-deep in experience. S#*$ happens, does it not? Or maybe he’s just unlucky enough to have chosen condo number 4.

Our days became a routine – work in the morning (and twice in the afternoon for me – I don’t know why I agreed to do Phone English classes while I was on holiday, especially for a measly $25), poolside talks and drinks in the afternoon. I hate to say it, but even Zicatela and Carrazilillo were a chore. Well, the latter really is a chore – it’s something of a physical feat getting back up those stairs, but a total pleasure when you’re down in the deep bay. Zicatela has some brilliant brick-oven baked pizza, but I don’t remember the name of the place. Trust me – you’ll know when you find it. I think it’s opposite the cinema which in itself is discreet.

Well, there is no “lucky” side to this incident. Unluckily, my computer kicked the bucket on our third day in Puerto. There was no rhyme or reason, I just turned it on and was met with a black screen that read “NDLTR is missing. Press the enter key to continue_” which I did and the message just repeated itself. If anyone does know the answer I don’t want to know now because I’ve already reinstalled Windows and lost all of my photos and writing. Bummer. Big bummer. But this is the thing, when you’re struck with unluck, what can you do apart from accept it? Actually, here it is: luckily I had backed up all of photos onto CDs a couple of weeks earlier. It doesn’t make up for the make-me-go-nuts fact that I am left to “reconstruct” my computer and I’m a complete computer dunce, but it does reduce the pain that this random stroke of bad luck would have inflicted on me had it been otherwise.

All in all, we had a fantastic time eating authentic Italian food in this little nook of Mexico, drinking 2 x 1’s on the Adoquin, lounging and laughing poolside (sans loungers – they have yet to be located. I know, surprising isn’t it, ironic mostly – beach town yet no patio furniture), fixing up the place (I was our handyman for the week – although Gerald did barge in with his toolbox and electric drills at one point, he wore a whole lot of purpose on his face and did his work efficiently), pretty much “taking care of business.” If this is what doing business can be, I’m ready for more work.

Lucky or not, I had a great time in Puerto and am already planning a return trip… I guess I would have to say that I consider myself lucky to have gone!

That's One Firm Ass

katiedoestheworld — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:31:00 GMT

I could write an entire book detailing the good, bad, ugly, and funny about Mexico’s City’s buses/peseros/microbuses but I can’t. Too overwhelming considering that I spend about 2 hours on them daily.

For anyone who’s visited the City, better yet, braved public transportation here will be familiar with the grey and green peseros that speed up and down all the main drags and budge their way through heavy traffic. Some amount of money has been spent on upgrading some of these buses this year but, not to worry, there are still throngs of the old things racing along their same old routes. What can I say about their design - it’s awkward at best. They’re certainly not designed for racing, being buses made for transporting the masses and all…but I’ve had enough experiences to know that the design is not a deciding factor nor is it important, but everything depends on the design of the driver.

Since they’re usually traveling far too fast for their frame, are often beyond capacity, and are, for a lack of a better word, bottom-heavy (I guess technically heptagon-shaped) corners are plain amusing with a hint of perilous-ness. I’m thinking they probably aren’t equipped with shocks, but what these peseros do on corners is seriously gravity-defying. Since we’re on the topic of “physics,” let’s talk inertia. For any lick-loving bus driver all those pesky stops and starts are a nuisance so for any bus drivers out there reading this, Mexican bus drivers have solved all of your “need for speed” problems. Just don’t stop. If there are only one or two people unloading, why stop? So long as you slow down enough for one person to hop off and then stop for a brief second where the second person can comfortably get off, but no more than a second, you’ll find that the bus will easily take off again.

Same goes for getting on the bus. I’ve seen people, old people and young people alike, take a running start when they see the bus slowing down because there’s a good chance that it just won’t stop for you. I’m not even kidding - a running start, like you would do before attempting the high jump. Others just crouch a little lower than usual and brace themselves for the high jump, no running start. The critical thing is that your judgment is near perfect. It would really suck to smack yourself on the loose sheet metal under the window of the on looking riders just because you jumped too late. And vice versa, but it’s generally better to be too early than too late; at least there’s a chance that you’ll roll into the bus as it moves forwards. There’s just no mercy when it comes to bus inertia.

So the micro quirk that’s actually relative to today is the distance between the seats. Your standard pesero is outfitted with rows of seats that flank either side of the heptagon and are probably about 2.5 feet in width (meant to seat two). This is generally agreeable since the aisle is 1.5 feet wide and allows for a little “spill-over” on either side should you yourself be a little bottom-heavy. Unfortunately, the space efficient peseros are indisputably built for short people like myself but even I would call it a squeeze trying to place my knees directly in front of me when sitting down. If the distance between your hip and knee is longer than 25 inches don’t bother paying the 25 cents to board the ship…but if you do decide to do it, take a picture standing up or sitting down, trust me, you’ll enjoy looking at it at some point.

The narrow aisles mean that if you’re lucky enough to be sitting down when the bus is crowded, it’s all hands and bellies from there on. Once, a woman had thrust her belly so far into my seat space that her saggy boob was in full contact with my cheek. I considered surrendering my valuable spot to her but she was on her way to Auditorio before I could make a decision. Today was a little different. Like I said, I’ve seen hands and bellies but the other end is something usually well-protected from the occasional wandering hand and not so occasional stares.

As I was traveling back from Periferico along the regular route back to Chapultepec, a man came up from behind me on his way towards the front of the bus where he would eventually climb down to safer grounds. But as maneuvered his way through the narrow aisle and passed me, his ass brushed my arm. It happens, right? No, it doesn’t happen like this, his ass was extraordinarily rock-hard and when I looked up all wide-eyed searching for the owner of this unbreakable backside, I discovered that this guy also had some serious booty on him. So here he was, a rare specimen: a large Mexican man with a firm fanny and the excess volume to boot.

Just as soon as I had encountered his ass, he and his backend had jumped off the moving bus and were gone. I settled back into today’s driver’s musical pick - techno - and made for home. Beyond the ass there was only class and back on the Bosques-bound bus I went come 1:30.

I did see a strange sight though. My stop is on the far end of this massive yellow bridge that crosses a fairly large valley and as we crossed the yellow bridge, I saw a small crowd of people gathered near the railing’s edge. My immediate thought was that something or someone had fallen off of the bridge and these guys were either witnesses or were there poking their heads into the excitement of a potential headliner. As we neared the group I saw a woman holding a dog and smiling as some chap across from her laughed. As we were on the passing end of them, I looked into the middle of the group and saw a girl nervously holding onto another girl’s shoulders while she adjusted some straps fitted around her waist and between here legs. Bungee jumping?

Well, I never found out what happened and there was nothing to see on my way back, but I figured that if anything did go wrong, I would undoubtedly be able to find it in tomorrow’s Metro and right there on the cover.

The Unsparing Metro Newspaper

katiedoestheworld — Wed, 9 Apr 2008 21:48:00 GMT

There’s a newspaper here called “Metro,” another called “Grafico.” Both are cheap, gory, and borderline pornographic as you near the last pages. Logistically, I don’t know how someone is always at the scene of a crash, murder, or assassination with their camera. They’re obviously there before the police arrive because everyday’s paper is inevitably plastered with some sort of bloody scene or body part. It’s vulgar on the front and vulgar on the back. And the thing is, you look. You know you’re not supposed to, but you’re also not supposed to take pictures of decapitated heads in garbage bags on the side of the street…you’re supposed to report them! The “Metro” costs a steep 5 pesos and the “Grafico” 2, and my estimation is that both are most commonly sold in the metro stations to the hundreds of thousands of daily commuters as most people who take the metro are low to middle-class citizens who don’t generally splurge on 10 peso papers, myself included.

It’s no secret that Mexicans have a macabre streak to them. I don’t know of any other country that celebrates a Day of the Dead where bread, representative of human flesh, is eaten and sugar skulls crowd corner “puestos” (stalls) to be offered to the dead then eaten. Though some aspects of the celebration were born of Spanish tradition, I don’t know which exactly so I’m going to have to research that and get back to you.

Small diversion cum history lesson…back to the reason for this entry. I consider myself as curious as the next Mexican and whenever I passed the “Metro” on my way through Tacubaya and saw its front and back pages sprawled across a showcase stand, I looked. I stared at the front page, not so much the back-page girl, with the same fascinated eyes as the locals and even bought it once. Just a note on that back-page girl, sometimes I look across at the person in front of me on the train and notice someone hiding behind the recognizable “Metro” reading whatever content there is intensely - front-page gore, back-page girl, what else could it be? But I find it particularly amusing when this person turns out to be a mother of two accompanying her children to school, or a Grandpa musing over the sports section and sitting there with his wife while that back-page girl teases her audience in front, and the front-page crash victim stares vacantly to the right. And without a doubt, the person to the right, intrigued by the blood he sees in his periphery, tilts his head to read further into the event. If he’s in a good position he might even lean back and start reading the paper with Grandpa. Grandpa doesn’t mind because we’re all gossips, chimosos, when it comes down to it and he knows it. I have to say though, that still bothers me. Dare I start writing a text message on the bus and Jose, who’s standing above me, will crane his neck over me and Maria next to me, will press her eyes into the side of her skull if she’s discreet, turn her head if she’s not…

So yesterday I started with a new class which ended at 8:30, nice and early, but too early for the market on Vera Cruz. I pondered waiting for my regular fruit stall man to set-up shop and waited at a puesto reading magazines in the meantime. Of course, “Metro” caught my eye because there in its vulgarity was a teenaged girl dressed in black hanging from a children’s slide at Parque Miguel Hidalgo. The only thing that make a tacky magazine more tacky is the accompanying headline. This one said, “Se puso Emo”: “she turned Emo.”

Recently there have been altercations between the “emos” and “punks” in the city. I saw a report on one in particular that made its way onto the news, which I viewed from Vera Cruz when I was there a month ago. Funnily enough, it happened at Metro Insurgentes in Zona Rosa, the closest metro stop to my house and a popular hangout for emos, punks, and gays and lesbians. The police were there with their shields separating the two groups who had gotten physical in their fight and at the end of the clip, a thin girl wearing a light tank top and dark eyeliner looked up into the camera and held a sign up to the camera that read: “Soy emo y que?” Yes, you are emo and so? Maybe I was just lost in translation or am completely ignorant, but I didn’t understand how the whole thing even begun. Aren’t emos and punks from the same alternative branch? Either way, this was an on-going issue and when I stopped at Metro Insurgentes two weeks later, the police were still standing there with their shields creating a human wall between the groups. Then this.

The headline was tactless to say the least. Whatever she was, I was really put off by this morbid display of her death and the assumptions made about her life. Emo or not, she’d killed herself very publicly in a place where children go to play and be innocent. It was sad and that was it. I bought a Women’s Health magazine to distract myself from this scene then turned around to face the gorgeous market, my favourite market, which brought me back to the beauty of Mexico. Then I realized I’d spent my money on that stupid magazine (good recipes however) and had nothing leftover for fruit and veg. I’m so glad that April has come - the mangoes are unbelievable, peaches are back, grapes are cheap and stuffed with flavor, and there are plums galore!

I walked home and waited for Saul to come back and now he is complaining about the Ranch dressing he bought. During lunch, he stuffed his mouth full of dressing-drenched salad then started gagging and spit it out. What was the problem? The dressing tasted like ass. Why? Made in Mexico. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the dressing so we gave it to his mom along with the cream of corn soup we made and didn’t like. She was initially excited but when she realized it was a bag full of stuff we didn’t like she wasn’t so flattered. So there’s a recommendation: skip the cream of corn and go straight for the “esquite” (corn in a cup with a concoction of mayonnaise, chile, lemon…) from your local street corner.

Haunts In Our House?

katiedoestheworld — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 12:47:00 GMT

Another restless night. But last night was even worse than the night before it. The night before we had been plagued by mosquitoes. So my current status is: loving Mexico City’s Spring heat, but hating the mosquitoes. This situation is much worse than I remember it being in Laos and that speaks volumes considering Jessica’s bite-ridden legs despite the nets and spray.

There was the usual routine: we turn off the lights. Saul pushes out a dramatic grunt of frustration, swears he can hear a mosquito, swats at it in the dark, then gets up and turns the lights back on. With the light to illuminate him in all his anger, I can see that he is a man with a mission. He is always standing with his feet shoulder-width apart, semi-crouched, and with his hands in a claw-type position like he’s about to engage in a sumo-wrestling match. He checks all obscure spots in the room and is particular about checking the narrow space between the mattress and the wall. He never finds them, but vows, “I’m gonna kill him…” Yes, mosquitoes are male. Of course they are. He grunts again, “Uuuuugh!” and turns the lights off. Since the mosquitoes returned two weeks ago, this has been happening some 4 or 5 times at the beginning of every night.

So last night started as they usually do. There was one mosquito, and I must admit, it was a vicious one. Saul faffed about with it but didn’t make a kill. After plenty of interrupted nights full of Saul jumping out of bed at regular intervals, lots of lights on, lights off (remember “clap on…clap off…”?) - everything but sleep, I entered a state that was probably close to comatose on this night.

I woke up at 1:01am and heard voices. We’d been keeping our window open lately because it was so hot that even a sheet was making us sweat. For this reason, the voices were much louder than usual but I gave it no thought. When I turned over to kind of slap Saul out of his sleep “by accident” so that he would join me in being awake my open-palm drifted into an empty space. I lay there for a while enjoying the soft light that came from behind the ridged sheet metal wall of next door and wondered where Saul was. After 10 minutes, I concluded that he wasn’t in the bathroom, he couldn’t be, so that was the first mystery.

