Cigars and a volcano

As far as I know it wasn't easy or cheap to travel directly from Utila to Nicaragua, so I spent the night in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. Teguci is much the same as all the other Central American capitals I've been to or heard about: big, dirty, and supposedly really dangerous. I stayed at the cheapest hotel I could find in the Lonely Planet, which was also near the alleged location of the bus terminal I needed the following morning. As I found out that evening, the bus terminal had moved and I was confronted with another problem of the capitals: they don´t have one bus terminal, and the local buses are confusing and carry the likelihood of being robbed, so you basically have to spend a load of money getting cabs everywhere.

So in the morning I got a cab to the bus terminal, only to discover there were no more seats on the bus I needed to catch, and no other bus on that line until the late afternoon. Another rather long cab ride later I was at another bus terminal, where I promptly boarded the next bus to the border. As always, crossing the border was a breeze (I'm not looking forward to that changing, as it probably will sometime), and I got another pair of buses to a town called Estelí.

Baseball is huge in Nicaragua; seen just outside Estelí.

A lot of people seem to have a really high opinion of Estelí, but to me it seemed really similar to most of the colonial-style towns I've been through. It's really close to a couple of huge nature reserves, and there's a pretty big tobacco industry in the area, so it was interesting for those in any case. The day after I arrived I did a tour to the Cañon de Somoto (cañon = canyon), which was a combination of walking, swimming and jumping off shit for about 4 hours down a river canyon. Apparently the highest point they jump from is around 20m, though the only one crazy enough to do it was the guide, most of the rest of us just went from 10-12m...

The morning after the Cañon tour, I went on another tour to a cigar factory. Someone told me that there's loads of tobacco companies in the area because a lot of cigar makers fled there when Castro was taking over in Cuba, but I'm a little dubious about that. Who knows... The cigar factory tour was really interesting: the company that owns it only really makes their own brand to sell in the small store they have attached, with the majority of the cigars produced there being under license to other brands. The tour covered everything from the workshop where they make all the different boxes, through to where the cigars are prepared for sale and boxed.

Making boxes.

There was a few piles like this, I'm not sure how many boxes they need, but I'm pretty sure the guide said they make something like 15k cigars a day...

Custom boxes for some luxury brand or order, with the foil-inlaying machine on left.

More fancy boxes of different designs.

 Tobacco fermentation room. The big pallets sit for a year fermenting, and the workers have to cycle the tobacco from the inside to the outside once every week or two for that time. The middle was really warm, the outside not so much.

Tobacco drying post-fermentation.

Women sorting the tobacco based on grade. The grades relate to thickness, and between the 3 I could feel basically no difference. mad skillz at work.

More tobacco sorters. 

Post-sorting, ready to be mixed in whatever proportion the particular cigars require and rolled.

The rolling room. All the cigars are made here by pairs of workers (1 male, 1 female).

The male mixes the leaves as required for the mix, and uses the big black rolling machine to roll it tightly, the puts it in the form on top to pass to the woman on the right.

The woman takes all the centres and cuts the leaves they're using as a skin into the shape, then rolls it around the centre, before putting them back in the mold to be pretty by the stack of weights in the other pic above.

Curing the cigars, there's 2 of these rooms, temperature- and humidity-controlled.

Packing the cigars into their plastic covers then whatever box they're to be sold in.

Freezing them for a week or so to kill bacteria/fungus and thereby improve shelf-life.

Fancy twisty triple-cigar-

The day after the cigar tour I went by bus to León, a reasonably touristy colonial city surrounded by volcanoes. The last I'd heard from Callum I assumed he'd be there within a couple of days, so I went to a couple of museums and other touristy stuff around the city while I waited so we could go volcano boarding (León is probably most famous among tourists for this: get a bit of wood and ride down a supermini Ngaruahoe), and maybe another trek or two. León is the home of the second branch of Quetzaltrekkers, the non-profit guide-run company we went with in Guatemala.

First thing I did was go to the roof of the cathedral. I really wish this was possible in more of these towns, as they're usually in really picturesque locations, but there's never anything tall to get a nice vista of...

