You want more (temples)...!?!?!?!

Yogyakarta :: Indonesia

The last shadow puppets.

Places: Solo, Yogyakarta, Prambanan & Borobudur.

Coolest thing I did: Sunrise (sort of) over the largest Buddhist monument in the world.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Cockfighting is apparently banned during Ramadan. Man, fun police or what?

Solo didn't particularly improve in my mind with the last day I was there, though I did enjoy spending the last night eating on mats on the pavement from the little stall holders that ply their trade on most city streets in Java. One thing you learn really quickly here is the people are all tiny and the portions of food match. I think most nights I have a starter and 2 or 3 mains. This lends itself well to eating from the street vendors as they all do one thing really well and you can go to a few of them on your way home, noodles at one, fried chook at another. It works very well. They also think the sight of me sitting cross-legged on the ground with the little Indonesians is a funny, funny sight. Kids just giggle their arses off at me.

The one thing I did learn is every time there's sectarian unrest Solo is most likely to be the place it happens. It's also the home of Jemaah Islamiyah, the Nasi Goering of the global Jihad movement. Most people not from Java were seriously confused as to why the hell I went there. I have to agree with them a little. Damn you Lonely Planet.

Yogyakarta is far more of a city than Solo is, despite their being founded at the same time for roughly the same reason. As I brushed over last time the Dutch really couldn't be bothered with that whole empire running thing like the Poms, they just wanted the money from the spice trade. They split up the Sultanate in Java into two parts and allowed each of the Sultans to found a city, build a palace and do whatever they wanted so long as the nutmeg kept flowing. One city became Solo and the other Yogya, both with the requisite palace (or kranton, as they're known in these parts).

Lets make no bones about it, both palaces are a bit shit. When I think of Sultans palaces I think of Topaki in Istanbul or something like the one in Bangkok, with giant gold Buddhas and such. The ones in both cities here look very low rent and a bit scruffy looking. That's because the sultans all went into politics when the civilians took over and don't really have much money left these days. With hindsight missing both palaces wouldn't have been a great loss. And unless you're really, really into horse carriages, the museum attached to the one in Yogya can safely be avoided.

I did like Tamansari though, the Sultan's old water castle. What's a water castle, I hear you ask? It's a place where the Sultan can perve on chicks swimming in his pools, pick one and have them come to his private pool for a swim and a "relax". He did this every day apparently. There was an earthquake sometime in the not too distant past that knocked the thing over so they're busy rebuilding it as we speak. This means that part of it looks like a pile of rocks and part of it looks brand new. The effect should be better when the whole thing is fixed up.

Next to Tamansari is the bird market, Pasar Ngasem, which I liked because it was a little different. Besides your standard racing pigeons and fighting cocks (as I said, off due to Ramadan) you can buy all sorts of non-birds. You want snakes, geckos, mice, rats? No problem. How about crickets, grasshoppers and locusts? All there too. Apparently if you boil up bats they're good for curing asthma. I declined drinking the python blood, telling them I was already virile enough. Even though they said it wasn't too bad with Redbull. I think I'll stick to vodka thanks.

As far as I know I don't have H5N1 yet, but I can certainly see how it came about. You want to smell the combined output of thousands of birds in one small space. I think the guy with the best business sense was the bloke selling birdseed. I reckon he was raking it in.

All this ye olde stuff is good and well but it's not what Yogya is all about. Stretching down from the main train station is the street confusingly named after the patriarch of the Churchill family, Jl Marliboro, which is shops all the way down. Mega malls rising out of a metropolis of stalls selling fake everything, this is where you find most people who look Indonesian in town. Hipster kids in Vans and skinny jeans brushing shoulders with Batik clad old grannies hauling their loot home, it seems like shopping is the only time you see Indonesians doing stuff besides hassling you to buy stuff you don't want.

Due to Ramadan most of the students have left town and the rest are not doing the things they shouldn't be doing all year, like drinking and smoking, meaning the nightlife here is currently non-existent. You can get a beer, but you'll only see other white faces as you do. This meant I did something cultural at night for one, I went to see Wayang Kulit, which means shadow puppets. They do look cool, and are accompanied by a full Gamelan orchestra, but they invariably act out scenes from the Ramayana, with the voices and singing in Javanese. Apparently the Ramayana is a Hindu epic about some dude Rama, who does some stuff. All I know is it's really long and confusing, especially in Javanese. Again, only white faces in the audience and everyone was too polite to be the first one to leave. Lucky for them I broke after 35 mins and I swear 3 quarters of the room followed me out. I did like the fight scenes however, which were like the kung-fu scenes in Team America, with two puppets flailing at each other in mid-air.

Java has been colonized by waves of Eastern types before the Dutch stumbled upon them, the first of these being the Hindus and Buddhists from India. Both left the legacy of an awesome temple just outside Yogya and it's about half a day to see each one.

The Hindus left Prambanan, a complex of temples spread over several kilometres but focused mostly on a temple to Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, the Boston Celtics back-court of Hindu gods. Even as you cross the plain towards the site you can make out the jagged shards of temple in the distance, which on closer inspection are covered in carvings telling all sorts of (I imagine) Hindu type stories. No nudie bits though, which I've been told are quite common on the ones in India. I got led around by an eager student whose English teacher makes them walk up to white people and tell them about the temple for practice. The lad in question was going to work for a shipping company in the Netherlands so I'm sure his intricate knowledge of all the English words surrounding Hindu architecture will put him in pole position for that.

The Buddhists left their biggest monument on Earth at Borobudur, which I took an overnight trip out in order to see at sunrise. It's a multi-layered temple, with carvings going from mundane human things like eating, shagging and animal husbandry all the way up to the top, which represents Nirvana (insert Kurt Cobain joke here). As you climb it you get carvings all the way up, with niches holding Buddhas in various states of repose looking out at you. Once you get to the top the Buddhas are these bell shaped cages called stupas, of which there are 72. It's possibly one of the most impressive bits of architecture I've seen anywhere and I've looked at a hell of a lot of old buildings in the last few years.

Unfortunately, it rained. A lot. After paying 4 times the asking price to get up to the top of the temple to catch the sun rising over the mountains to the East we got little more than a sliver of red in a grey sky. It was still a good time to be up there, as the hordes pouring in at the official opening time of 6am attested to but looking at all those postcards of sunrise over the temple it does feel a bit like a lost opportunity. The pictures will probably come out quite well though, with everything having a sheen to it because of the wet and the rice paddies and mountains in the background all covered in mist and cloud. Still an amazing site.

So I'm back in Yogya today waiting to catch the night train to Jakarta tonight, which I'm informed by the Lonely Planet (and other tourists pretending they heard it from somewhere else) that it's lovingly known as the big durian, spiky on the outside and stinky on the inside. Can't wait!

Sandwich come with chips

Solo :: Indonesia

Sampling all of Indonesia's public transport in a very short space of time.

Places: Labuan Bajo, Denpasar, Surabaya, Probolinggo, Cemoro Lawang, Gunung Bromo & Solo.

Coolest thing I did: Watched a perfect sunset over the Komodo Islands from the lobby of a half constructed hotel overlooking Lubuanbajo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Ramadan really isn't a pain in the arse here like it is in the Middle East. All they do is put curtains up in the windows of the restaurants and everyone eats anyway. Including women in headscarves. Hmmmm.

I've seen quite a few volcanoes this year and the experience I had with marshmallows over molten lava in Guatemala was always going to be hard to top. Still, I'm glad I went two days out of my way in order to climb the crater of Gunung Bromo (from here on in just Bromo because it's too long to type the real way) to watch the sunrise. The town you stay in, Cemoro Lawang is actually sitting right on the outer crater of the original volcano and you can look down over a sea of black sand to see the two remaining peaks, one active with a smoldering crater (Bromo itself) and one dormant (as opposed to doormat, which is what one Indo guide kept telling some Germans it was). It's an amazing visa, especially when the sun is either rising or setting and I got to see it from two vantage points, one at sunset from the outer rim and once at sunrise looking down into the steaming cauldron itself. It is a 4am start, and you have to walk 3km over black sand in the dark but there's enough other people doing it so you can pretty easily find your way by following the light of the other torches.

After 253 steps you reach the rim of Bromo itself and in the dark it's hard to make out the deep fissures releasing all the steam on the inside, however once the red dawn light breaks over the valley formed by the outer rim it's almost like looking into Tolkien's idea of hell. I also thought that covered in snow the outside would make a pretty decent blue run with a snowboard. It's very rare you get to see a volcano that looks like those volcanoes you draw when you're a little kid, but this is a wonderful exception.

I admire the Cemoro Lawangers for having the guts to build their village on the very edge of what is a pretty geologically hyperactive bit of real estate. They do cover their faces with bandannas when they're tiling the fields to try and breathe a bit less sulfur when the clouds come over in the afternoon and all the old people look like they're made out of beef jerky, but they seem to get on with their hot headed neighbor OK. I guess if you spend most of the day chain smoking a bit of sulfur isn't going to do much more damage.

The trip from Flores over a third of Indonesia to Bromo wasn't one I expected to make. I didn't really want to fly interior flights in Indo if at all possible but the scale of the place and the 30 day tourist visa has decided otherwise for me. I took a flight on a prop plane from Lubuanbajo back to Denpasar in Bali and then within 10 mins of landing I had another flight booked to Surabaya, Java's second city that same afternoon, for $45AUD. What a country. I ended up getting into Surabaya late enough to warrant a stay there overnight and then to get up early to make the trip to Bromo. On the flight over it was a perfectly clear day and you could see down into the man volcanoes dotting the length of East Java. It was kind of like looking at the moon, if the moon was red and had trees on it.

