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.

Muy Bien

Oaxaca :: Mexico

The first week of the Central American jaunt

Places: LA, Mexico City & Oaxaca.

Coolest thing I did: Watched what can only be called a Mariachi parking lot in action.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Prehistpanic Americans used to play a kind of soccer using only their hips and forearms. If you broke certain rules you got decapitated. Pleasant sounding bunch.

After a brutal three days of planes and beds (Brisneyland, Sydney, LA and then Mexico City) I arrived in the Mexican capital and was rather pleasantly surprised. I´d been a bit primed to find it dirty, crowded and dangerous, and while it is the first two, it´s an easy enough city to deal with and chock full of interesting stuff to look at. I found that my trying to learn Spanish from a book before I came didn´t survive my first contact with people who actually speak Spanish, but with a mix of the dozen words I can remember and a healthy does of Spanglish ("Whereo areo los underpantos") I´m getting by fine.

The first thing you notice about the heart of the city, it´s main square which is called the Zocalo is that while it may have seemed cool to build your new city on the heart of the city the people you just conquered, it may not make good engineering sense. All the main buildings, including the Catheral, appear to be sinking in certain places. Apparently the leader of the Spanish Conquisadors, a bit of a devious bastard by the name of Hernan Cortes, wanted to prove a point so he had the cathederal built on the site of the main temple of the old Aztec captial. Turns out thats a pretty bad foundation and walking around inside now is slightly vertigo inducing.

My favourite bits were the murals that seem to be the thing to commission if you´re working for the Department of Culture in Mexico. There´s some massive ones inside the Presidents office building, which they nicely let you go in for free and have a look at, showing the whole history of Mexico. There´s also a great one inside the Art Nouvea/Deco Palace de Bella Artes that had originally been commissioned for the Rockerfeller Centre in New York, but looking at it you can see why the Rockerfellers weren´t so keen on it. It´s about the battle between Capitalism and Communism and you can guess which ones are the baddies. If you keep your eyes open you end up spotting murals bloody everywhere.

If you do go to Mexico City, do go to the Anthropological Museum, which is full of heaps of Prehispanic stuff made out of rock. I liked the great big Olmec heads and great big heads of the feathered serpent God (whose name starts with a Q and I can´t be arsed finding out how to spell so I will call Frank). The building itself is also very cool to look at, with the upstairs windows covered in these honeycomb looking strips. Its also worth doing because at some point you are going to go and look at pyramids somewhere in Mexico and knowing a little about what you´re looking at helps. There are signs in English too, which I haven´t seen since. The highlight are the death masks, kind of made in the the Egyptian style but out of jade.

My best nightime experience so far was walking down to Garibaldi Square after dinner to see what had to be a hundred guys dressed like matadors playing trumpets and guitars and the like. I´m not sure why they congregate there or if they were getting any money out of it, but you can buy a cheap beer and sit there and watch the chaos. I especially liked the ones who got sick of the square and stood on the median strip playing trumpets into oncomming traffic. On the way back I also got the treat of seeing the cops standing in the entrance to a strip club watching soccer with the bouncers while there was three guys handcuffed to the rails in the back of their paddy wagon.

One other spot worth mentioning is Condesa, which is pretty much like another country. It´s a posh suburb a short Metro ride away from where I was staying and it was a strip of nightclubs, cafes and restaurants that could be in any upmarket street in the world. The biggest shock is just how un-Mexican most of the people there look. You expect people to be Americans but when they open their mouths it´s pretty obvious they speak Spanish and come from around there. Instead of crumbling rusty old hunks they drive the latest model yank tanks (think Escalades and Navigators). It´s eye opening that what we´d consider a fairly normal upper middle class exists in a city where most of the population live in concrete block houses clinging to the side of the mountains.

So far my ruin visiting has been limited to Teotihuacan, a pretty impressive set of pyramids just outside Mexico City. They are in pretty good nick, considering the age and history of the place, with the Temples of the Sun, Moon and Feather Serpent, Frank all accessible and climbable. One thing you do start to appreciate is that the Prehispanic Mexicans were a pretty bloodthirsty lot with a whole load of reasons to sacrifice people. I wonder how they decided who was going to get the chop, so to speak. That´s a conversation you wouldn´t want to be having with middle management ("I´m sorry Bob, you just haven´t been showing up on time and we´ve noticed your guarding of the granery is getting sloppy. We´re going to have to sacrifice you to the Sun God. Sorry about that, mate").