The noise was really loud so I thought he must be watching TV downstairs. I also thought this was pretty disrespectful since we had a guest staying downstairs (the guest factor is a whole other entry, the house was once a hostel and some guest from that time still float in and out) so I made my way into the night in search of Saul and the source of the noise. I wandered down the cold marble staircase and as I neared the entryway, I stretched my head and strained my ears to the left towards the TV room. No light, no noise. I turned right instead and entered the carport equivalent part of the house where the car was. The voices were definitely coming from the car, the radio was on. I thought this was strange of Saul to be listening to the radio in the car but I wouldn’t put it past him so I peeked through the window. He wasn’t there - this was the second mystery.

The whole thing was weird. I went back upstairs kind of creeped out and turned on our bedroom light. Saul’s phone was missing and so was he, so I called it. He answered sleepily and told me he was sleeping in the front room (the haunted one, might I add) because our room was too hot. Mystery number one solved. I told him the radio was on in the car, had he turned it on? No. And mystery number two still remains unsolved.

I have my own theory…this hundred-year-old house has its haunts but like I said, that’s another story.

Intro to My Mexico

katiedoestheworld — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 09:58:00 GMT

I’ve started this blog about 8 months too late. And apparently I’m so far behind the times that it was my dad who suggested I do it (although he is also a self-professed “computer geek”). When I decided to move to Mexico City for a year, I figured that I may as well segue from Asia to Mexico. I only stopped at home for 6 days where I unpacked, packed again, drank many a gin’n’tonic, saw neighbors, family, friends, indulged in all those treats I’d missed in Asia and would continue to miss on my next spat away, and said goodbye to my 14-year old, deaf, cataract-wearing, wart-ridden, arthritic husky-lab who was supposed to die while I was away with Jessica in China. Note: she’s still alive as I write this and freshly 15-years old.

I had cultivated this grand - albeit romantic - idea that I would take my laptop down to Mexico and “write” on the roof of my Mexican boyfriend’s house in Colonia Roma between teaching English classes and spending all of my spare time traveling. As it turns out, the peso isn’t worth a whole lot. In addition to this, it proved be more difficult than I expected to find a company hiring teachers for the right price. The combination of the peso’s value and my initial 4-hour work-week didn’t afford me much (my current 16-hour work-week still doesn’t), never mind the romance. Time, yes, but travel was a clear-cut no. I could go on about those first few months, but that would be me being long-winded (it’s a vice) and thinking people are actually that interested in the details of the past.

Back to the writing aspect. Let me put it this way: the time has come that I have sufficiently deprived my brain of hard, critical work since leaving university two years ago, and I have also finally amassed enough experiences on which I can write. However, I now realize that while I’ve been waiting on these experiences in order to write informative, theme-based short essays I’ve probably forgotten most of the things that are actually worth writing down. In my opinion, it’s the small things that create the clearest and most interesting picture of daily life. For this reason, I have decided to put aside my romantic ideas of going artistic and literary with my year down here and will instead recount both my day-to-day happenings and the thoughts that go with them. An outlet. Trust me, it’ll be much healthier for my brain. And hopefully it’ll be useful to anyone who has plans to either travel or move to Mexico City or beyond the Federal District, as it’s known (Distrito Federal, D.F.).

So I’m living in Mexico, have been for nearly 8 months now, and even though traveling has become a peso-based possibility it remains a priority in my books. For that reason I’ve been trying to go somewhere I haven’t visited before every month just to keep the “bug” at bay until June arrives. June is when Kristen comes down from the rainy suburbs of Vancouver to the rainy season here and we have wicked plans to hit-up Cuba, drag our packs through Chiapas, then traverse our way along the south coast of Oaxaca. But I’ll catch-up on my travels so far and the travels to come on a later date because I’ve got to get back to today.

I went teaching this morning, bright and early, there at 7am. My classes have been a little out-of-whack lately mostly due to the sudden withdrawal of two classes - one of which I was glad to see go due to budget queries just because it was in Vista Hermosa, a short hour away from my house on the way there and an hour-and-a-half on the way back, and the other shocked me. My usually optimistic student had been working for the company for 15 years, had two kids, a wife the polar-opposite of him, a house, but no dog. This wasn’t the problem. The day of our, unbeknownst to me, last class, he revealed that he hadn’t been feeling well physically, had been having doubts about his marriage, and wasn’t sure about his career anymore. He handed in his notice the following day and left the company exactly two weeks later. This was a great move f or him - but I was still out of work and the spot still hasn’t been filled because the company I work for is owned by Captain Awkward and run by a few clueless men and one very capable woman. But she’s still only got two hands and 24-hours in her day.

In place of the other class I wasn’t so sad to see go, I did some placement testing on Tuesday morning and today I started teaching an advanced group. Half-an-hour in, only two of the five students had turned up so I opted for a conversation class. More or less, this was my way of simultaneously distracting the students from the ugly bags under my eyes and trying to get paid. We discussed, none other than the great topic of travel. And actually, this part of my story is more Mauricio’s story than it is mine.

Mauricio went on a business trip to Brazil some months ago. Once the business part of the trip was over and done with, he was alone but being a small boy from the big city this didn’t seem to stop him from wandering the streets both day and night. A man approached him during one of his wandering and with a fearful look in his eye, warned him not to wander anywhere alone at anytime. Though his encounter with this stranger was peculiar, Mauricio heeded his warning and stayed put as soon as the sun went down. One day, perhaps a forgetful moment, he set up a lonesome plot on one of the beaches in front of his hotel in Rio de Janeiro and had a beer. Literally a minute or two later, a dark, burly man talking Portuguese on his cell phone started in the direction of Mauricio. Mauricio was told that he would buy this man a beer and the man sat down next to our innocent friend. Realizing the potentially dangerous situation he was in, Mauricio told the man, “I know that you think I’m here alone without any friends or family and you want to rob me.” The man nodded in silent agreement. “I’m a drug-dealer from Acapulco, man,” Mauricio continued, “My family’s in the business. I‘m here on vacation.” He improvised a lengthy explanation and in the end the other man gave him a strong pat on the shoulder and told him, “You can go anywhere in the city, on the streets, no one will touch you.” Mauricio had apparently become part of a brotherhood through his lies and sure enough no one touched him the rest of his time in Brazil. Who knows whether or not this man’s power spread so far as to protect his own kind like that, but whatever the case, Mauricio invented a shield and it proved useful.

That’s one thing I’ve learned here. One way or another you’ve got to protect yourself. In China I had protected myself from being stared at by picking my nose or taking pictures of people who took pictures of us. But here there’s a real threat, and when I’m taking the metro at 6am or walking between buses, I’m not so concerned about my belongings, believe it or not. I bring my iPod with me wherever I go, my cell phone too, and to date have had no problems touch wood. Kind of like Mauricio did that day on the beach, I become someone else when I’m traveling solo. Sometimes I employ tactics I used in China, although it’s not nearly as funny without Jess there to laugh at me, simply to appear as unfeminine as possible and ever since the butt-grabbing incident back in December, I always have a bag over my butt then box myself in with my books at either side whenever I’m walking up from the metro to the buses. Also imperative? An uninterested face that says that I know where I’m going and I’ll put up a fight. Make-up is out and scuffed shoes are in. If I was brave enough, gel would also be in then I might have a chance at blending in. Okay that’s enough, I sound like a really unattractive woman…and if you saw me on the metro at 6am you might just think so.

The good news is that my 6am metro days are over! In fact, my class this morning was the first and last with that group as well. I received an email an couple of hours ago from Captain Awkward and I will be starting a new class on Tuesday to replace another teacher who didn’t quite click with the students. No pressure right…

This is getting long - onto other thoughts later.

Cambodia and Vietnam Were Visited

katiedoestheworld — Tue, 1 Apr 2008 14:18:00 GMT

We did go to Cambodia, where among other things, I crashed a Vietnamese wedding and spent three unforgettable days exploring the temple of Angkor Wat, and Vietnam, where I experienced the bliss that is rapelling in the lush jungles of Dalat and travelled solo for a few days until I met up with an Israeli buddy who I met initially in Siem Reap. There were amazing tales to be told of those two countries - not so much for the sights we saw but mostly for the people we met and travelled with. Jess filled her days travelling with Graham until they parted ways in Hanoi, where he flew back to Perth and we flew back to Beijing to hang out with a friend, load up on pirated movies, and buy shoes, and I travelled through most of Cambodia and Vietnam with people I met along the way. It was an incredible experience to be southern SE Asia also, but it's too far gone now to recount all of the gory details as I did with China and Laos. I'm sad for this in a way because I like to record everything, but essentially I was having too much fun to sit down and put it all down.

This is kind of a pathetic written conclusion for what was a trip of a lifetime but I guess at the end of the day, you can't spend all of your time trying to record everything that happens otherwise you'll miss out on the happenings themselves! It's all in my head somewhere, so I'll just have to trust that my memory really is as capable as I hope it is.

Gallery: Vietnam

katiedoestheworld — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 08:05:00 GMT

Gallery: Cambodge

katiedoestheworld — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:43:00 GMT

Laos: Part 2

katiedoestheworld — Mon, 2 Jul 2007 16:10:00 GMT

Conveniently, a tuk-tuk was waiting at the top of the riverbank when we emerged from the water, but a handful of us boycotted his "outrageous" $1
per person rates and walked (though we hadn't the slightest clue where we were). Following the river was a grand idea, and on our aimless but
certainly southern route somewhere, I ran into a stray sandal. My search for its partner led my eyes towards the middle of the road, where we noticed
motorcycle carnage. There were two motorcycles lying on the ground head-to-head, a few more sandals, and broken flowers strewn everywhere, as
though they once made up a bouquet. It was a curious sight though - there wasn't a soul to be seen, and the motorcycles could only be spotted as
other motorcycles passed by sporadically. Being the Nosy Nelly that I am, I approached the scene and by the only light for 500m along this part of the
road I could see two large pools of deep, red pools of blood. But there were no drops anywhere, as though the accident had been set up. It was
completely undisturbed but there were still no authorities and furthermore, no spectators. It was altogether creepy.

The sound of Friends in the distance affirmed that we were headed in the right direction. I returned my tube, and paid a hefty $2 fine for its late
return, and as I was on my way to...nowhere really, I didn't know where my sister was and wasn't quite sure where to wait if they returned. In the
middle of my contemplation, I was interrupted by France. If France was here, then where were Jessica and Graham? I borrowed money from Rory, who
happened to be passing by us on his bicycle as we discussed what to do, and shared a pad thai with France at the Simpsons Bar in the hope that Jess and Graham would come strolling by. Craig joined us sometime later and we decided to form a three-person search party. We wandered the riverside for some time,
then just as we strolled down a random side street, who do we see stumbling out of a random bar, both shirtless, broke, tubeless, scratched-up, and
one (Jess) bare-footed, but Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-Dum...Jessica had somehow mastered being passed-out while still standing and was waving backwards
and forwards in struggle to appear awake, and Graham was, well, hungry.

Piecing together both accounts, which consisted of small clip-like memories, it seems that they ditched their tubes when they decided to head back to
town and instead of taking the beaten path, trekked through a patch of thorny bushes, climbed a fence, and from there on, no one remembers
anything.

Since Graham had lost his dry-bag, we took him back to our place for a good night's sleep on the floor. But bedtime didn't roll around for Jess and
Graham until AFTER a round of Thai boxing outside of the room where they knocked a plant over and crashed into the door a few times. It was strange
that these two apparent crushes should be knocking each other around, but kind of endearing in a way.

A few days later, after one spent playing pool, eating, and watching movies, Graham was to depart for Luang Prabang. But after he left, Jess was, like
myself, mostly tired, but noticeable down which I thought rather odd. We moved back to Phoudindaeng from Vang Vieng into a cheaper guesthouse just
up the road from the farm cafe and I prepared to go solo with Rory up to the school to teach English classes. Jessica isn't the sort who enjoys
teaching or kids that much anyways, but when the next day rolled around and she still wasn't too keen to work on the farm, I realized that she her spirit was a little broken with her funmate's goodbye.

We spent the morning mudding the walls of the inside of the farm's seed bank with Ong-Gel - a project aimed at collecting organic seeds in order to
encourage the growth of organic food by local farmers and in case of a bad season - and when lunchtime arrived, Jessica insisted on jumping off one
of the nearby platforms (which I interpreted as being one of the rope swings) and wanted me to film it. So I sat there, busily talking to one of the
students who worked at the jump during the day with his family, and when I looked into the viewfinder to locate Jess, I saw that she was climbing up
this enormous pole! At this point, I didn't have much control over the situation and could only curse and think of what my parents would do to me
when they found out that I'd let her do this...obvoiusly she made it out alive, but the film commentary is NOT pretty.

A sudden downpour chased us from the jump back to the farm cafe, and when it ended, I returned back to the farm while Jess showered for some one-on-one
with Ong-Gel, with his limited English, where I probed him about Laos culture and enjoyed fresh mango with Pih. English classes were on the
schedule for me again and I convinced Jess to come along because the kids had been asking about her whereabouts. Our first class had welcomed us
with a series of pointed questions (more like statements), beginning with an enthusiastic, "HELLO!"
"How - ah - you!"
Then "What - is - yuh - name!"
"It - is - nice - to - meet - you ____!"
And "Wheh - ah - you - from!"
Then the students would clap. And at the end of every class, a few of the students, some 5 years old, some 17, would come to us and shake our hands,
then, "Thank you, Teacher!" and, at the end of our final class, it was "Good luck to you!" and I wished them, "Sohk dee" good luck to them.