Surabaya is a shock. It's a real, working city, as big, unequal and polluted as any in Asia. As an added bonus it was also my first hot shower and aircon since I left Kuta so I slept there like a baby. Which is a good thing because it's big enough to ignore tourists altogether. I struck up a conversation with a marine diesel mechanic sitting next to me on the plane when I recognised his ringtone as being Black Holes and Revelations by Muse (as an aside, the young Indos seem to all be deeply into rock, bucking the global trend towards more R&B and Hip Hop) and he was a bit puzzled at my being in Surabaya at all. It has 3 lanes of traffic in each direction in the middle of town and no footpaths or crossings. I learned that you just have to walk out into the road and have faith the swarms of motoscoters will miss you. The Indos don't even look but I admit I have trouble with it. Touch wood I've yet to be run down. Surabaya also has shopping centres that are as much palaces of retail in white marble as anywhere in the world, only the scale is massive. Compared to the ramshackle shanties and food vendors carts that huddle in the mall's shadows the shopping centres themselves are inhumanly large. I had trouble getting inside one on foot, you really aren't supposed to go there unless you have a car. It really is the other Indonesia.

After a regular bus to the wonderfully named but armpit-smelling Probolinggo you have to get onto the public minibus that drives through the mountain villages up to the crater of Bromo. This sounds nice, but all these minibusses have had an extra row of seats added and the average Indo is about 3 feet tall. When you're rammed in for 2 hours with my gangly legs it's more than uncomfortable. Still, I managed to grimace nicely at everyone that got on. It's also a good way to see how these people operate. As most of them don't have cars even the business people use it to get their goods around. My favourite was this cunning old lady who would hang out the window at each village and buy a load of something to sell on in the next village up the mountain. Eggs, bundles of spring onions, a bundle of coriander the size of a prop forward's torso she slowly built up her profit margin the higher we got. Takes your mind off the fact you've lost all feeling to everything below your neck.

After the Bromo climb I was a bit drained for the ride back down but did manage to think nice thoughts back to Probolinggo, where I'd arranged to get a van with some other tourists (a bunch of French business school undergrads on exchange in Singapore who seemed to spend the trip playing some game involving stadium names until they fell asleep) that were going to Yogjakarta. We were setting off at 7pm, meaning we were going to drive all night and I'd his Solo at about 4am. I was lucky to secure business class (ie shotgun) and slept between sudden lurches and breaking waking me up, which was quite frequent. The driver kept eating little pills and overtaking 4 or 5 trucks at a time with suitably wild eyes on him. Lucky we didn't have seatbelts, otherwise I'd have felt really unsafe. Between that and being told Garuda airlines 737s have a habit of exploding I'm having to put any rational fears of transport in Indonesia in the back of my mind for now.

My impression of Solo is it's really a bit of a nothing down. It's got two palaces built by the remaining monarchs in central Java after the Dutch decided to let them remain in place as figureheads, so long as they didn't interrupt the spice trade (in the 1700s at some time). Both look a bit shabby and one of them was closed. There's also markets but, you know, there's markets everywhere in the poor world. One of these days I'm going to write to the Lonely Planet and ask why the hell they are so mad on bloody markets. Still, I'm only here to break up the maddening journey of the last few days before moving onto Yogjakarta tomorrow morning.

Poison saliva, cannibals and more fish!

Labuan Bajo :: Indonesia

Bintang Clan ain't nuttin' ta fa wif.

Places: Mataram, Perama Island, Satonda, Dougo, Komodo, Rinca & Labuan Bajo.

Coolest thing I did: Saw real live Komodo Dragons, some even lounging around after some dragon love.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: They're cannibals, even to the point where Komodo mothers will eat their own young.

In an attempt to stay off planes in Indonesia I decided that the best way out to Komodo and Flores from Lombok was to embark on a boat cruise through the islands to Flores. I booked it all very last minute so managed to have myself sleeping on the deck (which is a lot nicer on sailing boats than on ones with stonking great big diesel engines vibrating you to sleep at night) with 15 of my new closest mates. It's run by a company called Perama, which is pretty much the company that you go with if you want to travel around Bali and Lombok without thinking too hard. It used to be the exclusive preserve of the backpacker set, but our trip included families and some grey hairs too. It was a very international crowd, and people who spoke more than one language were in high demand, quite often with conversations involving several people to get a point across from one person to another via one or two other people. A nice bunch, however. I did feel sorry for the couple of German kids of about 10 or 11 who did look pretty bored on the boat.

When they started by putting us in a bus across Lombok which stopped at a place making traditional pottery I was a little concerned. Probably the factor I hate most about organised bus tours are the coerced retail opportunities. Thankfully the whole party seemed to of the same mindset so the time in these kinds of places were limited. The only similar attempt was to take us later off the boat to a traditional village so we could be mobbed by kids and watch the local football (as in soccer) teams playing on a dirt pitch. I'm never quite happy with walking around a village like it and all it's inhabitants are attractions in a zoo so I'm kind of glad that wasn't most of the trip.

The boat itself was a bit crowded but the food and company was good and the weather impeccable. We spent our time swimming off the boat or snorkelling on the shore when the boat wasn't moving and sunning ourselves on the deck when it was. It was a very good way to take in some spectacular scenery along the way, watching the archipelago change from jungle to barren rock as we progressed. I saw more sunrises than I have in a row than I have in my life, simply because when you're sleeping on a listing metal deck with vibrations of a heavy diesel motor and the associated fumes you tend not to sleep in.

The real reason for the trip was to take in Komodo National Park on the dry land before I spent the next few days under it's water. The main attraction are the Komodo Dragons, large lizards of up to 3m in length that have poisonous saliva and simply bite their prey and then follow them for 3 or 4 days until they keel over a die. They love to tell the story of the Swiss tourist who decided to go off walking on his own and all that was found of him was his camera and his spectacles. The ones on Komodo itself were a bit hard to see, because they're more interested in living in the dry scrub land where the tourists aren't allowed to go. We did see a few though, some up close as they waited outside the ranger's cooking hut taking in the smells. In between some diving I did go to the smaller island of Rinca, which also has Komodos but you can also get up close to their nests. There were also monkeys there, which you are well aware of my opinion of. Indonesia seems to have a very high monkey/land mass ratio.

I got off the boat as it arrived in the fishing village of Labuan Bajo, which is actually still a fishing village for the most part with the tourism yet to full take hold. They have rusty huts, crappy hotels and dirt roads, the kind of thing you'd expect from an Asian fishing village. What they do also have, however, is access to the diving in the Komodo National Park, meaning that tourism pretty much means diving in Lubaun Bajo. I spent three days getting up early, riding out of town on a land cruiser (a real, proper old one), getting on a big cruiser and watching the islands pass by on a gorgeous blue sea for two or more hours to the various dive sites. Very small groups and nice people and a crew of constantly giggling Indonesians. I have to say that the Indos involved with boats seem to be the happiest people. They also tend to rib each other a bit and even though you can't understand exactly what's being said you do realise they spend a lot of the day taking the piss out of each other.

The diving is world class, this being shark and turtle territory in a big way. The sites themselves are mostly rocks sitting off a bigger island with dramatic coral formations, crevasses, spires and the like to dive around. The big stuff like white and black tipped reef sharks, Napoleon fish and turtles are so in abundance it's hardly worth mentioning the massive schools of practically everything else. A word of warning to beginners, the currents are fierce and I'd make sure you have your buoyancy under control before you attempt coming out here. We had saftey stops hanging off the side of rocks, saw bubbles coiling around us like a washing machine. It can be fierce even for the pros. At one site we saw lots of divers coming up in ones and pairs as they were separated from their groups. Still, there's heaps of boats to pick them up and quite often you spend a bit of time swapping divers at the end so everyone gets home.

There was a case only a week before I got here where one of the companies here, Reefseekers lost 5 divers. They floated for a day before washing up on one of the islands and were found 3 days later by fishermen. The best version of this story I've heard is they survived by eating berries, drinking water out of puddles and staving off Komodo Dragons by throwing weights off their weight belt at them. As a result I chose not to go with Reefseekers.

I've had to bite the bullet due to time constraints and am now going to fly back to Bali tomorrow and off to Java hopefully on the same day.

Fishy, fishy, fishy.

Gili Trawagan :: Indonesia

Staying at the pub makes your liver hurt.

Places: Senggigi & Gili Trawagan..

Coolest thing I did: Saw a blokes fighting with sticks and shields in the street, and they were just members of the audience.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Komodo dragons can apparently kill you.

I'm assuming at some time in the not too distant past the town of Senggigi on the island of Lombok was a tourist hotspot, once the preserve of backpackers and other such lower forms of tourist life (yes, I include myself) but now with nice looking resorts sitting all along the beach. It has a beautiful collection of bays to walk along and you can snorkel right off the beach. There's a picturesque little temple overlooking the whole scene from the point and the sun sets right over the water. What Senggigi doesn't have is any tourists. It's deader than dead, and a little bit dull. Why the empty night club over the road chose to play music until 3am every night is beyond me, but I do like their optimism.

The staff in the shops and the touts and hustlers walking the beach seem just as confused as everyone else as to why it's so dead, making me think it's a recent phenomenon. There are load of half built shopping centres and bars that are boarded up so I'm assuming that is may have tried to expand upmarket too quickly and are paying the result from having neither backpackers or luxury tourists. I had lots of time to chat to the hustlers because they had nothing else to do and I was obviously not going to buy necklaces or fake pearls or pirate DVDs. As an aside one bloke did seem a little concerned when I told him you can download music and movies off the internet for free. Seeing as he has no real moral recourse due to the face that he's also pirating his material to sell I'd say he's looking for a new line of work.

There seems to be a constant contest between individual Indos in the place, everyone can organise any tour, transfer or activity you want, usually because they get a taste of the action if they bring in new customers. I spent a fair bit of time sitting around drinking the super thick gritty Indo coffee with a local bloke who is the caretaker of a villa owned by a real estate developer from Perth who only goes out there once or twice a year, hence this Indo bloke having loads of free time to try and organise tickets for people on the side. There were quite a few older Aussies who have bought up places near the beach there and are in semi-retirement. I ended up having beer with a boat builder my Dad's age (from Perth also) who makes his money selling catamarans all through the archipelago. When I asked him if he was worried about it being quiet he said he was delighted.

In stark contrast the Gili Islands are under-going transition from backpacker dives to upmarket designer hotels and bungalows for Europeans without too much tension, even if the prices are starting to bite a bit deep for the true shoestringers. The diving is a fixed price by agreement on the island and it's about double what I was paying in Belize in April. There are still a slew of grungy bars and beach front restaurants (including the pub located directly in front of my room, I just pay the guy every morning at the bar) but they're starting to look a bit lonely and there's a whole lot more being built all the time.

