The End

Well, I'm now well and truly home. This blog kinda fell by the wayside as I journeyed further into the heart of the Mexican darkness, mostly off the beaten track, mostly in the back of a truck, always with reckless abandon, often stupid.

Circumstances conspired to bring me home – lack of money, inflexible air fares, swine flu (just kidding). I was reluctant to come back, but so far the transition has been relatively smooth. Although – it has to be said – I'm nearly 28, single, with a postgraduate education and I'm working in a bar. It's as if the last five years of life and love disappeared into some rift in the time-space continuum.

But now it's all new beginnings, fresh starts, clean slates. Rebuilding from the ground up. Learning life's harsh lessons. Drinking too much.

My energies will now be focused here and there.

Until the next tRip... viva zapata.

More Photos – San Pedro & Semuc Champey, Guatemala

San Pedro La Laguna, Lago Atitlan, Guatemala


mmm coffee






The view from San Marcos – San Pedro's quieter hippy sister village



My favourite Banana Bread lady Juanita


Semuc Champey, as seen from the lookout

Semuc Champey means 'where the river hides beneath the earth' in Q'eqci', the local Mayan language... and that's exactly what it does. The pools in the above photo are part of the natural limestone bridge above where the water goes underground. Wow.

Middle of nowhere

Here I sit, in the middle of the Guatemalan wilds on a wireless internet connection! Ain't technology grand! Sadly it's not good enough for Skype, Bittorrent or uploading of photos to this blog, but good enough for basic HTML email and text blogging...

After a week of nothing much in San Pedro La Laguna, I've made my way north, to the dead centre of the country, to a little place called Lanquin. San Pedro was nice – if only slightly overrated. Paradoxically, San Pedro is a town full of Spanish schools... where everyone speaks English. Menus are never in Spanish, even the drug dealers speak English. Seems like a shitty place to improve one's Spanish if you ask me. I caught up with my old mate Matze from Dresden, Germany and we drank overpriced Guatemalan beer (shite for the most part) and were subjected to cheesy late 90s trance in any number of sleazy gringo bars. It was fun, although far from cheap.

(While I'm on that point... to all the peeps who have travelled to Guatemala and raved about how cheap it is, I regret to inform you that it is no longer the case. Indeed, food, beer, and transport are far more expensive in Guatemala than in Mexico, especially Chiapas. How much this has to do with the devaluation of the Mexican Peso and how much with the Guatemalan propensity for price-gouging and ripping off tourists is debatable. I find it difficult to believe that somehow Mexico's economy has suffered more than the economic powerhouse of Guatemala... so maybe it's the latter).

Lanquin is a would-be ecotourist hotspot, and thankfully it seems to suffer slightly less from the rubbish problems that plague the rest of this very beautiful country. All around are waterfalls, caves, rapids, etc... it is a place of undeniable beauty, and as this post's title suggests, I really feel like I'm in the middle of fucking nowhere (despite the wireless internet and hordes of gringos). It's great.

Yesterday I visited Semuc Champey, a natural limestone bridge and series of pools that is honestly one of the most incredible pieces of nature I've seen ANYWHERE. Words do no justice, you'll have to wait for photos.

From here it's on to Flores, the jump-off point for the fabulously overpriced ruins at Tikal (around AU$30 entry I'm told) then back to the adopted mother country – Mexico. There's a Zapatista gathering taking place for International Women's Day, so I'll probably check that out, then head back to Oaxaca to wether the financial crisis.

Gotta go. Dinner's ready where I'm staying.

Peace. x x x

San Pedro

I'm now in San Pedro, on the shores of Lago Atitlan in Guatemala. I came here for a reggae festival, which has since been canceled :( Not sick, happy, surprisingly not broke yet!

Much love to all, from the Amsterdam of Guatemala.

X

Forced Sobriety + Temazcal = rebirth (Or: Meanderings through the Selva Lacandona)

First, apologies to anyone who was upset by the apparent gruffness of my last post on this blog. Without going into details, I’ve been experiencing a fairly wild ride on this trip, a story for another time no doubt. And besides, poverty IS depressing. Think about it.

The good news is I’ve isolated the source of the physiological funk that has contributed to my state of mind and killed the little fucker. After a few weeks of feeling pretty shitty, I finally bit the bullet and visited a medico, who fairly quickly diagnosed me as having a kidney infection of some variety. This is obviously a fairly debilitating illness, especially when coupled with a well above average alcohol intake (an occupational hazard for a semi-pro traveller such as yours truly).

So, a course of penicillin and a full week without a beverage was to be the treatment, with a gutful of ibuprofen (gross) to alleviate the virus-like symptoms the infection was causing. It came at a time just when I was contemplating the impact of booze on my health and my bank balance, so it really wasn’t that hard. The fact that I left San Cristobal for the jungle, waterfalls and ruins of Palenque also made drying out/getting healthy a lot easier. Yes, well San Cristobal. It has been a while since I’ve communicated with cyberspace, so let it be chronological. Brace yourself, or scroll down for photos.