We prepared for our final day at the farm, working on the seed bank again, then met Rory in town for a farewell lunch before hopping in the back of a
pick-up truck, or sawngthaew, dressed up like a tuk-tuk but bigger, bound for the country's capital, Vientiane.

We managed to score a windowless, freshly painted room in a central guesthouse on the Mekong River that had 6 hooks on the wall, two beds, and
no table, but it was $5 and we were laughing. Our most critical discovery in Vientiane was made on the following day's wanderings: the Scandanavian
Bakery. Think: quiche, cheese croissants, chocolate brownies, egg sandwiches, and air-conditioning in 35 degree heat on a breezeless
day...on this day, we'd decided to cover the city's monuments, temples, and various other "must-see" sights. In our mildly dehydrated state, we were
slow-paced with the heat and becoming increasingly accustomed to Laos time as every minute rushed by us with a wave, a thumbs-up, and a "sabaidee!"
("hello!").We do love those minutes...

Our last stop was at the Laos National Museum - incredibly insightful on the country's recent past and, at the time of our visit, home to a temporary
exhibition on the Dutch explorer, Van Wuysthoff, and his diary accounts of a 17th-century tour of Laos. On our way out of the top-floor exhibit, my
quietude was interrupted by a man's comment to me on the horrors of Laos' political past. This man was George, and the conversation carried on
between the three of us until the museum's closing. Once standing outside the gates and the conversation had now moved onto the topic of his business, which
he had recently sold, he decided that it was a long story to tell and suggested that we grab a drink somewhere and continue the chat.

Over JoMa's own lemonade, George continued to tell the tale of how he became a multi-millionaire with his invention of the Triton Workbench. He had a
good score of energy at the age of 57 and clearly enjoyed telling us his tale. And we were more than happy to lend an ear to his
story-telling, figuring that we were likely to learn something about him and possibly about life over the two hour conversation. Break: JoMa is a cafe,
resembling something like a Starbucks, offering various treats that would otherwise be hard to find in Laos, but the great thing is that the
employees get paid twice the regular wage and many of them are former child prostitutes who have been rescued by the opportunity to work. Any tips
made are matched by JoMa and this money is distributed as the community needs it. For instance, one of their current recipients was a family who received
$10 a week from JoMa so that they would not have to sell their 11-year-old daughter into prostitution. So that not-so-cheap spinach croissant goes to
a very worthy cause and overall, I was immensely impressed with the whole operation. Back to George, he invited us to join him for dinner which we
eagerly agreed to. Basking in endless roquefort-filled dishes, wine, and seafood, this French restaurant made for a tasty treat for Jess and I both
and by the end of the night, I was convinced that the man at least rivalled my longwinded style of story-telling. From his Palace of Yum in Byron Bay,
as he has affectionately named it some time ago, to his aversion to marriage because of his friend who spent more time planning her wedding than the
Allies did before an invasion, we "discovered" George. And for anyone who's interested in a work-free, financially stressless life, George wants us to
put the word out that after having convinced three of his previous ladies to have terminations, he would like an heir, so...girls? Anyone??

There were wisdoms too, and to be able to speak to a man who had succeeded incredibly at some things in his life and failed miserably at others was a
lesson in itself. George wasn't exactly travelling modestly and when you think that between the 3 of us we struggled to break $50 at dinner, his
hotel rate of $90 was lush. We went back to George's hotel to drop him off and he wanted some company while he drank tequila shots and smoked a
joint. Another generous invitation to us for dinner at the same restaurant ensured us all good company once more and great food.

Jess and I spent $1 the next day. A local bus dropped us off nearly 30km outside of Vientiane at the Buddha Park and we wandered the grounds for a
few hours, even managing to make friends with a group of young monks who wanted to practice their English - a common weekend activity for those
confident monks who seek out foreigners for a simple chat. The monks walked with us around the statues and carvings and when the time came to leave,
one of the monks who spoke English reasonably well said, "Good luck. I want to come with you..." He became shy when he said this and with a hesitant, but
wide grin he blurted out, "I love you." Whom he was speaking to exactly, we weren't sure, but, once we'd gone our separate ways, we muttered between
ourselves awkwardly that he MIGHT not want to be throwing that one out so freely...We spotted the boys riding their bikes into their temple on our
way back, but other than this and a woman with a shaved head, wearing a nude, silk, strapless bra, high-top pants and carrying a paint roller, the bus
ride was largely uneventful.

Our dinner with George played out much the same as the previous night, just one table over and two new dishes for dipping into, and when it came time
to pay that bill (we covered the tip this time at least) and walk those stairs back down to reality, we heard some bass. When we arrived in the front
room of the restaurant on ground floor, we found a big French-Laos man, who turned out to be the chef and owner, dancing to Black Eyed Peas with a
sheesha in one hand and a craft of homemade wine in the other. Apparently the restaurant had closed up before we'd managed to get out, and as that
last few patrons, we were invited to join in the festivites. A whole lot of wine and salsa dancing later, Jess and I left George behind flirting with
a freshly-separated woman whom he now thinks may be a princess - a real one - based on an article he read about a woman with the same strange last name,
and made way for our lovely lime-green gem just a 5-minute walk away.

We had been somewhat conned into buying a VIP bus ticket for the overnight ride to Pakse, in southern Laos, but decided, in the end, that if we were
going to splurge on anything, this would be it . Okay, honestly, I can think of a few more worth causes (i.e. my tastebuds) but being picked-up from
our doorstep and complimentary dinner sounded luxurious. On our way to the southern bus station, we saw a crowd of people standing around a body, and
coincidentally, the same flowers that I had seen strew all over the street in Vang Vieng near the motorcycle crash there were similarly lying all
over the road. It was dark and difficult to get a proper look at the situation, but it was clear that there had been an accident and the man was not in
good shape. What irked me most, besides the fact that I had never seen a dead person before (presuming that he was infact dead), was that the crowd was
doing just that. Crowding, watching, but not doing anything. Later in the week, I recounted what I'd witnessed to an Englishman living in Laos and
he informed me that usually, if there is so much as a remote, but clear sign that the victim is alive, he will be lifted into a passing car or
motorcycle and taken to the nearest hospital, and if it is clear that he is dead, everyone just waits for the police to arrive at the scene. This must have
been the case.

The VIP buses were easy to spot with most of them wearing a theme on their exterior painted in neon colours: ours was Under the Sea. We were
fortunate not to be on one of the buses that also had sectioned, neon aisle lighting, but the vinyl roof and pink tassles lining the windows in lieu of curtains
didn't exactly exempt us from being in the tacky category. Nevermind, it was a bus decoid of Asian music videos, but with reclining chairs, free water,
a bathroom, and...seat numbers. The driver seemed quite adamant that we sit in our assigned seats despite its being half-empty, so I took a seat next to
a young Israeli, Uri, who I'd met on the tuk-tuk ride TO the bus station. He was very enthusiastic and, as with George, I found myself on the ear side
of the "conversation" more than the voice side, but again, I was interested in what he had to say. Uri was knowledgable about his country and, as rare as
it may be, he was also extremely open about his mandatory army experience and his company's station during the most recent war with Lebanon. At 23,
Uri had been recalled for the end of July this year, but travelling abroad apparently excuses him from this "duty." Uri lives in a kibbutz, has seen
elderly women with numbers tattooed on their arms here, and constantly probes his grandmother to relay to him her experience in Israel during
WWII. Relatively in the dark about Israel, I was more than intrigued with his life there but as 11pm rolled around, the bus was dark, its passengers asleep,
and his voice still booming with excitement, I tried to sway my head into a sleep. However, the 1am bathroom break had Uri awake and ready to
talk...and as everyone else quietly nodded off again, I was engaged in a conversation again.

The sunrise was spectacular and a frequent occurrence on the Bolaven Plateau. We were transported to the appropriate bus station in those wee
hours of the morn, from where we planned to locate transportation to Tadlo. Tadlo was a place of interest to us only for its cheap elephant rides, but
was essentially a small village situated 2 hours outside of Pakse and amidst the dense rainforest that blankets this flat southern region of Laos and a
number of impressive waterfalls.

The bungalows at Tim's Guesthouse rang in at a steep $1.50 each, but from here we had access to Tim, an odd English-speaking Lao man who randomly
oscillated between being reserved and unsociable and animated and friendly, and also arranged treks and elephant rides from his establishment. We
arrived here at 10am and did nothing for the entire day but look forward to the next meal, managing to locate a cheaper menu for dinner than the one
at Tim's, and enjoy the silence. Ahh, the simple life.

The following morning, we returned to the same restaurant up the road for breakfast with a couple of girls we'd met the previous evening. I had
forgotten to take my malaria pill the night before and brought it with me thinking that I should take it sometime soon. Without thinking, I took the
pill as soon as I had purchased a bottle of water and washed it down with an advil to quell a slight sinus headache that had erupted as the cold that
had been festering in my nose and throat worsened. Not long after sucking back this disagreeable concoction, a certain flavour invaded my mouth, a lump
rose in my throat, and I began to feel dizzy. As that lump became braver and braver, I gulped down more and more water, but by the time I could think
of nothing but keeping the lump down, I excused myself from the table and created my own spewtiful waterfall. Leave it to a doctor's daughter to
make THAT mistake... Apparently no one had noticed this public display of stupidity or its results, so I just sat back down at the table with the
girls and opted not to mess with their appetites by mentioning it.

Since I was feeling just fine, we decided to go through with the day's plan to ride elephants in the morning and trek through the isolated, obscure
trails that would lead us through crop fields and villages in the afternoon. By the end of the day, Jess wanted a Dumbo to call her own and I wanted
to delay taking my malaria pill again...we had dinner with the Englishman who works in Vientiane, Damien, who told us of life in Laos for him. His
neighbour is a 65-year-old specialist who works for the public hospital for just $1 a day and essentially supports his family by running a small
clinic out of his home which sees hundreds of Dengue fever patients weekly during the wet season. Although he knows what his talent could earn him elsewhere
in the world, this doctor feels a duty to his own people and for this quality he is rare. He informed Damien once that 95% of motorcycle
crashes, whose many victims he sees, are the cause of alcohol. In a country whose culture is so simplistic, it is not surprising that Lao Lao is the most
popular choice for wasting away the day. The women are kept busy for the better part of their days and are constantly pregnant while doing so, but
it is very common to see the men lying in their hammocks sleeping or sitting around a table with other men from the village drinking Lao Lao.

The next morning, we were destined for Champasak, a kilometre long village 30 km south of Pakse and once the capital of a Laos Kingdom. It can only
be accessed by crossing the Mekong River and only boasts a small set of Pre-Angkor temples that once was home to the King of this Kingdom. We
plonked ourselves down in the nearest guesthouse to our drop-off point, which incidentally happened to belong to the friend of one of the
drivers...but it did have an unbeatable riverfront restaurant whose deck protruded into the air, hovering 20 feet above the Mekong and offered its
patrons the choice between chair and hammock, whatever suits. The owner, though part of the scheme that landed us there, was quite a character.
With his bulging belly, "Chuckles," as we named him between ourselves, laughed heartily and willingly at absolutely anything said outloud and ran his
business completely shirtless.

We rented bikes the next day and rode 8 km to the ruins of Champasak, Wat Phu, on bicycles that seemed only suitable for a time when Marcia Brady
might bless its shallow frame and cushy seat with her presence and place her packed lunch in its front-loading basket. The temples were a nice preview
of what we figured Cambodia's Angkor temples would be like and we soaked up the solitude that we had here knowing the Angkor would be a far cry from calm,
nevermind quiet. From our balcony that night, which offered us a 180-degree view of the opposite side of the Mekong, we watched a battle ensue between
blasts of sheet lightening across the river, then suffered its wrath when it moved to our side by midnight, momentarily causing a blackout and so close
to us that it sounded like gunshots.

With little reason to stay in Champasak any longer and without much time to spare, we rode a transport tuk-tuk back into Pakse so that Jessica could
make one last trip to the bank. When she'd been gone for nearly 2 hours, my nerves started brewing and just as I was about to lug our packs onto a
tuk-tuk to go into to town to find Jess, a short Laos man wearing a t-shirt that read "Paris," thick glasses on his small face, and a navy blue beret
on his head approached me and told me a few random things that only kept me distracted long enough for Jess to turn up. He assisted us in finding a
ride down to the Four Thousand Islands, our last stop in Laos before journeying into the Kingdom of Cambodia.

There were two other "falang" (the Laos term for foreigner) aboard our tuk-tuk riding the bumpy road to the departure point for Dondet Island and
the four of us took our sandals off and climbed into a very unfit-for-Triton water "chariot." Our docking was, just as at the other side, a wet one,
and once we'd made the short climb up a sandbank, we arrived on the island community's main hub and eastern path, sandy and dotted with afew
restaurants, simple guesthouses, and two bars. It had been recommended to us that we stay on the Sunset Side of Dondet, so we kept out eyes peeled for
an apparently obvious sign that read, "Sunset Bungalows." The 200m path that led us west was lined with tropical plants and tall bamboo fences - the
only thing that distinguished one property from another - on our right and rice paddies on our left. Tena's Guesthouse won our business with its $1.50
waterfront bungalows. Although the thatched single-room stilt-house bungalows were fanless and literally only big enough for a double bed, it
would only ensure that we would not waste any time inside. Plus, the hammocks hung at each bungalow deck provided just one more place to rest
should the minimal room space cramp your style or your legs.