The next day I went to the Museum of Legends and Traditions, a repurposed prison that was used from the 20's til the 70's to hold and generally mistreat political dissidents. Now the cells are filled with dolls and such which represent local legends (famous historical figures along with folk tales), none of which I can remember..

The following day (I was trying to make it as drawn-out as possible, and doing stuff in the afternoons usually involves much rain), I went to another place called the Gallery of Heroes and Martyrs, but I think I wanted the museum of the same, as the Gallery was basically just a load of boards with little student ID photos of a lot of the youth that died in Nicaragua's civil war. Interesting, and with a little bit of background, but not what I expected... That afternoon I decided I was done waiting for Callum to email me and booked in to do volcano boarding, one of the main things León is famous for.

There's a whole bunch of companies that run volcano boarding tours, but they all cost roughly the same, and almost all of them are privately-owned, for-profit companies, so I did it through Quetzalrekkers again (also as far as I know the only company that lets you do 2 runs instead of one!). We met at their office relatively early, loaded into a truck, and drove for an hour and a half or so out to the foot of Central America's youngest volcano: Cerro Negro (Black Hill):

After an hour or so's walk to the top, we were rewarded with some pretty nice views:

After 'mirin for a while, we got ready to board down. Apparently the speed record is something like 70km/hr, if I remember correctly. Naturally, I wanted to try and break it, so I tried as hard as possible. I suspect you need a fresh board with some crazy wax or something, coz without braking at all I only got up to 40 or so (also assuming my phone's speedo worked, but I think it's reasonably reliable)

Naturally, I wasn't satisfied with such a low speed, so I tried again, but rolled a bunch at maybe 30. Surprisingly wasn't too dirty:

When I first booked the volcano boarding, I had an email from Callum when I got back saying that he was staying at a retreat-type thing based on organic permaculture, near Jinotega to the northeast (http://www.hijuela.com/labiosferaretreat.html - if you're ever in northern Nicaragua you should check it out!), so I told him I'd be there in 2 days and ran a few errands before leaving León. 

El Salvador and Honduras

After my second visit to Antigua (only for 2 nights, during which I couldn't replace the delicious organic peanut butter I'd just finished...), I caught a series of buses to Santa Ana, El Salvador. Santa Ana isn't really the nicest city, but I was recommended to stay there by a friend due to the excellent hostel there, with a swimming pool and 2 kitchens (for cheap as), and the nearby Santa Ana volcano.

The day after I arrived I went to the volcano with a couple of other people from the hostel (including another Cam from NZ!), and we climbed for a couple of hours from the carpark with our guide and 2-man police escort. The walk was pretty easy, with a rather spectacular view from the top of the volcano's crater and a bunch of western El Salvador. We then had a leisurely walk to the carpark, and hitched a ride with some locals that were heading to Santa Ana.

After Santa Ana I visited Juayua, on La Ruta de Las Flores (The Route of Flowers), which also came highly recommended due to their weekly food fair. I had some pretty delicious rabbit on the Saturday, and was psyched up to try the roadkill-lookin frog later in the day, but it rained and all the stalls packed up, so we got pupusas instead (pupusas are something a bit like tortilla/bread dough wrapped around whatever you want - usually with beans and cheese, then with chicken/pork or other things. The best were of course the pupusas locas (crazy pupusas), which were plate-sized and contained everything). The next day I did a short tour to some "natural" pools, created by a weirdly-designed hydroelectric dam. We also walked through a coffee plantation, where the guide described the process of growing and harvesting coffee, which is ubiquitous around here. That afternoon I returned to Santa Ana for another night, in preparation of going through Guatemala to Honduras on the Monday.

A day on buses later I arrived in Copán, Honduras, at a hostel Callum's stayed at, at which some of his friends still were staying. The following day I went with one to the nearby Mayan ruins, which were exceptional compared to the rest due to the preservation of the carvings and sculpures. Most of the Mayan ruins around the place don't really have much intact carving, whereas Copán is loaded with it. The ruins themselves were, as always, fun to explore for half a day, especially combined with trying to puzzle out what the carvings actually were (some of the heiroglyphs especially were pretty cool).

