La vida loca!

Thoughts on La Vida Loca

rachel_and_daniel — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 04:07:00 GMT

It was odd and pleasant to get off the plane and be surrounded by familiar accents and environments. Being away a year certainly gives you fresh eyes on your own country and home. What struck us most? Well, San Diego had given us some adjustment time already to the wealth and choice in shops and restaurants, although this was very nice to come back too. For me, some things were how clean everything was – in Central American and Mexican towns you get used to being surrounded by trash the whole time. Also all the buildings were finished - every second person wasn't half way through building an extra storey on the roof. The other thing was how green and fresh the English spring was – the lushness of the countryside and the birdsong. Despite its many faults, being away from British society and countryside for a long time made me appreciate it on my return, and Rachel and I spent a very enjoyable spring and early summer settling back into our house and putting down new roots (we acquired some ex-battery hens and a new ginger kitten), whilst job-seeking in the newly recession-hit economy.

It certainly cost us to pack up and leave for a year – particularly financially (obviously for the trip, but also storage costs, lost earnings and both going back into less financially rewarded jobs afterwards). But for the opportunity of experiencing the communities, individuals, cultures and environments we stayed in and moved through for that year, I think we’re both extremely grateful – things which you can’t buy, or put a monetary value on. Now over four years later, I still read back our blogs from that trip and look at the photos with immense pleasure and re-live those experiences – a good escape in my mind from the realities of a British midwinter or sometimes perceived day-to-day grind of work and home. It also strengthened our relationship – being in each-other’s company nearly constantly for the majority of a year is a good way of knocking off some of those rough edges!

Would we do it again if we had the opportunity? I don’t know. Rachel would say it was too long away, and she did struggle with home-sickness particularly in the last six months – I think it brought home to her the value of being settled and having roots in one place. I on other hand could have gone on moving and experiencing and as long as I had Rachel to share it with – although the realities of life and finances unfortunately preclude that! I would love to go on maybe less long adventures in the future. I personally loved the way that my perception of time slowed massively when I was away – a function of continually experiencing new things and people. I certainly think the reality of living and travelling in a country for weeks and months gives you a much better appreciation and understanding of it, particularly when you stay in a community for some time. So maybe we will – but not for now. Now we have commitments and roots that put those adventures into the medium future at least.

Final Flurry in San Ignacio and Diego

rachel_and_daniel — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 03:29:00 GMT

Nice Beach - who put those SUVs there?

After another breakfast watching small birds doing their Sisyphean nest-building task (poor things) we got the bus up to San Ignacio some 270km north which is known as a base for seeing the breeding grey whales that Baja is famous for. The bus journey took six hours winding up through barren hills and past beautiful sandy bays on the Sea of Cortez – unfortunately marred by uncontrolled motor-homes parked and huts built on seemingly every beach. We arrived at a truck-stop outside the town and managed to share a lift in a taxi with a local into the centre – what there is of it, which is not much and it turned out we arrived in the very-much low season. Most of the tour operators were closed, with just a couple of bars/cafes open. On top of that some of the few guesthouses had closed their doors because of fear of the pox. This was tumble-weed-one-horse-town-ville. Half the families are descended from a German shipwrecked sailor from the 19^th C, which shows in the shop signs. We had great trouble trying to use a 200 peso note – no one had change!

As we suspected, we’d missed the grey whales by a couple of weeks (add that to the turtles in Nicaragua and the monarch butterflies in central Mexico – a year of missing natural spectacles - doh!). We spent the next few days mooching in cafes and walking around the environs – the town (if you can call it that) is set in a natural oasis amongst a large palm plantation which is the only greenery – once you climb above it you’re straight back into the quiet desert scrub, with gnarled dead wood bleached by the sun, little lizards scurrying round and the jewel-like flowers of tiny succulents that hang onto existence in shady spots. The only other feature is a river winding languidly through the palms with minnows in its murky shallows. We got talking to a retired American expat (‘CV’) who showed us round her house, and introduced us to another expat lady who runs one of the town’s (closed) guesthouses – we had a couple of meals with her, exchanged books and she even offered to drive us to the bus station the next day, which was very good of her.

Looking down over the palms of San Ignacio from the surrounding desert

That evening after saying our goodbyes we got on the bus headed for Tijuana – Mexican border town and violent crime capital (well, ok, Cuidad Juarez on the east is probably worse) to try our luck at the American border. A (relatively) uneventful night journey later (only 2 check-points), we piled off the bus and got a taxi to the San Isidro border crossing with huge lines of Mexican day workers, and US OAPs getting cheap meds trying to cross over. After 30 minutes queuing we worked out we hadn’t filled out our visa-waiver forms, so had to get out of the queue to get them filled in. A couple of mal-filled out forms later (to the chagrin of a humourless immigration official), and Rachel turning into a random Chinese bloke on their computers, we were given the all clear and managed to pass through the border.

The first thing to strike us was the great, spotless trolley bus linking the border with the centre of San Diego. Everything was..well.. so clean, and organised, and relatively quiet. After getting some info from the lovely Amtrak station in the centre of the old town, we got a taxi to our chosen motel – on the coast further north. We had some trouble finding a driver who knew where it was, and when we eventually got a Somali guy with a sat-nav he took us on a massive detour and charged us $25 for the privilege – just shows, there are Somali pirates everywhere! Saying that, the motel was great for the price, with uber-helpful staff (they let us borrow a laptop), a nice breakfast and large signs saying ‘no fish in rooms!’ The nearby marina had good restaurants too - Italian pizza made with fresh ingredients - yum! (although a different set of prices to over the border..). Another novelty was potable tap water... We spent the next day getting the (really good!) public transport into town and did some shopping at ‘fashion valley’. Well, what to do in an American city, than go to the mall? Plus we needed some new clothes and shoes for our imminent return home and job interviews – all our stuff being in storage. In the afternoon we visited the maritime museum with its Isle-of-Man-built cutter and replica British man-o-war used in the ‘Master and Commander’ film – some odd links to back home on this far Pacific shore.

Absolutely!

Our final day we got a lift off our motel owner (soo friendly!) into town and walked the central boulevards of the ‘gas lamp district’, which have some nice oldish buildings, but suffer from the prevalence of the car and the grid-iron system, which doesn’t make it a very nice experience for pedestrians. We headed downtown and as it was quite nippy, and we did another all-American experience - Rachel bought a $2.25 jumper in a thrift shop! We ended up in the lovely Balboa park with its Italianate buildings and lovely African thorn trees in red bloom, and visited the ‘Bodyworks’ exhibition of Gunther Von Hagens – lots of striking plasticised cadavers in various poses and states of dissection – different.

Overall, we were pleasantly surprised by San Diego – nice parks, lovely marinas, decent public transport and very friendly people – a much more manageable (and pleasant) place than the megalopolis of Los Angeles which i’d experienced previously.

We had originally intended to travel up the pacific coast to Seattle – but itineraries slipped and so that trip will have to wait until another time. Instead, our flight back to blighty was calling, so we got an internal flight to Miami, where we stayed out of town in a hotel near the airport, and then got on an uneventful return trans-Atlantic flight back to England, exactly a year after we had left.

Sweeeee! Fleeing the Pox up Baha

rachel_and_daniel — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 22:24:00 GMT

We were rudely awakened at 6.00 by the ferry horn, telling us it was time to get up, get ready, and get off, as we'd arrived uneventfully in La Paz, at the south-eastern tip of Baha. Baha is seemingly a different country, not because of the swarms of American expats, but because we had to go through full customs and passport searches and checks (including thumbprints) to get into the state - which took hours. No drug mules or illegal immigrants getting in here, I tell you... . After eventually getting out of the ferry port, our bus was stopped nearly imediately by the state police. We all had to get off, have our bags searched AGAIN, whilst a group of mexican lads had to nearly strip down to their undies.. - some serious lack of co-ordination going on.

