Adios Mexico mi amor...

So, all good things have to come to an end and finally after almost exactly two months we were going to leave Mexico. We’d never expected to spend so long there, nearly twice the length of time we’ve spent in any other country during the trip. Nor was it one of the places we’d been wildly excited about beforehand. It had been a bit like popping out for a reluctant beer of an evening as a social obligation with someone you vaguely know. Then finding yourself staggering home blind drunk at 5am with an inane grin on your face having had ‘the besht night out ever’ with your new best friend in the whole world. Two glorious months of cacti, culture, cowboy hats, cervezas and enough frijoles to sculpt a convincing scale model of Popocatepetl. Mexico, te amo!

We were faced with a dilemma however in regard to the different choices of overland routes from our base in Palenque into Guatemala. All of which involved some form of river crossing. For perverted masochistic travellers there was a remote option that began with a 12 hour bus journey on kidney-stone disintegrating roads to the miniscule village of Benemerito. For any nightlarks out there Benemerito enjoys a 9pm curfew. Once there (hopefully) at some point over the next few days you might find a boat to take you into Guatemala, usually a trading vessel which itself can take a day or two. You’d probably be quicker swimming it if it wasn’t for the alligators. No prizes for guessing that your negotiating powers with the boatmen on price are somewhat constrained by the fact that after actually getting to Benemerito, metaphorically speaking (or in extreme cases literally perhaps), the boat operator is cradling your cojones gently in his calloused palms and clearly has the upper-hand.

The second choice was an equally convoluted series of buses to the river at La Palma that cleverly just failed to connect with each other thus creating maximum potential for unexpected stop-overs in tawdry transit towns. In La Palma an erratic boat service awaits, that often leaves early apparently (when does THAT ever happen in Central America?!) thus requiring you to hire another boat to chase the first one James-Bond style into the mangroves; ‘Follow that lancha!’. At competitive prices of course.

A little travel weary we opted in the end for the simplest route, a bus to Frontera Corozal and a short boat hop up the Rio Usumacinta to Bethel. Fi felt strangely guilty about taking the easy route until I pointed out that after dragging our sorry arses round the world without flying for the past 11 months nobody could accuse us of habitually taking the soft option.

The trip didn’t exactly start auspiciously however when the battery of the IKEA alarm clock we were gifted by a Swedish travel acquaintance in Cambodia decided to give up the ghost that very night. We were supposed to be on the bus at 6am and cunningly woke up at ten past. Thankfully we were still on Mexican time so after approximately 3 minutes of frenzied rucksack stuffing we were sat amongst bleary-eyed compatriots on the bus waiting while the driver leisurely had his breakfast.

It was an illuminating journey as we discovered that the curse of the ‘Venga Boys’ is inexplicably international, the tune ‘Boom, I want you in my room’ perhaps not being my first choice of soundtrack to the beautiful dawn light on the jungle canopy around us. Musing, as I tend to do on long bus trips, about climate change (weird obsessive that I am), I was entertained to see the legend ‘Se vende carbon’ scrawled on the side of a roadside hut. It’s carbon trading of a sort, but not quite as we might have envisaged from the Kyoto Protocol.

The lancha ride up the river was swift and smooth through the fast-flowing rock strewn waters and once we’d landed half an hour or so later on the far bank we were in Guatemala. Most conveniently the familiar site of a border money changer clutching wads of alien currency greeted us offering to convert our Mexican Pesos into Guatemalan Quetzales. So armed with a grubby stash of notes of strange denomination and uncertain value we bounced along a dusty, unpaved road to Flores. New town, new country and new money but the same dirty, dishevelled and ever so slightly delirious us…

Fat as a ship...

As well as my Freighter Travel witterings the Observer also published my latest column last Sunday, which seems to have lost a little of it's edge in the editing due to my slightly flippant observations and criticisms of American tourists we encountered in Zihuatanejo. Judge for yourself by reading the unexpurgated version below and the online version on the Guardian website here.