One day in the water will show you why. In one dive I saw two (!) sharks, half a dozen turtles, octopus, cuttlefish that change colour, all sorts of stuff. It all seems well run, even if I did manage to pick the dive school that cater mostly to French people (though I did learn today that digital camera in French is camera numeric). For the those who absolutely must surf there is a right hander breaking over hard coral but I'd say once the backpackers are driven out for good it won't really get ridden again.

For this whole slew of gentrification I lay the blame squarely at Oprah Winfrey's door. She hyped up a book a couple of years back called Eat, Love, Pray; which I admit I did read passages of and had to stop due to not being able to stomach the big heaping mound of pseudo-spiritual crap it was dishing up. You are now seeing a whole load of Americans reading their emails on their Macs by the beach with that book prominently placed in front of them. There are cafes with the word "organic" in their name and yoga classes on the beach. I imagine pretty soon the guys selling weed and mushrooms (who seem to congregate outside my pub) won't have any backpackers to sell too. I've been amazed that there's even a kickback system for drug dealers. If the guys behind the bar bring in customers they get a cut of the price. It also seems you can haggle over drugs too. Nothing in this country has a fixed price. However, price fixing seems to be on the rise. Getting off the ferry from Bali to Lombok was my first encounter with a taxi mafia in this country and they're fearsome. There was only me and a Dutch couple who had not arranged any onward transport from the ferry "port" in Lombok and after the first guy spoke to us no-one would speak to us or haggle for a price. We walked into the town and were about to get a guy to drive us in his car for half price when the taxi driver came over and threatened the bloke so he refused to take us. He also threatened me, saying he'd find out where I was staying. Nice start. Wonder why you don't have any tourists? We ended up having to pay the full price and he had the cheek to be offended when we didn't tip him on arrival to Senggigi.

I'm about to spend three days on my way out to the Komodo Islands to see the dragons and will base myself on the island of Flores where the diving is supposed to be even better than here. If that's the case then it'll be well worth the trip.

Same same, but different.

Ubud :: Indonesia

You'll never go broke putting beer logos on t-shirts.

Places: Depensar, Kuta, Ubud, Bedulu, Gunung Kawi & Tinta Empul.

Coolest thing I did: Stumbled onto a proper Hindu festival, Galungan, which in Ubud includes monkeys. My thoughts on monkeys are well documented.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: That people from Bali are actually Hindus or Buddhists or something. They're not Muslims, that's for certain.

The plane over didn't bode well for my liking Kuta Beach, the Costa del Sol or Cancun of the Australian package tourist. The bulk of the flight from Darwin to Depensar was either families with lots of kids or single males well into their 40s or 50s the wrong side of too much brown spirits. I was a little scared that I'd end up sharing the beach with lots and lots of Aussies doing their best to give us a bad name abroad, but I should have been warned by the presence of several French and Germans that we wouldn't completely own the place.

Your heart does break ever so slightly to see just how perfect the beach at Kuta and surrounds is, with kilometres of surf breaking in nice straight lines into a beach that is a salt-and-pepper mix of volcanic black and snow white. The hippies that first put it on the map in the 60s must have been gobsmacked to see it without any development and thus helped it on it's rise to fame. I can still remember when Thailand was a cool, edgy place to go on holiday but I can always remember south Bali being developed so I was kind of surprised that I didn't completely hate the place like I thought I would. I mean, there are tons of Aussies and some of them are as loud and rowdy as you would expect, but the converse is that the Balianese themselves are a very, very understanding and welcoming people. They would have to be. This does also seem to bring out the better side of lots of Australians and there does seem to be an actual cultural exchange, even if it is just watching the Aussies chatting with street vendors on the beach while chomping down on their Nasi Goering.

I think this is one example where even though the development has not been all that kind to the environment (just walking along that beach at sunset whilst garbage swirls around your ankles shows you that) it does seem to be appreciated well enough by both sides. Tourism is the industry here and the chance to buy t-shirts with the logo of the local brand of beer is something Aussies have always appreciated. I assume the Indonesians also love our inability to bargain without feeling like a prick.

Kuta is really about two things, surfing and nightlife. There has been an attempt to cater to upmarket Europeans, which can be seen further up the beach in Legain where you can see all these sprawling bungalow complexes where the Euros can sunbathe in view of the beach while still being separated from the touts by a low fence and security guards. However the nightlife was what I was most afraid would put my countrymen to shame, after all when we go overseas it's generally once we've had 9 too many that we tend to do things that would get us escorted from the suburb at home. There was a fair smattering of young surfers out drunk, but they seemed content to limit themselves to trying to pull the other young Aussies of the complementary sex and weren't even that fussed by the Indonesians. What was a little bit sad was the much older crowd, the tattooed greying men I'd seen on the plane over from Darwin. I'd say this had always been a location for older men, especially the aging, blue rinsed ponytail types, but no my single night out in Kuta I got into conversation with two separate large groups of Australian men old enough to be my father and the common theme in both cases was the commodities boom.

It seems that the resources boom at home has meant that there are a lot of single older men, either that way from the start or due to broken marriages resulting from long times appart from their families. The couple of guys I spoke to did seem to realise that this was a once in a lifetime opportunity and they had to make as much money as possible while it lasts, no matter how high the human cost. The thing most lacking from their workplaces, which also double as home due to their remoteness, is fun, especially the fun resulting from there being women present. Most of them are full of as much braggadocio as younger men in large groups are, only by the end of the night they seem to realise how unlikely they are to be going home with any 20 year olds from the Sunshine Coast. It's all a bit sad, and I suspect it's part of what keeps sex tourism alive in this part of the world, but I imagine months on end in the Pilbara can drive men to this kind of thing.

The whole place is mad for scooters, whether they are driven by white people or locals and you quickly get used to being nearly mowed down in narrow alleyways that should really only be for foot traffic. You can tell no-one really cares about such rules when you see that many of the small shops sell litre Absolute Vodka bottles full of petrol at a small mark up all up and down the small back alleys, called Gang for reasons I'm sure you'll find out if you're reading your Lonely Planet more closely than I am right now.

I think part of the reason I didn't get so scared the hell of Kuta was that I found myself living a classic backpacker slum between two Gang knows collectively as the Poppies. It's all cheap places to eat, alternating internet cafes, bars, t-shirt stalls (his: Harden the fuck up. hers: toughen up princess. My pride in my country knows no bounds...) and tourist information places, and despite myself I feel cozy and safe in these kinds of places. All I had to do was tell touts on the beach I was staying in the Poppies and they trudged off thinking it was a waste of time to try and sell whatever it was they were selling to a tourist more likely to have a less tight arse than mine. And what crap they sell. One bloke was hawking a bow and arrow set, which made me giggle at the thought of someone sitting on the beach picking off people as they came out of the surf. That wouldn't have been hard either, people actually wear helmets surfing out there due to the fact that any given wave is going to have about 20 people trying to catch it. My surfing isn't that great anyway, so I tactfully declined to embarrass myself trying to do so in front of that big a crowd.

So onto Ubud I came, up on the slopes of a couple of nearby volcanoes and so chock full of temples and whatnot that it's the very antithesis of Kuta. Except of course, it's just a geared up for tourists. They are a different breed, the ones that would rather take pictures of scary Gods they can't identify rather than stay in the tack of Noosa with Noodles that is south Bali. You do hear them pronouncing their superiority at times too, well I assume that's what they're doing because I don't speak passable French and that's what most conversations take place in here. For some explicable reason all of Paris appears to have upped for the summer and planted themselves here. I expected the Dutch if anyone from Europe, after all, they did own the place once.

Ubud is a nice place, with street names that tell you where you are. At the end of Monkey Forest Road is, well, a forest full of monkeys. I managed to rock up to town the day before Galungan, which I'm told by google is "celebration is the triumph of dharma against adharma (evil)", which of course it very well looks like. I was made to buy a sarong and scarf to wear around my head (making me suspect this is all some ruse to sell tourists more sarongs, I hear the sarong lobby has loads of clout in Jakarta) and wear it around all day if I wanted to get into temples and see secret stuff. Lots of people giggled at me, mostly children but I did get to see lots of ceremonies that I didn't understand. The women carry big boxes of food and stuff on their head to the temple, where they sit them on a big dais out the front. Then a bloke who I assume is a priest sprinkles holy waters on the offerings, then plays these bells for about 15 mins, then sprinkles lots of the people, then they all get up and have a good natter to each other while the next sitting comes in and does the same thing.

I took a day trip with my landlord around to lots of different temples throughout the day and saw lots of variations on the same theme, with everyone's kids giggling at the way I was dressed and having a good time. It's like Hindu Christmas or something. It was good to have the landlord and his co-pilot (who was his elderly neighbor, who's job appeared to be to chain-smoke clove cigarettes and grumble away in Indonesian the whole time) tear around the blind corners and sideswiping dogs and small children instead of trying to do it myself.

One thing they did was introduce me to the need for tourists to take pictures of rice paddies. Bali is stupidly humid so it's all wet rice cultivation and generations have gone out of their way to carve horizontal pools into the side of almost vertical hillsides to make more use of the limited arable land. It seems that taking a photo of rice paddies is good, but you get extra points for farmers, scarecrows, bicycles and farmyard animals somewhere in the photo too.

I liked that the kids have something to do in the whole festival. They get to dress up as the Barong, which is kind of like a Chinese dragon, only it only has two kids inside and has a pigs head. They go around to your house and if you give them some money they dance around a bit and get all that nasty adharma out of your house. There's a much bigger bunch of kids following the Barong around playing Gamelane instruments, which make lots of varying metal clanging sounds. I did see two Barongs meet in the street but they seem to pass without there being some kind of Barong-off, which would have been cool.

So I'm enjoying my forced exodus from the UK to wait for a work permit a whole lot better this week. More Indo to come as the next few weeks progress. Or until I get a work permit, whichever comes first.

Communism's like that

London :: UK

Cuba: When cars are big and rum is cheap.

Places: Havana, Santa Clara, Trinidad, Guardalavaca & Santiago de Cuba.

Coolest thing I did: Got chauffeured around the sites of Santiago in the back of a 1950s model Fairlane. From before Ford even made the car.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Che Guevara played Rugby Union at medical school.