We booked into a hostel in La Paz. The town had a good write-up in the guidebook. Granted, it was the off-season, but we couldn't really see why. It was an amalgamation of nasty hotel developments, tacky tourist shops with a down-at-heel town centre - a bit like Morecambe! There's even a hotel with a big sign saying 'Cervesas y Papas'!

This is where, checking our emails, we suddenly caught up with the rest of the world and heard that a killer epidemic was sweeping out of Mexico City (it had started around the time we were there). We had wondered why we'd seen increasing numbers of people wandering around with surgical masks on... it wasn't just dust after all! An American girl at our hostel asked us whether we thought she should skip the country - our families were sending us emails telling us to get out. However, La Paz is a long way from Mexico City, and the whole thing, even at that stage (and luckily we were away from the 24hr media frenzy), sounded overblown. Instead, we checked out and headed out on the bus up the peninsula to Loreto, seeking something with a bit more character (and getting a bit nearer the border, just in case that crazy American senator demanding the border was closed got his way...).

The bus station was filled with worried looking people in surgical masks. Posters and leaflets around the place gave advice on what to do if you got symptoms of the plague and mexican nationals had to do a questionnaire to make sure they weren't carrying the pox (strangely, we didn't have to fill it out..) - it was actually quite unnerving, and gave the slight impression we were fleeing the apocalypse, even if we didn't actually believe it.

The bus rolled through flat cactus desert and then wound up roads through sun-bleached, jagged hills until we arrived at the sea in Loreto. Loreto was QUIET. Half the guest houses were closed and the place had a laid-back, off season charm to it (probably exacerbated by the fact that all the visitors and half the expats had flown north...). It was a Spanish mission station back in the day, and it hasn't grown that much now, with some nice old colonial villas in the centre, through cobbled streets. The Malecon on the sea front has beautiful views over to the large islands in the adjacent marine national park, the hills of which are lit up in deep reds and yellows at sunset.

The Sea of Cortes as a mill-pond, on the way to Isla Coronado

The town also has some really decent cafes and restaurants, largely home to an expat crowd, but really welcome after the generally below-par stuff we'd been having on the road up Mexico. One morning we sat having a rather good breakfast in Cafe Ole in the central plaza, watching a pair of incredibly cute little fluffy birds trying to build a nest in a light fitting out of long sticks and seed fluff. Every time they nearly got to a critical mass of material, the bottom would fall out, leaving them to flit around re-gathering their fluff, and placing it carefully back in their doomed nest. Full marks for persistence, but maybe not for darwinian selection.

Being next to a marine park, Loreto is a great base for diving, so we booked a dive off one of the offshore islands, in the deserted dive shop. We went out early in the morning from the little harbour - dozens of brown pelicans were stooping and crashing into the water around us as we chugged out. We also passed mating rays, flipping around on the surface, before eventually getting to our destination - Coronado Island. We sailed past an Osprey, looking down at us from a bush on the cliffs, before coming to what we'd come here to see - a colony of sea lions basking on the rocks. A big bull puffed out his chest and roared at us, whilst the females and little'uns carried on sunbathing, unperturbed. This is where we jumped off. We were in full, thick wet-suits here, and actually, we were warmer in the water than we had been down in Cozumel or Belize. We saw an octopus hiding in a crevice, puffer and parrot fish, groupers and rays. Finally, we floated below the colony whilst Rafael, our dive-master, blew bubbles up to try and catch the sealions' attention.

Rachel, kitted up as a pretend sea-lion... owww owww!

Sure enough, after a few minutes a few of the mums dived in to see whether there was something worth eating down below. It was quite simply a fantastic experience floating in the water column and having these massive, feline-like predators zipping past you (if also just a slight bit unnerving). Once we got out we could still see them knocking about, back flippers in the air, checking out whether the rubber-encased, not-so-tasty visitors were still around. We then headed for a secluded golden beach to dry off, with a really rather lovely view of turquoise sea and yellow-red hills.

Loreto was a great, relaxed place, but our impending plane back to blighty, plus the ever more panicky news reports from the US border meant we couldn't stay - so we headed off again further north to San Ignacio - grey whale capital.

For more pictures of Loreto and sea-lions, click here.

What better way to dry off after a dive?

Bandit Country - Rocks, Pines and Sky down the Copper Canyon

rachel_and_daniel — Sat, 6 Nov 2010 00:16:00 GMT

On arriving at Chihuahua at some godforsaken time in the morning, we found our way to the train station to get the morning Copper Canyon train up to Creel, high in the Sierra Madre. Except, there wasn't one, so instead we walked into town (probably a dodgy thing to do), got some fine, and much needed Huevos Rancheros breakfasts, and then got the bus instead up to the foothills through pine forests, until we hit Creel.

Creel is a pretty sleepy town seemingly consisting of the railtrack and one main road, dotted with tourist hotels. As this was off-season it was a bit tumble-weedish. Still, we didn't mind - it meant we could get a cosy room in the cheap and friendly Casa Margarita. We stayed a few days. The air here was fresh and had that slight bite to it that you get at altitude. The skies were bright electric blue, with small cirrus clouds. We hired bikes and rode down into the San Ignacio ejido - a Raramuri co-operative area, with miles of pine forest and rock outcrops, ranch lands and some really strange rock formations. In the 'valley of the mushrooms', boulders are perched on their own pedestals, carved out by winds over milennia, whilst at the 'valley of the monks', groups of 20m high totemic stone columns loom over you. The place had an other-worldliness about it.

Monoliths in the Valley of the Monks

As much as anything, it was just great to get out in the countryside and nature for a day - something we hadn't really been able to do since Chiapas. We cycled up to Lake Arareco, before returning to Creel - a really nice round-trip. The skies, rocks and pines leaving an indelible near-monochrome image in my mind.

The next day we boarded the work-horse train up to Divisadero, where we were able to get out for the best view of the incredible Copper Canyon - with vast canyon walls in yellows and reds dropping thousands of feet below. The train then started to descend, through endless pine forests, through tunnels and edging down the sides of huge canyon walls. This whole area is so remote - it did seem like the wild west. And in many respects it is - reading 'Bandit Roads' by Richard Grant after our trip, I realised we were in a small corridor of calm - outside in the Sierras was no-man's land, ruled by drug gangs and fugitives.

The train carriages had hellish Mexican piped music - until the air-con in our carriage failed, which luckily also hit the music on the head - hurray! If you wanted to get some air though, you could stand in the carriage doorways and look out over the edge of spectacular precipices - thank goodness for lax health and safety. Later, we staggered down to the nice restaurant car for a cool drink and a very friendly conductor who announced the highest bridge, the longest bridge, the longest tunnel etc..!

Our sturdy beast of burden pulls into Creel

We passed a huge dam, nearly empty, so that the landscape created by the receding water looked like a moonscape. Further down the pine forests made way to deciduous trees, in yellows and oranges - although there were also corridors of green where trees were able to still find water. We wandered back to our carriage to find that everyone had vacated it and moved to one next door with air-con. It was getting rather hot and stuffy by now, but we opted to stay - the heat was better than the music. Then, as the light began to fade, we chugged (very slowly) along the muggy coastal plain to the flea-pit which is Los Mochis, port and our gateway to Baha. We didn't waste any time hanging around and shared a taxi to the port, passing what looked like a traffic jam in the middle of no-where. It wasn't - instead it was the non-place to be in Los Mochis - everyone parked their cars up, pumped-up the stereo and started having a party at the side of the road. One car even had disco lights rigged up in the boot. These Sinaloans are crazy! Not feeling in the party mood, we carried on to the ferry port and booked a (somewhat expensive) bed in the new-looking ferry just before it embarked, and crashed in our rather nice little cabin whilst we pulled away from Sinaloa State and started our journey across a dead-still Sea of Cortes.