23rd Observer column

We spent the festive season in Veracruz on the brown sand, crab-patrolled beaches of Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Our first journey of the New Year was a cross-country bus mission over to Zihuatanejo on the Pacific, a couple of hundred kilometres north of the tourist hordes undoubtedly ‘going loco’ down in Acapulco. In typical style we completely misjudged the duration of the first night-bus leg of the trip, arriving in Mexico City at 4.30am. Which was nice.

‘Zihua’ was our first real taste of a mass-market holiday resort in Mexico. It’s a former fishing village on a beautiful horseshoe bay of rocky, forested headlands and a series of sleek, sandy beaches. Bodily unself-conscious North Americans waddled along the shoreline whilst mahogany-skinned Mexican beach dudes, with deep tans the colour of expensive, antique furniture, touted various serenity rending activities. The air was thus filled with the squeals of parascending ‘vacationers’ and the nasal whine of waspish jet-skis.

We stayed in a hostel in town run by a Canadian: Mexican couple, lovely in all respects bar its location which gave us an unwanted insight into the (very) early morning activities of the market next door. I explained our slow travel trip to Gregg, the gringo half of the partnership. ‘You’re in the right country’ he winked. We’d also admired the lovely white sheet on our bed that had a striking red striped strip along one edge. Very Mexican we thought and asked Greg where we might buy some. Turned out the sheet was unique, he’d bought it in a second-hand shop in Vancouver. The label said ‘Made in Pakistan’. The bloody bed linen was better travelled than we were.

It was a slight shock to the system to suddenly be surrounded by so many Americans. On the distinctly un-touristy Veracruz coast the only guy we’d met from north of the border was sporting a Vietnam veterans cap and a sweat-shirt that read ‘I’m 100% in support of more gun control’. Which seemed fine until you saw the legend on the back ‘One shot, one kill – now that’s what I call control!’.

At a bar in Zihua Fi was accosted by a woman built like the hulking cruise ship moored in the middle of the bay, blighting the whole horizon. ‘Where in Scotland you from?’ barked barge-girl on hearing Fi’s accent. ‘Edinboro?’ she mispronounced whilst echoing Fi’s reply, before reeling off a list of places that were either incomprehensible or nowhere near ‘Auld Reekie’. ‘Row-Ther-Ham’s not in Scotland honey’ pointed out her equally distended husband who appeared to have wandered off the film-set of ‘Eraserhead’.

Extricating ourselves from this decidedly un-illuminating chat, fate decreed that we bump into them again later in town. Our friends, who were staying at the same hotel as the blimps, attempted to share a taxi back with them. The fallacy of this became clear as the pair of them heaved their well-fed forms onto the back-seat. ‘Sorry’ apologised Eraserhead, ‘there’s no room’. As the old joke goes; ‘How many Americans can you fit in a taxi?’ The answer, apparently, is two.

The following day we were enjoying lunch under the palapas of a beach restaurant. A large group of impressively turkey-wattle throated elderly Americans arrived and began downing Margarita’s at the adjacent table. A prowling Mariachi was recruited to serenade them with a couple of tunes, one old crone taking long, lingering and lascivious delight in stuffing pesos into the almost as mature musicians’ trouser pocket. The American gift of vocal projection gave us little choice but to eavesdrop on their conversation. ‘Your ass ain’t going to bed at five’, rang out one curiosity-inducing fragment, ‘I got plans for your ass later’. The mind it boggleth.

Cheap Yank-baiting aside there is a serious aspect to the influx of North American cruise ships to Zihua. At present passengers are ferried ashore by a flotilla of small boats but plans are afoot to build a proper cruise ship terminal with questionable benefits to the local economy and ecology of the bay. The jetty plans are generating stiff local opposition and wider national support, even bringing the enigmatic Zapatista leader Sub-Commandante Marcos to Zihua for a tub-thumping pipe and balaclava speech in solidarity. The stakes are high as the initiative threatens the finely balanced mix of local family owned businesses and limited corporate tourism that makes Zihua so attractive in the first place. There is and should be room for both. But maybe not in the same taxi.

A freight way to travel...