The day after the ruins I went to a bird sanctuary, where they have a whole bunch of different varieties of parrots and macaws. Apparently macaws aren't parrots - who knew? Also in Copán was a brewery/bar run by a German GC. Apparently he has around 12 different brews, but he only has 2 on tap at a time and hadn't changed them between the 2 nights I went, but they were both pretty delicious, especially when compared to the generic crap everyone drinks in CA...

Cal and I had arranged to meet in centralish Honduras at Lago Yajoa for my birthday, where there's a hostel with another brewery attached. Much drinking of more delicious beers ensued for the next 2 days, and we also walked up to a lookout on top of one of "Las Nalgas" (the buttcheeks), for a look-see at the lake itself, which is apparently all weedy and whatnot around the edge, so not really swimmable :/

After Yajoa, we split again so I could go to Utila in the Caribbean to learn to dive. Supposedly Utila is the 2nd cheapest place in the world to learn to dive (after Indonesia), and I'd been hanging out with diving-obsessed friends in Belize, so was really keen to try it by the time I got to Utila. I guess diving's pretty hard to describe to those who haven't tried it, but it's totally fucking awesome. Probably the closest us powerless humans can get to flying, amongst some of the coolest wildlife I've ever seen. Ten days of diving in the mornings and reading/sweating in the afternoons later, I left the island to head to Nicaragua, but I think that'll be a story for another day...

Guatemala + Belice

Hola a todos!

I think just after my last email we climbed Tajumulco, which was pretty amazing. We went with a trekking "company" called Quetzaltrekkers, which is completely run by the volunteer guides, and gives all their profits to a school and home for disadvantaged kids they´re associated with, which is kinda cool. We had a huge group, which worried the guides as it´d probably usually be slower, but we made really good time. The first day we got a couple buses to the base and walked for maybe 5-6 hours to the camping spot. We stopped enough that it wasn´t terribly taxing, but still a bit of a mission with all our gear and the altitude (we started at about 3000m and ascended to about 4000m that day). The view was absolutely amazing the whole way up, or at least when it wasn´t too cloudy, looking over the Guatemalan highlands, which´re hella green at this time of year. We mostly slept the afternoon away, with a break for dinner, as it was super cold. Also we got up at 3am the next morning... Callum was too sick to summit, which was pretty stink, but the rest of us half-climbed/half-walked the rest of the way in the pitch black (my headlamp batteries were almost dead, made it fun..). Then we waited around in our sleeping bags for the sunrise, though I couldn´t sleep so just mucked around with my camera. The sunrise itself was mostly covered by fog, although that was pretty beautiful in its own way. When we could actually see the sun it was well above the horizon, and everything looked spectacular. We spent maybe an hour after that on the summit, before going back to breakfast and break camp, then walked back down and bussed back to Xela.

The next day we got in some well-deserved rest, before starting another trek for 2.5 days to Lago Atitlan. This group was much smaller, which was a bit better I think. The trek itself was also amazing, walking through the forest (there was a bit of cloud forest, but the weather was uncooperative in that respect, and it wasn´t actually cloudy) and a load of tiny Guatemalan villages. Some of the views were really stunning, whether of the forest/mountains, or at times the ocean very far away, and on the first day we could see the lake, which is apparently basically unheard of. We got pretty lucky with the weather, the only rain was during the night, and this is supposed to be the rainy season!

Basically around the lake there´s a whole load of villages/towns of different sizes and vibes. We came in in San Juan, which is pretty tiny but has some cool things, then went to San Pedro for a drink and a swim. San Pedro is much bigger and touristic, with loads of places owned by Americans/Israelis. We stayed near Santa Cruz, which is tiny and has basically nothing. The hostel was on the water, but you have to walk up a rather steep hill to get to the town itself. Cal stayed for 2 nights and I stayed one extra coz I wanted to kayak around and around midday it gets too choppy to bother. Had a pretty good time there but had to drag myself away as it´s so easy to get stuck there for a long time.

I then spent 2 nights in Antigua, staying in a tiny unknown hostel full of Latin Americans, so it was good to get forced to use Spanish a bit again, though it´s sometimes really hard to talk, especially when drunk/tired. Antigua is a nice little city, has been hit by a few earthquakes in the last couple hundred years, but it´s still really beautiful and was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so the whole centre is really old architecture and crappy cobblestone roads. 