To see more photos of the Creel and the Copper Canyon click here

Our train winds its way down the canyons on the way to Los Mochis

Road journeys up the Central Spine

rachel_and_daniel — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:48:00 GMT

The next journey was up north three hours on the bus to Queretaro through an increasingly dry and desert landscape. Queretaro was once a centre for opal and silver mining, and it shows in the lovely painted mansions and town houses in the centre. The city has many winding streets and alleys, punctuated by shaded squares with tinkling fountains. The first evening Rachel and I went to a free show in the main Zocalo – a rather strange mixture of Aztec warriors dancing (read fat blokes with feathered headdresses jumping up and down), some rather alluring flamenco dancing (which Daniel probably appreciated more than Rachel) and a whole lot of Mariachi. The main singer strutted around singing his stuff, and then in between each song would stoop to kiss adoring teenagers and elderly women alike, accepting innumerable flowers.

We’d got a room in a cheap hotel for the night – which was fine, except that our room faced onto the main corridor from the entrance, with no glass in the window, so we heard everything ranging from the night-watchman rhythmically tapping a pipe for an hour, to members of staff having a conversation outside our room at 1.30 in the morning, to our next-door neighbour leaving, noisily at 3.00am! Next day we checked out and wandered next door to the much nicer, much quieter and much more pricey tourist hotel.

A faithful dog fountain in Queretaro

One reason for stopping off in Queretaro was to find some fire opals to buy and take home. Rachel and her mum had seen some lovely set stones in Playa del Carmen on the Yucatan, which had been sourced from mines here. They didn’t buy them as they were Playa prices – but maybe they should have, as in actual fact, numerous net searches and walks around town revealed only a few jewellers selling local stones, and none were quite as nice. Saying that, the one’s we managed to purchase were still beautiful – veins of red, yellow, greens and blues running through polished stones, reminding me somewhat of hatching eggs (dragon eggs?). It was fun rummaging through trays of semi-precious stones – and they were cheap – the most expensive was only £25.

After several fine meals and many good cups of coffee we said adieu to the silver town and caught the bus north again, up through the centre of Mexico to the upland, desolate town of Zacatecas. Our journey this time was rather more eventful, the bus departed half an hour late, then it was two hours up the highway to San Luis Potosi before branching off across an alien, hard country dotted with yucca trees and little else. Each town we passed seemed to have trucks full of balaclava-clad, assault-rifle touting troopers – a visible reminder of the drug war. On our way the driver announced every stop… except for Zacatecas, meaning that we eventually got off the bus an hour past the city in Fresnillo, and then had to get another bus back – yikes! Luckily, when we eventually arrived, the youth hostel had one room remaining which we snatched up and crashed, exhausted.

The superb view of Zacatecas from the teleferico

Zacatecas got rich in the 18th C from silver mining again – and the rich owners ploughed it into lovely stone town houses in the local red sandstone and a totally OTT baroque cathedral façade, carved with a confusion of saints, squirls and motifs, although the interior was actually quite understated. It’s a pretty town in the middle of the desert nestling between two knife-edged hills with Mexico’s only cable-car (made in Switzerland) linking the two. The ‘teleferico’ provides fantastic views of the old town. The peak of the Cerro de la Bufa has a small chapel and observatory perched on its cockscombe-like peak, along with some impressive statues to the heroes of the revolution – with Pancho Villa striking a dashing figure on his rearing horse. Apparently he took the city off the imperial forces, massacring the garrison in the process – not a particularly nice guy, even if he was an amazing general. As with nearly all the revolutionaries, he met a sticky end at the hands of his rivals.

Our last evening we had a meal in an italian restaurant, run by a very effusive guy from Cancun – the restaurant used to be his living room, and it was covered, floor to ceiling, in paintings, which he explained and interpreted with great pride. Next day we got the overnighter to Chihuahua, something like a 12 hour journey. This time it was uneventful though – we both even managed to sleep all right – and we weren’t missing much, just innumerable mile after mile of desert…

Pancho Villa still doing his stuff..

For more photos of Queretaro and Zacatecas, click here

Photos: Baha California

rachel_and_daniel — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:39:00 GMT

Photos: The Copper Canyon

rachel_and_daniel — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:08:00 GMT

Photos: Queretaro & Zacatecas

rachel_and_daniel — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:47:00 GMT

Mexico City Madness

rachel_and_daniel — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 01:37:00 GMT

Our journey to Mexico City took us up through scrub woodland and then through endless miles more of upland cactus scrub, grey, white and brown, interspersed by the odd river surrounded by a narrow belt of green. It once more brought home how alien this landscape was to us northern Europeans – towering spiny columns, small thorn-strewn bushes and what looked like giant dragon-trees, with twisted, gnarled branches. Goodness knows what the first explorers made of this strange, desolate country.

A desert tree on our way...

Further into our journey we travelled across a wide valley (although there was no river I could see), nearly entirely claimed by agriculture. Saying that, there didn’t seem to be any crops, and the wind seemed to be doing a good job of blowing the topsoil away – it rose in wicked dust-devils all across the valley floor. Up in the hills, poor subsistence farmers grazed sheep and goats on the nearly inedible vegetation – you could see where it had been totally cleared by the animals, the rudimentary soil destroyed, and the area quickly becoming desertified.

Skirting the big, dusty city of Puebla, we gained height again, now driving through pine woodland until the two great volcanoes, Ixtaccihuatl and Popacatepetal rose to our left, capped by snow and ice. Then it was the final stretch down into a vast valley which cradles Cuidad Mexico – it took us less time than I thought to get to the main bus station near the centre – it’s a big city, but not that big (I was expecting another Los Angeles megalopolis) – its just jam-cram full of people – 21 million of them at the last count. After a short taxi-ride we arrived at our apartment – run by a very nice ex-air steward and his wife in a 1940’s block just off the Zocalo.

The great Popocatepetl - try saying that quickly after a few beers..

The next day we explored the city centre. The Zocalo is huge, with probably the biggest flag I’ve ever seen flying in the centre – the Mexicans are big on big flags. The main cathedral is an over-domineering pile of drab, chunky granite, made to withstand the numerous earthquakes that have hit the city – various arches inside are at interesting angles as a result. I found the whole ‘earthquake baroque’ edifice really quite nasty, however, in surprising contrast to the beautiful cathedral in Merida. Obviously earthquake architecture in stone does not a beautiful building make.

The Zocalo and surrounding streets are littered with various men and women with hand-wound organs, of seemingly moderate antiquity. You can tell this because the noises they emit generally appear to be random tinkles and hoots, as opposed to anything resembling a tune. They wear brown uniforms, making me think they were collecting for a veterans association or some-such. No however, - apparently they’re just ‘traditional’ buskers – and you need a hotly sought-after licence to go out and grind away miscellaneous notes to the masses.

Rivera's gorgeous friezes of Mexican history

The national palace is a far more beautiful building than the cathedral, with courtyards filled with bubbling fountains and a quiet botanical garden with families of cats curled up beneath the agaves. Diego Rivera’s murals of the history of Mexico are fantastic – especially the friezes upstairs of Aztec life in rich, deep colours. We had fun getting in though – we politely refused the offer of an official guide, only to be told by the security guard on the gate that he needed to see 10 forms of identification to show that we weren’t anarchists set on bringing down the state (ok, maybe I exaggerate). However, once he saw that we weren’t relenting on the guide front, (or proffering any ‘tip’) he merely waved us through.

The Templo Major – the remains of the great temple of Tenochtitlan is also rather impressive. There’s not much left – it was comprehensively levelled by the Conquistadors, but what’s there is huge, and the friezes and carvings left in the remains hint at what a rich and ornate building it once was. The only reason it was found and excavated by the way, is that the area above it belonged to some Spanish lords who were executed for treason, their palace torn down, and the land salted (in true Spanish understatement) – so it was empty for years. On reflection, I rather think I’d prefer to see an extant Templo Major, rather than the fugly cathedral the Spanish put in its place. Eh well, that’s progress.