The Observer published a feature article I wrote for them yesterday about our cargo ship travel experiences, under the toe-curlingly cringe-worthy pun title of 'A freight way to travel...'. The piece was written whilst we were still gliding gracefully across the Pacific, so it´s a case of 'let´s do the time-warp again!' in terms of blog content, as we´re currently in steamy, jungly Palenque and crossing the border into Guatemala tomorrow! You can read the whole article here, and it also includes lots of useful tips and links on ´How to travel by cargo ship'. Disgracefully however the Observer managed to omit a link to our fantastic shipping agent extraordinaire Hamish Jamieson of www.freightertravel.co.nz who has helped us secure all the maritime passages of our trip and provided a wonderful, personal and efficient service (he even picked us up at the port and gave us a tour of his hometown of Napier when we arrived in New Zealand!). If you fancy a bit of freighter action then Hamish is your man...

Better (slower) world...

BT's 'Better World' E-zine has just published a piece I wrote from them about our trip, you can read the piece 'Slowly does it' (paraphrasing the Stranglers 'Nice and sleazy does it'!) by clicking this link. They didn't tell me they were going to use the 'lobster fetish' immersion suit photo of me! The Better World E-zine also has loads of other good news stories about positive change, including Futerra's clothes swapping, or 'Swishing' parties! Worth checking out...

Guns and arse!

Ciudad Mexico, less a city than a medium-sized European nation of 20 million souls jammed into a place built almost entirely on a drained out lake-bed. These uncertain boggy foundations cause a structural engineers nightmare of wonky, squint buildings with highly questionable perpendicularity. Throw in the odd earthquake to rearrange the substrata and it makes for a quirky, somewhat irregular skyline. In the Centro historico a grid of grubby avenues stretches hazily to the distant mountainous horizon through the claggy air. Whilst the cobbled streets reverberate to hordes of cute green VW Beatle taxis of untrustworthy and now unlicensed origin – a sure-fire route to a rip-off apparently (still cheaper than a London black cab I’ll wager). Big, noisy and dirty – we loved it. Where else is your metro station built around a restored Aztec temple?

Staying next to the Zocalo, the famous central square, our hostel’s roof terrace bar had impossibly good views over the cathedral. The ambience marred only by the barman’s aspirations to run a hard-core techno club judging by his gallstone shatteringly loud musical choices. We also explored Chapultepec park, the largest urban green space in Latin America and Mexico City’s wheezy lung that offers some respite to the distinctly ‘Chinese’ atmosphere. Alas our stay was cruelly brief as we headed to the Veracruz coast for the festive season.

We went to stay with Omid Khayyam, a British-Iranian friend of a friend. ‘Look for the guy who seems most ‘Taliban’’ were Omid’s instruction on how to identify him at the bus station. He’d also promised to be wearing yellow cycling shorts and a peephole bra, which was lucky as it uncannily matched my own choice of attire. We’d effectively invited ourselves to spend Christmas with strangers so were a little concerned about the random-ness of it all. Our reservations melted away quicker than a celebrities entourage after a ‘kiddie-porn’ conviction however, in the face of the warm welcome we received.

‘I hope you like dogs’ Omid had said. He wasn’t wrong. A veritable canine menagerie awaited us at ‘Taboga’ the family home he and his lovely Mexican girlfriend Vania are in the process of converting into a hotel. The gang consisted of a gaggle of small, black woolly Schnausers (Docker, Kenya and Malibu), ‘Zeba’ a petite half-fox like beast, ‘Puppy’ a Labrador: Alsatian cross and Vania’s sister Azul’s dog ‘Patricio’ a big, if slightly flouncy, Terra Nova. The resulting pack mentality was complicated by the fact that Puppy was ‘King’ dog of the hotel and he and Patricio were threatening to tear each other’s throats out at every opportunity. I couldn’t really blame Puppy as he was merely defending his turf, and if a bloke in a pub had behaved in similar fashion to Patricia he’d have got what was coming to him. As a consequence we all became bouncers, operating a ‘one-in, one-out’ system on the doors of the house. ‘Your name’s not down you’re not coming in’.

Dog-fighting aside (Mexicans prefer cock-fighting anyway) the Veracruz coastline has an earthy charm. Omid and our adopted Mexican family the Costello’s were consummate hosts, as we enjoyed blazing beach bonfire’s, bountiful banquets, ruinous visits (well, visits to ruins) and long, loud laughter into the night. We even, as well you know, made a film.