After Antigua, we bussed up to a place called Lanquin, and stayed at an awesome hostel on a little river for 2 nights. In the intervening day we did a tour to Semuc Champey, which was totally amazing. We started off with candlelit caving for a couple of hours (it´s pretty tricky swimming with sandals and trying to keep a candle above the water!), which ended with jumping about 4m into the black water, and also included a little abseil down a waterfall. Too good. Then we used to biggest rope swing I´ve ever seen, which was rather painful to mess up, followed by jumping off a ~10m bridge into the river. After this, we actually went to Semuc Champey, first to a lookout overlooking the pools. Essentially Semuc Champey is a series of amazing blue limestone pools that go down a valley, with another river going underneath. So from above, you see this brown water that kind of dissapears under the blue-watered pools, then reappears at the bottom. Up close, the place where the water goes under looks pretty terrifying, and apparently a plastic bottle would take 3 days to come out the other side. We swam in the pools a bit, then went back to the hostel.

We then went to Flores for 2 days. Flores is a tiny colonial town on an island half-surrounded by a city called Santa Elena, which isn´t much to look at. On the first day we visited the ruins of Tikal, which were much better than those at Tulum. We spent the day walking around the city in the jungle, though all you could see was the temples and whatnot, obviously. Some of the temples were pretty amazing, and the view from the top of one of the temples was spectacular, looking over the top of the forest with other temples poking their heads up around the place. 

After Flores, we went straight to Belize City, which is a bit of a dump to be honest. Callum left the next day to go south and back to Guatemala, because Belize is 3-4 times as expensive as Guate/Mexico. I went to Caye Caulker for 4 days with a German guy we met in our hostel in Belize City. Caye Caulker is fantastic, a tiny island (actually 2, a hurricane broke it in half) with apparently far fewer tourists than it´s larger brother to the north, Ambergris Caye. We spent most of the time sitting in the sun and swimming at the split, where it broke in half and there´s a crazy strong current from one side to the other, and eating delicious cheap seafood. We also did a snorkelling tour on the reef for a day, which was also pretty amazing. I don´t think I´d ever been on a reef before, so it was cool to see all the fish and whatnot, and swim around maybe 50 nurse sharks and a bunch of rays which they were feeding, and later with some rather indifferent-looking sea turtles. 

I decided I had to leave Caye Caulker or also risk getting stuck there, so I went back towards Flores to San Ignacio. My first day there I went on a tour to a place called Actun Tunichil Muknal, the meaning of which I´ve forgotten. On it´s own, ATM was probably the most beautiful cave I´ve been in, with all sorts of crazy rock formations I´d never dreamed of before. But it was also used during Mayan times for offerings of food, blood, and people. Towards the end of the cave there was loads of old pottery, which would´ve been used for food and bloodletting, and then there were 5 skeletons in various states of disrepair (apparently there´s 9 more, but they don´t take tourists to them for whatever reason). This whole day was pretty surreal, seeing 1500 year old buildings is crazy enough to me, let alone peoples´ bones, which´re remarkably well-preserved (except where people had dropped their cameras on them. wtf.). I wanted to leave San Ignacio the next day, but that would´ve meant missing the football final, so I hung out another day before going to Punta Gorda. I just stayed in Punta Gorda for one night, before crossing to Livingston in Guatemala.

I spent a few days in Livingston hanging out with a French guy I met on the boat from PG. Livingston is a reasonably Guatemalan little town at the Carribean end of the Rio Dulce, with no outside road access as far as I know. There wasn´t too much to do there, but the hostel was good and it was a nice place to catch up on laundry and whatnot. After Livingston I spent a few nights at a place on the Rio Dulce called Finca Tatin. Finca was amazing, on the waterfront of a tributary to the Rio Dulce, made up of a cabins around the place in the jungle linked by cobble walkways. It was nice spending days just swimming in the river and reading, but again, I had to leave lest I get stuck. 

So yesterday I came back to Antigua, and tomorrow I´m hoping to cross into El Salvador, where I´ll stay for a week or so before meeting Cal again somewhere in Honduras for my birthday.

Update 2!

Had to read over my last email to see where I left off... After that, we finished our 3 weeks of Spanish lessons, which were super useful, as before then we basically couldn´t say anything, and our teachers were really good (if you ever find yourself in San Cristobal wanting to learn Spanish I´ll give you their names - they wanna start their own school!).