My second destiation on this trip has been Oaxaca, and the biggest problem with getting here was working out how to say it (for the record it´s Wah-ha-ka) so I could buy a bus ticket. It´s up in the highlands and very hot during the middle of the day which tends to enforce siestas. Which isn´t a bad thing. It´s the kind of place to come if you don´t mind moving from meal to meal and taking pictures of churches to break it up. It´s the kind of colonial town you think of when you imagine Mexico during the day. At night, it´s a different story. Due to the fact it´s the home of Mexico´s most renowned Mescal (Tequila´s dirty little sister, which has had one less distilation) and that tends to make you go a bit stupid on the shots. I´ve found it easy to be adopted by Mexicans to be paraded around the bars and clubs. I do sometimes feel like their retarded friend, not being able to say much except "My name is Steve".

I took a day trip to the Zapotec (a kind of Mexican Indian, apparently) villages up in the Sierra Norte, which is a coule of hours north of Oaxaca. Lots of hiking involved and with the change from 1500m in Oaxaca to 3200m in the moutains you do feel like breathing isn´t really doing much for you. The guide was local and spoke no English so it was hard to tell him set a bit less of a cracking pace. At least I wasn´t the slowest of the two gringos on the trip. There was a poor bloke my age who wasn´t exactly Ukraine´s fittest man. I swear he could have had nose bleeds and you wouldn´t have noticed from all the sweat pouring off him. There was lots of clambering up rocks and looking over sheer cliffs but very pretty all the same. As a bonus we also got the local bus on the way back, with half the seats taken up by produce going to town. Luckily no chooks.

So far, so good. I´m having a bit of a Japanese experience again, as it´s hard to blend into the background when you´re a foot taller and several shades lighter than everyone else. It´s not been as hardcore on the hassling and begging as I´d expected but I´ve yet to hit the tourist hotspots in the Yucatan yet. Still it was nice to walk around pyramids without being chased by blokes wanting you to ride their camels.

Scaly and warm

Darwin :: Australia

On being a "bus tourist"

Places: Sydney, Darwin, Litchfield, Kakadu & Katherine.

Coolest thing I did: Saw real live Crocodiles in the wild

Coolest thing I didn´t know: .

When you’re and Australian living in a foreign country people tell you all about their trips to Ayer’s Rock and the Top End with an expectant look on their faces like you know first hand what they’re talking about. You nod sagely at their discussions of butter thick air and scaly, dangerous wildlife but really, you’ve got no idea what they’re talking about. The reason, of course, is most Australians seem to go and see half the world before going and visiting their own back yard. I’m pretty firmly in that camp, but due to my brother taking a job in Darwin over the last 6 months I have had the prefect excuse to see some bits of Australia’s Top End that have up until now only been known to me via National Geographic.

Darwin itself is a tiny place that’s trying very hard to get a whole lot bigger. Almost half the buildings here seem to be in various states of incompletion, cranes perching on the exposed ribs of half build multi-storey buildings. They tell me it’s a combination of increased military presence and the resources boom (you can see refrigerated tankers carrying Liquefied Natural Gas pulling out across the harbour) that’s causing Darwin to stretch at the seams. The lucky thing for Darwin, as opposed to a place like, say Dublin that’s been going through similar pressures of growth is between the Japanese Imperial Forces and Mother Nature Darwin has pretty much a clean slate to build on. As late as 1974 90% of Darwin was destroyed by Cyclone Tracey, giving you lots of room to put in nice wide roads and big high density buildings.

Still, it seems that even a 5 min wait at the lights or any whiff of not being able to get a seat at a restaurant causes Territorians to claim the place is getting way too crowded and going to the dogs.

People don’t come here to see Darwin, they come here to see the big name national parks. I’m up here at the very end of the wet season and most rivers no longer have defined banks, but have spread out onto the flood plains. I decided that even though I’m nowhere as fanatical an angler as my brother and Dad I got up at 3am to go fishing with them on the lower reaches of the Mary River. Despite my reservations about launching boats into Crocodile infested waters IN THE DARK(!) it was an experience to see a blood red sunrise coming up over endless water punctuated by the very tops of trees. Our attempts to catch the sport fish de jour, Barramundi, didn’t amount to much but we did have a fun day tearing around in the boat and catching fish too small to legally be kept.