Our stay built up to a climax on New Year’s Eve when, amidst the firework celebrations, one of the family cousins Manolo added to the pyrotechnics by emptying his pistol into the air, thus ensuring we saw in 2008 with perhaps more of a bang than we intended. We, on the other hand, mangling the pronunciation of ‘Año’ (year) had been merrily wishing everyone ‘Feliz Ano Nuevo’ – ‘Happy New Anus’. Guns and arse, welcome to 2008.

Sickness & Dogging...

We left Guanajuato and headed towards the great gathering of the Monarch butterflies in El Rosario, supposedly one of the most incredible natural spectacles on the planet. Millions of Monarchs arrive to over winter in Mexican sanctuaries each year having migrated from as far north as their summering haunts in the Rocky Mountains. The weirdest thing is these migrations take longer than the average lifespan of a typical Monarch - about two months. So the butterflies that return to the over-wintering grounds are the great, great grandchildren of those that left the previous year. Think about this navigational feat next time you’re lost returning from the pub. And blame a distant ancestor for not telling you the way home.

Alas, we never quite made it to El Rosario. En route in Morelia we enjoyed a fortifying breakfast of ‘huevos revueltos con chorizo verde’, which for any Dr Seuss fans out there was the living incarnation of ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ (no sign of ‘Sam I Am’ however). It was delicious but perhaps not entirely unconnected to the violent bout of Montezuma’s revenge that Fi then suffered over the next 48 hours in Zitacuaro, our base close to the butterfly reserve. The poor woman was ‘firing from both ends’, like an innovative cannon, in our hotel room which only had a shower curtain separating the bedroom from the bathroom. The simultaneous evacuation of stomach and bowel created a harrowing symphony of many movements.

As a consequence we didn’t get to the butterfly reserve, the prospect of a three phase bus journey over several hours along mountain roads didn’t really appeal to Fi in the context of her unstable and unpredictable bottom. So I played nursemaid, procuring mineral water and fruit for my suffering (some would say long suffering) lover in her hour of need until, stuffed full of Imodium, we caught the bus to Mexico City and the madness of the megalopolis.

We got tantalising glimpses of the extent of the smoggy, suburban sprawl as we approached the Terminal Poniente in the west of the city, the metropolis melting off into the murky air. Outside the bus station two elderly and mangy dogs were unselfconsciously enjoying a dry looking fuck by the taxi rank. Dogging Mexican style.

Emerging from the clean, efficient metro at the Zocalo the first thing that struck us was the wall of noise from the festive street vendors. Like a football crowd in-between recognisable or co-ordinated chants, where every fan is roaring out their own thing, the hawkers competed in a deafening, cacophonic bedlam to be heard. We sought sanctuary from this pre-Christmas commercial gauntlet by checking out the Diego Rivera murals in the expansive Secretaria de Educacion building. The highly politicised slogans were stirring stuff from ideologically simpler and more idealistic times. My favourite was one which read ‘True civilisation is when men live in harmony with the earth and with each other’. Can’t exactly imagine that coming out of Bush’s mouth now can you?

Other propaganda pieces included a great image entitled ‘The Capitalists Dinner’ depicting honourable workers offering up produce to the ugly, stern faced bourgeoisie. They were sat humourlessly around a banqueting table accompanied by a crying child. Cryptic eh? Another showed a beaten and bleeding member of the gentry surrounded by triumphant labourers – ‘The Defeat of Capitalism’. After getting our fill of the somewhat unsubtle but beautifully executed and creative cant we wandered a little aimlessly through the adjacent streets only to stumble on the building formerly used by the Spanish Inquisition. Now nobody expects that…

Let me put you in the picture...

Happy New Year! We celebrated the start of 2008 on the beach in Mexico with new friends who seemed like old buddies, entertaining ourselves by making this little film. Enjoy!

Big Daddy Splat!