It was on Tena's balcony restaurant that we met a group of mixed nuts - not the ones with shells but the crazy variety: Croyden's-own, Ross, Nick from
Ontario, Frenchman Yoshi (we are still unsure of his given name, however, when we inquired about his name being Yoshi, he explained, "My friends
gave dis to me. I am like deh dinosaur, you know, deh green one wid deh big nose." How flattering...), and Tomoko from Japan. We soon got into the
swing of things on Dondet, literally, I didn't stray far from my hammock for the remainder of the daylight hours on that first day until it was "Beerlao"
time, which took us to one of the two bars for whiskey buckets and gained us a few more frends until the generator was turned off at 11:00.

The days were lost to me while I was at the Four Thousand Islands and time was only as relevant as a polar bear might be in Kashgar. When the rooster
called, I woke up. When the sun set, I watched. When I felt hungry, I ate. And when the generators were turned off, we bought candles, brought out
the headlights - yes, I wasn't the only one with that brilliant idea - and sometimes just relied on the lightening to keep the party blazing.

There was absolutely no agenda and so our days were unstrictly motivated by simple wants and needs and it was a great experience that is difficult to
create at home where all of those things that are supposed to make life easier instead make it more complex. Knowing how special our Dondet
experience would be made it easy to appreciate, and the fact that Laos' tourism industry is booming guaranteed us that Laos would not be the same
Laos we knew in even as little as two years. Our 2006 guidebook prices had for the most part doubled by the time we arrived at some of our
destinations and Laos is becoming increasingly popular - I can only hope that the reason WHY we all love it so much will be the reason WHY it will hopefully thrive sustainably. Unlike the rest of South East Asia, as I understand it to be,
Laos is the cleanest third-world country I've ever set-foot on and all of its tours and treks are based around the idea of ecotourism, so I have
high hopes that Laos will maintain its appeal in its isolation and small-town feel but also manage to prosper economically.

While an internet cafe and new guesthouse were popping up along Dondet's main sandstrip, the island still runs on generators between 6:00pm and
10:00-11:00pm, which was the only time that we had light in the complete darkness that encompassed our green gem come nightfall. There were no
streetlights - well, no streets, really, not even so much as a stray light beam on our way home from the bar, and when you wanted to use the
internet, an employee would invite you to sit down for 5 minutes, jump on his motorbike for the 100m ride to the generator, power it up, ride back, and
after wiping the sweat off his brow, did that thing that we so take for granted - pushed the On button. There. Just like normal.

The land was extremely fertile in Southern Laos, and with the exception of a few business owners who ran guesthouses and restaurants, most of the
population tilled the land and we had arrived just in time to see the rice being picked finally. It was a strange realization: I had arrived in China
when the rice was being planted, and not having realized that time had passed, an entire season had infact come and I was now watching it go, on
its way to gone...while narrow, sandy paths traced the perimeter of Dondet, the island's flat interior could only be navigated using paddie paths,
which were shared between bikes, cows, and monks alike.

On one such sunny day, after we collectively decided that three consecutive days of playing cards, eating, drinking, and reading would render us true
sloths, the 6 of us rented bikes and travelled the only "road" visible on our Turbo Fairy-brand bikes. The bikes here were exactly the same as the
one Jessica and I had rented at Champasak and weren't exactly made for off-roading. Okay, we weren't off-roading, but there were no marshmallows
in THIS Rocky Road. Surprisingly, we didn't suffer any flat tires between us, but everyone, except for us Lin sisters with our terribly good fortune,
stopped regularly to remount their bike chains. We crossed a bridge to the island just south of Dondet, Don Khon, and rode three slow and painful
kilometres down an even bumpier road to a village before we were informed of our whereabouts. We had cycled all the way to the bottom of Don Khon and
had missed the turn-off, just 500m from the bridge, to the waterfall that we were originally seeking out.

Our voyage back from that white-water-rafting-worth waterfall spurred our stomachs to speak up, so we grabbed a bite to eat in Don Khon's small
riverside community at a restaurant just below the bridge. We were shattered by the time we returned the bikes just before dusk and most of our asses
were raw by this point! Overall, an amusing day, enhanced by a nice light over the paddy fields on our way back, and topped by a stunning sunset.
Personally, I had hoped to have the opportunity to employ the locals' traffic warning system, which consisted of monotonously saying, in an
appropriate volume when approaching "pedestrians" from behind, "Beep, beep." We didn't run into anyone else and the only people who passed us on those
narrow paths were on motorbikes, so alas, I resolved to beep whenever I could, bike or no bike.

There was one particular luxury on Dondet, brought to us by the makers of all foods exquisite...they were doughnuts made by a Frenchman who had
materialized this grand (and lucrative when you've got starving backpackers frequenting a small, isolated area) idea and spent his days cycling the
circumference of the island with a metal box full of doughy goodness. It was on our first night on Dondet that island veterans, Ross and Nick, waved
the Doughnut Man our way, thus introducing us to these cane-sugar-covered, chocolate, and chocolate banana delights. And they were so gratifying and
sweet, not because I was unusually deprived, but because this man had talent! After this first encounter, we waited for the Doughnut Man. We
waited one day. On the second day, we saw him but were too late and he was all sold out. By the third, and last full day of our island time, we were
driven to chase him down, wanting to catch him before he even set to baking and guarantee him that he could sell at least a dozen doughtnuts to us if
he would find us this time. We wandered the fields in search of the guesthouse where the baking happened, and eventually stumbled upon it when we spotted
his bike with its tin box on the back leaning up against a bamboo fence.

We rushed up the stairs excitedly and..."No doughnuts today." "But why?!?!" we all demanded.
"Well," he started, arms crossed lazily across his chest, "We got a dead guy in a house [he pointed vaguely south] and we're gonna burn 'im in a field
today." We all looked at each other, and as we discussed our confusion after leaving him, we had all misinterpreted this as meaning that some guy when out to
the field and got burnt so badly he died. We asked him again, "What...?" "Yeah, we got a dead guy, he died, and he's in a house down there, so we
gotta burn him today. So yeah, no doughtnuts." Oh, a funeral. Moreso, a cremation. A fine description, Doughtnut Man,
fine description...when we asked him if he'd be baking tomorrow, he just shook his head and laughed. It would be a while, presumably. By this point in
our desperation all of our day's hopes and plans were revolved around the doughnuts and eating the doughnuts, and of course, now we were
unexpectedly doughnutless. Euker was a close second of fun things to do and we spent the entire day playing it, only breaking once during the daytime to pick up
tickets into Cambodia for our next-day departure, and then leaving Tena's deck after sunset to play cards at the other bar, the one we hadn't yet
been to.

So, just 3 days away from exceeding our 30-day visa, that inevitable day arrived, that day we'd dreaded for so long: the day we'd have to say
goodbye to Laos, to our hammocks, and to easy living. Although the south was exceptionally cheap and we were well under budget the entire time we were
on Dondet at just $5, we also had not wanted to end up with leftover kip, as it's entirely useless in the rest of South East Asia unlike the Thai Baht.
So ultimately, we were a little tight for cash EVEN at $5 a day, pathetic really, isn't it.

Laos was extremely easy to travel in. We could communicate in English virtually everywhere we went, even in the most remote of regions and if
you wanted, your transportation could always be arranged by a travel agent. Even on Dondet! In some respects though, the whole ease of the travel aspect
made the "travelling" much less amusing exciting - the less confusion and frustration, the less memorable. So I've found myself, in spite of
everything, looking forward to returning to China for two more frustrating weeks at my trip's end JUST so that I can be relieved by my plane journey
home! Laos can be more "rough" in terms of transportation, but getting to and from is simple. That said, we welcomed it after stressing in China for
two and a half months and my time in Laos has so far been one worth recounting but more importantly, one worth reliving (and with prices like
they are down here, realistically...).

8am: Ross, Jess, and I departed by ferry, then van, and tuk-tuk to the Laos-Cambodia border...

Sad, but excited, and still with lots of love,

Katie

Laos: Part 1

katiedoestheworld — Mon, 2 Jul 2007 14:54:00 GMT

Departure date from Luang Nam Tha: June 3. We returned to the bus station
bright and early that morning, and when we went to purchase tickets, we
were told to "Sit. Five minutes." Okay, so we sat and waited until 8:30am on
the dot. When the long hand hit 6, we jumped up and purchased out tickets -
the Dutch couple after us didn't manage to get seats which seemed curious to us. But as we approached our bus, thanks to the lending finger of a sitting man, we realized that all of the locals who wanted to travel on this fine
Sunday morning had risen and arrived early in order to claim their seats. We
passed our packs up to a young fellow straddling the bus's roof rack, who added
our luggage to "the pile" and tied everything down. After two and a half
months in China, some 70 local and long-distance buses later, and only a single
encounter with A foreigner on them in all this time, our first bus in Laos
was a third full of 'em. We were definitely on the well-worn track through
Laos...somehow, my seat happened to be in the very back row, left-most
corner, and the only seat in the entire bus to have a permanently
fized-shut window. The bus was already beyond its capacity and a family of five was
my company in the back row. During the hour's wait for the bus to fill up (if
you could believe there was room at all), we watched as the Dutch couple
made it on, and, in fact, 4 other foreigners and 3 locals joined us as well.

Short - very short - plastic chairs for children were passed to the back of the aisle and "the leftovers" filed in for a bumpy ride. As this was being organized, a "disagreement" erupted between an Aussie and a local woman who had seated her children on top of the Aussie's things which were meant to indicate that the seats were already taken. Having been influenced by the Chinese's curiosity for anything loud, I craned my neck over the seat infront of me trying to find out what was going on. Of course, the Aussie woman tried to communicate to the woman that she had bought tickets and showed her the seat numbers. The local woman just stared her down, wearing a determined smirk on her face and her children sat silently and patiently. Meanwhile, the Aussie's husband, "Andrew," stood outside eating a ball of sticky rice in a plastic bag, completely uninterested and most likely the non-confrontational type, and left the arguing to his wife. The local woman ignored the Aussie, and as frustrations built over her stubbornness, the Aussie began speaking to the children, telling them, "Isn't your mother just silly...don't you just wish she'd stop being so ridiculous?" Not once did the Aussie consider that this was just how things worked in Laos, and fought incredibly hard to reclaim these seats at the front of the bus. Eventually, the bus driver was summoned at the Aussie's request and the problem was more or less sorted. The children were made to sit on top of the engine, which was a large raised platform with sort corners where hand luggage is usually placed and when tight for space,
people are placed.

A space was created for the original "Space-Taker" by the family sitting at the back with me when they were thoughtful enough to send their two
children to the engine platform as well. And I had the good fortune of having her sit next to me. She was angry, resentful, and very upset. I kept to myself on
this one, and became well-acquainted with the window next to me on the 7 hour ride. I had about two-thirds of my seat to myself, as the man next to
Space-Taker was rather large but also rather kind, and things only became more cramped when Space-Taker went to the front of the bus 2 hours in,
collected her son, and brought him to the back to her seat. And her space-taking skills didn't stop at this new action; everytime I went to
move my arm from behind her elbow or my knee from under her son's leg, she would fill the space and I was oftentimes left with my shoulder squished up to
my neck which made my straight arm jut awkardly in front of me, or if I managed to push my arm back into the stolen space, it became as good as paralysed,
but at least my spine would be straight in this position. Her son was not so awful, when his head wasn't sloping down his mother's arm and onto my
boob, but eventually she resolved to shove him between her legs so that her legs ended up invading the foot-wide space between her and the window that was
home to my legs. Luckily I was deeply distracted with thoughts of writing, so much so that I rarely noticed the discomfort once we were all settled. Space-Taker left us part-way through the ride, taking her 4 suitcases, 2
bags, and 2 children with her. The large man slid over next to me and invited his daughter, who was sitting on the engine at the front of the
bus, back to join us all in the back row. For the first part of the second leg of the journey, I found myself squished up against the window in a
half-sleep, half-wake state (though intending to sleep) with a middle-aged man cuddled
up to me and his head rolling biasedly towards the left.

Later on, and at her father's urging, the daughter, a shy 12-year-old with a mature face and thick black hair trailing her spine all the way to the
small of her back, slowly moved an open packet of cookies into my peripheral. I looked at the packet, I looked at her, then at her father, next to me, and
both of them nodded their heads and gestured with a free hand each for me to take a cookie. My immediate reaction was to refuse the offer, which I said
with a smile on my face, thinking that it indicated to them that I was fine, thank you, not hungry, but thank you for the offer. However, immediately
after refusing the cookie, I thought of how shy the girl was and how my refusal at her stepping out of her shell and into foreign territory
probably didn't boost her confidence. I also probably put too much thought into it, but in the end, I regretted not taking the cookie.

There were thunder showers along the way, and even a close call when lightening hit a telephone pole on the opposite side of the road as we
passed it, but our arrival at Luang Prabang's northern bus station (that resembled an unpaved, rural gas station) was a dry one nonetheless. That's
what the rainy season is here: small requests for intense spats of heavy rain that are met with the immediate approval by the clouds. And within
half-an-hour it has rained a centimetre, cleared up, we're back to 30 degree heat, and the roads are dry again.

We joined the Dutch couple in a tuk-tuk into town who were returning to Luang Prabang for the second time, which funnily enough didn't affect the
price per person, but at least this couple knew where the town's cheaper guesthouses were located. It was dark, but already I could sense an
atmosphere about Luang Prabang that I liked...we booked ourselves into a new guesthouse located down one of the many narrow streets, only wide enough
for the likes of tuk-tuks and two lanes of motorcycles, that branches off of the main street.