Fountain in the National Palace

Around the remains of the temple, young people dressed in elaborate costumes and headresses bounced around, chanting and burning aromatic leaves. Apparently, this is part of a re-emergence of nahuatl identity – and religion. It great that people are exploring their cultural roots after so much repression over the years. However, it did strike me that so much of the original culture had been burned by the Spanish, that this new religion probably has about as much to do with the Aztecs as modern paganism does with the Roman-era Druids in Britain.

The centre of the Mexico city seems like something out of a 1930’s American film – there’s loads of nice early 20thc architecture still standing (despite various said earthquakes), blackened by the massive air pollution from the huge amount of traffic. Its very easy to imagine the streets being filled with trams and carriages and people in Trilbys. As you go out and explore other neighbourhoods, there are really rather exclusive areas where we felt a bit oikish in our travel clothes. There are lots of nice parks too. One fun thing are the innumerable green and white VW Beetle taxis zooming around. We got one back from a restaurant one evening – only two doors and three seats, so Lucy sat on the floor in the front! Our friendly driver put the world to rights as he weaved in and out of the traffic at alarming speed, complaining about his useless government and corrupt politicians, and how he hoped the visit from President Obama was going to lead to something better.

Oh no! Its a barge-jam on the Xochimilco

In the following days we explored more of the suburbs. We visited the Xochimilco – a small area of surviving floating gardens and canals that used to surround Tenochtitlan and provide the old city with food. Although it was fun to be poled-around for half an hour, it was rather a disappointment – the floating islands now mostly had people’s houses on – no floating veggie-patches to be seen, and the canal was chocker with barges – some with floating Mariachi bands on them, waiting for a commission, others lashed together with big parties of Mexican families having a great picnic on the water. Fun if you haven’t been anywhere else with canals, but not really worth the horrendously expensive amount the now-fully-regulated barges charge the gringo visitors.

We made up for it though by visiting the lovely Dolores Almeda museum – housed in said deceased Dolores’ expansive gifted mansion, which contains a big collection of native cultural artefacts and paintings by Rivera and Frida Karlo. It also included a collection of rather alarming-looking bald Aztec dogs, which Frida Karlo bred.

Fantastic sawdust mural at the Dolores Almeda museum

We also took the metro and bus out to Teotihuacan – the great ruined city of the granddaddies of Meso-American culture. Yep, those Aztecs and Mayans were mere Johnny-come-latelys compared to these dudes. However, before I describe the wonderfulness of the ancients, its worth saying that we got the wrong bus from the metro. Not that it didn’t go to Teotihuacan, just that it took two hours of donkey-like speeds through housing estates, and far too many speed bumps with dodgy-suspension to get there.

Anyway, once we arrived our aches and pains were suitably numbed by the sheer scale and number of pyramids, temples and grand ceremonial roads. Oh yes, those Teotihuacanians knew how to build. Even if they weren’t quite as crazy as the Zapotecs. Both the Aztecs and Mayans copied them shamelessly, what with the pyramids, snakes, eagles and jaguars n’all (oh, and probably the bloodlust thang too).

The Teotihuacanians didn't need to keep up with the neighbours

The temple of Sun is simply massive, and it does bring up the question of how the hell they managed to build it. Over a large amount of time, with a large number of people, I think is the answer. Further up the ceremonial avenue there are uncovered friezes of brightly-painted jaguars, eagles and geometric patterns. Other than this and the artefacts they’ve dug up though, no one really knows who the Teotihuacanians were, where they came from or where they went.

Of course, besides being over-awed by the scale of the city, we were also worn down by the constant attention of knick-knack sellers. I tell you, if I hear another jaguar-roar whistle, I’m going to flip. If someone else tries to sell me another pseudo-jade death mask, I may well use it as an offensive weapon. Rachel got round the crowd of them at the base of the Temple of the Sun, by running through them at top speed shouting ‘NO GRACIAS’. Maybe she did flip.

Dan just can't take the jaguar growls any more and decides to end it all in true Teotihuacanian fashion

Of course, Jon and I being planning-minded people, we couldn’t leave Mexico City without going up the ‘Latin America tower’ – the tallest building in Mexico, built in the 70’s and providing a rather impressive view (lessened by the smog) of the centre. We watched an incredible red sunset (heightened by the smog!) over the volcanoes, whilst lines of innumerable car lights slowly oozed down highways in every direction. We capped the evening by having dinner at the tile-clad Café Tacuba, with a brilliant band, playing Mexican folk songs at full tilt.

On our last day, we visited the massive Chapultec Park – with its pea-green lake and winding paths before going to the really great National Anthropological Museum. However, our exploration of the wonders of Mexico’s civilisations was hampered a bit by a misunderstanding about where we were going to meet each other when we first arrived – leading to Lucy and I waiting around for an hour inside, with Jon and Rachel waiting outside…doh!

The great Aztec calendar wheel, National Anthropological Museum

After waving off Jon and Lucy at the airport, Rachel and I took a day off, before girding our loins (and our backpacks) once more and starting a bus-odyssey up through the centre of Mexico.

To see more photos of Mexico city and surrounds, click here.

Semana Santa in Oaxaca

rachel_and_daniel — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:24:00 GMT

We took the night bus to Oaxaca – an 11 hour journey down into the arid plains and up again into the mountains. This was our first taste of the massive scale of Mexico – it’s a big country! It was also our first taste of near ubiquitous cactus desert, which to European eyes is quite a bizarre and alien environment. The journey through the night was relatively uneventful, except that we were stopped ten times. Yes, that’s TEN times, by the police and army, who sometimes checked our bags and always ran up and down the coach to make a cursory check that none of the passengers had ‘drug mule’ or ‘indigenous insurgent’ tattooed on their foreheads. Subsequently, we didn’t get an awful lot of sleep.

Still, we were glad to arrive at Oaxaca, and crashed out at a hostel, before mooching around the centre. A brass band was played in the Zocalo, watched by hundreds of people, while others (including us) ate dinner in one of the numerous restaurants around the edge. There were various other musical events on around town too – including a lovely close-harmony guitar group near to the botanical gardens. The next day we met our friend Jon and my sister Lucy at the airport – they travelled over to spend two weeks with us. Lucy’s bag had gone walk-about (hmmm, there’s a trend here somewhere), but luckily it turned up the next day, without her having to go out and buy any clothes. We had hired an apartment on the outskirts of town for ten days – we were lucky to get it, as we’d booked late, and Semana Santa is the week where all of Mexico go off and visit family, so all the hotels were chocker.

I know, let's carve the top off a mountain and build a city miles away from any water! You have to hand it to the Zapotecs, they had style...

We spent the next few days exploring the city centre. The architecture with fine colonial buildings, many made from a lovely green stone was really enchanting. There’s also some great OTT catholic churches and altars (more gold leaf than you shake a stick at), and we enjoyed the culture of art and antiquities museums. All in all, it’s a pretty chilled place. Which is good, because its bloody hot – it took a while to get used to lowland life again! The food in Oaxaca is pretty good by Mexican standards – lots of different ‘moles’ – different sauces with various intensities of chilli heat. Also loads of people hawking fried grasshoppers. I’m sorry, I wasn’t game. Insect eating ain’t my forte (ever since my mum tried to feed me a house spider in my brussel sprouts when I was twelve…).

We had a couple of trips out. The first was organised by the hotel who owned our apartment, which took in the amazing Cypress tree at Santa Maria del Tule, which is immense (the first tree I’ve ever seen with hundreds of small birds nesting in it), and extremely old (its at least 2000 years…). It made me wander what primeval forests might have looked like before we got around to chopping most of them down. We stopped off at a carpet-maker in Teotitlan del Valle where we were shown how they make dyes from natural materials that they find in the desert, before spinning the wool and weaving it into geometric-design carpets. Very lovely, but I’d already bought one in Merida, so I resisted the urge. Our trip ended in Mitla, which was a temple site of the Zapotecans – fantastic block buildings covered in geometric designs. The aesthetic seemed very futuristic, even if they are over 500 years old. On the return journey we stopped at a Mezcal distillery – the agave-cactus juice drink of which tequila is a variant. If I’m ever stuck in a desert with nothing but agaves, at least I’ll know how to die having a good time. However, even then, I’ll stick to not licking ground up cactus worms off my wrist before taking a shot. That’s just nasty.

