Zipolite and Oaxaca for Christmas 7-27 December

After 24 hours of pain (12 hours Antigua-San Cristobal; 12-hour night bus on tortuous roads to Pochutla), I knew I'd made the right decision. I met a guy called Christoph off the bus in the early morning and he'd lived in Zipolite 3 years earlier and knew exactly where to go. Great! No need to think and another really nice person to chat to. Got some great mandarins for breakfast, arrived in Zipolite, loved it immediately. Went up the beach to find my two friends Luke and Drew sunning themselves as God intended. Hadn't realised it was a nude beach! After a brief chat with them, I decided to take the price offered at the first location with a second floor view of the beach with hammock. Lovely jubbly.

Many days of real, proper relaxation followed. It's a south-facing beach so the sun rises on the left and sets on the right and is there all day. The surf was actually a bit dangerous, hence its local name, 'playa de los muertos' but it was extremely exhilarating. For those who enjoy wearing your birthday suit as I do, it was a sublime pleasure. Sunbathe, swim, sunbathe, swim. Read, listen to music, ... just what the doctor ordered. And the company of lovely people. Wonderful. Went for a walk with Ruth and Christoph and a random guy we met at breakfast. Up to Mazunte via San Augustinillo.

After a lovely 'torta' (=bun/sandwhich) which was my culinary discovery of the week, we carried on to a  lookout point just past Mazunte. I'd also been to a really excellent open mic music night on the Thursday and done the only poetry slot. Went really well and felt good to be back on stage.

After this lovely day out, it was goodbye to Christoph and a final few days relaxation before the week had turned round to the next of the weekly open mic nights. My last night in Zipolite and unbelievably, it rained. It wasn't as rocking a night as the first one, but the bar, 'El chocolate invincible' and its ownwers, Crazy Horse (from Redcar) and Kevin (USA) plus charming Mexican girlfriend, Hilda, had hosted us for several enjoyable nights out.

What a beautiful place this was! Perfect preparation for 10 days with my parents in Oaxaca. Yes I missed out Tikal and Semuc Champey in Guatemala, but the minimal 6-hour bus ride to Oaxaca seemed worth it. In fact, I got dumped out of the executive minibus I had been very comfortable in, as the other two companies were blockading the third one, ours. In the middle of nowhere the driver seemed to be being chased as he went round dirt roads to avoid the road block, dropping us off in Ejutla, from whence I took a rammed 2nd class bus for two hours of jolting discomfort, standing most of the way. I was most dischuffed.

However, the luxurious lifestyle of Oaxaca soon soothed my briefly ruffled feathers. With a zero-stress approach, we limited ourselves to some frank, healthy and very productive family discussions, walks, meals out and in of a very high standard like this one at La Biznaga (above). A return visit after being there in October. Lovely food, and a lovely ambiance with the semi-covered roof and pleasant jazz music.

Oaxaca's clear blue skies and beautiful streets are a lovely backdrop for Christmas. Also nice for a few runs, as both Oaxaca's swimming pools are out of action, and running is the only available source of exercise.

I just love the colours and the light. Walked around some of the other streets I hadn't seen. Lots of yoga and meditation in the mornings and no booze. All of which started to pay off as the yoga feels better and better and general mood improved, as always.

Nice bit of random art work on the wall just up the way from the previous photo. Also went to a poetry night at La nueva Babel, a very bohemian bar. Other than the arts, political tension is very significant in Oaxaca. Lots of tags like 'gobierno asesino' referring to extra-judicial executions by the state's top brass. No one has been brought to justice. Only two years ago, political protests involved deaths and there is a lot of tension here. I didn't mention it before but our trip to 'Hierve el agua' a month or two back was held up by a road blockade expressing a political protest. The town centre is consistently heavily policed by federal cops.

Benito Juarez (statue above) and his life have been a real revelation. Having heard lots about Emiliano Zapata, here was another figure for Mexico to be very proud of. Not only one of the country's great presidents, but also a full-blooded indigenous Zapotec. The culture that produced some of the finest art work I have seen in Mexico and which occupied the superb site of Monte Alban for hundreds of years, found a representative whose legal training, courage and leadership gave Mexico the strength to survive serious challenges to its new independence and 10 years of war, 3 against the conservatives, rejecting reform and 7 against the French army. A true hero, and a man who fought to make Mexico better for all Mexicans. Which when you look at the history, is truly the best (political) humanity has to offer.

Here is the apartment complex we are staying in. A nice little two-bedroom flat with a beautiful little sun trap in the courtyard. Chilly enough to see my breath doing yoga at 7.30am but by the time the sun came round for breakfast, it was beautifully warm.

Christmas Day and a meal at los Danzantes. Very nice indeed. Good quality food, good service, a very nice day out. And then the superb pleasure of Australia being dismissed for under a 100 at the MCG in front of 90,000 Aussies, their lowest total in Melbourne since the first ever test in 1877. Joy of joys. Leaving for the capital on Monday, then Bogotá, Colombia on Tuesday. So the next time I speak to you, I´ll be in South America!!!

