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.