Carpet-weaving in Teotitlan del Valle

Our second trip was to take a bus out to Monte Alban. Another Zapotec site, this one is a temple city on top of a mountain. Basically, they levelled the top, built a shed-load of massive temples, and then had to carry all their water from the valley some 2 miles away. These Zapotecans are crazy! The site really is awe-inspiring, the atmosphere doubled by the incessant atonal chant-like droning of thousands of cicadas. The whole experience was really quite surreal.

Back in Oacaxa, we spent time in the various markets, buying cinnamon sticks (cheap as chips - to take home and make tea with), and grass-woven baskets, although I resisted getting one of their fantastic pinatas. We also sampled (and then bought) some ‘Majordomo’ drinking chocolate, which Oacaxa is famed for (which I’m drinking while writing this. Yum).

Pinatas in one of Oaxacas markets

Another highlight (there were a lot) were the ethnobotanical gardens, set in the grounds of an ex monastery/barracks, which has a collection of Oaxacan food plants, as well as a brilliantly set-out collection of the numerous cacti and arid trees you find in this diverse region. We were guided round by a very knowledgeable ex-pat American lady. We combined this with a trip around the Oaxacan cultural museum – in the monastery itself, which has massive collections of Zapotec artefacts, set in lovely old brick rooms, often with painted doors and ceilings.

Oaxaca was a great location to experience Semana Santa – Holy Week. As well as numerous smaller parades to various shrines around the city through the week, there’s the main procession on Good Friday, which half of Mexico comes out to see, it seems. ‘Fraternities’ of masked and robed penitents carry very heavy platforms with statues of Christ, the Virgin Mary and various saints around the city streets. There are also other masked penitents who carry heavy wooden crosses – the mask is so that people don’t know who you are – its supposed to be an act for God after all. There’s lots of incense censors, drums, flutes and massive wooden clackers – equivalent to what you’d have at a football game, but five times the size. The costumes come straight out of classical medieval Spain, although they were unfortunately highjacked by the Klu Klux Klan, which makes them seem rather sinister.

Penitents carry their crosses, Semana Santa.

All in all, we had a really good ten days – a great introduction to ‘Mexico-proper’. Next up was another long journey up to the centre of it all, Mexico City.

More photos of :Oaxaca : the Ethnobotanical gardens and museum of culture : the surrounding valleys

Gallery: Mexico - Mexico City

rachel_and_daniel — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 02:52:00 GMT

Gallery: Mexico, Oacaxa - Surrounding Valleys

rachel_and_daniel — Sun, 4 Oct 2009 02:31:00 GMT

Gallery: Mexico, Oaxaca - Botanical Gardens and Museum of Culture

rachel_and_daniel — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 04:03:00 GMT

Gallery: Mexico, Oaxaca

rachel_and_daniel — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:15:00 GMT

San Cristobal - Anyone up for insurrection?

rachel_and_daniel — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:04:00 GMT

After the long drives around rural Chiapas, we were glad to get back to San Cristobal and spend a week or so just bumming around. There are worse places to bum, and it seemed that quite a few fellow europeans had chosen the same place to hang out in. Oddly, there weren’t so many Americans and Canadians here – maybe they’ve been put off by the Zapatista rebellion…

We stayed cheap and cheerful in the Youth Hostel, cooking our own meals from veggies bought at street stalls. San Cristobal, although it has a good share of expats and tourists, retains its charm and still operates as a city doing its thing – it hasn’t been knocked around by ill-advised 20th C re-development, so there are still avenues and streets of old colonial town houses, with cobbled surfaces and brightly-coloured facades. There’s lots of graffiti too – even some banksyesque stuff – doubt the man himself, but some fun imitations.

The streets are paved with gold in San Cristobal...

Rachel and I spent a lot of our time just mooching around the streets, checking out interesting shops and the vibrant markets, investigating the luridly-coloured churches and eating a host of different food in the cosmopolitan restaurants. There were plenty of vegie options, which meant Rachel was a happy bunny. There was even some decent music – at the Casa del Pan we ate lovely locally-sourced food, whilst listening to a great local guitarist and singer. This cultural centre also hosts a language school and cinema!

We went to a viewing of a documentary about the Zapatista rebellion, which was a bit of an eye-opener. It turns out that the Mexicans are rather similar to their more southerly neighbours that they try to disassociate themselves from. When the peasants start suggesting that it might be a bit unfair that a very small minority own all the land and pay them next to nothing, and the state gives them no education or services, it turns out the Mexicans used the usual fall back response of ‘send in the death squads’… Yeah. Nice one.

Column detail, Santa Domingo church

We also went to our first bit of ‘cultcha’ since Granada, by going to see a show on Pakal, the greatest lord of Palenque. The costumes were great, although the story interpretation, attempting to take on the myths and world view of the ancient mayans, made it a little bizarre – still, a fun spectacle.

The Na Bolom museum/cultural centre, had a great exhibition on the Lacandon people, furnished with loads of great black and white photographs from the Danish owners of the property, seemingly cast in the eccentric aristocrat role – they explored the Lacandon rainforest, surveyed Mayan ruins and also did an awful lot to try and retain the culture and independence of the native people. Outside, a separate building had a really good exhibition showing fashions in Mayan ladies-wear over the last forty years. It seems that the women from each town/village decide on what patterns and motifs they are going to make that year, and then all make the same blouses, with their own variations. The quality of the stitching is fantastic and the colours are very lovely. The museum also did a really good tea!

We also did the usual tourist thing of visiting the nearby mayan towns of Chamula and Zinacantan. The people are from different tribes and speak a totally different language (Tzotzil and Tzeltal respectively!), even though the towns are in neighbouring valleys, which I imagine meant trading was interesting. Chamula is famous for its markets and the wonderful 16th C church. Well, it was a church when it was built, but its been a mayan temple ever since. The interior is ablaze with thousands of candles on the floor, which is scattered with resin-scented pine branches. On the walls, boxes contain statues of ill-looking catholic saints, which have come to represent different mayan entities, which different families pray to.

The atonal chanting of praying couples, together with the scent of candle smoke and pine and the myriad of tiny flames really is quite moving. It did feel a bit intrusive with groups of tourists wandering around, but it seemed everyone was trying their best to be respectful. We then moved on to visit a traditional weaver family in Zincantan, where the ladies roam around in fantastic shawls decorated with blue and purple flowers. We had black corn tortillas (cooked on a griddle over an open fire) with white beans, ground pumpkin seeds, cheese and salsa – really delicious.

Pine crosses at Chamula market - no, not christian

Our last trip out of San Cristobal was to the Canon de Sumidero – a gigantic gorge, which would be even deeper but for the dam at the end of it. Our trip down to the canyon gave us our first glimpse of the drylands of Mexico, as we drove down the side of the (once) tree-covered mountains, looking out over an arid plain. The temperature difference between the two was staggering. We piled into a motor boat and cruised up the river to the gorge entrance – a titanic cleft in towering cactus-covered rock, with vultures wheeling overhead. I’ve never been up a river with such huge cliffs on either side – the midday sun didn’t hit the bottom.

We passed flocks of vultures hopping around the river-edge, eating salt deposits. Inaccessible woodlands on rock plateaux towered above us. There were even weird formations of calcareous deposits made by dry waterfalls. Eventually, the river widened out into a huge hydro-electric dam, with a vast wall 260m high. The boat disturbed flocks of cormorants and duck that wheeled around us as we powered back to the canyon. A great trip. Later we had a drink in Chiapa del Corzo with its lovely 16th C zocalo centrepiece, in the shape of the spanish crown, before heading back to the welcome cool of the mountains. A fine end to our long journey through Mayan lands. Next up, a rendevous in the lands of the Zapatecs...