I especially liked the real world encounters with Salt Water Crocodiles. You’d spot them slinking off the river bank into the water (down the river more, where there actually were defined banks) or a pair of reptilian eyes floating just above the surface. We got probably our best look at one when my brother cast a lure that got caught on a tree not too far from our boat which caused a crocodile that had been lurking under the water to race towards it. There was some debate at whether it was worth trying to get a $15 fishing lure away from the crocodile but with a bit of casting lines in the water to lure the croc away we did manage to get it back. Amazing animals to see up close.

We did also get to see some wallabies, some dingoes and even a snake on the way in, which you don’t really get to see on the tours because the animals tend to avoid the heat of the day when most of them go.

The next two days were a blur of going on bus tours with my Mum to Kakadu and Katherine. I remember why I don’t like bus tours now, there’s just too much logistics into getting everyone on and off the bus to look at every little thing, have a wee or eat something. While we covered a massive amount of ground in two days it was highly frustrating. Still, at one point I did have to laugh at the self-superiority of a younger group who came on a tour of the same places in a cover truck rather than a bus. Their guide would say “just wait for the bus people to move on…”. Seriously, I don’t care how young or old you are or how rugged you vehicle looks, if you pay someone to do all your thinking for you when you travel, you’re in the same boat. Man, that superiority gets on my nerves.

Right, back to the sights.

I liked the two boat cruises the best, one over the Yellow Waters of the South Alligator River (so named because the bloke who found it wasn’t much of a zoologist) and the one through the salmon pink cliffs of the Katherine Gorge. The wet season is the wrong time for seeing the big animals like Crocs and Buffalo by the water but it does attract a whole lot of bird life and things like turtles. Both tours were taken by part-Aboriginal guides, and both were very funny blokes. My favourite one liner was when the guy taking us down the Yellow Waters was late getting us back and said his boss always told him to apologise to groups if he was late. “Sorry. There, that didn’t take 220 years to do, did it?”. Classic.

I also like the cave paintings at the Nourlangie Rock, and even more I liked the fact that while the guide would happily give you his interpretation of what he thought they meant, he admitted that no one really knew and anyone who claimed otherwise was full of crap. I found that very refreshing.

I think was surprised me most about the landscape is that it wasn’t as desolate as I’d been led to believe by David Attenbourgh. While the trees are spread far apart there is grass about a meter tall covering everywhere, making it all look quite lush. I’m told that the way they know the wet season is over is that grass is knocked down by strong winds but still, it was a nice sight to see some life out there.

Documentary watchers will know that there’s been a bit of a debate about whether the Aboriginals were hunter gathers in the strict sense or whether their abundant use of fire to alter the landscape on a massive scale could be considered a kind of agriculture. They used to burn large swaths of grassland in a fairly ordered pattern to try and encourage new plant life and the migration of animals in search of new food.

Actually, you get told lots of these kind of legends where, with hindsight, it turns out the natives were right. One that sticks in my mind was that the people of Kakadu have referred to the area around the Ranger and Jabaluika uranium mines as being cursed lands, which could have been explained by the presence of radioactivity. Or that the area around Nourlangie is rich in ore, probably explaining the large lightning strikes in the area the Aboriginals had identified. While all these are impressive I'm wondering about all the tales they told that haven't been substantiated or have turned out to be plain wrong. Maybe we're being dazzled by a very small section of stories that were right but they suffer from survivorship bias and most of them are either wrong or unlikely. Still, I wonder how much knowledge that took centuries to build we're still losing because we don't at least try and collect all these stories. Who knows, maybe BHP could be looking for exploration rights in all the Aboriginal cursed lands. Stranger things have happened.

I think you don't quite appreciate how different things would be if you came back in the dry season except if, like my parents, you'd been here in both. They told me I'd be very impressed by the magnetic termite mounds, so called because they are big, flat, tombstone looking things that align with magentic north. I would have been, only the grass was so long I could only see the very tops. I did see some of the other, rougher looking Cathederal type termite mounds, but I never really did see the magnetic ones. Maybe I'll come back and see it all in the dry one day.

