22 November - The Yucatan

Howdy,

We´re now in Cancun, and are counting down to our flight over to Mexico City on 30 Nov... then from Mexico to LA on the 06 Dec, then HOME!!! (That´s on the 10th, arriving on the 12th Dec).

Things we´ve done in the Yucatan Peninsula...

Tulum

Diving/Snorkelling in the Cenotes. For those of you who don´t know, ¨snotties¨ as we´ve taken to calling them, are waterfilled caves or sinkholes in the limestone of the Yucatan. The diving is cavern diving so there is natural light filtering into the water giving it a real (as Rob called it) an ¨Alice in Wonderland¨ feel to them. Swimming through stalagmites and stalagtites...

Lazing on the beach...Tulums beach has nice white sand but resorts line the beachfront. The ruins overlooked the sea and may have been nice if they weren´t sooooo covered with tourists.

Chichen Itza
Famous ruins but oh... the crowds!! We also stumbled on a Mexican Independence day parade (20 Nov), with all the kids in fancy dress of historical significance.

Celestun

Played a game of ¨Spot the Flamingo¨and found a few thousand! The waters run almost red with the krill which the flamingos feed on, giving them their pink colour. Phil went a bit mental with the telephoto lens, trying to capture flamingos with their heads above water.

Uxmal

Enjoyed some rather unique ruins. The pyramid in the background is rounded and a lot of people think its just been reconstructed wrongly. Quadrangles and palaces were impressive with their detailed facades.

16 Nov - Barmy (and Balmy) Belize

We crossed the border to find ourselves back in a mainly english speaking world...but no, wait... was that chinese we just heard? Or some German from the Memonites?(A religious group-more later) Or a bit of creole, which is basically warped english.

Orange Walk (weird name hey!)

We stayed here for a few days so that we could take a boat tour down the river and have a look at the Mayan ruins at Lamanai. We`re a bit ruined out, but our guide was quite good and there was a quite impressive stone relief of a ruler. There was more... but things have been re-buried for preservation.

The first impression of the town was a local woman throwing up in the middle of the central park, followed by a hell of a lot of chinese restaurants, this was quickly proceeded by the mennonites... a bible based community who are a more integrated form of Amish... so they´re big in Pennsylvania, USA, Bolivia and in a town called Shipyard, a boat ride away from Orange Walk in an isolated village...check the photo for the clothing!

Caye Caulker
Expensive is a good summarizing word for Caye Caulker, so is hot. This place grows on you, we had a good dive guide one day who showed us all the local species and taught us some Creole as well... e.g. Tek Kyer (take care), Anda da wata (under the water)... you get the picture, try saying it with a Jamaican accent, and you can speak Creole! This day we also went snorkelling the famed SharkRay Alley... yes, there were both Sharks and Rays!

On Day 2 here, Phil went diving the famed Blue Hole, a 125m deep, 318m wide perfectly circular hole in the reef a couple of hours out of the Caye. Karen, for fear of seasickness, chose instead to go snorkelling more locally, and was treated to a guided tour inclusive of fighting moray eels!

Crossed the border back to Old Me´ico...
We´re now back in Mexico, Tulum and in the midst of loads of gringos... off to go cavern diving tomorrow in the Cenotes (caves in the area formed mysteriously).... let you know more soon!

10th Nov - On the Mayan Road Again

We caught an overnight bus to San Cristobal de las Casas, which is a nice colonial town in the highlands of Mexico. We´ve seen heaps of colonial towns by now though, so we were more impressed by the nearby Mayan village of San Juan Chamula... With its pagan church with pineneedles spread across the floor, people lighting candles, chanting and waving eggs around in the hope of curing sickness. We met kids who couldn`t speak a word of Spanish, only the local mayan dialect of Tzotzil.... and yet we met a Mayan guy who knew the Cazador de Cocodrillos (Crocodile Hunter) because he watches him every Saturday at 6:30. We also went a bit mad at the markets... our bags are pretty full again!

Palenque.
The single most touristed Mayan ruins we`ve visited yet. Oh, my god. There were more orange-hat wearing dutch, bad spanish-speaking Americans and Germans... it was the biggest population this side of some big German city somewhere in Germany.

The ruins however, were in pretty good nick, and highly impressive. The number of carvings was impressive, and our guide managed to furnish us with explanations of the inherent egyptian, greek and chinese influences all readily seen within the artwork, apparently. He was a guide with 40 years experience, so we`d hoped he had some tales to tell, turns out they were tall tales.

Xpujil and Ruins

In the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula. We visited four sites in the middle of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. This is one hard to get to region.... required hiring a taxi for the day and have him wait for us while we walked around.

1. Calakmul

Incredible views. One of the tallest pyramids in Mexico. Quite a big complex overall and a historic rival of the Society in Tikal, Guatemala across the border.

2. Balamku

We were surprised when we were invited to enter one of the pyramids and saw an amazing stone/stucco frieze still with some of its original colour that was buried under an outer layer of pyramid, when remodelled by a later dynasty... this frieze was discovered only in 1993. And with the 3 pyramids next to it, we`re betting that once the Mexican govt finds more money, they`ll find more inside the adjacent pyramids.

3. Chicanna

Called the ¨Mouth of the Serpent¨, this site was dominated by the huge monster mouth doorway.

4. Xpujil

Dominant aspect was a huge 3-towered structure with a hidden staircase. This is an after-and-before photo.

We`re now in Chetumal, and just visited the Mayan museum and learnt how to add and subtract with Mayan numbers. On to Belize tomorrow.

1 Nov 06 - Day of the Dead

Hi all,
Oaxaca is changing daily. Now the federal police (about 4,500) have moved in and helped to start cleaning up the town following the riots. The town is looking cleaner but there are still sporadic protests to their occupation and the teachers have moved camp from the centre plaza to elsewhere in town.
The town now is getting geared up for tomorrow - The Day of the Dead.

There are skeletons in the windows and more plastic vampire, werewolf and scary masks on every other corner for sale. Last night we went to the Xoxo cemetery where locals were elaborately decorating graves of their dear departed with marigolds and gladiolas and many with coloured sands in the image of Jesus and Mary, and candles everywhere. Of course the obligatory trick-or-treaters were out in force as well last night.

Last weekend we managed to be out of town, down on the coastal town of Puerto Escondido... a good place to be while there was trouble in town. A surfing paradise, built for tourists, and yep, we went diving.