San Cris certainly was nice, although the aforementioned post does capture the tangible melancholy of the place fairly well. A bit like Prague or somewhere, the place seems a little fake – it’s all very nice, with the colonial architecture, the great coffee, the accessibility of Zapatismo. But you really feel like you’re in tourist central, as if the authenticity of the place has been sucked dry by the gringo dollar and desire for an experience of cultural diversity. Ooh, look at the Mayans!

Having said that, it is certainly a place worth visiting. Chiapas is undeniably a magical part of the world (again with that), and in my time in the city I managed to visit some natural wonder in the form of the Cañón del Sumidero (photos below), and fulfill a long-held desire to come face-to-balaclava with the EZLN.
Cañón del Sumidero

A little over an hour out of San Cristobal is the Zapatista Caracol (community) at Oventik. Oventik’s proximity to SC makes it the most commonly visited Zapatista site, and again the feeling was that it was all a bit of a show. You can’t deny the real work being done here however, which includes a clinic, a school and the seat of the area’s Junta de Buen Gobierno (JBG or Good Government Council). The Oventik Zapatistas are well used to welcoming interested gringos, and provided a comprehensive presentation on the history of the movement, its aims and how the caracoles work. For a ratbag like me, I was like the proverbial fat kid in the lolly shop.

To Palenque: Undeniably one of the most impressive ruins in Mexico, and a jumping off point for visiting any number of waterfalls, jungle treks or even crossing into Guatemala. Palenque is also famous for its hongos or magic mushrooms, which are in abundance along the road to the ruins and in the surrounding farmland. I think they were gold tops for those that are interested. I’m off the mushies, but by all accounts they are the goods.

Seeing as I know nothing much about the ruins and/or the many and contradicting stories the tour guides come up with to explain it all, some photos for your consideration. The place speaks for itself. Wow.

(Change of plans: Palenque photos are in RAW format, you'll have to wait until I've Photoshopped them, or do a google image search and pretend they're my photos).

The next day was taken up with a visit to two waterfalls: Misol Ha and Agua Azul. Both very impressive, and well worth visiting, although I didn’t swim. The empanadas available at 5 for AU$1 are also highly recommendable, especially the chicken ones.

By now, I had gotten to know a few people around the jungle where I’m staying, and got wind of a hippy commune/organic farm/retreat nearby named El Jardin. I’ve been on a quest to experience a Temazcal or traditional Mayan sweat lodge since hearing of it through the grapevine in Mazunte, but despite their ubiquity I still hadn’t managed to get inside one myself. It was with much joy that one of my newfound friends told me there were plans afoot at El Jardin to make a Temazcal the following day. I already had a ticket to go back to San Cris and on to Guatemala, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We arrived early to help Martin and Silvi, the German-French couple who own El Jardin make preparations. We fetched firewood, gathered the stones that are heated and used to generate the steam, ate yummy vegetarian food with home-made chapatti, chanted mantras, sang around the fire and revelled in the bohemian-ness of it all. Many folks say el Temazcal can be an entirely transcendental experience, that the complete darkness, herb-scented steam and introduction of chants and meditations can result in a disassociation from the ego, and in some cases, divine visions and direct contact with whatever God means to you.

I sadly can’t say I reached this level of sweatiness, but not for a lack of trying. Perhaps the fact that we were making our own polytheistic version of a Temazcal, where ritual was more Hindu than Maya (Martin is a Yoga teacher) had some bearing. Nonetheless, I sweat out what little trace of the blues and any kidney infection there may have still been in my system and spent all of yesterday and today buzzing from the experience, with what I can only describe as a shit-eating grin plastered to my face. It was fucking intense, extremely enjoyable and I will be looking to do it again in a more traditional style.

So way over time and way over budget, my time in Mexico draws to an end (for now). Guatemala awaits; I’ll be kicking things off in San Pedro de la Laguna, on the shores of Lago Atitlan, a place of great beauty and apparently great parties. My first taste will be a reggae festival happening there this Saturday (FUCK. YES.).

More stories to come. Thanks for hanging in there.

Peace, harmony, universal love and light. Om Shanti.

Mazunte Photos

Sunrise...

Mazunte, from Punta Cometa

Lovers/fuckers on the main beach

Where I slept (like a baby)


These little buggers were everywhere, I wasn't quick enough to catch one of the many Hummingbirds though :(


Playa rinconcito, as seen from my 'room'

Two of the local dogs on their regular morning walk. There was also a goose on the beach!?