In fact, I'd say this few days has done nothing but whet my appetite to do more travel in my own country. I've been so focused on seeing the world I think I got a bit blind to how far people come to see Australia and how very unlikely they are to be disappointed. Maybe when I grow up and come home I'll try and see a whole lot more of it.

Cyprus Hill

London :: UK

This years vitamin D fix

Places: Pafos, Coral Bay, Polis & the Akamas Peninsula.

Coolest thing I did: Loads of beach crawling

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Aphrodite was apparently formed from the foam of some other God's testicles. Just try picturing that as a Disney cartoon.

London has had a terrible summer this year. Utterly horrific. Coldest May on record, followed by the wettest June and July and hardly a sunny day to speak of. So I was mostly looking forward to this trip simply to get some sun. I've since been accused of acting like a Pom as all I've been going on about since I got back was how good the weather was. It's made me realise that this is in now way the holiday I would have taken had it been my call, but there's no harm in something different now, is there?

The holiday involved more of an inventory than I was used to, you know, 8 people instead of one, a 4 bed villa and 2 cars (instead of no cars) all parked just north of Pafos, tourist hotspot of the west coast of Cyprus. I think the hardest thing for me to adjust to was getting into the rhythm of 7 other people who wanted very much to unwind, 3 of whom I'd never met before. I'm used to traveling around a lot on holiday (I reckon in a week I'd normally have stayed in 5 different places and seeing a whole lot of island) so the idea of lazing about the pool until a late lunch and then getting out to see a little bit more of the local area was a big adjustment. However, I think all this forced relaxation did me well.

The Republic of Cyprus feels Greek, everyone speaks Greek, the food is pretty much all the meatier bits of Greek food and people pretty much all look Greek. Which means you have to stop yourself from referring to your present location as Greece. The countryside should be a bit of a giveaway as it's much drier and more rugged than anywhere I've seen in either the Greek Islands or on the mainland (someone used the term 'moonscape' at one point) and once you get out of the two touristy build ups in Coral Bay and Pafos itself it's all very undeveloped.

We took day trips to both sides of the Akamas peninsula on the very north western tip of the island, which was difficult in places due to the very un-rugged nature of our Renault Scenic minivan. The completely empty stretch of beach at Lara bay can be overlooked as you eat grilled chicken and pork are spectacular, even if a little bit un-swimable due to some heavy undertows. The opposing side, with the town of Polis is a proper working village complete with old stone churches and flagstone capped squares you can sit after a hard day on the beach and drink coffee you can stand a spoon up in. All very relaxing.

The most touristy thing we did was go and have a look at (and even climb) the Rock of Aphrodite. It's supposed to be the birthplace of the goddess of love, prostitutes, marriage, war and a few other things, who obviously casts a large shadow of Cyprus by the fact practically everything on the island is named after her in some way. The coast dramatically plunges into the blue sea and big rocks jut out of the water and the dark sand beach. The legend goes that if you nude up and swim around the rock 20 times at dusk you'll look 20 years younger. I don't know if I want to look 10 again. I reckon maybe it's for the oldies.

I came back from the trip quite happy to have eaten my fill of meat and seafood, to have a bit of a tan and to have not done very much but swim in pools or beaches. I do, however, have a slight feeling of restlessness due to not having even come close to a column or Turkish town the whole time I was there. I think Cyprus is somewhere I could revisit to take a better look at on my own terms, but I think I needed a good relax and dose of sun more than anything else this time.

I saw you coming!

London :: UK

Well, what do you do with your old power stations?

Places: Tate Modern

Coolest thing I did: Resisted the urge to yell out at the top of my lungs It's just a stack of bricks!

Coolest thing I didn´t know: They replace the installation in the main turbine room of the Tate Modern every year. It's kind of cool when it's empty.

OK, so I know I don't usually write about touristy things when I'm not on the road, but I haven't been to the Tate Modern in London since the very first month I was here last time (May 2000, back in the Dreamtime) and it's the most touristy thing I've done since I've been back. That and I don't go to see modern art very much and had some thoughts about it all.