The towering canyon entrance...

To see more pictures of San Cristobal, the mayan towns and
Canon Sumidero, click here

Northern Chiapas - Mucho Mas Mayan Metropolises

rachel_and_daniel — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:15:00 GMT

We booked a micro bus to take us out of Guatemala. We suffered a rather large wait for a connecting bus at Quattro Caminos, which caused a rather large Italian fellow traveller to go into an angry tirade with the new bus driver in good Italian fashion. Our new bus then took us up north through wide valleys in the highlands, up to Huehuetenango, and over to Semilla and the border with Mexico. The border crossing was surprisingly easy – no bribing officials or extortionate fees like we’d been warned about. The only glitch was that we had to change bus again, but angry Italian had now decided he was better off using a different transport means and had buggered off somewhere. So, after initially not noticing his absence, we turned round and drove around the border looking for him, until finally deciding he was probably better off somewhere else anyway, and heading out.

Our original plan had been to get off in Comitan, but we were disuaded, partly because Comitan turned out to look like a fairly unpromising industrial city, and partly because our bags were at the bottom of the heap on top of the van and it wasn’t worth the bother…. Therefore we carried on to San Cristobal de las Casas. San Cristobal is a pretty colonial town, surrounded by green wooded hills. Its slowly becoming gentrified, but its in no way as expensive or gringofied as Antigua. One interesting thing was the lack of Americans – maybe they’ve been put off by the the whole Zapatista thing, but there were far more European visitors here.

Another cheery Mayan motif, Palenque

We decided to come back to San Cristobal and stay a while (story to come), but first, took a bus up to the north of the region and Palenque. Our journey took us through wide, pine-covered valleys. It reminded me a strange way of Europe – Germany or Scotland perhaps - it was just nice to find ourselves in a familiar landscape. Soon, however, we headed down into the heat of the lowlands. Palenque is a hot, dusty town with little going for it. In our five nights there we didn’t find a decent meal - stale tortilla chips, rubbery steaks, bitter coffee. However, the Mayan ruins are what people come here for, not the cuisine.

The Palace, Palenque

The Palenque ruins are in a lovely site – nestled into the edge of the tropical forest, with temples piercing through the canopy – a little like Tikal. The palace with its observatory tower and murals was probably the most impressive building – different from any of the other sites we’d been too. However, it was the altar murals and stellae which really did it – the artistry in the lords and gods, along with the glyphs was fantastic, and most were really well preserved. The tomb of the great lord Pakal was just the icing on the cake. We also saw a very strange orb spider with a spikey body. Cudos to anyone who can ID him for us….

Bizarre alien orb spider, Palenque

Following on in the Mayan theme, the next day we travelled down into the badlands of the border road and the Lacandon forest to visit the nearby sites of Yaxchilan and Bonampak. 15-20 years ago both these sites were only accessible by plane, but following the rebellion, there’s now a good paved road all around the triangle of the border with Guatemala. Its also pretty safe – there are military checkpoints at regular intervals – not that it was ever especially dodgy, unless you were a Mexican soldier. A rather strange American fellow traveller insisted on asking random nationals at our lunch stop whether they were Zapatistas. This was despite the fact that to admit as much probably isn’t very good for your health in these parts….

Yaxchilan is still only accessible by long lancha down the strong, swirling Rio Usumacinta, right on the border between the two countries. It’s a fun journey – the river is obviously much fuller in the wet season, as islands and platforms of hard clay border and bisect the river, which our lancha guy had to swerve around in the strong current. Yaxchilan is enveloped in forest. The main plaza is really the only clear area and past the temples thick vegetation grows unhindered. The site is renowned for its carved and painted door lintels – many of which are still in place, although a lot have been carted off to Mexico City and the British Museum (ooh! that’s us Brits again!) – which is fine from a preservation point of view, but I can’t help but think that they lose much of their power when taken out of the context of this arcane city in the jungle.

Long lanchas on the Rio Usumacinta

Such was my anticipation, and the limited time period we had until our lancha left, that I sped off up the hill to make sure I saw the temple groups away from the plaza. Rachel is often happy to mooch around as I hive off to explore that temple on the horizon. In this case, however, she was actually trying to follow me, and eventually caught up with me half an hour later, not best pleased after chugging uphill around various forest temple groups, trying to avoid rampaging howler monkey troupes. In the top temple complex we were bemused by a Spanish group, consisting mostly of middle-aged women in white loose clothing, hugging trees and appearing to be inciting the sun god. What I thought we needed at this point was an ancient Mayan priest to pop out, tear out their finger nails, carve out their hearts and burn them in front of them. Don’t look at me like that. It’s what Chak would have wanted!

Musicians, Bonampac murals

Bonampak is a small site, with just a very impressively large stellae and a massive set of stairs which lead up to a series of small temples containing the famous painted frescoes of a dedication ceremony, battle and parade. To be honest, much of them have faded so badly as to be unrecognisable, and we only really knew what was going on because we’d seen a recreation at the Mayan museum in Chetumal – still it’s a pretty marvelous place. A large tree in the plaza contained a dozen or so hanging oropendula nests (if I haven’t talked about these guys before, they’re large brown birds with a yellow tail and a gorgeous bubbling song). Rachel spent a good twenty minutes trying to take a picture of a bird entering one of the nests – harder than you might think, as by the time you click the shutter, the bird’s either gone in, gone out, or has hidden itself behind the nest. Thirty shots later we gave up – thank goodness for the wonders of digital photography (or more accurately the delete function :) ).

At a nearby border village, with a name like ‘New Union’ or some-such (positive thinking on the Mexican government’s behalf methinks), our American friend pays some local women and kids to pose for a photo. He thinks they must be Lacandon Indians – despite the fact they are dressed like, and look like ladino immigrants – probably brought in to try and stabilise the area. The nearest we got to the Lacandons were the women and rangers at the Bonampak reserve, the men with their give-away long hair and moustaches. Eh well.

For more photos of Palenque click here

For more photos of Yaxchilan and Bonampac, click here

Xela and Volunteering with the Mayan Stove Project

rachel_and_daniel — Sat, 4 Apr 2009 04:40:00 GMT

After surviving our chicken bus challenges (I now see why most tourists travel by private microbus in Guatemala – its still pretty manic, but its this side of hair-raising) we arrived in Quetzaltenango, or Xela (pronounced ´Shela´) in Quiché Mayan. This is Guatemala´s second biggest city, more a large town. Its up in the highlands, so still chilly at night, but nice and warm during the day. We had some time to kill, so we spent a good few days just bumming around the town. Although Xela doesn´t have much in the way of nice architecture (most of it got flattened in various earthquakes), its a lively, bustling university town, with lots of nice cafés and restaurants and a great, diverse market.

We spent a day looking for more fabric like we´d bought in Chichicas´, but found that none of the numerous fabric shops had the same design or colour – it appears the fabrics are hand-made on a small loom, and they don´t make enough to export to other areas of the country. Besides, other areas have their own specific traditional designs. Eh well, we´ll have to hope that the half bolt we have will be enough to cover our sofa. We also investigated sending back the rather large bag of Guatemalan textiles that we´d accumulated over the last few weeks – all eight kilos of it! Turned out that it was going to cost us 240 quid by DHL and 120 quid by standard post! We decided not to send it, but to lug it around some more and try our luck in Mexico....

Yum! Little mangoes at the mercado

We also used the time to start applying for jobs back home. Slightly depressing, but it has to be done, as at some point we have to start earning money again! Still, it´s quite surreal that you can now apply for a job half way around the world. Interviews might be interesting, but we´ll just have to see how telephone lines are in Mexico!

