A Bizarre Lack of Patriotism

Mummy’s been making a blanket, you know, where she sews on cloth patches of the flags from each country she’s taken me so far. But I was getting a little worried as of late; in the whole of America, we couldn’t find an America flag!

It all turned out okay in the end though; Mexico is full of them.

Mexico City - Greg

Addendum

It’s been pointed out that in all the excitement over hypothermia, I forgot to tell you all what I was throwing up over. No pretty blonde women this time, but just rather a lot of fish.

After the Great White Sharks in Cape Town, it seemed about time to get a little closer to them. But there are plenty of sharks out there; how to pick the best ones? Well, in the American way, we went for the biggest fish on Earth; Whale Sharks.*

They’re one of those filter-feeder types with the big mouths which suck up plankton and, by a mechanism inadequately explained by the guide, somehow ingest it, but not people. As they don’t have big teeth, you get slung into the water with a snorkel to swim alongside them.

They’re not hard to spot, especially when you hit a crowd of 30+ of the buggers. They swim right on the surface, to get all the plankton, and your main aims whilst in the water are (a) to get close, (b) not to get so close you end up in the mouth and (c) not to get hit by the tail. Some people also go for (d) to take a semi-decent picture of it.

We couldn’t move for them in the water, and they go slow enough for you to be able to keep pace for quite a long way. Here’s my favourite picture of the dive, there are more, including gob, in the Photos section:

So that was day one. What else? Well, me and L took our Advanced Open Water course, which involved going very deep. Deep enough for turtles, in fact (yeah, they’re higher up too, but the deep ones are big, like coffee tables), which are very thick and don’t notice you floating next to them. The temptation to grab onto them is so great I fear I might have done, had the book not drawn me a picture specifically forbidding it.

Aside from that, we saw seahorses (which will wrap their tails around a little finger if you stroke their bellies) and moray eels and squirrelfish, which are minging, and scorpionfish and trunkfish and pufferfish and bats. The bats were in caves in the fresh water dives, not under the sea.

Cancun, Mexico - Saf

* Yeah, I thought it was Basking Sharks too, but Wikipedia agrees with the tour guides.

A Rainbow of Experiences

The world is a beautiful place you know, especially the tropics, and full of glorious, shimmering colours. I can still barely believe the range of them I’ve seen over the past few days.

The first day I spewed up a rich, warm chocolate-coloured pool of brown vomit, probably as a result of all the coffee I had at breakfast. Clinging to the side of the boat, it was rather nice to see it waft and glisten in the sea before melting away. Sadly, there were no “carrots” (bits of stomach-lining), but the occassional miscellaneous green bit made for interesting pondering and texture.

Of course, once I was on land in the evening I felt much better, so had pasta with cheese and vegetable oil (it served instead of butter) for dinner. The vibrant orange that poured forth from me the following day, like juice spilling from a freshly-cut mango, was almost unreal and contrasted rather pleasingly with the deep aquamarine of the Caribbean Sea.

Armed with hindsight, I can no guess that strawberry yoghurt might not have been the ideal thing to pump into the protected reef, where you can’t even wear sunscreen unless it’s biodegradable to protect the wildlife. Still, I had my fifth kind of tablet by this stage, so was really hoping that I might have made a breakthrough. I now carry with me Stugeron, Kwells, Sea Legs, Damarine and (my favourite) Vomisin. Sadly, the Vomisin was just as effective as the rest; it made me very tired, but sod all else. Still, watching the waves of salmon pink sweeping across the waves was rather soothing.

So we’re on day four of water-based adventures, and you can imagine my delight in anticipating a nice, calm cavern dive* in fresh water, straight from the land, with a surface interval (gap between two dives where your body tries to recover) on nice solid earth.

What, you mean to tell me that’s not a sufficient rainbow for you? That one band remains unrepresented. Not to fear; my body was one step ahead of you. Very proud at not being sick, I hadn’t really noticed how cold I was getting in the water until I emerged with bright blue lips and fingernails, framed by an expanse of grey skin. You know, you feel kind of odd walking along a beach in 31-degree heat between people in nothing but bikinis whilst wearing two fleeces and multiple tops, desperately trying to fend off the hypothermia. Still, makes a nice change from vomitting, and gives muscles beside my stomach a good workout.