For those who aren't familiar, the Tate Modern is the gallery the British government built out of a disused power station on the south bank of the Thames in order to house it's ever growing modern art collection, thus also freeing up more space to show all that pre-20th century stuff the Tate Britain had in storage somewhere. The building itself is very cool, with one half left completely open 5 stories up and the other with lots of galleries on various levels. The collection revolves a fair bit, because that's the thing with modern art, people keep making more of it. Once you draw the line and say "right, everything made after 1900 is modern art" then you've got one collection growing faster than the other. Dissected cows and poo in jars aside, I don't mind a bit of modern art, especially the older stuff. Which I know is a bit of an irony, bugger off.

What I like most about going around modern art galleries (it's something I first noticed in the MOMA in New York) is watching the people looking at the art. There are three main grades: clueless-but-open-minded (this is where I fit), dragged-there-by-significant-other (this is where I used to be) and self-proclaimed-expert (god help us all). The first grade tends to take a look at the piece of art, scratch their head a bit and then read that little sign next to it to try and figure out what the bloody hell it's supposed to be. They then read it, look back at it and then they either have a eureka moment when they figure out why this pile of egg cartons is called "monument to the soul" or they close off their faces and mumble something about it being crap. You can sit in the Tate and watch most of the room around you reading the signs and pretty much none of them actually looking at the art. The second grade involves someone who really, really does not want to be there but are doing it because they are either at the start of a relationship and trying to impress someone, or are well into it and have been dragged there against their will. These people can be made out by their eye-rolling, sighing loudly and the need to sit down every 5 mins and hold their head in their hands. I once ended a promising relationship because I would have much rather had a pint than drag myself through another room of canvases painted grey. Oh, how times change.

The last kind, of course, is the true believer. You can see them rapturously staring for hours at a stack of house bricks trying to work out how many formations are possible because that's what the artist intended when they got 50 grand for a stack of house bricks. Thankfully, this kind of person is rare, but they are fascinating to watch, but not for too long. It's all you can do to hold off the urge to run over and slap them when they pontificate to their rather bored boyfriend about the torrent of ideas flowing from three white lines on a blue background.

Despite the negative tone I've had all through this, I do think there are some clever things done with modern art. I read somewhere that modern art is supposed to shift some of the work of thinking about a piece of art from the artist onto the viewer, kind of outsourcing the ideas so they give you enough space to look at something and make up your own mind about what it means. Sometimes, you probably think of something the artist didn't intend, and that's probably a bit of a success. I like the idea of that, even if the reality doesn't always meet it. I think for me to appreciate something like that, the artist has to meet me half way. They have to do something that's actually a bit clever, and obviously clever before I can get anything out of it. People keep telling me Andy Warhol was a genius for taking crates of soup cans and putting them in an art gallery, and I'd tend to agree, but not for the same reasons. If someone can attract enough stooges to pay lots of money for something they could have got for nothing then he is a branding genius. That's not really my bag when it comes to art.

I think the trouble these days is all the new stuff that's being created is being looked at by proper art people, who tend to have a hive mind like appreciation for what's good art. I'm waiting for the day when someone points out that the emperor has no clothes and the British government just paid 75 grand for half a cow. What arty types tell us we should be liking, and what most of us like seems a world apart. I that tastes change, and I'm sure they said the same thing about Picasso and Monet (and probably Da Vinci, in his day) but unless I'm missing something, so much modern art is leaving too much to interpretation. I'm willing to be open minded, but I'm not going to admit that 6 canvases painted brown in a room is all that inspiring. Call me uncultured.

I can't help but think of the sketch on the new skit series from the cast of the old "The Fast Show" which is called "I saw you coming". It's about a small antique/art shop in Notting Hill that sells to rich, pretty and thick women. The proprietor says things like "this particular piece of wank is rather popular with your kind" and "it cost me nothing, but as your husband just sold his media company I'm going to have to price this at 50 grand", followed by the women whipping out their chequebooks. It works better on TV.

The best thing I reckon I saw in the Tate was this giant egg thing with a big bit cut out of it's side and a black shiny interior. As the viewer was standing right in front of it you can see a beam of light that is reflected from the roof that moves when you watch it. The little sign tells us this beam of light is the art, and an object in it's own right. Even though it sounds wanky, I did see what they artist was trying to do. More of that, less of the piles of old mattresses (the smell is supposed to be challenging the viewer about the wastefulness of consumer society. Oh SHUT UP!)