Our trusty Olympus Miu digital camera also took the opportunity in Xela to die on us. Well, let´s say it may be terminally ill anyway, as the LCD screen has stopped working, which is kinda important without a separate viewfinder. Despite Rachel clutching her poor baby camera to her chest and talking softly to it, there was nothing for it but to scour the local electronics stores for a new one. Luckily, there was a good line in mainly old models, although there were rather alarming discrepancies in pricing between shops (eg: more than a hundred quid for the same camera). We plumped for a two-year old Canon – its the size of a small brick, but it does the job. We´ll see whether Miu can be fixed when we get home, in which case we´ll sell the Canon.

Café Baviara, our hangout in Xela

Rachel wanted to do some volunteering with a local community while we were here, and she found out about a stove project that could take volunteers for a day at a time. This project builds wood-efficient stoves for poor mayan families who can´t afford the capital to build their own. These stoves help by reducing the amount of wood required to make meals – so reducing the rate of deforestation on the hills, whilst also reducing the back-breaking task of collecting wood. Just as importantly, the stoves burn efficiently, with a built-in chimney. This stops the women and children of the house having to breath in loads of woodsmoke, which in the long-run leads to lots of respiratory problems and diseases. It was a subject I remember doing an essay on back in my undergrad days in the mid ´90´s.

We turned up at the language school which runs various social projects in the mountain villages surrounding Xela. We were joined by a couple from Canada who´d been volunteering on the project since February. Along with a couple more volunteers we headed off for the chicken bus up to Los Pinos, a Quiché mayan village far up in the mountains, beyond San Francisco del Alto. The latter was having its weekly market, so our bus was jammed full of shoppers – we stood, or sat on the edge of a seat as more and more people were squeezed on. It reminded me a bit of the record-breaking attempts to see how many people you can stick in a mini, or a telephone booth.

Eventually we got off at an un-assuming sign by the side of the road. Sure enough, the area is dominated by pine forest. The village was a large, low density sprawl over the hilside. Each household had a milpa around the house to grow corn and vegetables. Two of us picked up a load of cooking pots that a lady had carried off the bus and staggered down the hill with them to our rendevous point with the local project co-ordinator. Once we got there, she thanked us, hoisted all of them onto our head, and bounded off, leaving us feeling rather inadequate.

The project co-ordinator, one of the village elders, took us up to the family who we´d be building a stove for. After saying hello to the family - a mum & dad slightly younger than us, and their five lovely young kids (eldest about seven), we were shown into the plank and corrugated iron hut that was going to serve as their kitchen. Volunteers at the project had already built the breeze-block and brick base the previous week, so we now set about lining the inside of the stove body with sand before putting in a brick oven-bed. We then sealed the joints with a mud-mix before mixing some concrete and tiling the outer-edge of the stove. The hob-plate was then placed on top (much like that which we used at MMRF in Belize), sealed with more mud mix, and then the chimney box and chimney concreted in place. After about two hours of work it was completed – and very nice it looked too.

photo to come!

Rachel had tried to talk to the younger kids, but they didn´t speak spanish – they only learn this when they go to school. After we´d cleaned up, the lady of the house gave us a nice meal of freshly made tortillas (made on a hot plate over an outside fire), beans, eggs, tamales and fresh lemonade. They weren´t going to be able to use their new oven for a month to allow the mud sealant to dry properly – very frustrating I´m sure!

After, we went up to another house where our other team was doing the finishing touches to another stove – this house was bigger, but still very basic. Neither of the houses had electricity, and water was from a nearby stand-pipe with an intermittent, not especially clean supply. All the rooms had dirt floors, and the families really didn´t have much in the way of furniture, let alone luxury items – the kids were filthy (there´s no-where really to get washed properly), and were dressed in ragged clothes. While we were waiting, Rachel started to feed a half-eaten bread roll to one of the local, hungry-looking dogs. The project co-ordinator told us that the kids at the house we´d built the stove for would probably be glad of it instead, which really took us aback.

We went back via our first family and gave a bag of snacks and biscuits that we´d brought with us to the kids. It brought a lump to the throat to see how happy the kids were to recieve the gift.

We were so glad that we´d volunteered for the day. Although we didn´t achieve much in the small time we put aside, it really did bring home to us what privileged lives we lead, and the small mountain of problems that people in these remote areas face. Getting basic infrastructure will really help them – there´s a project to get a decent water supply just starting up, and preventative projects like the stoves will make a significant difference in the long term.

But we couldn`t really see a way out for the kids. There really isn´t any work in the area except for subsistence farming – the men have to go away and work as itinerant farm labourers if they´re going to get any money. The school is very basic, with poor teaching, and most of the kids only attend for two or three years – after this their parents can´t afford the uniforms and books required, and besides, they need the kids to help out at home or in the fields.

Its this lack of opportunity that really gets to you in the end. There are always going to be poor people in the world, but it is unjust that these kids are not going to have any opportunity to make their lives better, and that they´ll most likely follow on in their parent´s footsteps in grinding poverty. Rachel and I will be looking to support the project more when we get home.

Yes, it was hot, and steamy.

The only other outing we took from Xela was to visit the hot springs at Fuentas Georginas, in the neighbouring hills. Our bus wound up a narrow hill road through thick cloud. We passed large fields of vegetables – this area grows most of the greens for the surrounding countries, until we arrived at the busy springs. We went on a weekend so there were lots of locals having a day out. The springs are pooled – the top one is really hot, and as the water drains into the lower pools it gradually gets cooler. The air, of course, is incredibly humid, and the sides of the hill above the springs are covered in lush ferns and tree-ferns looming out of the warm mists.

The next day we said goodbye to Guatemala and took a bus up the mountains, past Huehuetenango (yes, they have fantastic names here), and over to the Mexican border.

The hot pools lit up as evening draws in...

To see more photos of Xela, the stove project and Fuentas Georginas, click here.

Chicken Bus Challenge

rachel_and_daniel — Fri, 3 Apr 2009 10:09:00 GMT

Missing the direct bus from Chichicastenango to Quetzaltenango (Xela), in the west of the country, we instead got a chicken bus to the junction with the InterAmericana at Los Encuentros.

We were ushered onto a chicken bus by the youthful, slightly manic conductor. ´Oia, Oia!´, he cried, and we were off, tearing at break neck speed down the narrow cobbled streets, while Rachel and I bumped down the aisle with our packs, before landing, like upturned beetles, in an untidy mess of legs and flailing arms on an empty seat at the back. Our driver - a middle-aged man, baseball cap firmly wedged on his head, hunched over the steering wheel as he swerved in between parked vehicles around the circumference of the town until we zoomed out, horn blaring, onto the road to Los Encuentros.

As we emerged from town a rival bus joined us going the same way. Its driver was a paunchy man with an impressive moustachio, shirt top open to reveal copious chest hair. When I looked back at him through the rear window, he stared at me with ominous intent. The fate of fares to Guatemala City hung in the balance. The race was on. (Cue adrenalin-inciting music).

Our driver floored it. Smoke and fumes poured up around the conductor in the front. Crunch! Third gear. Crunch! Fourth gear. Just outside town the road dives steeply into miles of hairpin bends down the mountain. Our driver hunched some more and sent us careering round the hairy bends, using racing lines. The bus banked alarmingly. On some bends I could even feel the back starting to come out. I looked behind. Rival bus was still near our bumper.

Out of the hairpins and into steep mountain curves. Our driver started to pull the stops out, overtaking vans and cars in the way with seemingly no regard to the possibilities of stuff coming round corners. THe rival bus did the same. We weren´t shaking him. A slow van came into view, but a steep corner around the mountainside was just ahead. Our driver hesitated momentarily, then with an ´Oia, Oia, Oia!´ from our mad conductor he swerved round it and took the bend on the wrong side of the carriageway, the driver yanking his horn furiously as he did so. Not sure what stuff coming the other way was supposed to do of course. Launch themselves into the ravine I guess.