I think of all the places I expected to visit on this trip I was looking forward to Cuba most of all. On the day I applied for my tourist visa to go there Fidel Castro announced he was stepping down in favour of his brother, Raul and the following weeks saw the papers reporting things were being liberalised over there at a rate unseen in the last 50 years. I expected to maybe see a little bit of history in the making, something that I always seem to be about a decade too late for in most places I end up.

The first thing that strikes you on arrival to Havana is things are actually as broken as you expect them to be. There's a lot of new model Peugeots that act as offical tourist taxis and things generally seem to work pretty well. The old part of the city, Havana Vieja is undergoing a massive restoration project so old colonial buildings are being turned into either 5 star hotels or classy restaurants, giving off a certain air or, well, affluence. I'd expected everything to be in ruins after years of neglect due to the lack of money since the collapse of the Soviet Union but it appears that the Cubans have made tourism their number one priority and are reinvesting the proceeds back into infrastructure and restorations.

It doesn't take you too long to see that there's only a very thin layer of sheen on the crumbling glory of what Havana really is. Once you go one street back from most of the tourist sanctioned streets you see the gritty ruins of Spanish colonial buildings and get a whiff of that mix of wet garbage and raw sewerage that you only really get in the developing world. You do see the glorious old Yank Tank cars that have been kept in working order (and sometimes in pristine condition) with what can only be mechanical sorcery since the 1950s when Americans stopped sending cars after the revolution but the majority of cars are still those Datsun inspired Ladas that Eastern Europe churned out in the 80s. You can get some awesome food but in most cases you get exactly the same meal (I can never look at ham and cheese on white bread ever again) every where you go.

All this can be put down to, despite all the work going into building a tourist industry, the fact that Cuba is at heart still a working communist country. After spending a lot of time seeing places in Eastern Europe where communism is kept safely locked in museums it's amazing to actually see a place where it still roams the countryside free. At first I thought it was cool that they pretty much only put ideas and slogans on billboards everywhere instead of advertising for products, but at the end of the day it's always the same idea and the entire course of the 20th century kind of proved it was the wrong one. In Cuba everyone is still guaranteed equality, just no one guarantees the quality of said equality. And without any kind of working democracy you're kind of stuck with it. Still, that's communism for you.

That being said Cuba is still full of people that are generally pretty nice and full of life and music. Music is a big thing here, and it's probably the first time I've ever felt a little bit disappointed that I don't know how to dance. You end up spending a lot of nights sitting around places with a band drinking rum based cocktails (Mojitos, Cuba Libres...that kind of thing), sometimes smoking cigars and watching bands play music. At random intervals the crowd will give up a few people willing to salsa or sing along and it's always pretty good fun. Similar to the beach days, where Cubans like to do nothing much more than sit on the sand and drink rum directly out of the bottle. Still if your life was shitty and rum was cheap you'd probably think that was a pretty good Sunday out too.

Like most countries with an unelected dictator in charge they like erecting statues of their heroes everywhere and the their favourite is a writer called Jose Marti, who seems to be on every corner, despite not playing an exceptionally big part in the countries history, so far as I can tell. He just seems to be a fairly uncontroversial figure that has a name that's easy to carve on a bust. For those of you who've been to Russia think of him as Cuba's Pushkin. I did, however, quite like the massive statue of Che above his mausoleum just outside the town of Santa Clara. Must be much more impressive than the airstrip the Bolivians stuck him under after the killed him in the 60s. I was actually also fairly impressed to not see a single statue of Fidel anywhere, which if you've looked a North Korea or any of those wacky Arab dictatorships in the Middle East is pretty rare these days.

My favourite tourist thing was the cigar factory tour just to watch the skill involved in what is still a fully handmade product. It's impressive to see all these (predominately) women taking rolls of tobacco and using nothing but big flat leaves and their fingers turn out one after the other perfect looking cigar. Due to the high estrogen heavy content of the work force the factory radio also plays novellas, or soap operas all day, meaning as you tour around you're constantly blasted with the voices of actors having affairs and dramas. I also liked the fact that once these women have moved up the food chain (I assume because they've got incurable arthritis) they become like pit bosses at casinos, sitting on high chairs all days smoking cigars and making sure no one is flogging the product to sell to tourists. Many of them smoke cigars all day and have no front teeth. As the tour guide told us, smoking cigars is better for your health, you only get mouth cancer. This means you'll look ugly but you won't die.

One thing I've missed out on (thankfully) over the recent years of travel to the rich world has been hustlers and in Cuba, they're rife. Fake cigars, women, taxi rides in 1950s cars, all sorts of services and scams come at you if you turn your head towards the constant hissing people do at you on the street. Most of this seems to come from the bizarre dual class system that the Castros have created with their dual currency. There are actually two kinds of peso in Cuba, one everyone uses called the peso and one that tourists and anyone that comes in contact with their filthy capitalist ways called the convertible peso, but which most people call the CUC, after it's currency code. Most Cubans aren't allowed to either spend CUCs or convert them at the bank into pesos so the government had thought this was a good way to keep communism intact while getting much needed hard currency from the tourists. The trouble is the Cubans, like most people, have found a multitude of ways around this. What this means is if anyone can get their hands on CUCs they can usually get someone to turn them into pesos at a good enough rate to mean everyone has a scam to get in on the action.

And there's the rub. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the Cuban people faced very hard times and had to do pretty much anything they could to get real money. Many of them either started illegally renting out rooms or feeding tourists in their front rooms. The former is called running a casa particular and the later is called running a paladar. Both were illegal but the government, until the late 1990s turned a blind eye because it stopped people from starving. They eventually legalised this and taxed it, meaning you had lots of casa and paladar owners who could change US dollars (then later CUCs) legally. This meant that these people became pretty important and lots of people opened their homes to either feed or sleep tourists. All this sounds dangerously like capitalism.

Going forward its hard to say what will happen to Cuba. Inequality between the service industry and the rest is becoming more common and it's hard to see how Raul will keep things together once they end up creating a middle class. He seems less wed to the ideas that brought Fidel to power in the 1959 but I'm not sure how the Cubans will react if they're told all the pain and suffering they've been through in the last half century turns out to be because one old man couldn't admit he'd made a mistake. Hopefully they'll take it all in their characteristic stride and adapt as they seem so capable of.

I'd say Cuba has been one of the most interesting places I've ever had the pleasure of visiting, it just gives you so much to think about. It's a pity that most people who go there just won't see it. It's become possible to now fly into Havana, be protected in your 5 star hotel, be bussed down to the beach resorts where Cubans aren't allowed to go and only encounter the people on a customer level. This is a little bit sad but does seem to be the way things are going. In a country where things are changing so fast who knows what you'll miss.

GrossenYank

Jaco :: Costa Rica

Into the Norteamericano's playground.

Places: Monteverde, Montezuma & Jaco.

Coolest thing I did: Got hurled around in the canopy of a cloud forest on an array of zip lines and ropes and whatnot.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: This place is so American you can get USD out of the ATM. Why they bother with a local currency is beyond me...

Monteverde is not at all what I expected. I'd read about eco-tourism and being founded by Quakers and thought I was in for overdeveloped hippy nonsense. I expected any place where the national park was founded by a sect of Protestant draft dodgers from the US to just radiate dream catchers and crystals and be covered in blocks of units (sorry, condos) by now. It turns out that those wacky Quakers are also anti-development and have not allowed the roads to either be straightened or paved up into the mountains. What this means is Monteverde is still off the tour path for most package tourists and has been left to the backpackers to enjoy. It's tiny, it's still cheap and when you look out the window in the morning you're looking down on the clouds. That's pretty hard to beat.

I'm not sure what the hell eco-tourism actually means, but it seems to have something to do with cold showers, toilets that don't flush properly and walking around in the dark harassing animals. Oh, and in Costa Rica for some reason it means ziplines, or flying foxes in some parts of the world.

I spent a morning dressed like I was going to chop down trees (helmet, climbing harness, etc) being attached to long lengths of steel cable and being pushed out over vast drops through the forest canopy. I assume this is so if you're really quick you can see the blur as birds scatter at the sound of your approach. It's got nothing to do with wildlife, but it is lots of fun. It's the first out of character thing I did this week because I'm a bit of a wus when it comes to being out in the open at height (though I seem to be better on chairlifts than I used to be). The best part of the day was the tarzan swing, which involves you being tied to a long rope and then pushed off a platform to drop 5 meters, swing out over a gap in the forest and then down to be caught in a contraption made of tire inner-tubes on a platform below. I went second and couldn't see what was going on so all I saw was the bloke in front of me drop off the edge and everyone below me would could see whoop and laugh (Americans love to whoop for some reason). When I saw what I was in for I did hesitate but the Costa Rican blokes just pushed me off the edge, and I despite breaking into full tourettes I did end up with a silly grin on my face after it was over.

The night time was all about looking for wildlife in the dark. When the guy spent the first hour pointing out bugs I did think we were in trouble, but we did manage to find a two toed sloth waking up from it's 18 hour sleep to scratch it's arse quite throughly (10 mins later it was still going) and to just catch a glimpse of a couple of tarantulas as they scuttled away into their nests. We also saw this hybrid monkey/cat animal whose name I'm informed is a kinkajou, but you'll have to take their word for it because I don't know what the hell it was.

After spending the first two thirds of my short time in Costa Rica in remote spots looking for animals (and plants I suppose, but who gives a damn about flowers when there's sloths!) I have decamped to the beach for the rest of the trip. I spent a couple of nights in Montezuma, which is a relatively sheltered black sand beach on the Pacific coast. They still have dirt roads and the jungle comes right up to the hotel porches so it does feel like Costa Rica is supposed to. There are a few too man y shops with the words "vibe" or "organic" in their names, and the requisite hippies selling trinkets by the roadside but besides that nonsense it's a very relaxed place to spent a couple of days.