We then met up with a friend we met in Oaxaca and a couple of her friends and hung out with them for a couple of days before going to Palenque. We had to get 2 kombi vans there, and going into the town where we changed there was a roadblock set up by the indigenous people, so it took a while to get in. Think it cost the driver about $5 to get past, and I assume some people were refusing to pay so it took longer. Then there was another roadblock on the other side that was completely closed so we were told to walk past and find different transport on the other side. We waited around for a while, whenever there was a "Palenque!" call we´d grab our bags and run. Eventually we were the last 2 on a rather packed ute used for people transport (totally closed by a much bigger thing on the back, I forget the name). It was so full I spent about 2.5 hours standing on the tailgate holding on to the bar at the top - what a rush! 

We got to Palenque and got another kombi to a little town most of the way to the ruins, and found a place to set up our hammocks to stay in, and settled down for the night. In the morning, we walked the rest of the way to the ruins up a hill through the rainforest. By the time we got there I´d almost forgotten why we were there, til we walked out of the forest and into the open, surrounded by ruins. It´s hard to describe beyond saying that it´s a fucking cool place - having never been in the rainforest or near anything near that old the combination was stunning. We spent most of the day walking around seperately checking out all the ruins, which is apparently only a fraction of the entire city; they´re constantly uncovering new bits, and I assume opening them to the public. On the way out we stumbled upon a couple of guys who were staying at the same place as us, and discovered the joys of refried bean tacos, which have since become our most common meal (with tomatoes, avo and salsa it´s delicious as hell, though you´d never think so til you tried!).

The next day we went to a small Zapatista community near to Palenque which is also home to some really nice waterfalls with a few waterholes you can swim in, with a few other people. Spent a couple hours there then got an overpriced kombi back to Palenque, as it was too late for the cheap ones to be running. Thankfully this night was our last, as the place we were staying had crazy loud awful Mexican music (essentially the equivalent to gangster rap - accordions with lyrics about trafficking drugs and so on) until 2am or so. 

After this we got a series of cheap buses and kombis and only made it to Escárcega, a place the internet says to try not to stay in, but it was too late to make it further. Stayed in a cheap hotel there, then moved onto Campeche. Campeche could be really cool, but all the historical stuff was closed for maintenance, making it just an average, smallish coastal town. 

Merida followed Campeche, and we stayed in a really cool hostel with a swimming pool and a hammock garden for a couple of days. Had a day of chores and on the other went to our first cenotes. Cenotes are basically sinkholes of various sizes with water in them, supposedly related to the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. The crater isn´t visible, as it´s something like 100km in diameter, but there´s a really high concentration of cenotes around the circumference. Anyway, we got a kombi, then a cool lil motorbike taxi thing, then a horse-drawn cart thing around 3 cenotes. The first was so-so, the 2nd was really cool and deep with a tiny wee pool in the bottom, and the 3rd was Lovecraftian - really long, pitch black at the back. Cal was talking about swimming to the back but wasn´t that keen, so I just did it and the rest followed. Apparently when I was at the back they couldn´t see me at all and when I stopped were a lil worried by the silence. Really cool place though.

After Merida, we spent 2 days in Progreso, a small town on the Golf coast near Merida, staying in another sweet hostel owned by some Italians that´s basically just a huge old villa. When we first got there there was a cruise ship parked up, so the town was -packed- with tourists, but that evening it left and then the place was totally empty. We had a really good time chilling out, but didn´t end up swimming as this was the middle of the week we didn´t see the sun for all the clouds (Cal still managed to get sunburnt!). Cal had read about a hostel in a town just up the road called Libros y Sueños (books and dreams), so we went there the next night, having a look through their rather large amount of books, and burying some treasure on the beach to satisfy a piratey urge Cal had (the map´s on FB, and there should be enough clues around for you to find it!). 