The next day, we were eager to see Luang Prabang. As one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sights, Luang Prabang has managed to maintain its colonial
architecture which remains intermingled with countless Buddhist temples. The Lao people speak French, and cafes and baguettes are as common as Coke and
7-Eleven in North America, but most importantly, you can find good cheese here which, as everyone knows, is essential to one's quality of life. Once
amongst the white-washed buildings going grey in the corners and with their wooden shutters, the tropical flora, and the French atmosphere, I found
myself only a cane, a one-eyed spectacle, khaki pants and a monkey on my shoulder away from being transferred into 1950's Laos during French occupation.

We stayed for 3 days and did nothing more than visit and revisit the night market, enjoy the cuisine, and worry about the fact that I had no money.
Of course, we hadn't prepared to visit South East Asia and here, Interac is only a thing of the future...we sussed it all out but I was a tad
threadbare by the time I came into my Visa inheritance. We went to exchange our books at a cafe, but mistook the "exchange" as meaning an "exchange" - what it actually meant was "exchange your book for one of ours but still pay
three-quarters of the price" so we exchange our books at another location where at least the money we paid would be going towards an orphanage
outside of town.

I do lie a little bit...we set out on our first day to wander the town and, not uncommonly, got talked into joining a collection of tourists in a
tuktuk on their way to "The Waterfall." Kuang Si Waterfall was paradise, in a nutshell. We walked and worked our way up from the bottom pools up to the
proper waterfall. Jessica leapt into the waterfall while I watched with a couple of locals and motioned to them that she was crazy by driving my
finger in circles near my ear. As for me, I was much more content with the rope swing and small waterfall jumps at one of the lower pools and we
easily made an afternoon of it (and had we not been so skint, we would have returned every day that we were in Luang Prabang).

While most people seek Luang Prabang out for its activities, such as kayaking and elephant riding, over the course of the three days that we
were there, we didn't hear any remotely good reviews about these activities and so decided not to waste our money here. Instead, we spent one hour of one
glorious afternoon treating ourselves to a foot massage. I know, why did I take the chance...why did I put my body at risk AGAIN...they're feet. So
we forked out the $3 and braced ourselves in some, if I might add, comfortable chairs. To sum up, if the man did not have a face, I would have fallen for
him right then and there. While I was busy thanking Buddha for blessing me with two feet (twice the pleasure), I realized that this was a whole meal
deal and didn't stop at just the feet. They massaged our knees - it feels surprisingly good, try it sometime - and sent us off only after giving us
a quick body massage! If I could have floated, I would have - my head was already in the clouds and I didn't want my clean feet to have to meet with
the insufferably dirty sidewalk.

The evening saw us to the town's night market again, but on this night, our last night in Luang Prabang, I experienced one of the highlights of my
time spent there. Several of the stalls sell these massive slippers, they're bulky but unique. At one of these such stalls, we encountered a young
Aussie lad picking over the lot in an attempt to walk away with a gift for his niece and himself. We advised him on what would be suitable for an 8-month
baby girl, and as he moved on to select a pair for himself, my eyes fixed on this little 7-month-old baby covered in white patches who belonged to the
woman running the stall. The crouched woman was preoccupied with business and was struggling to hold the snot-filled baby who was clearly
uncomfortable on her mother's knee. Naturally, I sauntered her way to say "hello!" to Baby and the woman handed her over to me. For anyone who
knows me, this was just heaven for me...we had seen so many cute babies over the past 4 months, and because I'm me, it pained me not to be able to cuddle
them, and NOW, I had been handed a baby to cuddle. What's more was that this baby was just stuffed to the brim with cold and had an awful cough. As
soon as I held her, I could feel an intense, feverish heat radiating from her head and realized that the white patches were herbal patches and had been
dotted on her forehead, cheeks and chest in the hope that they would have some healing effect on her chest cold. As if I wasn't emotional enough at
the chance to hold the poor thing, she was very sick, extremely tired, and, since mom was working at 10pm, she was up too. She lay on my chest for 10
minutes before her mom had sealed the deal with the Aussie, and I reluctantly gave the baby back to her. (And then bought a pair of slippers
out of pity for the baby). She was grateful and so was I.

Naively, we had booked our bus tickets to the next destination, Vang Vieng, through one of the many travel agencies lining the main strip of Luang
Prabang. When we arrived at the bus station the morning of our departure we were enlightened with the Laos rules on transportation and I shall do the
same for you, reader: if there are enough people on the bus to justify making the journey, then the bus will leave; if not, then it will be
cancelled and the riders must wait for the next, supposed, departure time. Our 10:30am bus, which would have had us arriving when there was just an
ounce of daylight remaining, moved to 1:00pm and since this bus happened to be an "express" bus, we were obliged to pay an additional fee.

The bus wound around the mountain sides for nearly 7 hours with the only disruption during an otherwise peaceful (and almost normal) ride being the
occassional sound of the woman sitting behind us choking on her own vomit. Luckily, her choicest puke landing pad was the ground outside of the bus
which was accessed both through her window and by foot whenever it came to a halt. A plastic bag rang in at a close second for things to vomit into and
onto, and her baby daughter even got into the spirit and spewed her song for all who could hear it...

We'd intended on arriving in Vang Vieng town proper during the day to orient ourselves then travel to the village of Phoudindaeng from there, but since
our arrival was much later than expected, we arranged to be dropped off at the village on the way into town in the dark. On a dirt road. That we were
unfamiliar with. It was a good enough idea at the time and only caused us "some" confusion. In this village, a man named Mr. Thi had established an
Organic Farm and was always in need of volunteers, so we planned to work on the farm during the day and teach English classes in the evening. A
community centre, youth centre, and school had been built here seven years prior in the hope to unify the three ethnic groups that make up
Phoudindaeng. All of the community projects, including the English classes, were created and funded by a Korean group and effectively run by Mr. Thi,
who tries his best to keep volunteers streaming into the Organic Farm to, most importantly, provide English lessons for the village's children.

We got straight to work the following day doing exactly was was requested of us by the kind-hearted farmhand leader, Ong-Gel, who at 4'11" (there's
nothing wrong with that Aunty Mandy...) was mostly cute. Though not the most glamorous of tasks, the weeding had to be done, and while I wondered why
a) I was weeding in a foreign country and not at home where my parents could use the help, and b) why I was so slow at it, we suddenly heard an
eruption of squealing. We turned our heads over to the sty, just beyond our patch of pineapple bushes and "good plants" according to Ong-Gel, we saw another
farmhand, Pie, dragging one of the older piglets along the length of the farm towards another sty by its back legs.

So it was back to some good old fashioned fun. We ran over to the pig sty where there were still three piglets to be moved and if you couldn't have
guessed, Jess was eager to get her hands dirty. Forgive me, but I didn't quite see the appeal in getting my hands dirty with pig crap and took up
my camera to record the activity instead.

After a swim in the river and a quiet afternoon of picking "bad things" out of the ground, we were invited by Pie to feed the farm's 6 baby goats
their dinner. That day we'd been on the farm with a young French graduate, Jislain who nominally became France, and the largest man I've ever seen, Graham
who's 6'8" stature won him the very appropriate title of Mr. Big. Not surprisingly, the boys were not so keen to feed the goats, but France
joined us on the 5-foot-high stilt goathouse nonetheless while Graham leaned on the floor from below.

Rory, a 19-year-old Brit who'd been teaching the English classes for 3 weeks when we met him but didn't know where the "farm" part of the farm was,
having not yet set so much as a foot on it, and had only just learned the name of a Korean woman, Young-In, who had been at the farm for 10 months
and accompanied him to the classes every night. It wasn't that he was entirely in his own world, but Rory was also volunteering some of his time editing
English articles and letters for an organization fighting child prostitution in Laos. This meant that he spent much of his time cycling between his
work in town during the day and Phoudindaeng for the evening English classes.

The English classes were split into two groups. The first hour was devoted to children aged 3-13. We happened to have arrived on Fun Fridays and so
played "Thumbs Up, Seven Up!" (talk about the good times...), but normally, the lesson would be taught by one of the older children from the second
group, aged 14-19, who were on rotation and would spend the class having the children recite the letters of the alphabet. These classes were voluntary,
and so the throngs of kids who turned up at school every night after either a day of work on the land, at home, or at school if they were so lucky,
had me thinking.

Of their own volition, the children were attending the classes in the hope that their possession of an old language with a new purpose would give
them access to a better future. However, many of the older kids cannot afford to go to university as their families still need hands at home, so I'm hoping
that someone from somewhere will create a scholarship program at some point.

I left the classes with such a strong feeling of community that I inquired with Young-In the next morning at the Community Centre, at the Saturday
study group that the children had organized themselves to review their week's lessons before beginning the next ones (and explain the lessons in
Lao to those who didn't understand), about the project. She asked Jess and I if we could correct afew written pieces she'd completed for the project
and left us to pick over her work before we set out to the farm for the afternoon, where we weeded again and made goat cheese at the end of the
day.

The Youth Centre provided space for community planning and an area for the local girls to sew and teach sewing on the weekends in an attempt to
maintain this traditional art and to make some profit. The Community Centre housed a library on its left, and a computer room on its right. Among the
activities organized by some of the older youths of Phoudindaeng was Saturday dance classes, which included both traditional Lao and hip-hop.
We were invited to watch or join in, depending on how confident we were feeling, and were instructed to come between 5:00 and 6:30 - Laos time,
like an elastic bank...but we arrived to empty grounds. We played badminton instead, as we waited for the kids to show up. We'd planned to move into
town that night for a few days and had arranged to meet Mr. Big, France, and Rory at an Indian restaurant there. When I rolled my ankle quite badly, we
decided that we ought to head into town and I ought to wrap it in a liquid bandaid, but just as we were leaving - okay, we were crouched
inquisitively over a Timon & Pumba-type grub - Pie leaned over the makeshift fence behind us and held out two pieces of cake, one for each of us. Pie was always
laughing, we're not quite sure at what, but we're quite sure why. We thanked him for the cake as we passed him on our way back to the farm to pack our
bags, and our waves were responded to with a one-armed frontstroke swimming action that gestured for us to come join him as he rang in the weekend
with the country's unbragworthy breed of alcohol, Lao Lao.

Sadly, we were in a rush and declined his offer, but determined before we tuk-tuked into town that we must return, if not for the friends we'd made,
or for the mulberry pancakes and goat cheese sandwiches, to finish weeding what we'd started on the farm. We're ridiculous...it's funny what a
little hot air and a whole lot of cheap whiskey will do to you.

It had been a clean week which became dirty as soon as we arrived in Vang Vieng. Being that it was low-season, we'd been guilted into staying at one
of the farm's employee's guesthouse a 5-minute walk out of town. That part was true, and Bob, who'd spent 12 years living in Toronto during some
unstable years in Laos, kept his promise to give us a reduced rate which met the rates of some of the guesthouses we'd found in town just to have our
business.

We had scrub-down, rush-job showers and pulled the "Lao time" excuse when we finally did arrive at the Indian Restaurant. During his time in Vang
Vieng, Rory had managed to make acquaintance with an exceptionally short Lao local, Addy, the owner of a grafitti-tavern with a desperately skewed pool table
and amusingly tall bar which, if you stood on the other side of the bar, you were barely able to see Addy's eyes as he mixed drinks from behind the
counter. This tall bar required tall swivel chairs, of course, and so Jessica employed her previous climbing experience and I called on my
high-jumping past, hoping to land on the "soft stuff" coming down (I know, high jump was a poor choice for a borderline midget but I was always a
lofty dreamer). After suffering a few too many biased losses at pool, we decided to play away from the table and when Rory received a bottle of Lao whiskey
after requesting another beer, we went to the high whiskey-flooded hills in Addy's and drank up before closing. Onto our second bottle of whiskey
between us all and in need of somewhere to sit and sip on it, we meandered over a bridge crossing the river - I remember it on the way back - and
took up temporary residence in a small, open, bamboo stilthouse housing a few hammocks with some new British friends we'd made, Craig and Dan, on our
way through town as the bars closed. Jessica walked out with one of Graham's freak-sized sandals on one foot and her own on the other, at some point
trading with him again for the walk home which WAS long. It wasn't an easy 5-minutes, I'll tell you that much.

We'd been fortunate, by this point, not to have encountered a single drop of rain during our stay in Vang Vieng, so we'd made a plan to enjoy the sun
while it was around and go tubing down the river on Sunday. By then, we'd amassed a mid-sized crew for the day's event, and agreed to meet at the
Simpson's bar.

Other than for the tubing, Vang Vieng is known for its TV bars. On the small kilometre strip that constitutes the "town" - in fact, along the 300 m of
it that is remotely interesting (translation: there are a few restaurants, bars, and cafes) there sits 3 bars that play reruns of Friends around the
clock, competing for hungry viewers, and one that plays Simpsons, strictly. Though these programs make for easy listening, and I admit, for the first
time I was sucked into the Friends plot and got stuck for 3 hours one morning waiting for Jessica, it's just not justifiable to lie on a soft
bench lined with pillows placed there specifically for your, the customer's, comfort and watch Friends while you're in Laos. I spoke to one friend,
Caroline, who stayed for 2 meals and watched for 12 hours. It's just evil...