You can hike a short distance out of town into the jungle to a series of waterfalls (well in some cases you rock climb to them, I really shouldn't have decided shoes weren't necessary) which are all fresh water and a nice change. Being waterfalls there's this unnatural need for the backpackers to jump off the things and the second one might have been as high as 9m going down into a pool 15m deep. I had no intention of jumping off it but the couple from New Jersey who I climbed up with both jumped off and if a girl did it then there's no way in hell I couldn't (even if she was an Italian girl from Sopranos country...still would make me gay if I didn't jump off too). I wasn't very graceful. The Joisey bloke was telling me to try and point my toes and keep my arms to my side so of course I ended up landing arse first and was in enormous pain for quite some time after I broke the surface tension of the water with my bollocks. I also learned you can fit a whole load of expletives in the second between leaving the rock and hitting the water (swearing underwater, on the other hand just creates bubbles). That was the second out of character thing I've done this week, but hey, that's what this travel malarkey is all about, isn't it?

I'm not spending my last night in the once remote surfing Mecca of Jaco, which is now erecting the concrete skeletons that will soon make it look like South Beach or the Gold Coast. It's another nice stretch of black volcanic sand with jungle coming right up to the water, only now that jungle has tower blocks sticking out of it. It also suffers from the classic smell of over-development: open sewer. It's good that the surf is still pristine and I even hired a surf board for the first time in about 10 years and had a shot out there. After an hour and a half of being smacked around by the waves I managed to catch one wave and call it a day. I'm already aching so it's a good thing I've got nothing to do but sit on a bus back to San Jose tomorrow. I think with more time and fitness I could get back into surfing a bit, but today was a little demoralising. New experiences you're crap at are ok, but if you used to be better at them then it's not so much fun.

Right, so Costa Rica is pretty much at an end now. It's Friday night now and by Sunday I'll be in Havana. Probably won't hear from me until I come out the other side.

There will be mud

Cariari :: Costa Rica

THAT´S why they call it a rain forest.

Places: Lago de Atitlan (San Pedro), Guatemala City, San Jose & Tortuguero.

Coolest thing I did: Saw a 1.5 Green Turtle nesting on the beach. Sorry, la playa.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The name of the national beer of Guatamala, Gallo, means "cock". It´s not 100% so calling someone a Gallo is going to confuse them rather than offend them.

My last couple of days in Guatemala were spend in fairly relaxing fashion in a little town called San Pedro, which is on the shores of Lago de Atitlan. The lake itself is a domrnant (they hope) volcanic crater full of water and surrounded by the spires of more volcanos. It´s really not much of a surprise that Guatemala is always in the news for natural disasters when you look at just how unstable the ground a lot of the country is built on.

Anyway, the area itself, like most of the places I went in Guatemala is stunning. I was fending off the flu I´ve been carrying since Antigua so I didn´t go too crazy on the physical activity stuff this time. I could have rode horses, paddled canoes around or climbed volcanos but I decided instead to let the fresh air do me some good and spent the afternoons soaking in "Solar pools". I think they mean thermal pools, as it wouldn´t be very impressive if they meant the pools were heated by sunlight, but who knows. End result, they were warm and soothing and that.

I did read much later in the Lonely Planet that one of the other villages I could have visited is home to Maximon, the Catholic/Mayan diety who is dipicted as always smoking and drinking. He gets set up in a different house in the village each year and you can go and leave offerings of rum or cigarettes. That would have been cool to see. Like an every growing list, that´ll have to wait until next time.

The cross over to Costa Rica on the plane was far more painless than anticipated. Copa Airlines, it turns out, is a branch of Continental and all very together in their operations. They fly Brazilian made planes (I didn´t know there was such a thing) that are just beefed up corporate planes, so they´re ultra silent and only 4 people to a row. The view of Costa Rica coming in is something else, all green hills and beaches as far as the eye can see. Like most countries, the international airports of both Guatemala City and San Jose are the most modern things I saw in either.

I decided that as I was in Costa Rica early in the morning I´d attempt to get to the most remote place I was planning to visit on the first day, there by making the rest of my trip easier. I didn´t realise just how remote Tortuguero would be. Two buses and a boat through the jungle were required to get there (there´s no road and getting boats up the rough Caribbean coast isn´t real easy) but it does boast some very good wildlife.

The village itself is tiny, wedged between the Caribbean and the jungle and you can walk the whole thing in about 5 mins. Good thing you aren´t there for the nightlife but the food isn´t half bad. It´s mostly Caribbean stuff, currys, jerk chicken and all that stuff. That´s good because from what I´ve been told by others so far the food in the rest of the country isn´t much chop. In fact, it seems very hard to find culture that´s Costa Rican. There´s no real handicrafts, music or any imprint left by the indigenous people at all. After all the tradition in Mexico and Guatemala it´s a bit hard to belive it when Spanish comes out of people´s mouths here.

Onto the wildlife. I hired gum boots (it´s almost knee deep mud in places so you can´t even go in hiking boots really) and went walking on the only track you can do yourself in the national park. In that first couple of hours I saw spider monkeys, lizards that run on the water and a green snake eating a bird whole. That´s a pretty good start without a guide and I would have been fairly happy with that. There was more yet to come.

Even though I´d spoke to a couple who had spent 3 hours walking in the dark looking for nesting turtles without finding any I did think that it had to be worth a punt in any town where they have the Spanish word for "turtle" in their name. During the peak breeding season in June and July this is why most people come here but we´re most definitely early now. Turns out I picked the right night. I was having a siesta after dinner waiting for the 9.30pm start when the guide starts banging on my window at 8.30 and yelling to get out of bed. He´s talking mostly on his mobile phone but manages to cram me together with a few other people and hire us a boat to get to the beach where he´s been tipped off by the park rangers a 1.5m green turtle is making it´s way upshore and has started digging in the sand. A bit more fixing and we get permission to go and watch so after a speedy boat ride and a run along the beach in the dark, we almost trip over a scene from Jurassic Park.

I´ve seen turtles nest before, but the ones here are so much bigger than in Australia. The old girl uses here rather ill-suited flippers to dig a hole and then squirts in well over a 100 ping pong ball sized eggs. Then she spends a huge amount of time trying to flick sand back over the hole by moving around in 10 degree increments anfd flipping sand behind her. It´s funny when people have sat a little close and get it in the face. They are allowed to show you this under red lights, but not normal flash lights, so you can see but sometimes it´s hard. Still the guides seemed to follow the rules and not uncover any eggs or block the turtle´s escape back to the sea so it was quite a scene to watch. Well worth it.

My last morning was a 5.30am start so me and a big black bloke could paddle a canoe out into the jungle to go looking for wildlife. This again, didn´t disappoint and I think starting early and not using a motor allowed us to get all the more closer. There were lots of birds (I especially liked the hovering ones, like the kingfishers and honeyeaters) but it´s the megafauna that does it for most people. We saw iguanas hanging off the ends of branchs, saw both howler and spider monkeys (well, we heard the former long before we saw them) and saw small crocodiles hiding out every now and then under the branches, despite the very high tide. I was promised wildlife and man, was I getting it. We did turn back a half hour early though, and I´m glad we did. Just as we got in sight of the village the heavens opened and pretty soon he was rowing and I was bailing us out. I looked like I had been standing under a shower about 1 min after the rain started and it pretty much rained the rest of the morning. Perfect siesta weather. As a plus side this brought all the frogs right into the village that night, including some rather colourful poisonous ones, but all my pictures didn´t come out so I´ll just have to remember them. I´ve decided I´m utter crap at taking wildlife photos.

So now I´m waiting for a bus (I´ve already been on one and a boat this morning) to take me back to San Jose so I can try and seem more of the country in the very few days I have left. Still, a most auspicious start.

Destroy the ring, Frodo

Antigua :: Guatemala

Saftey? Bah!

Places: Antigua, Pacaya, Lanquin & Semuc Champey.

Coolest thing I did: Toasted marshmallows on molten lava. Yes. Really.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The CIA has actually orchestrated the overthrow of this countries´ elected government on several occasions. Once to save banana plantations.

Guatemala has some absolutley top notch natural beauty to behold but part of the fun is having to put your Western sense of legal protections behind and realise you´ll be doing things that are inherently dangerous and if you get hurt there isn´t much come back. Lawyers don´t get much work on litigation claims here. I imagine if you´re from the US that must sound a bit like heaven.

Take Pacaya. It´s an active volcano (last major eruption waayyy back in the 90s) about an hour´s trip out of Antigua and is pretty much day trip de jour with the Lonely Planet toting masses here. You imagine when they say you´ll be climbing an active volcano that you might get close enough to take some pictures, not close enough to have your leg hair burnt. You get to the lip of the crater and look down on a blackened lava field that is pure Mordor (from Lord of the Rings) sans flaming eye at the peak then notice people actually a few metres away from what looks very much like molten lava and realise you´ll be doing the same thing. Words don´t describe just how expletive inducing cool that is, despite the fact I´m pretty sure my travel insurance won´t cover this kind of thing.

Walking on lava that´s only hardened days ago is a lot like walking on ice. It´s crunchy, hollow sounding and has massive cracks all the way through it. Every now and then you look down a fissure and see the glow of shifting lava a foot below your feet and in the split second before you realise how scary that is the only thing that goes through your head is "holy crap, this is cool!". So I did toast marshmallows on a 1.5m long stick and realised that was pretty much what everyone did, only the Mexicans (lots of richer Mexican tourists, which was a change) seemed to prefer slices of chorizo. Posh types.

I made a move from Antigua to the central highlands of the country to a place called Lanquin, which is famous for some caves (gutas! See how my Spanish gets better in leaps and bounds!) that I didn´t see. The trip up there takes you over a couple of hours of windy roads through coffee and maize growing country and it appears to be just before planting season. They love slash and burn farming in this part of the world and there were times the smoke was so thick over these massive valleys you couldn´t see the sun. It seems by going up on Saturday they were all trying to get through two days of burning before their day off on Sunday and you mostly saw the spectacle of entire hillsides ablaze. I know it gets better as my trip back through the mountains was on Monday morning and the sky was clear over green hills and all rather breath taking.

The reason I didn´t go to the caves at Lanquin (I did stay in the town though) was I´m feeling the walls closing in a bit and I prefered to go to Semuc Champey (SC from here on in), which has a much better rap. That was a wise move, it seems with hindsight. They put you on the back of a ute for the 12k winding drive through the forest to the site and again you know saftey is in your own hands. If you´re stupid enough not to hold on and fall off the back of the tray onto the road all the Guatemalans are going to do is laugh. I´m starting to like that devil may care attitude.