Following the ‘Museo de las Momias’ our experiments in activities of questionable taste continued with a night out at the ‘Lucha Libre’ (literally ‘free fight’) that is Mexican wrestling. Very much a family affair we sat in the ‘Parque Beis-Bol’ amongst groups comprising several generations of locals as the first bouts of the night began. We’d arrived ridiculously early so sat on our concrete bench behind the chicken wire fence separating us from the ring (in ‘The Pen’), our sense of anticipation increasing in direct proportion to the loss of feeling in our buttocks.

The wrestlers in the first part of the bill looked like your Dad had decided to have a go. With podgy bodies clad in string vests, ‘budgie-smuggling’ Speedo swimming trunks and old tights they grappled with each other in amateurish style. One even looked like he was about to go fishing, wearing camouflage shorts and a khaki green body warmer. More J.R.Hartley than Giant Haystacks.

In between bouts the gargantuan stereo system pumped classic bass-heavy Mexican two-beat rhythms into the stadium, some of which had English lyrics. ‘You’re so fucking sexy, you’re a sexy fuck’ ran one saucy little rhyming couplet. During these breaks a wonderful array of hawkers descended upon us, touting everything from gimpy wrestling masks to strawberries and cream, though any other similarities to Wimbledon ended there. One hugely fat dude flogged nuts, cakes and biscuits from a heavily-laden round tray perched atop his plump noggin. Impressed by his deportment and balancing skills when he paused and offloaded the tray to pat his perspiring brow we realised how flat and plate-like the top of his polished pate was. Either born to do it or been doing it too long.

As the evening wore on the combatants grew bigger, were in better shape in an Arnold ‘body like a condom full of walnuts’ Schwarzenegger sort of way, and no strangers to body waxing and tanning salons. The costumes were also a little more sophisticated, looking a little flashier than something their Mum had seemingly knocked up on a sewing machine at home. The actual ‘fighting’ however couldn’t have been more pantomime without involving a wrestler called Widow Twankey. It wasn’t so much about the winning as about taking your opponents apart. Dirty tricks were integral and the crowd only became enlivened when what superficial ‘rules’ existed were transgressed with a sucker-punch to a distracted opponent or by kicking a man when he’s prostrate on the canvas. The acrobatic, gymnastic choreography of throws and holds was all stirring stuff, but the Royal Shakespeare Company couldn’t have been better rehearsed.

Just when we felt the comedic bitch-slapping slap-stick had reached its zenith there was a special round for what the politically correct would call ‘vertically challenged’ wrestlers (or a 'Dwarf bout' to the less PC). These diminutive brawlers were a case study in ‘small man syndrome’ viciousness, going at each other in a febrile frenzy of aggression. The violence of this was then unexpectedly leavened by outbreaks of simulated oral or anal sex on incapacitated opponents. One burly masked midget (and I never dreamt I’d be writing those words on this blog) suffered the repeated indignity of having his pants yanked down to reveal his g-stringed buttocks, like a tourniquet tightly bisecting a bronzed ham. This was invariably the cue for another member of his tag-team (3-man tag is simply an excuse for a brawl) to be flung face first between his presumably hot sweaty ass cheeks to the crowd’s delirious roar of approval.

The final headlining match featured the wrestlers whose faces adorned the posters that had first drawn our attention to the night, plastered as they were across the city. In the red corner we had ‘El Hijo del Santo’ (the Son of the Saint), in fetching white tights and silver hood and ‘Gronda XXX’, a red body-painted demon with horns (!) and massively steroid-induced muscles that looked more inflated than pumped. Their opponents were the ‘Blue Demon Jnr’, a vision in shades of cerulean and his partner ‘Dr Wagner’ whose popularity with the baying mob that seemed to have replaced the audience was secured by the hilariously camp, homoerotic mincing of his muscular bulk around the ring.

Twice the action spilled out of the ropes, into the crowd and once even into the stands, a wonderfully unlikely eventuality in that it involved both wrestlers clambering precariously up on a metal chair. This was also a rather more conventional use of a chair as usually they were beating each other over the head with them. By the end of the evening we were numb of cheek and somewhat emotionally exhausted if not quite beating the canvas in submission. We have our own wrestling masks to help us relive the experience. Now we just need a justifiable and acceptable excuse to wear them to avoid resembling perverted gimps. But hey…it’s a look.