So we breakfasted, rented out tubes, and tuk-tuked, tubes atop, back to the Farm, which just so happened to be the "drop-off" point. It was 11am, and
already we were mildly concerned about the small amount of time we could now afford to be on the river. The 3km stretch would take approximately 3
hours to ride if it weren't for the countless bars and rope swings that distract happy tubers innocently on their way downstream to a peaceful end and
sober sleep. One Beer Lao = free jumps at the first bar, which was a zip-line jump into the river so we had a few gos before floating 50 metres downstream
into the bamboo pole arms of the next bar owner. Accustomed to the endless shipments of drunken tubers, many bars have their people stand at the
water's edge or in the water bearing 10-foot bamboo poles which the rider wraps their water-logged fingers around in order to be pulled ashore. They
take the tube, hand you a drink, and convince you to jump off a 15-foot high platform.

The first few jumps were bearable by my fearful standards, and over a game of volleyball, a few drinks, and a half-decent (we're getting closer,
folks) hot dog, I gathered my nerves for the "Last Bar" where an enormous, 30-foot high rope swing awaited our inevitable arrival. It was inevitable because
there were Buckets of Fun - a fine concotion of half a bottle of whiskey, Red Bull, and Coke that arrives at your thirsty lips in, quite literally,
a bucket - for only $2.50. We did NOT need dragging in on this one. Jessica took the first jump with Graham, and let me tell you: you have never seen
a giant jump so gracefully...there was vitually no splash...France and I jumped next and while I let a blood-curdling scream most of the way, it
was actually exhilarating. So much so, that I jumped two more times! As the darkness encroached on our fun - Buckets of Fun - a mud fight ensued and
there wasn't clear eye or a dry eye about following that one. What were we thinking going up against Mr. Big?? But Jess was the one who really
challenged him. When he threw sand at her, she threw it back harder; if he gave her a dead-leg, she gave him one back, and vice versa. It was clear
enough in my dizzy, sand-packed head that there was some serious flirting going on...when Jess will fight you, you know you've got a place in her
heart ;)

France felt it too, and when the time came to make some headway for the river's end, still an hour-and-a-half away, I left Jess in Graham's
trustworthy and frighteningly large hands and under France's semi-sober, watchful eye since I was already on my tube and floating. I had believed
that we were all going when Graham picked up a tube and yelled, "Okay, let's go!" but as I floated downstream I spotted him back up at the bar and
there was little I could do so I joined the hand-holding line with Dan, Craig, and Liz and we sang our way through the dark for an hour to the river's edge.
It wasn't the convenient end, the one that brings you back to into town, but the mosquitoes were getting ravenous and we were starting to chill in the
water.

Gallery: Laowais in Laos

katiedoestheworld — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 05:38:00 GMT

The Fifth Slice

katiedoestheworld — Sat, 2 Jun 2007 09:16:00 GMT

Well, Readers...

The bus ride was NOT 22 hours long, but closer to 30. I won't quite go there yet, since, plot-wise, we still haven't left ChengDu. We acquired a new rooomate one of our nights in ChengDu, Irishman Liam, who joined us for a self-guided tour of ChengDu his first and only day there being the good sport he was. That same night, we set out on the town in search of an Irish bar playing the F.A. Cup finals - how hopeful and naive we were...we dropped that plan, agreeing instead to meet at "the pub" (apparently there is only one) in LiJiang on Tuesday night at 8pm. So Liam left the next day for LiJiang, and Jess and I allowed ourselves one more day in the ChengDu area so that we could visit the much-famed Giant Buddha in LeShan. A literal stopover in JiaJiang at the Thousand Buddha Cliffs had us in complete awe, and a minibus ride to LeShan had us feeling drowsy. Headed for bus No. 13, which would take us to see Buddha, we were approached by a fine, English-speaking university student, Mickey, who was "so excited! You are here!" When we informed him that we had wanted to take a boat to see Buddha from the water, he got extremely giddy, clapping his hands together, even jumping a little (while his more mellow, and mostly shy friend stood by), but had enough calm in him to find out where the cheaper boat departed from. "I am so excite! to go on a boat trip!" were Mickey's words when he discovered that, indeed, the boat ran. And like our cave guide in Yangshuo, Mickey's voice would turn from loud and emotional when speaking Chinese to quietly enthusiastic and soft, but high-pitched when speaking English.

The Chinese, especially those who come in contact with foreigners regularly, such as hostel employees, and many university students, often choose an English name. It's much easier for foreigners then to remember their names and gives them an identity in another tongue. I have, so far, run across two Apples, we've caught wind that there is a Tantalus living on the East coast according to an acquaintance who met the man himself, but Disney character names consistently dominate China's English-name dictionary. If it's not Alice (In Wonderland), it's Mickey or Minnie. Debbie was a one-off, and we've met a Simone. What would you re-name yourself if Star Magazine and Shakespeare were your only sources for nominal selection?

So, for 1 yuan, 49 yuan less than the speedboat option, the four of us chugged across the river to an island which brought us perfectly close to the Buddha - from the water, it was possible to see the Buddha's two guardians who were carved into either side of the cliff face surrounding him. Mickey had brought a fan that he hand-painted himself so, naturally, we took a picture of him with it in front of the Buddha and promised to send it his way, then experienced a bit of celebrity as Chinese tourists crowded around us taking it in turns to have their picture taken with the "laowais." Though the term "laowai" once carried a negative connotation and is still occasionally used in such a way, it has generally become a neutral and common word for "foreigner" and is used among old and young alike.

We thanked Mickey for his hospitality and got on bus No. 13 finally. However, this particular bus was on its way to deliver the day's collection of money and so, as the sun descended and the closing hour of the Buddha Park drew near, we sat on a random road in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go while the bus driver ate noodles and the money-collectress sang to herself. Not only did we make it to the Grand Buddha in time to see him, but a student price existed AND we were relieved of the masses of tourists who flood the park during the day. Sitting at over 71 metres tall, the Buddha was understatedly "grand" and an incredible sight. We were pleased with ourselves for managing to do a two-day trip in just one, and returned to the long distance bus station hoping to catch the last bus back to ChengDu. The bus driver dropped us off at the station, beeping his horn at us as he took off and sent us a long farewell kiss when we looked back at him. We arrived only to find that the bus station was closed and that the last bus had left at 6:30. No matter, we decided, we'd just go to the Central Bus Station. It turned out that noone knew where this station was, but rather than suffer the embarrassment of having to admit this, we were just pointed in various directions and sent in circles by the people that we asked. Even worse was that the bus station no longer existed in the location that we had it at on our map - and for all we knew, it no longer existed at all. The options were not good. Having left our passports in the safety deposit box at our hostel in ChengDu we wouldn't have a chance at getting a room for the night, but all buses from LeShan bound for ChengDu had already left and we had to pack to leave for LiJiang the next morning. We determined that we had to get back to ChengDu that night. Our good fortune led us to a group of people who didn't speak English, but also didn't laugh at our MISfortune, and organized for a taxi driver to take us to a place that, according to their body language, they were certain would have a bus so we hopped in. The driver took us to the newly located and not-so-central Central Bus Station, dropping us off at its locked front doors. Thanks but no thanks :) Of course, this is probably a common occurrence, and so we were immediately smothered by taxi drivers competing to take us to ChengDu. We agreed to a price and thought we would be leaving on our time. We waited to FILL the taxi, in fact, and left only once it was full - and our fee didn't fluctuate, funnily enough...Despite the deafening techno played for the entire duration of the ride, the 140km/hr speed that had us over-taking police cars, got us back to ChengDu in under two hours. The driver maintained our price, charging the other couple half of that, then dropped us off at the outskirts of the city before taking off with the couple! We returned unscathed but mildly angered. Whatever the case, we were where we wanted and needed to be, and celebrated our relief with some veggie street skewers.

It's not that my entire life's entertainment is found in China's overnight bus rides, but this one deserves mention. Outfitted in unwashed pink linen and devoid of any form of air-conditioning system, this sleeper wasn't the one you would want to spend 30 hours on if you had to. And had I noticed the dried blood on one of the blankets (from a nosebleed, most likely, as this journey takes its riders into high altitudes) or known that many Chinese are not accustomed to travelling by road and often buy snacks, stuff themselves silly, then end up vomiting out the window along the curvy roads on this route, perhaps I would have considered the more pricey and lengthy trip down to Kunming first...we departed at noon on the Monday from the heatbed that is ChengDu, which finally brought a breeze through our open windows, but also signalled to its mostly male passengers the beginning of a smoking marathon. Most of the passengers and all three drivers chain-smoked, which in the stifling heat that had collected during the midday station stalemate where we'd sat for an hour prior to leaving and lack of air-conditioning created a toxic cloud in which Jessica's asthmatic lungs were at their angriest. The windows helped for air flow, but were strangely large. At just over 2 feet tall and sufficiently long that a 12-year-old child could easily topple out of the space should the driver take a sharp turn, the window seemed an accident waiting to happen, but we just need that air.

The drive was beautiful, as we climbed higher and higher Tibetward-bound, but the roads were unpaved in places, there were no barriers lining the cliff's edges, and the previous week's heavy rains meant that landslide leftovers were numerous and landslides themselves were a serious concern. Our driver-with-a-death-wish didn't help. My nervousness was dismissed as unnecessary and confirmed as legitimate as I watched the seven-year-old beside me get thrust off his middle row bed into the aisle on one such sharp turn which we took at dangerously high speeds. As you might imagine, sleeping became an issue. When I wasn't tensed up from the fear that I might die tonight, I was having to save myself from rolling into the aisle as we sped along the mountain sides, sometimes cutting corners by driving on the opposite side of the road, or hold my head as we raced over potholes at twice the speed of every other vehicle on the road. You know that falling feeling you sometimes get when you're on the verge of a deep sleep? Not so cool when you might actually be falling. I finally did get myself into a half-awake, half-asleep state, when the whole bus was startled by a loud "BOOM!" At 1am our engine blew. Though a minor two-hour delay, Jess and I were stunned not by the noise but by the clear sky when we looked out of our enormous windows. We were finally grateful for the size of the windows, and through them, decided that every star that does exist was out that night. They were incredibly bright against the moonless night, and the air so clear that it enhanced their light from bright to brilliant. The drivers, with their seemingly minimal mechanical skill, managed to get us moving, but not without a steady clanking noise whenever we reached speeds above 10km an hour. A very long and slow journey brought us to a short strip of dimly lit shops - they were closed, of course, but the drivers simply banged on one of the metal doors hoping for a response. Many businesses in China, especially guesthouses and some shops, have an employee sleep in the reception room with the valuables for security reasons and also in the case that someone might return late. In this case, it was likely that the mechanic's home was attached to his business and so it wasn't a completely hopeless effort. The mechanic, much to my surprise, emerged and after a drowsy half-hour of drilling and chit-chat, we got going again, and relatively noiselessly at that!

As 10am approached the next morning, the supposed 22-hour mark, Jess and I attempted to determine where exactly we were. When we finally saw a sign, it read the name of a city that was about half-way between ChengDu and LiJiang. This was a disappointment in itself, but the worst part was that we couldn't even ask how much longer the bus ride would be. While the bus was stuffy, dirty with nosebleeds, smokey, and not the most desirable place to be for what turned our to be an additional 8 hours, the scenery was unbeatable and made the extra time spent on the bus much more bearable. What was almost UNbearable though, was the two official bathroom stops that our male drivers made in the entire 30 hour trip. There were two "lunch/dinner" stops, but if your bladder didn't comply with these times, it made for a long trip. We arrived in LiJiang at 6:30pm on the Tuesday night, set ourselves up in the Old Town Youth Hostel, turned around, and made way for Frosty Morning to meet up with Liam. Although we'd thought we'd given ourselves ample time to make this date, we had instead arrived with not even enough time to shower or change before we had to meet Liam. But this wasn't a problem - the chips and drinks were calling us from two days before and we certainly didn't want Liam to think he'd been stood up.

So here's another lesson for THIS week: if the bus only runs twice a week and is only half-full when it does leave, you might want to consider its reliability.

We decided that with the weather being so amazing, we'd get onto the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail earlier rather than later, and joined Liam the next morning (after a deep and undisturbed, but short, sleep) on his way to the West entrance in the town of QiaoTou. A hearty breakfast at Jane's Guesthouse, yak meat, vegetables, and noodle soup for moi, had us raring to get going, if not for the fun of it, for the next Naxi meal that awaited us at our first night's stay.

LiJiang is located in the northern region of China's south-western Yunnan Province. This area sits on the fringes of the Tibetan plateau and is home to the large but still very local Naxi people, who are a Tibetan minority and bring all of the wonderful colours, textiles, and food of Tibet into this more accessible territory of China. So for any visitors who are unable to make it to Tibet still get to enjoy Tibetan culture here, one that is the most relaxed and welcoming that I've experienced so far in China.

The entrance to the Gorge trail was little more than a wooden plank of wood painted with the words "Ancient Trail" on it. There was little the locals could hassle us for along these parts, but we did have a man on a horse follow us for most of the day waiting for Jessica and I to collapse under the 20kg weight of our bags. The tactic is to follow the hikers closely, pushing them to their limits, and exhausting them so that they will require your conveniently nearby horse. With this in mind, I made sure to stop whenever I wanted to take pictures, which halted him, and took several pictures of him on his horse. He liked it. He also eventually abandoned us. The landscape was undescribable - almost - I'll try, but the pictures are much more articulate on their own...the Gorge was how you might imagine a gorge to be: there was a muddy river at the bottom, which was lined by incredibly steep, endlessly tall mountain slopes. This sight alone was grand. In the distance, there were snow-capped peaks that lost some of their white as the sun came out over the course of the day and were eventually only capped by the sun's beams at its end. On our side of the gorge, a narrow trail had been walked over thousands of times and blazed amongst a barren landscape of long, wiry, dry grass and short shrubbery. Two hours got us to the Naxi Guesthouse, where we reloaded our water supplies, and the next hour got us up the fearsome 28 Bends - which weren't actually that bad. If you haven't climbed the 100-rung ladders of the West Coast Trail, I could see it being overwhelming, but it wasn't so steep and hard-going as slippery with loose slate on an unsafe mountain side and so mostly slow-going.