We then spent the majority of the day in a variety of kombis, buses and hitched rides getting to Valladolid, via a pretty sweet little town called Izamal, the entire centre of which is painted yellow! We again stayed a couple of days in Valladolid, briefly meeting up with some friends from San Cris. On one of the days we hired bikes to ride to another pair of cenotes, but it turned out that the entry price we thought was for both was only for 1, so we just had a swim in the one. Really cool bikeride, and the cenote again didn´t disappoint - in all the ones we went to we were constantly reminded of the horrors of the deep in fantasy/sci-fi, but they were all hella beautiful.

From Valladolid we hitched to Cancun, and got the ferry to Isla Mujeres (we didn´t wanna stay in Cancun, though the ferry was only around half an hour, so I assume Isla´s basically the same). Had a pretty cool couple nights there, on the day we had we again hired bikes and rode all the way around the island (about 8km each way, I think, it´s long and thin). We didn´t really eat out as the food was really expensive, but I thought I´d better try some fish tacos before we left Mexico, which were totally delicious. 

A couple of kombis and rides later, we arrived in Tulum. We´d essentially been following a couple of friends who were following another friend who´s volunteering counting fish near Tulum, and the pair were soon leaving Mexico, so we crashed their final reunion/farewell. Our first day in Tulum we hired bikes and visited the ruins before the others got there as they didn´t want to go there. And for good reason. The ruins are in an amazing location on the coast with a little beach, but by the time we got there they were totally packed with what we assumed were tour buses from Cancun. We also couldn´t walk on any of the ruins; they were all roped off. I guess if they weren´t they´d get destroyed by the copious foot traffic that place probably sees every day. We therefore didn´t spend too much time there, and just took a nice ride back to the hostel. After lunch we went to yet another cenote with the others, this one called the Cenote Calavera (the skull cenote), as it had one big hole and two smaller ones directly onto the water. This was probably my favourite of the cenotes we visited, jumping through the eye-holes was particularly cool.

The following day we said goodbye to the others, and boarded an 18 hour overnight bus back to San Cristobal. This was 2nd class, so supposedly not so great, but the bus was basically up the standards of those we have in NZ, and there were no screaming backs, so it really wasn´t too bad. Had a little nap when we arrived, then met up with our Spanish teachers and went to another of their ex-students´ houses for the evening, which was interesting to say the least. Hanging out with people speaking another language almost exclusively was really cool, though we were extremely tired and reasonably drunk, so actually making conversation was crazy hard. Met up with another couple friends the following day for some more goodbyes, and after 2 nights we crossed to Guatemala.

We´d heard that apparently this crossing is sometimes this nightmare situation, but it went off without a hitch - we didn´t even have to pay for the exit visa, which was the icing on the cake really. On the Guatemalan side we got a kombi to Xela to meet another friend who´s been stuck in Guate for a month and a half after having her passport stolen, so we thought we´d come keep her company for a bit. The kombi ride was around 3 hours up this beautiful river valley - Guatemala so far is extremely mountainous, and somehow even more green than the Chiapan/Yucataneco rainforest. Looking forward to seeing the rest of Central America during it´s verdant rainy season, supposedly it mostly only rains in the afternoons/evenings, so you just get shit done in the morning and laze around the afternoons reading or whatever. 

That´s about it I suppose, yesterday we visited some really sweet hot pools which smelt of Rotorua, and got our first taste of a cloud forest (including the hammering rain). Despite only having around $0.60 between us on us after paying the entrance, and having to walk/hitch back to town, we had a really cool day. This weekend we´re going on a trek up Tajumulco, the highest mountain in Central America (we haven´t really done any tramping on this trip so far, and figure since the highest point is so close we´d probably better do it). Then on Tuesday we´re doing another trek over 3 days to Lago Atitlan, which has almost been a goal destination as it´s apparently amazing. Both of these are through a really neat-sounding non-profit that donates everything to local schools, so we feel less bad about blowing the budget...

First half of Mexico!