The first part of the day was into the caves at SC, which are small, narrow and mostly under water. They tell you not to wear anything but your swimmers and some rather nasty looking shoes they give you (mine were size 17. Zapitas grande!), not even to take your camera. They give you a candle and say to try and hold it out of the water while you´re swimming (!!!) and then it´s an hour or so of swimming between rock formations, climbing ropes, sliding down waterfalls on your arse and jumping off high rocks into murkey water. It was an amazing experience and one I´d strongly recommend. I even got good at doing breast stroke with a lit candle between my teeth and not setting any of my hair on fire. A skill I´m sure will come in handy one day.

After lunch the other part of the day was SC itself, which is a series of huge clear pools that cascade from one into the other and after a photo frenzy from the lookout high above you then swim in each one, sliding down waterfalls or diving off them to get to the next level. The place has repute (acording to the Lonely Planet, in case anyone thinks I´m getting actual knowledge from anywhere else) of being one of the most beautiful in Guatemala and I´d have to say from what I´ve seen so far I´d agree. It´s also prime chocolate growing country so the little girls from the village come up and see you raw cocoa pods, which are sort of creamy coloured, have a purple centre and a very sticky. I don´t think they taste much like chocolate but all the Europeans disagree so maybe their sugar beet flavoured chocolate is closer to the real thing than our cane sugar stuff. I´m still not converting.

So a few really good days of nature (punctuated with some horrible bus rides I´ll spare you from) and I´m back in Antigua for my next leg. I´ve only got 4 more days til I fly to Costa Rica and I really should go and learn something about the country before I get to the airport. My last stop here will be Lago de Atitlan, which is supposedly another natural gem. I could get used to this. As I´ve since seen that the cities are hell holes and the transport is utter crap it´s good to know there´s something worth seeing here.

Poverty Fetishists

Antigua :: Guatemala

Firmly back in the 3rd world.

Places: Flores, Tikal, Rio Dolce, Livingston & Antigua.

Coolest thing I did: Saw the sunrise over Tikal. Even worth the 3am start.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There were a people of Carib (ie black) descent living in Venezuela before Columbus hit the Americas. Still haven't found someone to tell me how they reckon they got there.

I was a little skeptical about seeing yet more Mayan ruins but leaving the daddy of them all, Tikal, until last now seems to have been a good idea. It's kind of like 3 Palenques' all stuck together and having had so little of it restored makes it feel all the more special. After a 3 am start I was sitting on top of the tallest temple with about 60 of my new closest friends to watch the sun rise over the mist shrouded tree tops with the silhouettes of the other large temples just poking through the roof of the jungle canopy that covers the site. You get the growls of howler monkeys and see toucans, just like the ones on the Fruitloops box flittering about in front of you. You also get the bonus of not having to share it with hundreds of picnicking locals or 40+ degrees and 100% humidity like you would if you went at lunch time.

As mentioned, Tikal, due to it´s location in a much poorer country than Mexico has not had much of the jungle cleared from it, nor have any but the main temples been uncovered and restored. The tallest, Temple IV was cleared and rebuilt in the 1960s and due to neglect during the various right wing military dicatorships since has already been reclaimed by the jungle. They've only re-cleared the top 1/4 since and it's pretty cool to just see the stone peak of it poking through the grass and vines. It's the most Indina Jones ruins I've seen on this trip. Great stuff.

While Tikal is undoubtedly why everyone is in the area, the nearby town of Flores where I was based was also a nice place to hang out after a hard day of climbing pyramids in the jungle. It's a tiny place on an island in the middle of a lake that's only joined to the mainland by a half km long causeway. It's a nice place to swim in the lake, have a siesta in a hammock or have a Gallo (that's the Cerveza of choice here) while you watch the sun go down. After all that sunning myself like a lizard in Belize I deserved the rest, after all.

My next movement had me skirting the edge of the Belize border to the very short point where Guatemala touches the Gulf of Mexico, a little town called Rio Dolce, whose biggest claim to fame is being at the end of the longest concrete bridge in Central America. However, I ended up staying at in a bunch of cabins off the main river up in the jungle that could only be reached by boat. That was well worth it. You could take little canoes out and go swiming in the main river or simply sit around drinking beer in hammocks. Ended up playing way too much "Arsehole". The only down side is my room somehow had become home to a small colony of bats who were too scared to leave during the day but would quite happily dive bomb my mosquito net all night when the sun went down. Ah well, you pay for nature then you should get it, warts and all I suppose.

The reason most people come to Rio Dolce is to do a boat trip up the river to Livingston, the port where the river flows into the Gulf. It's a winding trip through limestone cliffs covered in jungle, and skirted by lillypads and bird life. You stop on the way to drink milk out of coconuts and swim in thermal springs (of dubious value when it´s 35 degrees, but still a novelty) and the like. Lots of people do it one way, mostly those who came to Livingston by sea from Belize or Honduras and want to get to the less remote Rio Dolce but I found doing the return trip over a whole day meant you got to do the whole thing at a slower pace and see a bit more.

Livingston itself is not very well connected to the rest of the country and as a result has harboured a black culture that's pretty alien to the rest of the country. The Garífuna are the only people who were living on the Gulf Coast before Columbus who were not Mesoamericans but they are obviously of African origin somehow. No one seems to know exactly when or how they got there but they do insist they are not descended from the slaves that spread out from the British colonies to places like Belize. We ended up buying lunch for one older guy who regaled us with his stories of travel around the world playing Caribbean music and gave us his opinion (as most old men do) about what was wrong with the country.

I decided to not cross into Honduras to see yet more ruins (I'm pretty happy about that at the moment) so I decided to do one last hellish day of bus travel for the country and go pretty much all the way from the Gulf to the Pacific in one day. I find the bus travel slow as hell, often cramped on surplus American school buses with seats designed for 10 year olds, not lanky bastards like me but very, very colourful. You don't really need to buy food because people keep selling you mango or cakes through the window of the bus at pretty much every stop. The scenery through the highlands of the middle of the country is rather nice (not quite as good as middle Mexico, but still worth a look) the illusion that the country is all very pretty isn't shattered until 15km from the middle of Guatemala City.

Guate (as they call it) pretty much has no redeeming features. It has that texture of exposed concrete, rust and grime that coats all third world cities, but there is a general undertone of menace throughout the whole place that you just didn't get in Mexico City. If you city has soldiers on the streets then there's a good sign that something's wrong. I see why tourists stay away in droves and was quite glad to only be swapping buses. The only downside is the place is total chaos and I had to cross the whole thing to get to a school bus (quite often refered to as chicken buses due to their common cargo of livestock) to the much nicer Antigua. Not somthing I plan on repeating.

If you've ever been to one of those pretty little European villages like Chesky Krumlov that has been totally warped by the Lonley Planet Effect then you'll know what to expect of Antigua. The businesses down any street go Hostel, Internet Cafe, Tour Agency, Spanish language school, Hostel,... and you get the feeling that someone once wrote it was a nice, low key place to stay and learn Spanish and it's become a self fulfilling prophecy. It's a spectacular looking place, all colonial, cobbled streets with three volcanos towering over it so you can see the draw, but it does feel a little bit like a safe option.

The town is also full of a breed I'm seeing more and more since I got into Guatemala, the poverty fetishist. I'm feeling a bit outnumbered by the young Westerners learning Spanish here for two months before going off to help weave baskets in the mountains or save the turtles or something. They're easy to spot, as they're usually covered in Indian bands or wearing blankets and generally trying to hide the fact they speak English. Interesting bunch to talk to, but you do get the feeling they're a bit like the people I met working in kibbutzim in Israel, ie everyone's doing it but not 100% sure why. I guess it's somewhere between guilt and looking good on the entrance papers for Yale.

I'm not sure why people reckon I´m a bit cynical....

We have a new winner

Flores :: Guatemala

A postscript: the best single day of diving in my life. Ever.

Places: Caye Caulker & Flores.

Coolest thing I did: The. Blue. Hole.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Breaking the PADI limit of 18m isn't actually that hard, so long as you play by the rules.

If you couldn't care less about diving you can probably stop reading now.

The wake up call was at 5am, which was actually the first time I've been up early enough to see a sunrise in quite some time and the one that lights up the sky over Caye Caulker was a perfect melange of reds and yellows. Not a single cloud in the sky and enough to make me remember to go back to the hostel and grab my camera. 5am starts really don't agree with getting my brain into gear.

I'd see pictures of the Blue Hole on postcards all week (put it into google images) and to be honest when the boat first slows down after the 2 hour trip from Caulker to get there you can't quite make out what you're looking at, but you do notice a large patch of water that's a much deeper blue than the turquoise around it. What you're looking into is a sink hole 100ish m deep which was probably formed when an underwater cave collapsed on itself about 50,000 years ago. I'd dived something similar off Dahab, in Egypt and was a little annoyed at half of Russia being already in the water by the time we got there. At this time of day (say 9am) there was one other dive boat and those guys were already on their way out, massive smiles on their faces. That bodes well.

The dive consists of a drop to a sandy ledge at 10m, then a quick descent to 35m where there's an overhang of stalactites that you can swim under to exactly 40m. For those of you who dive that's pretty much the far edge of the PADI tables and more than double the limit for Open Water divers, which of course we all were. The diver masters were very professional and did tell us that doing this as the first of 3 dives was pushing the tables as far as they'd go but they were always sure to corral us to the right depth at the right time and to make sure we did our saftey stops. Very impressed with the skill, but if you do come, bring your own dive computer. I told the time by counting in my head and wasn't 100% sure the mechanical dial on the gauges were very acurate.

Enough physics and technobabble.

The highlight of the dive, besides the eerie feeling of floating through caves or being suspended in blue light is the reef sharks that seem to congregate at about 20m down, where the water temp drops most suddenly. I'd say we saw a dozen swimming around us and one got so close that it bumped one of the diver masters tanks. A unique experience and the icing on the cake for this one.