At its summit, also the highest point on the trail, we spotted a viewpoint. We crawled underneath a suspiciously-smooth wooden bar supported by two trees about 3 feet high and laid across the only path to the viewpoint, but didn't think much of it. It was the wilderness, after all, and trees fall, branches fall. We took our pictures and turned around to return to the path, when we saw that a little old lady, clad in simple navy blue pants, navy jacket, matching cap, and simple cotton shoes had snuck out from hiding and was on one of the rocks nearby blocking our way out. So, there we were on a rocky finger of a viewpoint, just metres away from a heavenly fall down to the gorge, and we were being pressured for money. I don't know what services she had provided exactly, certainly nothing that warranted a fee, but apparently putting up a bar and trapping people on the cliff's edge is reason enough to charge people or at least bribe them for their freedom. We became concerned about this comprosing position, and she became excited at our resistance and began flailing her arms about. In all of this, Jess got poked in the eye by one of the old lady's dirty fingers and received only a soft pat on the shoulder as an apology and consolation from Crazy Bends, as we named her since she was at the top of 28 Bends and was arguably crazy. We managed to carry our conversation TO the wooden bar at least, where the argument continued. From what we could understand, the lady wanted 5 yuan per person, and though it was only a dollar to each of us, it was more the principle - that she'd hidden on us, then trapped us on a cliff's edge and demanded money of us. I paid my 5 yuan and wanted to see if she'd let us ALL out, but when Jess went to climb under the bar, she was abused by this woman yet again! As Jess put her head underneath the bar, the woman put her hands on her face and pushed her right back under! Knowing that there was little chance at communication, Liam demanded from this woman, "a written apology. In the Queen's English." When she shouted back, "Woo-guh yuan" (5 yuan), Jess asked, "Do you take Visa?" This petty, but satisfying, battle of words went on for some time before Liam just handed her another 5 yuan and we were on our merry way again. We contemplated the chances of Jessica contracting pink eye and various other infections from her run-in with Crazy Bends' fingertip, then forgot about the whole thing. We arrived at Tea-Horse Trade Guesthouse just in time for dinner, and joined a travelling GAP Adventures group and a lone traveller from Quebec, Eric, for the meal.

The name of this guesthouse, though seemingly random, was in fact relevant to the history of the Gorge trek. This trail was a part of the China's famous Silk Road, less known for the silk that it did not trade, and the tea and horses that it DID trade between Tibet, Yunnan, and Sichuan (the province north of Yunnan). So not only was it significant that we travelled the same trecherous path that traders centuries before us did, but it was also a special experience to spend a few nights on the trail. It was, at the least, a quiet, cheap refuge (and the best outdoor bathroom view I've ever had) from the usually crowded and incessantly loud city streets of the places we'd been staying at.

We rose the next morning for a leisurely start to our next trail destination, Sean's Guesthouse. It was a mere 3 hours, comparatively relaxed considering the previous day's 6-hour trek, and an hour in, Eric caught up to us while we were taking in the view (and catching our breaths!), so we had his company for the rest of the road there. It actually did turn into road near to Sean's, but this didn't take away from the scenery. We dropped our luggage, raised our tired feet, and gave-in to our craving for pizza. It was relatively early in the afternoon and we had planned on taking a trail down to the Gorge via the Lower Tiger Leaping Gorge Trail. Walking into the dorm room to deliver our bags there, we noticed that each bed was host to a teddy bear - each of which, we discovered, Sean had picked out at the store - and someone (Eric) thought it would be fun to bring the teddies down to the Gorge.

The idea was funny, but seeing two grown men practically skipping down a path with teddies stuffed lovingly under their armpits topped all the day's humorous events. We managed to get lost on our way down and after passing through a local's garden we encountered another old lady. Liam had read something about entrance fees and we assumed she was the money collector. As we neared her, she began waving two fingers at us and we spent little time trying to understand what she was trying to tell us since a) we thought we had it figured out, and b) we were a bit distracted by her one eye an single long tooth that crept over her bottom lip and halfway down her chin. She was perfectly kind though, and so I gave her 5 yuan. To this, she received the bill with both hands, (an indication that she considers it a gift) and let out a high-pitched, "Ooooooooooooooh!" Her eye became wide and her mouth began to curve around her tooth in a close-lipped smile. She waved two fingers at us again, and so the boys each got out a few bills, and again, she exclaimed, "Ooooooooooh!" After we'd given her all of this money and witnessed her surpised reaction, we realized that her finger-waving could have meant "Peace" or "I wish you a happy journey down to the river" or "You're going the wrong way, turn around." Regardless, we'd obviously made her very happy in our mistake so we carried on considering the priviledge ours to have met her.

The Gorge was magnificent. Standing beneath a kilometres-high cliff on a rock (supposedly the "tiger" leapt across the rocks at the bottom of the gorge where we were) in the middle the raging Yangtze River was nothing short of magnificent. We had an amusingly long photo shoot at one of China's most spectacular scenes - with the teddies - and just chilled on the rocks for an hour before hiking the arduous kilometre-long hike back up to Sean's. "Be back before 7 o'clock," they advised us). The GAP group we'd encountered at the previous guesthouse was having a few drinks when we got there, and after a shower and a meal, some of their lot joined us for bai jiu and Sprite. Beer Goggles kept us occupied until the wee hours of the morn...and everyone was feeling it the next morning.

Not too many people were hiking the road to Daju (which more or less completes the 3-day version of the trek) as landslides had made it difficult to climb and for all transport to get through. It was an estimated 3-hour journey by foot to the Old Ferry, so we decided to make a day of it. It turned out to be 4 and a half hours, but we didn't know this of course. After the first hour, the gorge basically "ended" and opened up into a plateau full of small villages, soft hills, and green valleys. At 3 hours in, without any bearings, in the 30 degree noon sun, and completely without water between the three of us, we unanimously decided to take a break. As we sat there, we noticed a truck with a canvas canopy in the distance slowly making its way up the dirt road towards us. We thought for a moment that we ought to catch a lift, but since it was going in the opposite direction that we supposed we were to be travelling and probably had someone in it, we watched it drive past us instead. There were a couple of plastic bags in the back, but no people...when suddenly, an old lady (yet again - they were very amusing in this part of the country), pulling herself up with her right hand curled over the half-closed window's edge, poked her head out and said in a coarse voice, "Bye Bye." As she spoke these words in her E.T.-like voice, she simultaneously thrust her left hand out the window and flapped her fingers against the palm of her hand, the way a 3-year-old might wave goodbye. This gave us some energy, and we continued taking a few wrong turns but eventually making it to the boat, and up the insanely steep opposing side of the river. We arrived at a guesthouse only to discover tha we were half-an-hour away from the last bus' departure for LiJiang - that was cutting it a little too close. We were thoroughly pooped from another long day's hike and stuck to a simple Naxi meal once back in LiJiang then a bottle of blush wine for dessert at The Sexy Tractor - this is what you get when an Irishman meets a Naxi woman.

We hired bikes the following morning and sped along the 10km stretch that passes through LiJiang in order to reach a more quiet route to the north of town. We made a few scenic pit-stops, refused to pay a few entry fees (being the penny-pinchers that we are), and arrived at the village of Baisha in the afternoon, where we were directed to Dr. Ho's clinic.

A Julia Berg put together a short film about "The Most Admired Man," and Michael Palin recalls his first (but apparently second) visit with Dr. Ho in his travel book,"Himalaya," at his famed clinic in the small village of Baisha, skirting LiJiang's more populous reaches. The Lonely Planet also cites him in a section of their Yannan Chapter and tour buses flock into the narrow, cobble-stoned streets daily having "pilgrimaged" to receive consultation from him. His clinic was difficult to miss as his proud son, Dr. Ho II, whose own son is currently studying medicine at university to become Dr. Ho III, had decorated the modest building's exterior with billboards of articles written on his father over the past 8 decades. These boards had flooded onto the street and mostly highlighted Michael Palin's mention of him, displaying blown-up photocopied pictures of Michael Palin shaking Dr. Ho's hand. We parked our bikes outside of the clinic and climbed up the three steps into its perpetually open door.

Two L-shaped glass counters occupied two opposing corners of the "waiting room" and long, darkwood benches took up whatever extra space there was. Just when we thought that the room was full, a pile of energy burst into the room from the back door of the clinic, arms open wide and with his right hand a metre ahead of the rest of his body ready for greeting. This was Dr. Ho II, Dr. Ho's extremely extroverted and genuinely kind in his enthusiam only son, a relaxed man clad in sandals, shorts and a t-shirt who spoke English very well. He welcomed us as though we were the first and only people to have ever set foot in his father's establishment, then, using his open left hand, he swung his arm backwards, leading our eyes back to the door from which he'd entered the room where his mother now entered carrying a tray of small, handleless tea cups. At 84, Mrs. Ho was keen to provide all of her husband's patients with complimentary "healthy tea" as they waited, moving in and out of the waiting room frequently only to collect used porcelin tea cups and replace them with new, full cups. She spoke no English and so was not as sociable as her son, but her face exuded only happiness as she watched her son interact so fluently with the hoards of strangers entering the clinic.

Everything a person might want or need to know about Dr. Ho was on display inside of the clinic. There were large picture frames with their mattes removed and the entire glass space filled with collections of hundreds of business cards that had been given to Dr. Ho and his family by previous visitors over the decades. Every article that had ever been published had made its way onto this museum wall telling of Dr. Ho's success and gifts from patients and guests were hung from the ceiling. But the clinic still had an air of disorder about it, as any doctor's office does. Paper filled the counters in piles, but messy piles. And just as any doctor can find his way around the disorder, we would occasionally see Dr. Ho scurry out of his room and behind the counter, then locate exactly the piece of paper that he required from amidst the chaos. There was little one could do to distinguish Dr. Ho's office from the waiting room since obviously many of his "supplies" were located in the waiting room itself. Dr. Ho's son handed out a plastic-covered write-up on his father's history for the wait, which we balanced on our knees while sipping our minature cups of tea using both hands. There was no doubt that the Ho family was proud of their patriarch and enjoyed his celebrity not for the perks, but for the recognition that Dr. Ho received for being the good doctor he supposedly was.

There was an air of mystery about Dr. Ho. As a Daoist who practices Traditional Chinese Medicine, Dr. Ho's practices had proved effective and life-changing for many patients before us, but also required that his patient had faith in him, his diagnoses, and methodology. As was his standard in the past and as it remains to this day, Dr. Ho consults and treats his patients by donation, so for those who cannot afford to pay for his services are not required to. This was a blessing and was much appreciated by the villagers of Baisha and the surrounding towns and villages as they suffered through famines and general hard times in the past. Dr. Ho's generosity and kind-heartedness during those times and these, is largely why he is so revered both locally and now, worldwide.

The waiting room order was based on a trust system, so you had to be careful to notice who joined the group after you and who was already seated when you had arrived. We were uncertain whether or not we were "next" in line, and so remained seated when the previous patient emerged from Dr. Ho's office. But as Dr. Ho's hand lowered itself bound for a bell on the nearest counter and noone else stood up, we realized that our turn had come. Liam and I went followed Dr. Ho's short stature into the adjacent room.

The office was characteristically stuffed with enormous plastic, red buckets brimming with crushed herbs - all local and perfectly powdered. There were shelves on the north face of the room that were packed with wide, shallow bowls also containing herbs. The smell was intoxicating and I felt as though I'd just stepped into a pool of scented essential oils mixed with fresh dried herbs. I stood in front of Dr. Ho's desk, between the desk and the only window in the room, when he placed a short wooden stood in the narrow aisle between the numerous buckets and gestured for me to take a seat. Liam stood behind me, observing, while Dr. Ho's assistant moved between bowls and buckets all the while scooping various herbs into a separate bowl for others' remedies to their ailments. Her concoctions filled my olfactory senses, distracting me from my one-chance meeting with Dr. Ho. I sat down. Hands overlapped casually infront of his white coat, Dr. Ho looked down at me with his wispy white, but wise, beard which pointed at me accusingly. He asked me my age:

"What is your age."
"22."
"Where are you from."
"Canada."
"Mmmm," he hummed curiously.
"But I was born in England, and my father is Chinese."
"He speaks Chinese."
"No...English. A little bit of Chinese, only a little."
"English."

He asked me to stick out my tongue, and with his mouth in a silent "O" shape, he peered into my mouth from above. He lifted my left wrist with two fingers and a thumb for a moment. He lifted my right wrist for another, then backed away in a somewhat clinical manner.

"Do you have PMS."
"No...it doesn't seem to be a problem..." (and I don't want to know otherwise from anyone who cares to stir the pot.)
"Not even a little."
"Nope. Not even a little."
"You are sure."
"Yep." Was there something I didn't know?