Playa del Carmen, Mexico - Saf

* That’s a cavern, not a cave. Definitely not a cave. We’re not allowed in caves. And yes, we could see daylight at every stage of the dive; it’s just that sometimes it happened to be weaker than the beams of our torches and a little hard to pick out.

A Random Factoid

Did you know that in Mexico canned drinks (Coca Cola, Sprite, Beer, etc) come in 355ml measures rather than the usual 330ml? This slight change in can size is rather disconcerting until you can place what’s gone wrong.

Playa del Carmen, Mexico - Greg

Tu madre tiene traseros como las montañas

Hola chicos!

Aren’t you impressed? That’s proper Spanish, that is. Well, I don’t think it’s bad considering the amount I had just a few weeks ago.

Seeing as most of South America, and Mexico, speak Spanish I did have very good intentions of learning some before I left. Sadly, these fell by the wayside as being far too boring. I made another stab in Africa, but trying to learn Swahili in parallel made it tricky, and the fact that I was driving for hundreds of hours in America meant that I couldn’t use the journeys to study either. So I stepped across the border with shockingly little control of the language.

Clearly, by this stage it was time for a crash course. It was only then that I realised how differently the three of us approached learning a new language. L, who has a GCSE in the damn thing, used the “how do I introduce myself/get to the beach?” technique we all remember well from school, where formations come much later than actually speaking. R had ended up with a series of comic/language books where she would figure out what each comic said using a dictionary, and try to figure out why that was the case. Personally, I’m absolutely astounded that the first thing they did was not to write out their verb tables and spend a productive afternoon chanting them.

I reckon they think I’m mad, but I can’t imagine a better way to learn a language. Granted, my vocabulary is dire, but I tend to pick that up during day-to-day activities. I can’t imagine just “picking up” verb endings - they’re hardly the easiest thing to distinguish in speech.

After the verbs I’m afraid I rather shunned the books, and have been relying on films, shown in English with Spanish subtitles on the oh-so-long bus rides we’ve been having, to fill me in on what normally occurs in conversation. After a film about tramps I had fully come to grips with the word “hedgehog”, Friends taught me “butt”, and after Blown Away I left with a range of vocabulary about bomb construction and denotation.

Of course, however you learn a language, you should always remember that as soon as you talk to someone it will be wrong. A very enthusiastic woman who was at the hostel selling Tintin books had a conversation with* me in which I am sure there was not a single word I already knew. Still, with enough gesturing you can always make yourself understood, and we spent a long time looking at pictures of Alfredo Fernandez on the Internet and discussing his bodily merits.

* talk at

Mexico City - Saf

Country of the Dead

One thing I knew about Mexico before heading out here was that it’s rather full of skeletons and masks. Exactly how many of either, I could not possibly have imagined, though.

At the moment, I’m in Guanajuato (City of the Frogs, although they all seem to be dead now) where we’ve just been to a rather bizarre museum. Museo del Momias is full of corpses. To be more exact, mummies.

It turns out that when people are buried, their families need to keep up the payments for the tombs they occupy or they get thrown out. But you can hardly stick a corpse in the wheelie bin, right? So the best preserved ones (there are quite a few, given how hot and dry it is here) end up in a museum for people to gawp at. There are, of course, photos, but I won’t imbed them here in case you don’t want to see.

It a fascinating, strange place. Quite a lot of people have no provenance, or clothing. They were mostly only in the tomb for less than ten years, so they’re much better preserved than Egyptian mummies, with hair and teeth and, where the skin is torn and you can see through the ribs, vital organs. The museum seems to delight in finding the most uncomfortable specimens, and has a big room dedicated to people who died violent deaths (including one who was buried alive, hands up over the face hammering on the coffin lid) and a second full of babies. The woman who died whilst pregnant has her own case, which she shares with her tiny mummified foetus (extracted from her body by the museum).

Maybe this immersion explains why so many of our conversations have tended towards the best way to commit suicide, what we want to happen to our bodies when we die, or the ideal afterlife?

Guanajuato, Mexico - Saf

Not Another Party

We’re stopped in Zacatecas at the moment, where my recurrent attempts to construct sentences in Spanish have severely retarded my ability to write English in a non-stilted, subjunctive-inclusive way. Disculpa.