The two other dives of the day, at Half Moon Wall and The Aquarium could have been the best to dives on any other day I've done so far. Eagle Rays, Turtles and more reef sharks were the highlights. While none of the three dives have topped individual dives I've been on at home or in Egypt, the whole day combined was probably the best I've ever experienced. If you're out in Belize, make a special attempt to do it.

As an aside, lunch was on Half Moon Caye, which is a bird sanctuary, but more interestingly (I thought) a coral caye much younger than some of the others, so much that you keep tripping over rocks that have a brain pattern or rows on parallel lines and realise what you've stubbing your toe on is dead coral that hasn't had time to be worn down yet. Quite something else.

Right, in Guatamala now, but I'll save more for next time.

Go slow

Caye Caulker :: Belize

Is it possible to be any more laid back?

Places: Belize City, San Pedro and Caye Caulker.

Coolest thing I did: Saw many, many stingrays whilst snorkeling and managed to not get Steve Irwin-ed in the process.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Belize is far more like Jamaica than Mexico. It's hard to find Spanish speakers and people who generally don't like Bob Marley.

Should you ever be in a position to arrive in Belize City by land here's a tip, don't arrive on Sunday. After Mexico, where everything is open pretty much all the time it was a bit of a shock to find that arriving in Belize practically the whole country is closed on a Sunday, no restaurants, no corner shops, nothing. That would have been fine had I not decided to walk the 800m from the bus station to find a guest house. Turns out I was not only the only white guy walking the streets with a backpack but the bus station (well, really a field where buses stop) was in the most ghetto part of town. As it was only the young, male and destitute walking the streets of what could be described as a shanty town (the sign saying "Welcome to Belize City. pop 70,000" was hidden partially by jungle) I got everything from nasty stares to pretty aggressive requests for change. Not the best start. Add to that the guest house looked like a gaol and it wasn't the best first impression of a country. I only really stepped out to get money from the ATM to pay the woman that owned the place and even that was a bit of a trial. The second I went behind the glass doors to use the ATM about 5 blokes started hanging around waiting for me to get out. I ended up sucking it up, stuffing the money down the front of my pants and attempting a bit of a stare down as I passed through the middle of them all to get back to the guest house. Scary stuff.

Thank God the next place I went sucked me in so bad I'm already 4 days overdue leaving. I took a speed boat out to Caye Caulker, which is a sandy topped coral island perched right on the world's second biggest barrier reef (after our very own in Oz) lacking roads and any kind of stress at all. The whole place has a very Caribbean feel as the inhabitants are mostly descended from the same slaves that were brought to the British Caribbean (Jamaica mostly) and English and Scottish pirates that took refuge here in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was nominally part of the Spanish colony of Neuva Espania with Mexico and Guatemala but due to it's reef that helped hide risk happy pirates and hinder pursuit by the Spanish navy the place took on a very criminal, independent feel. In the end the Poms made it all official and claimed it as a colony (and made an effort to stop the pirates flogging all that Spanish gold), giving this little stretch of jungle and reef a very different feel from it's neighbors. For one thing, all that Spanglish I've been mangling for the last 3 weeks isn't needed. Some Mexican looking types (Mayan refugees from some colonial war or another, mostly) do speak Spanish, but pretty much only to each other.

The island's unofficial motto is "Go Slow", which is posted all over the place. If you first get here and rush around looking for somewhere to stay with a great big pack on your back everyone is pretty forward with giving you this advice. After a while it takes you most of the day to walk the 800m of packed sand road that divides the island, going suitably slow. It's the kind of place where you have to take it down a few notches otherwise you'd go nuts with boredom. The biggest dangers here are being hit by golf carts (there's no cars) or being hit with a coconut falling from a tree. Hectic stuff.

So, what do you do here? Well there didn't used to be a beach but a hurricane in the 60s cut the island in two and created a small swimable section of beach at the south end of the new gap, which is called the Split. There's not much sand there but there's a disused concrete dock that's been turned into a bar so you can sun yourself on that if you like. They've dropped picnic tables into a foot of water so you can sit in the water and write postcards or drink beers or whatever you like. Fish swim around your ankles and you can go snorkeling right off the beach.

However, that wouldn't be doing it justice. The water is like glass, warm as a bath and there's a bigger coral reef than Egypt's to explore. This makes the diving some of the best you're ever going to do, and that's before you try the Blue Hole (which at the time of this writing I'm one day off doing myself). There's an abundance of sharks, turtles, rays, eels and the like and the coral, while not nearly as good as that in Oz, is still amazing. Even if you don't dive, you can get on a half day boat cruise that takes you to some snorkeling spots that are amazingly abundant for being not even 1km offshore and only a few meters deep. I'd recommend it as a place to do your dive course if you don't know how, it'd be 5 days well spent even if you decided at the end of it all that diving isn't for you.

I'm having some trouble leaving, to tell the truth. I was seriously going to try and do some exploring of more of Belize but I've been enjoying this all too much. I did think about splitting my time between Caye Caulker and the much bigger San Pedro which is a 15 min boat ride away but I'm kind of glad I didn't. We spent our surface interval between two of the dives I did one morning walking around San Pedro and it was big enough to have cars and tarmac roads. Totally not the scene I'm looking for at the moment.

So tomorrow I'm taking my final chance to do the 3 dive day they do out to the Blue Hole (look it up on google, it's spectacular), including a personal deepest for me of 40m. I'm a little anxious but excited at the same time. Everyone who's done any diving on this island I've spoken too has claimed it to be the highlight, and from what I've seen so far then that's a huge call.

After that, I'm going to have to put some km between me and Belize if I want to not have to tear through Guatemala. Swapped my left over pesos and and Lonely Planet of Mexico for a Guatemalan LP and some Quetzals with a bloke I went diving with the other day so I'm all set.

Musica en vivo!

Playa de Carmen :: Mexico

Getting mostly wet.

Places: Cozumel and Playa de Carmen.

Coolest thing I did: Really didn´t do much but dive over and over again.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: So tequila is of such good quality you can actually drink it neat without lemon and salt.

Tomorrow Mexico is going to give way to Belize and as a result I´m in Playa de Carmen, which is pretty much baby Cancun. Lovely white beach running into turquoise water but totally geared up for extracting the maximum USD from everyone here. I spent a bit of time in Cozumel depressed about the whole thing, but in the end I´ve decided that I´m encroaching on the cruise ship holiday maker´s turf and shouldn´t be too judgemental or concerned about the whole thing. Most of Mexico isn´t like this, as the last three weeks have shown me, and having all the cruise ships dock in one place is better than having more baby Cauncuns popping up all down both coasts. After all, the Mexicans would be mad not to try and get as much money out of the Yanks as they can, it´s just the result of the differing incomes being so close together that it´s possible for the smart Mexicans to expoilt the different and get ahead.

It didn´t take me long to work out how to avoid the touts and those-who-wear-floral-shirts-without-irony and pretty much make my way between dive boat, cheap taco house and hostel. I found a pretty good operation to go on two dives with every morning and despite it being a fairly wild time to dive here I had a pretty good warm up for Belize. The same barrier reef stretches from the Yucatan all the way down to Honduras so every dive is along coral reefs and in bath warm, crystal clear water (if you dive, we were getting something in the order of 40m visibility). The highlights were rays, turtles and barracudas, the last of which I don´t think I´ve seen anywhere else. It was good to get back in the water and do some fairly shallow and easy dives, but this time of year there´s big problems with the currents shifting suddenly. As we´re going from dry season and building up for the hurricanes right now the weather patterns affect the currents minute to minute and on one dive we had to abandon the whole thing when we saw divers being washed 30 to 40m off the edge of the wall we were supposed to be following by currents ripping through gaps in the coral.

The scene on Cozumel is pretty much drunk day trippers from cruise ships or getting underwater. The hostel crowd was divided into people who were diving, learning to dive, instructing divers or who pretty much got the hell out of there on the first day. The waterfront in town goes for several kilometres in both directions meaning there´s no beach to lie on any more and after you´ve been conned into hiring a moped to cruise around the island you realise what a pain in the arse it is to even go for a swim. It´s well worth staying on Cozumel if you dive or snorkel and not at all if you don´t. Unless you do enjoy doing body shots off Texans in Senor Frogs. Then you´d be ok too.

I have to say Mexico has exceeded all my expectations as a place to travel and you could quite easily spend several months here. I´ve only had a small taste of it all and I could see how people spend half a year following the surf down the Pacific or diving their way from the tip of the Yucatan all the way down the Carribean. That also discounts the nightlife of Mexico City, or the relaxed vibe of the colonial towns in the highlands, both of which I encountered lots of travelers and ex-pats in for the long haul, either volunteering or learning Spanish the hardcore way.

While I found the people very warm and easy with their "amigos" or "buenos" I do feel like this is a country that is always going to be a bit tense with itself under the surface. The fact that the police at all levels carry machine guns and the army is deployed through much of the highlands shows theres something going on with the diverging incomes and the feeling that while Mexico overall is growing into a full fledged developing nation there´s a frustration with those being left behind. A country that has exported an estimated 15m people north of it´s border in the hope of getting ahead of those left behind farming the dustbowls of Northern Mexico shows there is still a lot of people being left out in the cold. Any country with a history so full of revolutions as this one doesn´t lend to having it´s people grumble quietly forever. I think Mexico is a country with lots of potential to continue to improve it´s place in the world, but it´s always going to be at least a little behind it´s northern sibling, with all the tensions that brings.

So hopefully I´ll be writing the next one of these from somewhere in Belize.

Kilometres y Ruinas

Cozumel :: Mexico

All the temples you can eat. And a beach too. Very Mexican.

Places: Palenque, Merida, Chitchen Itza, Tulum and Cozumel.

Coolest thing I did: Had all-you-can-eat steak for 5 pounds. Still digesting it.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: .

I wasn´t expecting much of Merida, after arriving at 5am and finding at town that has not much going for it besides a colonial town square I was ready to write it off and move on. I´m glad the thought of getting back on another night bus talked me out of it. On Sunday the main square (I´ve since found all town squares are called Zocalos, not just the one in Mexico City) is shut down to vehicle traffic and people wander around all day and night soaking it all up. I spent the evening in a cafe in yet another old colonial building eating and watching a band play. The best bit was when old couples would just be walking past, stop and start dancing samba or the cha-cha in front of the band. Happened all the time and was very cool to watch. It turns out that Sunday night in Merida was one of the best so far in Mexico. Serendipity is tops.