He held my hand for a long minute, then turned around quickly to face his desk. He shuffled the papers around on his cluttered desk, hurriedly, then picked the cardboard label out of one of the herb bowls sitting on his desk, showed it to me with two hands holding it just under his chin, and explained, "Healthy tea for you." He tossed the label onto his desk which splashed herb dust all over the papers it landed on, instead of returning it to its appropriate bowl, and rushed out of the office. While he was absent, I resumed my position in front of his desk now that my consultation was presumably finished, proud that I was prescribed only "healthy tea."

Dr. Ho returned with a sheet of paper which he lay ontop of the desk clutter - instructions for my prescription and dosages. He underlined and underlined various parts of sentences again and again, then pushed the pen tip into the right margin of the page where it read in handwriting, which had obviously been added some time after the instructions had originally been printed, a url address.
"Guggle. You can find me at Guggle. Just, 'Dr. Ho.'" Google. I could find him at Google. Here was a man who, at the age of 84, was most likely only mildly familiar with computers but knew enough that he had a cyberspace presence on a site called "Google." I wondered if he simply recited these instructions without much understanding - would he be able to locate himself on Google? - or had he been following his own popularity on Google all this time? The way he said "Google," which was transformed into a soft gurgling, "Guggle" and his probable unawareness of its meaning made me just want to cuddle him...but the closest I got was an awkward sideways stance next to him in a picture of the two of us.

Dr. Ho pulled out a thin sheet of paper, piled two generous scoops of healthy tea onto it, then folded it into a triangle. He painted the words "healthy tea" on its front with thick black ink using a traditional Chinese paintbrush, plopped it into a small, red, plastic carrying bag, then smiled at me as he held it up for me to grab along with the sheet of instructions.

"Say hullo to yuh fathah."

And that was it. I had been diagnosed as healthy by "The Most Admired Man" and much to his apparent disappointment I did not suffer from PMS. Liam was next. Liam is a freckled Irishman and is whiter than snow. On this day, he was wearing something like a third degree burn on his skin despite his efforts to prevent such a result by slathering himself in 90 SPF sunscreen all day, but Dr. Ho paid no attention to this. As Dr. Ho passed Liam's healthy tea to him over his desk, he pulled up his sleeve and urged us to rub the skin on his wrist: "See, healthy tea. Everyday."

This was what he claimed was keeping his skin smooth and if not that, I can attest to the fact that he moves with the confidence and perhaps more ease than a 30-year-old, strong and without any sign of a stumble in the future. Like me, Liam was healthy. This was a relief, but he was still burning from the outside in when he left Dr. Ho's office. Jess went in solo and was equally healthy, but at informing Dr. Ho of her asthma he gasped, then concocted some sort of relief in powder form for her and sent her off. I returned to ask him for something to help my mum with her back pain.
We returned to the waiting room where Dr. Ho's son insisted that we sign his guestbooks - he has one for each and every country that has visited his father's clinic and got into a bit of a panic when he discovered that we were infact Canadian and not American and had contaminated the USA guestbook with our comments. We corrected the problem and signed our names again in the Canadian guestbook. Liam was well pleased that he even had an Irish guestbook, and in the excitement that Dr. Ho's son had built up in us over who knows what, we all celebrated our general happiness with a group photo, which Dr. Ho's son was starting to collect in preparation for an online museum he is in the process of creating.

We ate at a quiet restaurant next door, leaving our bikes parked where we'd left them a few hours earlier in front of the clinic, and when we went back to collect them, the now empty doorway to the clinic was open, but Dr. Ho's office door was shut. The crowds had dispersed and so we figured that he'd finished up with his day's work. We were just about to set off when we heard a "Goodbye!" and when we turned around we saw Dr. Ho and his son both standing in the doorway waving us off like we really had been the only ones to have ever visited them. It finally felt like a village and I felt my day was more than complete. It was a quiet ride back, rushed only by Liam's need to make his sleeper bus to Kunming at 6:30. With the bikes returned and goodbyes said to Liam, Jess and I went to LiJiang's Black Dragon Pool Park for a view of the China-renowned lake and its near flawless reflection. We'd had a late lunch and weren't terribly hungry, so indulged in an apple strudel - a rare find done properly - and had a browse of the Tibetan goods in the stores lining LiJiang's old town streets.

The next morning, we prepared to make way for Dali. Although we weren't impressed by the road and scenery coming into Dali, especially when we compared it to that of LiJiang's ride into town, we were still glad to arrive in the ancient town which was much less touristy than LiJiang (there were no yellow flags flying above the crowds conducting a tour group in sight) and far quieter. We stayed at the No. 5 Youth Hostel, a converted school with a treehouse feel, and infact had our dorm room to ourselves the first night. We bought some bai jiu and Sprite and lounged for our first day. There was hiking and biking to do, but we were more than satisfied with what we'd done in LiJiang and instead decided to wander the 200-year-old streets of XiZhou on foot the next day. My curiosity got the better of me and my photographer's eye drew me to frequently invite myself into any door that was open, forgetting that it was someone's home. Fortunately one family had noticed the curiosity that foreigners had to see inside one of these tall-walled homes and realized the potential for profit in actually showing their home. Apparently, it was the home to The General - whoever that was, but the woman seemed nice enough, and the man who stood back quietly as we toured the courtyard and indoor stables, kindly invited us to drink tea with him. As I stepped up to join him, I found myself climing over something's freshly removed entrails and also found myself not so keen on the tea. We had a leisuredly look at the two-storey wooden exterior that bordered the courtyard, but were eager to leave only when the woman began chasing us with some handmade horses that she insisted we buy at 15 yuan each. We didn't particularly want them, but thought we might find some way to pay her for the tour, however, when she wouldn't budge on the price, we signed their guestbook, thanked the nice couple and left.

The day's slow pace had us dying to make some quick cash exchanges, so...we went to the local "tourist" market. I stumbled upon one stall which, like so many others, had Cultural Revolution pins pressed with Mao's profile and various slogans and dates strung from table end to table end and boasted various other items that would fall under the category of Maobilia. What distinguished this stall was its large collection of "Revolution" magazines and enormous piles of Chinese comics, which, unlike the comics as we know them, are thicker and much smaller, about the size of a flip-book. I picked up the occasional Chinese opera printed into comic form, but didn't feel as though I could follow the plot well enough to justify the $3 spend - this was only important because I couldn't, and still can't, read Chinese. As I picked up and put down comic after comic trying to find one of sufficient interest to me, the woman, being the business person she was, directed me to a new dusty pile that I'd ignored on my way in. In it, I found an incomplete series of Chinese Tin-Tin comics dating back to 1984 and 1985. Presumably there was a comic distributed monthly: there were 7 comics from 1984, and 5 from 1985. Seeing that the 1984 collection was more complete than the 1985 collection and it was my birth year, I tried to get a good deal but failed miserably. Instead, I abandoned the 1984 dream and paid the price in full for the 1985 collection. Whether or not they're worth anything, the deal is sealed and I am now the proud owner of 5 1985 Chinese Tin-Tin comics and a Communist propaganda magazine from 1973.

As advertised at our hostel, the "Breakfast for Buffet" (and also for $1.50) met every expectation a breakfast buffet possibly could. I even managed a fried egg on toast with soy sauce AND it was delicious. We went to ErHai Lake that day which only made us nostalgic for the bodies of water we'd left behind 4 months ago and also made me want to swim in a pool, mostly just to feel clean water against my skin and then to float weightlessly away in it. Heat can make you feel heavy. It was our departure day - another nightride, another sleeper. Lucky for you, I have no horror stories to tell for this one. Infact, not only was the bus clean and the ride short, but our driver was extremely friendly - without hesitation, the nicest we'd had. We interpreted this as being indicative of what we could expect in the south, where we'd planned to spend a few days before heading into Laos, and came to expect even greater things from the Lao people.

Sunny, hot, humid, and tropical was where we landed the next morning, in the busy southern city of JingHong. My Communist propaganda magazine, which was too big to send home in our last package and when I communicated that I wanted it sent home flat I was told "No" - it couldn't be done because it didn't fit into any of the boxes that they had at the Post Office, was literally disintegrating at its corners and I needed rid of it. So we made a stop at the China Post in JingHong and waited an hour for its packaging. Thankfully the women there were innovative enough to wrap it correctly, and the wait wouldn't have been so bad had one of the other waiting customers not been slapping her poor baby in the face hard for crying. It was unbearable! Everytime the baby would cry, the woman would slap him up his face, sometimes grabbing its nose and pulling it up forcefully. I was only one slap away from slapping her myself, but as is the belief in China, it is not your business to intrude on someone else's troubles, especially when it comes to parenting. We were completely appalled by this very publicly abusive "parenting" method and made sure to at least give her disapproving looks. It's strange, the things that you need to be careful about in China, but you have to remember that it's not your country and they're not your customs to criticize. So all we could do was bite our tongues, sit on our hands, and get on with what WE were there to do. To say that the Chinese have to keep to their own business is ironic since there wasn't a single pair of eyes that wasn't on my hand as I filled in my mailing form, all necks straining to see where my package was going to and trying to place me in a catergory: I was Canadian, and now that they knew this, they were relieved. Still curious though.

During our rendez-vous with Liam in LiJiang, him and I had done a book exchange: my "Red China Blues" for his "Wild Swans." I own a copy of "Wild Swans" and had it ready for reading and in my pack before I left home until I discovered that it was banned in China. It is, infact, only banned from being published on China's Mainland, as far as I know, mostly to keep the Chinese majority uninformed and to maintain loyalty to and a sheening image of the political body that still runs this country: Communism. But it is very possible that its possession is also banned - customs is lax and oftentimes doesn't search foreigners bags. Liam had carried the book INto China and I ended up carrying it back OUT. And actually, I unwittingly placed it on the customs counter as the officer checked my passport photo (as well as the rest of the line-up, who again, craned their heads to look over the desk at the computer screen) then continued to read the book as I waited on the other side of customs on the street curb. So much for control...I should add that I've now finished the book, which I couldn't put down, and it was so movingthat it had me shaking by the time I got to its end. The thinking and reflecting has been unstoppable since I finished it, and having just arrived in Laos from China, where I had focused a good amount of energy on visiting WWII and Revolution hot-spots, made the book that much more poignant. If you're interested, prepare to relive some of history's most vivid atrocities.

So...back to happy Laos, we crossed the border and dug into our pockets to pay for our on-the-spot visas. Jess had forgotten her passport photo in the bus which had already crossed the "border," and, naturally, we thought this would be a problem. Instead, the officer waved a couple of loose fingers in the direction of the border and, still looking down at my passport, said, "No problem. Go." It was an honest introduction to Laos: relaxed to the extreme. She retrieved her passport photo and the process was completed.

In just four hours, we'd driven from MengLa, crossed the border, and made it to Luang Nam Tha's poor excuse for a bus station - a dusty parking lot with a wood hut ticket office. So the bus stations between China and Laos differed in architectural standards, but there was no spitting, no hacking, no pooping babies, and the people were immediately more friendly. This was more than a pleasure...We'd finally left China behind and I was, despite my apparently resentful feelings towards it, sad and was only comforted by the fact that we had to return for our flight back to Canada in August. To this end, I concluded on thing: I am so grateful that I know how to use chopsticks. As if it wasn't embarrassing enough to not be able to speak the language after admitting that we were, indeed, half-Chinese, not being able to use chopsticks would have been completely and utterly disgraceful. But we were not submitted to this level of shame thanks to you, Dad. :)

We went to the bank after the bus ticket office refused our US dollars, which we figured meant that we needed to obtain some local currency: kip. The woman who served us was a 25-year-old with two children who spoke English brilliantly and also happened to own a guesthouse. After checking out trekking prices and deciding that they were too expensive, and in keeping with Lao attitude, we just "went with the flow" and checked ourselves into this nice woman's guesthouse, Zuela's Guesthouse, named after her daughter Zuela, who was named after the country of Venezuela.

These rooms were among the more "pricey" of guesthouse rooms in town, but $6 is worth it when you're in a place that produces fat, 3-inch long cockroaches, and it got us a fan, a clean, comfortable bed, and a new bathroom. Also nice was the request sitting above the hallway entrances that "Everyone is to be quiet. Step quietly, like good Buddhists." We were required to take off our shoes before stepping into the building, and the same went for internet cafes, the tourist information center, and virtually any building that would like the custom abided by. Luang Nam Tha isn't a particularly interesting town, but it's for the trekking and surrounding village bike-rides that foreigners come here at all. There is one language school where you can learn Lao if you wish, and one main street, which has about 10 blocks behind it. The town is puny, really, but the people are remarkably friendly and there is a restaurant here that cooks up some of the best Indian food I've ever had, so Luang Nam Tha has been a great introduction for us to Laos (it is pronounced with a silent "s").

We went biking through villages in the surrounding area for 4 hours today and it was amazing, of course, made only better by the fact that we've hit low season (who would come here during the rainy season? Us). The fresh air, though heavily humid, was a relief to my lungs as I believe I now suffer from a smoker's cough due to my time spent in the tobacco chamber that is China. Seriously - I cough stuff up every morning. We were given one piece of advice by a fellow West-Coaster today, which I was glad to have at the beginning of our visit here rather than the end, and that was, "If you love it in Laos too much to leave, then don't." We will inevitably have to leave, but like so many others, I think we may end up just taking it easy, which may translate our two-week planned stay into three weeks...then four...who knows. It's nice not knowing sometimes.

Unfortunately for YOU, readers, this is not the end of my depressingly long emails but it does conclude the first part of my trip to China. And so, for now, I'll say, bye bye to "lao-wai" and hello to the Laos-way...

Love Katie