Around the corner safely, and a straight bit of road. Our driver floored the accelerator again. A 4X4 was overtaking a lorry coming the other way. Surely our driver must slow to allow him to get back in. Silly me. Guatemalan Chicken buses don´t slow down for anything. You get in the way, you eat chicken bus. The 4x4 swerved in front of the lorry seconds before we hurtled past. Looking back, rival bus had done the same crazy maneuvers and was still with us. We came to a village with parked cars. Our driver hardly slowed down, but weaved in and out of the chicane. ´Oia Oia!´ shrieked our clearly insane conductor. We hung on for grim death in the back. The Mayan ladies in front of us chatted in a relaxed manner as we looked at each other in a wide-eyed I-think-we-might-die way. Obviously this was not an abnormal piece of driving.

We hurtled past a sign for ´topes´ (the copious speedbumps everywhere in Guatemalan villages). He must slow down! Yes! He slammed on the brakes metres away from the first bump and we jolted over it. Rival bus, seeing his chance, came alongside and took the bump at the same time. For a moment rival driver and I eyed each other, but, then he shot back as our driver crunched rapidly through the gears again. A hopeful Mayan gent with a large sack indicated he wanted to get off. Of course, we couldn´t stop, as that would allow moustachio to burn us off. So, as we lurched to slow for a tope, the man tossed his parcel off and then jumped off the bus, with a helpful push from our crazy-eye conductor.

At this point a funny thing occurred to me. I hadn´t seen any Guatemalan suicide dogs in the villages we´d been through. But then it struck me. THEY¨RE ALL DEAD ALREADY.

The final village before Los Encuentros. The road guys here had gone one step better than topes – negative topes – eg: gouged holes in the tarmac. Our driver saw his chance and accelerated toward the first one. Now, any normal car would lose its undercarriage if it tried to go over the holes fast, but our trusty chicken bus was up to the task, and instead, the passengers were just catapulted into the air, bums clear off seats, hands sliding over the rail, threatening to deposit you in the lap of the nice Mayan girl in front.

That was it, Moustachio didn´t fancy totally wrecking his suspension, and took the negative topes at a sensible speed. We´d won! We charged into Los Encuentros, rounding the corner on near two wheels. The mad max conductor grabbed my bag and with Rachel and I stumbling behind with backpacks and bags of Guatemalan textiles, we launched ourselves off the bus.

We stood on the pavement, and looked at each other in a slightly dazed way, before being shoed onto the next bus by another keen conductor. We´d survived the Chicken Bus Challenge. Well, this one, anyway.

Lago Atitlan - check out the vibes, man.

rachel_and_daniel — Fri, 3 Apr 2009 08:01:00 GMT

After surviving Pacaya, we booked a tourist microvan to Panajachel on the shores of Lago Atitlan. A thankfully uneventful journey, although I did marvel at the way that the Guatamalans appeared to be in the process of blasting away a good proportion of the highlands in order to improve the road. And in true Central American style, they were doing it along its full length, all at the same time.

‘Pana’ is a bit of a non-descript tourist town, crowded with Mayan people selling textiles and pots, and with an horrendous green soviet-era tower block next to the lake. Still, the lake is fantastic – a massive calm body of water surrounded by towering, green volcanoes. Just before dusk a strong wind blew up, sending waves dancing across the surface, whilst sun rays speared the clouds. We stayed a night and next morning got one of the regular water taxis along the lake to San Marcos, where we hoped to stay and chill out for a while.

The view from our room at La Paz
First impressions of San Marcos were of a very sleepy village with informal walkways alongside big gardens full of palms and ginger, nestling guest-houses and restaurants. We managed to get a room in the lovely La Paz hostel – in a timber-framed, palm thatched cottage with an idyllic view out of the window. The hostel provides good, cheap veggie meals and you can arrange massage sessions to get out those kinks in your shoulders from backpack-carrying. Both of us immediately felt the need to do absolutely nothing for a few days.

In process of chillin’, we happened across a little Mayan man carrying an enormous bag of blankets via a strap around his forehead. We told him we weren’t really interested in a blanket, but he charmingly hooked us by offering to do a trade for any spare medicines we had. Therefore, in the peaceful shade of our cottage we got out our medipack and gave away half its contents, oh, together with two white T-shirts…. . I was happy for the guy to have them, but that wasn’t really what he was after – he laid out his rather nice hand-woven wares and got us to choose what we liked – then offered us an astonishing price of Q2500 (£250!):- it was one-of-a-kind, and alpaca wool, with a herd brought from Ecuador. He was such a nice man. And we were so loath not to believe him. We got him down to Q700. I didn’t want to go above Q400, but somehow I did…. damn him, and his charmingly disarming Mayan ways! So, we acquired the world’s most expensive woollen blanket. Although I have to say that it is very nice, and is hand-made, and will last us a lifetime. Oh, and it also came in handy as the nights there were really cold. We just try and forget that guys in Xela later tried to sell us handmade blankets for Q200…

Lago Atitlan - note floating stones...

Having been purged of our Quetzals, we then needed to find a cash-machine in order to pay our hotel bill. There isn’t one in San Marcos, so we got the water taxi over to San Pedro, the supposed party town of the lake – which is mostly nasty concrete buildings, English/Australian pubs and a thriving drugs and gringo-pulling scene. Both cash machines were defunct, so we got another taxi over to Pana’, found a working machine, and then got yet another another taxi back to San Marcos. Blimey. Mental note – in future do not spend available cash on overpriced blankets from seemingly kind-hearted salesmen.

We spent my birthday chilling out, although we did hire a double kayak in the afternoon and managed to negotiate it a few clicks down the coast without capsizing, smacking each other on the head or having an argument about who was steering – amazing! The beach we stopped on was covered in white pumice stone – which floats, I found out… An evening meal in the next-door restaurant newly bought by a gregarious guy from London finished off a good day.

Bougainvillea at La Paz

Rachel spent a couple of evenings meditating at the Pyramid centre next door the other way. The meditation was fine, but the new-age ‘pick and mix’ past-life regression and flaky ‘loving messages for the world’ first bemused, and then enraged Rachel, much to my amusement. We got the impression it was the reserve of middle-class people wanting to ‘find themselves’ in the ‘wilderness’, with lots of money, self-invented problems and needing to feel good about themselves without actually doing anything positive. We especially liked the couples on the thirty-day fast and introspective, gorging themselves on stone-baked pizzas and Chilean Chardonnay at the restaurant next door.

We had a great walk along the coastline west to Jaibalito – along a steep path cut into the hillside. We stopped to have a drink at a fantastic hotel (Casa Lomas Tzuzuna) perched on the steep slope, with gorgeous terrace views out across the whole lake. As we sipped our lemonade, a volcano erupted, sending a large spume of dust up into the atmosphere. Not bad. We got the water taxi back the next day to have lunch and take some photos. If anyone wants a different place for a honeymoon, this is it.

Quiche skirts

We finally left Lago Atitlan on a weavy microbus up to Chichicastenango in the highlands – home to the largest indigenous market in Guatemala. The market really is something – streets packed with stalls selling a huge variety of brightly collared textiles and embroidery, and incredibly busy, mostly with Quiche women with there black skirts, bordered with a bright band of colour and incredibly bright tops. As we wandered, we quickly had to get used to ignoring every other stall owner who wanted us to stop and barter with him or her. We had a good look around and selected the stalls we wanted to buy from. After some rather more successful wheeler-dealing than in Atitlan, we came away with a nice selection of bedspreads, table embroidery and even a bolt of hand-made cloth to re-upholster our couch with. Now we just had to work out how to get it back home…

A great experience, including the copal offerings on the temple steps, the temple confradia in hat and stockings offering stall holders a blessing (which involved kissing a cross in return for a donation), and the pine-strewn courtyard café where we had a break from the hubbub. We stayed the night in an un-obvious guesthouse with a roaring open-fire in our room, in preparation for the haul to Xela the next day.

Gallery: Mexico - Chiapas, San Cristobal, Chamula and Cañon Sumidero

rachel_and_daniel — Fri, 3 Apr 2009 07:33:00 GMT