Punta Cometa – a bit like Cape Byron, but no lighthouse


Sunset from Punta Cometa

Mazunte to Chiapas (with apologies to HST, who I've been reading a lot of)

There's nothing quite like child labour to kill the buzz of two weeks of sitting on a beach smoking mota all day. 14 hours on a bus over two mountain ranges helps take the shine off too...

Arriving to San Cristobal de las Casas in the state of Chiapas (Mexico's southernmost and poorest), it's immediately obvious why the Zapatista movement would have started here. Much like the Basque country in Spain, which gave rise to the 'terrorist' group ETA, these people have really got the short end of the stick. Mexico City, Oaxaca – fuck, even the beach hamlet of Mazunte, where I locked down, navigating an emotional fuck-around of a time – are all undoubtedly Mexican, developing world places.

But in Chiapas the desperation and the misery are staring at you like balaclava-clad eyes of the Zapatistas at every corner. The cunt-paradox of endorsing child labour in the form of a shoeshine or some trinket or other - or not - is always around. Do you give these poor Mayan kids the few cents they desperately need? Or do you politely, repeatedly decline and direct your time, money, efforts and consciousness to addressing the cause of the malaise rather than the sickness? The eternal question.

I write this, suitably listening to Rage Against the Machine outside a San Cristobal hangout called Bar de la Revolucion, replete with images of Mexican Revolutionary heroes, who've long dreamed and died in their attempts to free their people from this terrible lot. In true clash-of-civilisations style, there is a Burger King directly opposite, where many of the not-so-revolutionary gringos will fill their fat faces with shit after dancing to Manu Chao all night.

The perverseness of this scenario is something akin to eating a plate of human faeces after spending a fortune on prime seats at the opera, ballet or any other bourgeois, high-cultural pursuit you might care to mention. But for 99.98% of gringos – at least of those I've met – this is as logical a thing to do as lighting a fag after rolling off whichever English/Australian/Canadian/Yank you've had the good or bad fortune of doing the horizontal salsa with that night. No wonder they fucking hate us. Not that the locals are above doing the same, of course.

Getting bogged down in philosophy and politics like usual, you fool. This was meant to be a post about how great a time I've been having in a place of heart-wrenching natural and human beauty; tales of Mezcal, mota, reggae, sun, crystalline water and abundant wildlife. Suffice it to say that Mazunte was all this and more – the skeptic-mystic duality that tends to turn my cerebral cortex in on itself had no difficulty in reconciling the presence of the 'energy' of this place.

I swam, ate, drank, smoked ad infinitum, day-in, day-out. I lived by the movement of the sun: rising with it, knowing the time (another absurd concept) by its position in the sky and its influence on the bountiful fauna of land, sea and sky. My only anchor in the 'real', ugly world of outside was a tube of Colgate toothpaste (no soap or deodorant for two weeks, but you can't avoid wanting clean teeth), monetary exchange and sporadic internet contact. Fuck everything else, it holds as much significance as our pitiful roles in this great universal clusterfuck.

Again with the philosophy... It's dark now, too dark to write without a light, and the cold that altitude brings has quickly descended. Time to get warm and revel in the milk of human kindness of another group of randoms.

Glad to have gotten that off my chest. Photos when I'm not on a stolen internet connection that comes and goes with the wind.

Viva Zapata!

DF, Teotihuacán & Oaxaca

I'm starting to think that the URL of this blog was a mistake, as it becomes increasingly obvious that I'm going to be spending more time in Mexico than anticipated. Being a pedant for things geographical, I feel like a bit of a nuf nuf, as I'm really in North America. But who really cares, right?

After recovering for a few days in Mexico City, I managed to actually get up and see some sights, and learn a little more about this place. I changed hostels to Hostel Amigo, in the centre of the city, and was instantly surrounded by Aussies, loud music and lots of partying. It was an entirely different Mexico City to that of Coyoacán, the tranquil village Frida and Co. called home.

Back on my feet, and with new bunch of amigos to hang out with, I made the trip out to Teotihuacán, a pre-Aztec site complete with pyramids. Funnily enough, that very day the Mexican media were reporting how a sound and light show planned for Teotihuacán had been called off after the Anthopologists Union had discovered the rigging of the lights had damaged the pyramids. The idiots drilled holes in the 2000-year-old ruins, and understandably people were upset...

This is the Pyramid of the Sun. Now with extra holes in it.
The view from top...
My crew for the mission – two Aussies, two Argies, a yank and a pom.

I also found time to check out part of the National Museum of Anthropology, which collects various ruins and artefacts under one huge roof, all organised into theire respective pre-Colombian ages and empires. The place was huge, such was the depth and variety of cultures in this part of the world until the whiteys came and fucked it all up. This isn't to say there wasn't war and empire beforehand - in fact the anthropology museum makes it pretty clear there was plenty of that going on, especially at the hands of the Mexica, who came to dominate most of the other mobs on the ground at the same time.