We had intended to use these few days to rest after rushing across the country, but it seems that the people around us have other ideas. You see, we are comparatively young (not to most of you, in all likelihood, but to the people cropping up in hostels certainly). This means that we are expected to drink and dance and go clubbing constantly.

What exactly I think about this rather depends on the context. The first night was great. In Mexico, there are processions in the streets at the weekends called callejoneadas, where men with instruments play music and people dance. They wander down some side streets and stop in another square to do it again. Although you’re not really allowed to drink in the streets, the police turn a blind eye to it and it’s a rather nice party.

It wasn’t long before some Mexican English-language students had offered to show us how to dance, and soon afterwards we were adopted by a lovely family, who decided we weren’t drunk enough (they were quite right; we were stone-cold sober). We got introduced to the tradition of drinking mescal[1] by having the bottle poured into our mouths from a great height, to the count of anywhere between 3 and 10. Sounds minging? A bit, but the secret is that it’s actually tasty out here, and not just like drinking lighter fluid.

The nice family then took us up the hill (the police also turn a blind eye to drink-driving, it seems) to look over the city at night, and we ended up in some random carpark trying to understand jokes in Spanish and having really a rather nice time.

It only seemed natural, then, to suppose that we would also have a good time later in the week when people from our hostel went for a night out. It started with the ubiquitous mescal-pouring, and a huge pan of margheritas dished out as fast as you could drink it. Sadly, though, it all deteriorated once we got out of the door. As women, we weren’t allowed to buy our own drinks at all, and were therefore obliged to dance with the men who insisted in getting some for us. From that point on, we spent most of the night trying to fight them off and having a really thoroughly miserable time. Free drink win, but harrasment fail. I think from this point on I’ll just drink in my room, thanks a lot. Still, if you want to see some photos of us wearing stupid hats and being mauled, check out the photos section.

Zacatecas, Mexico - Saf

[1] Mescal is tequila which isn’t made in the town of Tequila. Turns out it’s a region-controlled substance.

Civilisation At Last

Hello everyone! I’m in Mexico-no-I-don’t-have-swine-flu-yet and am having a fantastic time. Mummy has been struggling a bit with the chilis inserted into every dish available, but I personally enjoy having my face burnt off when I lick the edge of a tortilla, so I’m sitting pretty.

Mexico really is actually a lovely place, once you get past the border towns where the druglords keep shooting one another, and very clean indeed. They disinfect every table and area around it between diners; who’d have thought, eh? This is the cutting edge of civilisation and, to act as a shining beacon of this, I have for you a video of the coolest pedestrian crossings my little beady eyes ever did point glazedly at.

I’ve nicked this from Youtube, as Mummy can’t figure out how to sort videos by herself and, well, it was already online so why go to the effort? At Mexican crossings, as in America and Canada, you get a little picture of a walking man and a countdown on a separate screen showing you how long you have left, so you can reasonably guess if you will make it or not. Useful idea; yes. Can be improved upon; certainly.

Mexico has a little tiny animated LED man, who walks across the road, just in case you hadn’t figured it out for yourself. But to up the ante, he speeds up the closer the timer gets to 0! By the end, the little fellow is sprinting as fast as he possibly can in his little box, and any pedestrian cannot really help but do the same.

Is this a bit pointless to write a post about? Possibly. It might not be one of your main reasons for visiting Mexico, but it’ll certainly brighten up your day.

A Link, because I am too lazy to figure out how to embed it

Los Mochis, Mexico - Greg

Falle

Erm… Hey United States of America Immigration People. You know those little green bits of our visa waiver you wanted back when we left the country, to prove we hadn’t outstayed our welcome. Well, uh, you didn’t ask for it back. You weren’t even at the border with Mexico. We managed the Spanish to immigrate to the next place, but…

I’ve still got my green card. You don’t know I’m gone, do you? Do you, you know, want it back or owt?

Ooops.

Cuidad Juarez, Mexico - Saf

America - Oh God, is that Albuquerque again?

Back in Albuquerque, trying to get to El Paso to return the car in time. It’s still boring.

Mexico soon! Wish us luck!

Albuquerque, New Mexico - Greg