Merida was the one break in my mad dash to see south central Mexico´s main Mesoamerican sites in 3 days. I´d left the Banksey-esque stenciled streets of San Cristobal with the full intention of staying overnight in the jungle near Palenque but arrived early enough in the day to work out that was going to be a bit of a pain in the arse so I left my bag in the bus station and booked a ticket on the next night bus. From what I´ve heard since I would have been sleeping to the sounds of guitar struming hippies and howler monkeys so I´m kind OK with my decision.

Palenque is the best of the Maya ruins I´ve seen. It´s still pretty much set right into the jungle and even though the main buildings have been partially restored in some places it´s still cool to see some with trees growing out of the middle of them and vines running down their side. Lots of pyramids, some with the temples on the top still intact and even with inscriptions and stellae that haven´t been carted off to the Louvre. I´d say from what I´ve seen if you´re going to see just one of the ruins out here then this is the one to go to. There was things I liked about Teotihuan and Chitchen Itza better, but overall this one is hard to beat. It´s also where they dug up King Pukal, whose Jade death mask you see in the museum in Mexico City (though they´ve since transcribed his name from the heiroglyphs as King Sun Shield II or something. I think they might be a little too literal in their translations...). Or rather as I just found out, a replica of it. Apparently the real one was stolen in the 80s and never found. Keep you eyes out on eBay, you never know.

I think another thing that I liked about Palenque was the noticable lack of Yank in the air. I arrived in Chitchen Itza about 11am and already the busses were disgorging their American daytripper bounty from Cancun. It´s hard to position yourself between the herds and still get good pictures without being interupted by such soundbites of wisdom as "I bet that´s old" or "what do you think they made it out of?". I kid you not, I heard both.

Chitchen Itza has a couple of very cool things about it. The best is the main Pyramid, that has been restored to it´s former glory so there´s no imagining about it. There´s these big serpent heads at the base of the stairs and during the equinoxes the shadows in on the stairs make it look like the body of the serpents are either climbing the stairs or going down them. That must be pretty cool to see. The other thing is they have a big domed building they think was an observatory. To think this was about the time my anscestors were busy rapeing and pillaging convents all up and down the Irish coast and that´s a pretty cool thing. All the sites are big on architectural tricks you can do with the alignment of celestial bodies.

Tulum doesn´t have the prettiest of ruins (in fact, they´re pretty crap compared to the others) but it´s all about location. Tulum was the only one of these cities that was inhabited when the Spanish arrived and it´s a walled fortress perched right on the cliffs of the Caribbean so all you´re pictures have white sand and turquoise seas in the background. That alone makes up for the fact that it´s much smaller than Chitchen Itza and thus the ratio of Yank to surface area is much higher. They travel in packs and a guide in broken Spanglish is trying to tell them something they could read on the plaques on the ground if they weren´t all blocking them. Deep sigh. I did see a big iguana right up close, making me look like a top notch nature photographer instead of really luck that it sat still.

I did a fair bit of reading about Mesoamericans because it´s been alomst impossible to get ahold of books in English and I ran out of things that aren´t the Lonely Planet to read quite some time ago. It seems that the two main groups the Spanish encountered, the Aztecs and the Toltecs were pretty much just a bunch of blood thirsty bastards that had taken over when the far more advanced Maya had collapsed about 500 years earlier. Both were big proponents of human sacrifice (there´s a platform in Chitchen Itza whose sole purpose is to make pyramids of the skulls of your defeated foes on) and the afore mentioned ball game. I reckon they should hold a soccer match in the reconstructed ball court at C.I., the accoustics are incredible and it would be pretty cool to watch from the temples overlooking the court. You wouldn´t even have to sacrifice anyone at the end, it´d just be fun.

Tulum was a revelation. The beach is what you expect Caribbean beaches to look like and I managed to get myself a cabana on the beach for two days to enjoy it. After my mad dash through temple land to have a nice pristine white sand beach to lie on and bright blue water to swim in right outside my door was pretty cool. The cabanas are slowly being replaced by big hotels so coming back in a couple of years might not be as relaxing, but I´m sure by then someone will have discovered another old fishing village just down the coast to replace it.

Today I´ve surfaced in Yankland. I thought steering clear of Cancun would have kept me away from the Yanks but I´ve been via Playa del Carmen to the island of Cozumel and I´m a bit depressed by all the rednecks drinking giant Margaritas outside Senor Frogs. I´m hoping things get better once the cruise ships pull up anchor for the night and I get to start some diving tomorrow. The second biggest barrier reef in the world awaits and it´s nothing but azure waters from here to Belize.

Me trae la cuenta, por favor?

San Cristobal de las Casas :: Mexico

Surf, Cervezas and Colonial Churches to come

Places: Peurto Escondido & San Cristobal de las Casas.

Coolest thing I did: Saw wild monkeys. Monkeys are always cool.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Spanish for "retired" is "jubiladas". It makes sense, I´d be bloody jubilant too if I never had to work again.

Up until this point my intercity bus travel had been done on the ultra swish directo buses, which go where you want without many stops, have air conditioning and even give you tickets for you bags in the bottom just like on a plane. The trip from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido on the coast was nothing like that. I paid about 2 pounds for the trip and that should have been my first tip off that it was going to be different. That and the fact everyone else on the bus was Mexican could have also been a clue. I ended up on what was an old American school bus, painted blue, which went the long route, and works on the idea that you just drive a set route and stop wherever anyone wants to get on or off, until you get to the end. You can also use it to transport produce, but that involves haggling with the bus driver to work out how much, say a 50kg bag of onions costs to take and dump on the side of the road in the next town. 200km took about 9 hours.

That may have sounded a bit like bitching, but it wasn´t for two reasons. Firstly, it was a wonderful insight into how poor Mexicans (ie most of them) get around and do business, and it was possibly the most breath taking bus route I´ve ever been on. You go through the mountains on roads right on the cliff edge and the views are spectatular. Every now and then you catch a glimpse of a ribbon of asphalt winding it´s way up or down the side of a mountain through the forrest and realise that´s where you´re going. When you finally break through and see the Pacific Ocean the sight is something else to behold. The fact the whole trip along the coast (say the last hour) was at sunset was truly special. Great 9 hours spent.

Puerto Escondido is the most touristy (and thus the most acessible) of the towns stretched along Oaxaca State´s surfable middle stretch but you´d hardly know it. The main strip is lined with cheap places to eat and stay and not much else, even if they do have a supermarket and an ATM, which other towns like Zipolite apparently still lack. Still, Pte Esco has one thing that all these other towns lack: Playa Zicatela, which is the home of the Mexican Pipeline. The lines of waves come in one after the other and curl off to break in perfect symmerty almost the whole lenght of the beach. The fact that I did not see one person try to ride it, even the Mexicans tells you how advanced a wave it would be to ride. Still, the town is full of Aussies walking around with a surfboad tucked under their arm (mostly learning for the first time...) at least looking the part.

Going for a swim with the sun setting over the bay is pure pleasure and I pretty much switched off for a couple of days, staying away from the two biggest attractions which are surfing and game fishing, either of which would have been nice to have a go at but I´m not that fussed at the moment. Plenty of more opportunities to be active later in the trip. I also learned that Spanish for fish is Pescado, which allowed me to eat fish. Seafood was top notch if you were willing to stretch your budget to 3 or 4 pounds a meal. Tough life, this.

I took my first overnight bus (back on the directos, so I got my own reclining chair and thus some sleep) to arrive early in the morning in the mountain town of San Cristobal de las Casas, which is kind of a prettier version of Oaxaca, but with a much different native flavour. The town is in the heart of Chiapas country, making it the home of the antigoblization movement, the Zapatistas. It was only in the 90s that armed insurgents led by a certain Subcommandante Marcos (why he didn´t at least make himself a commandante is beyond me...) took control of the public buildings in the town declaring that the just come into effect NAFTA free trade treaty with the US was going to make the indigenous population of the area even more impovrished and that they weren´t having it. The army had to be sent back in to take control. This means theres lots of people with guns on the street here most of the time. If you can ingore that fact then it´s a very nice, laid back place.

Churches, do you want churches? It´s got loads of them, bright colours, dull colours, up hills, in squares, recently renovated or run down, they´re all here. I think I pretty much just wandered around town and every time I saw a church I took a picture of it. There must be heaps.

Luckily the town has a none too meanacing feel too it and is a nice place to just relax and take it all in. It´s also good day triping country. I went on a day trip to the Cañon del Sumidero, which is an easy hour on a minibus away. It´s basically tearing around this great big Canyon in speed boats looking for animals to harass. I saw vulture-looking birds, crocs, iguanas and best of all, monkeys. I felt a bit sorry for the crocs, as the biggest on was sitting on a massive pile of plastic bottles. Lets just say garbage disposal hasn´t made much impact on rural Mexico, where they tend to just burn it all in big piles or chuck it out of moving vehicles. Sad really. The canyon trips all unfortuately include a side trip to a nearby town that really doesn´t seem to have taken to the massive influx of tourism very well. We didn´t want to be there (because it´s unattractive and everyone is surly) and they didn´t want us there (because we're unattractive and surly, no doubt. A complete waste of an hour, bar the fact I did have a pretty good hamburger for about 25p with a coke. The local mayor must get a kickback from the tour operators or something.

I think by talking about this to a few other people who have been traveling Central America more than I have recently that anthropological experiements in tourism have widely failed in this part of the world. It´s like someone has decided that rich people from the West want to go and gawk at how the indigenous population live (ie. mostly poorly) and said people actually want to be looked at in this way. I´d say they want the money but they don´t want to be a tourist spectacle. I´m sure I´ve raved about that before, but going into remote villages and being force fed local handicrafts isn´t finding "The Real Mexico". People here drive cars, ride on buses, have satellite TV, can get antibiotics when they´re sick and watch football. I quite often think we´re looking for something that just isn´t there.

I´m off to the temples in the jungle for the next stretch, which I´ve been quite looking forward to. Everyone I´ve spoken to coming the other way speaks especially highly of Palenque, the next stop. More to come.