I was under the impression that photos were a no-no, so I can't share with you the wonders of this place. You would honestly need at least two full days to see everything it has to offer. Incredible.

I took this from wikipedia... the centrepiece of the Anthroplogy museum – La piedra del sol, Stone of the sun.

From here I took an overnight bus to Oaxaca City, a hotbed of political activity and as it turns out, amazing street art. The shit hit the fan in Oaxaca in 2006 after a teachers strike turned into a bigger issue when the Mexican Federal Police were sent in to shut things down. Peolpe died, the city was under siege and the previously peaceful city found itself at the vanguard of the struggle against the Mexican state and its all-powerful police force and miltary.

I've managed to track down some of the artists and ask them about their work, their politics and what's happening here and now and have taken about 200 photos of the awesome work they're doing. I'll put the photos up once I've had a chance to put them through photoshop.

Coolest things about Mexico so far:

• The guys selling CDs on the Mexico City Metro for 10 pesos
• The people in general
• The music – lots of very talented musos everywhere you go
• The food – especially tlayudas, a speciality of Oaxaca. Imagine a giant (12-14" in diameter) taco stuffed with refried beans, cheese, avocado and your choice of meat. Delicious!
• Mezcal. Despite one of the worst hangovers in my life, it was still fun.
  

Tonight I head for the pacific coast, where I'll be hanging in a hammock, drinking beer and eating fish tacos for at least a few daze.

Montezuma's Revenge

It has to be a record... 32 hours in to my time in Mexico I've been struck down with the squirts.

After finally sleeping off the combined jetlag and Woodford comedown, I set out to acquaint myself with the sprawling madness that is Mexico City. I sat down to a plate of huevos rancheros at a local cafe (organic and vegetarian, no less) and headed to the Frida Kahlo musuem, in the suburb of Coyoacán, where I'm staying.

The museum is Frida's family house, known as the Casa Azul, or Blue House. It has been tastefully converted into a musuem dedicated to the life and work of Frida and her malingering husband, and renowned artist in his own right, Diego Rivera. Seeing all the random letters and personal belongings of these two massive personalities was just as exciting as seeing some of their works – particularly impressive was Diego's collection of communist pamphlets and their studio space, complete with half-used paints, pastels and the like.
Unfortunately, no photos were allowed inside, so you'll have to come and check it out for yourself .

This is a shot of the outside of the studio. Frida and Diego were avid collectors of pre-Colombian artefacts, which feature throughout the house and its gardens.

Feeling particularly excited, I decided to check out the Zócalo, the city's main square and home to numerous tourist attractions such as the Palacio Nacional and Catedral.

I think photos will speak louder than words – the murals were done by Diego and as far as I can understand tell the story of Mexico, including invasion by the Spanish and the revolution of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata.

I got back to the hostel by sundown and imediately fell asleep, with the familiar creep of nausea beginning to take hold. All I need to say is that I had a shitty night's sleep (no pun intended) and wished like mad I wasn't alone on the other side of the world from everyone dear to me. At one point, in a state of dehydrated delerium, I convinced myself I'd have to summon the repatriation arrangements of my travel insurance, such was the extent of my illness. Thankfully the dreaded bug gave up after about 10 visits to the toilet, when there wasn't anything left to expel from my body.

So here I sit, sharing my shitty experience with you over a litre of rehydration salts. I'm hoping that having been struck down with Montezuma's Revenge so early in the piece will harden me up a bit, and that from here on in it will be all good health and good times.

Touchdown

After a fairly freaky final 24 hours in Oz I made it on to the big bird and to El Lay.

My dear friend Em pointed out that the US immigration officials probably wouldn't be too keen on letting a disheveled punk like me into the country without a return ticket, so last minute flight changes, hair pulling and a sleepless night were all necessary.

Before you write me off for being totally naive, I actually thought that my onward flight to Mexico City would be ample evidence of my intention to get the fuck out of God's Cuntry, but apparently Mexico is now part of the US, at least as far as the slightly confusing US Visa Waiver Program is concerned.

An ugly side effect of NAFTA? Most likely. Evidence of the Yanquis' arrogance toward their southern cousins? Surely. More on that later, no doubt.

Despite this, I have to say my first two hours in the States have renewed my faith in its people, with even the Customs and Border Protection staff surprisingly friendly, and chirpy 'can I help you?' volunteers at every twist and turn around LAX. Maybe they're excited about the prospect of taking the photos of Bush and Cheney down in 17 days time!!! I am. In fact, I'd hoped they'd have done it already.

So here is the first of what should be many blog postings about my jaunt through Central America, coming at you straight outta the food court of the Tom Bradley International Terminal. I'm determined to stay awake all day and actually see some cool shit in LA, as my previous two visits have not revealed the the true radness of this giant