The fun house mirror

Tokyo :: Japan

A bit of a quick sum up.

Places: Tokyo

Coolest thing I did: Saw a shopping centre with a zoo in it. A zoo I tell you. Are these people mad?

Coolest thing I didn´t know: In Japan Astroboy was known as Mighty Atom. I think their way is cooler.

So tomorrow I leave Japan and I have to say it's more than lived up to my expectations. I wasn't sure what to expect from the whole thing but from the mountains of snowboarding to the piles of history, I've had a ball. Of all the places I visited I have to say Tokyo is my favourite. Many people have told me they liked everything except Tokyo, but I get the feeling that this is what life is like for the vast majority of Japan's population, which is strikingly urban. I guess I feel more comfortable in big cities myself.

While I learned more than I ever wanted to know about Buddhism, Shinto, Japanese history and the like it's been the vision of the future and just watching the Japanese do their thing that I've liked the best. Watching them go about their business I get the idea that these people have childhoods that extend far longer than ours. I've seen women in their 20s walking down the street dressed as French Maids (apparently French maid is the new Schoolgirl for those who like to dress up), grown men paying $USD800 for one of those old game and watch machines, shops stuffed with comics and readers of all ages, shops that sell models of everything from Godzilla to Transformers and all the patrons are older than me. I swear these people are all kids!

From what I've read the post-War building boom has fueled an economy where everyone works hard and then has to find something to spend all their money on. I've mentioned the consumerism but there also seems to be this need for novelty, and to have a collection of something, no matter if it's vinyl records, porno comics or foot high robot models. Everyone needs a massive amount of novelty. Work and spend.

The cultural relativists will tell you that it's a shame that these people are losing the rigid culture they once had, that their national character is being replaced by a monoculture that stems from all that is evil in the US system. I tend to disagree with that. You only have to take a look around Tokyo for a day to recognise the inspiration for a fair deal of the West's popular culture, design and fashion. Thought we probably are gaining a global culture, it's not all one way traffic. I get sick of know it all guidebooks and backpackers scoffing at those who eat McDonalds here and don't experience the culture. You just have to look around to see the Japanese aren't hung up on these things, so why should we be? They are both embracing and extending the global culture of our generation so it would be foolish to go looking for "the real Japan" (as someone in the hostel put it to me) because Tokyo IS THE REAL JAPAN. The small number of people living in little farming hamlets and cultivating rice with a bullock cart are doing so because that's what the tourists want to see. I am personally more interested in what Japan is, not what it was.

I was sitting in a bar in Shibuya last night (the Insomnia Lounge, you walk around barefoot because it's all shag carpet, choice!) and a couple of guys sitting next to me at the bar stuck up a conversation with me. One of them was born only a week before me (1977 and all!) and does exactly the same kind of work as me, not only the Sun Unix geekery but the EMC and Cisco as well. So here I am, confronted with what my life would have probably been like if I was born to Japanese parents. It made me realise how lucky I am to have the life I do. These guys said they thought I was a musician because all the IT guys in Japan wear suits 6 days a week (because they work 6 days a week and often Sunday from home). They were stunned to hear I've lived in so many countries and just take time off to travel between contracts and countries. Both are barely out of Uni (that's how it works here) and should have been married 2 or 3 years ago, according to their parents. They work, then go out drinking 3 or 4 nights a week to go looking for girls. The studio the bloke my age lived in apparently has enough room for a single bed, a sink/kitchen/bathroom and a clothes rack. They also get paid about half what I do, even though this is the most expensive country I've ever seen (and I've seen a few).

Before this trip I was starting to question whether my life of drifting around is starting to wear thin and should I be thinking more about a career and becoming more settled. I think Japan has shown me just what a society based on the extreme of career and consumption looks like and it's made me more resolute that I've not wasted the last 7 or 8 years. That could have been me working 6 days a week, 50+ weeks a year with little to show for it. If nothing else this trip has given me some perspective on things and I'm much happier with life.

Right, I've enjoyed Japan but it's nearly time to fly back to Dublin. St Patricks Day awaits!