Anyway, all is going well here, first we spent 3 days in San Francisco, mostly just walking around the city to save money. We wanted to go to Alcatraz but hadn´t booked a tour in advance, and there were none available until after we left. I really liked it there though, was reminiscent of a bigger more colourful Wellington.´

We then flew into Mexico City, where we spent a week, mostly just exploring around where our hostel was, going to a few museums and whatnot. MC is unimaginably massive, the lights went past the horizon when we were flying in (in both directions I think!). We also visited the pre-Aztec ruins of Teotihuacan, which were really awesome. It was essentially a city centred around 2 avenues, with two huge pyramids (the photo attached is from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, looking towards the Pyramid of the Moon). For some reason we weren´t allowed to walk up the pyramids until 3pm, even though we´d gotten there early to see everything and be back at our hostel in time for the Lucha Libre wrestling that night. So we could only go up one of the pyramids, though it was so fucking hot we didn´t really wanna go up both anyway. The Lucha Libre wrestling was also a really cool spectacle, pretty similar to American pro-wrestling, but with more masks and less props (there´s no chairs and such, just their bodies). 

After Mexico City, we spent 2 days in a much smaller city called Puebla, which was a welcome change from the hecticness of MC. Although we weren´t there very long we visited nearby Chamula, which is home to the world´s largest pyramid by volume (which is significantly less impressive now as it´s mostly covered in dirt, but there´s a really nice church on top of it, symbolic of the religious conquering of the Americas by the Spaniards).

We then spent a week in Oaxaca, as we weren´t sure how easy it´d be to travel/find new accommodation on Semana Santa (Saint´s Week, the week before Easter, is a huge thing here, most people get a lot of it off and visit their families and so on). We spent most of the mornings and early afternoons in Oaxaca exploring the centre of the city, visiting museums and such, and then spent the afternoons with the other people in the hostel, who were a pretty good crew. We also hired and rode bikes an hour or so up a pretty good cycleway in the middle of a reasonably major road (the cycleway was the old railway, as far as I know trains are basically non-existent here now) to the Tule tree, which is the tree with the largest circumference in the world, which was rather impressive. The day after we visited Hierve el Agua, which is waterfall-looking formations of limestone as the result of springs burbling for however many thousands of years. This was our first experience in colectivos, which in this case were small trucks that people load into the back of to go places for cheap - they´re also sometimes cabs or vans, but always cheap as chips). Someone in the hostel mentioned that he wanted to find somewhere to hire gear and then go rock climbing, so he found a crag online and we visited it for a hike one day, then hired gear the next for a climb, which was pretty awesome to do (me being such a slacker it was my first outdoor climb). Easter Sunday was particularly cool, with a massive silent procession through the city, then what was described as a ¨castle of fireworks,¨ but in reality was a small tower covered in huge catherine wheels. In any case, it was probably one of the more impressive fireworks displays I´ve seen. Mexicans sure know how to celebrate Easter!

After Oaxaca, we bussed to a town called Concepcion Bamba, which doesn´t appear on any maps, but is around 40km west of Salina Cruz, for anyone keeping track. This was a tiny village next to the beach, and we stayed at a campground which is mostly full of surfers. We slept on the sand under mosquito nets under a roof with 3 walls, and spent most of the days sitting around reading or sleeping (between maybe 10am and 6pm it was too hot to do anything, even walk to a shop (which were just bits of peoples´ houses) to get a Coke). We also swam most days, but it was really just a surf beach, and sometimes the waves were too huge to be able to swim so we didn´t bother. There were also these raccoon-like creatures there which walked around all day sniffing at the ground and eating bugs. Apparently there was no snakes or scorpions there because the raccoons ate them, which is kinda cool. Unfortunately, that meant that when someone else was ratcheting the slackline they had there, one of the raccoons thought I was a snake and attacked my leg, after which I kicked him in the teeth and he kept his distance. 

We then had a rather nightmarish journey to San Cristobal de las Casas, on which we learnt about the unreliability of even the expensive bus services (it´s really hard to find cheap buses here if you don´t know Spanish, everyone sees you´re white and assumes you want the fancy ones so you get directed straight there). We spent a week exporing and such (Callum was sick for a couple of days, so I also didn´t really wanna do anything without him that I´d then needa repeat or he´d have to do alone). After that we started taking Spanish lessons at a school here for 4 hours a day, which have been really good. It´s still exceedingly difficult to converse, but at least we´ve gotten much better at understanding, and every day it´s easier to say stuff. We´re gonna be here for another week and a half taking lessons, then who knows? We´ll probably stay in Palenque for a couple of days to check out the ruins and a couple other things, then head up the Yucatan and back down the east coast of the peninsula.