Lots of love,
Steve

Guatemala Saturday 20th November - Tuesday 7th December

So, having woken up feeling fairly hungover, I set off for the bus station in San Cristobal, confident that I would be able to make it to Lake Atitlan that day. Wrong! The tour buses leave with sober people at 6-7 in the morning, not hungover morons at 9.30. So I decided that I'd chance my arm anyway, as with the best will in the world, I'd had enough of San Cris. Got the 11.30 bus to Ciudad Cuahtehmoc and checked out of Mexico, paid 50p for a short taxi ride across the border, checked in to Guatemala and found myself in La Mesilla. 

A blog I'd read before leaving had made it sound like dirt squalor hell, but actually it was fine and I was able to get money out the cash machine. It was getting dark though and I didn't really know how to get to Panajachel, the place where all the tour buses arrive for Atitlan. A barechested ogre (above 5.8 = ogre in this part of the world) gave me incomprehensible travel info and after checking it at a nearby shop, I jumped on his bus to Huehuetenango. Which I'd never heard of, but sounded like a good way along to Panajachel. As it was getting dark, I was a little unnerved, but it all went fine and I had a really nice chat to a guy on the bus who was local yokel (=campesino) but who'd worked in Cancun and was very interested in the world and history. Not what I'd expected and really, really life-affirming/heart-warming. 

I decided to break the journey to Panajachel by staying a day rather than leaving the next morning and the town repaid my faith by providing a Sunday carnival, an internet place to do some blogging but sadly no laundry. So I bought some surprisingly expensive Guatemalan underwear :))) Oh, and for someone who has heard the song about a billion times in Russia, I was quite amused to be staying in, you guessed it, the Hotel California!!

After the dirty hole in the ground that was La Mesilla bus station, Huehue's was positively 1st world. Lovely and colourful though, the chicken buses! I didn't actually see any chickens, but I was the only foreigner on my bus and I only saw one other in all my time there. Another Huehue highlight was having egg and chips when I first arrived to settle my travel-and-Chiapas-ravaged digestive system.

The journey to Panajachel involved three changes (Los encuentros, Solalá, San Jorge) so I really got a slice of local travel - more chicken buses, pickups and a boat, from which I took this photo of the lake. I took a walk round Panajachel, hated it and decided to move on but, instead of following the recommendation I'd had, a boat tout collared me and suggested Santa Catarina as the smallest, least touristy place on offer. Obviously he forgot to mention that I could have got there for 4 Quetzal, instead of the 25 I paid him, but never mind :)))

Santa Catarina provided some of the worst accommodation I've had so far but it did have the annual 4-day fiesta too. Which meant lots of colour and decoration and incredibly loud music of, how shall we say, ... very variable quality. I hung out with a couple of locals whose mobile-phone reggae had caught my ear whilst watching a local footie match. Two nice guys who showed me around with varying degrees of disorganisation and ineptitude and we put the world to rights in Spanish which was great for me to follow up on mornings studying in cafés.

The guidebooks (which I don't have) said it was dangerous to walk in certain areas as tourists had been mugged etc of which I was oblivious, and this photo was the reward for my lack of caution. The rest of the time I was with Pedro and Rambo (nickname) anyway so it didn't matter. They both spoke Kachikel, a local Mayan language, and you could definitely see large similarities between the local indigenous folks and those in Chiapas. Sadly my stay in Santa Catarina was fun but also collapsed my immune system, so after being woken up at 5am by my landlord asking for beer money, I packed and hurriedly set off for the relative Western comfort of Antigua. And, after dosing myself up with loperamide following some extremely dodgy street chips, went up the volcano Pacaya a day or two later...

As I chose the evening slot, it was pretty chilly as we went up, and there was no lava as such but the landscapes were brilliant. It was also nice to chat in English with a couple of really nice Italian-descended guys from Milton Keynes.

This was as fiery as it got, which was good for roasting marshmallows and phenomenally hot if you stood close, but no rivers of fire...

I pointed the camera up into the darkness of the next feature, called the 'sauna' which was a cave-type thing which was pretty damn hot and deliciously scary.

This is me, James Hetfield, inside a volcano.... rock 'n roll....

After a week of studying Spanish one-to-one with a pretty robust teacher, I felt I needed to treat myself and do something exciting as my guts were just starting to be a bit more normal and energy levels resuming after lots of morning yoga and meditation in the various hostels of Antigua I stayed at. So I looked on the internet and found the prospect of churches and ruins which I'd already seen from the outside, to be rather unappealing. So I decided to spend my birthday money from Mum, Dad and Pete on this...

A 2-stroke, 175cc boy's own weekend. Actually I spent 4 hours on Saturday riding in ever-decreasing u-turns, doing emergency stops and more advanced cone-obstacle courses, another hour of the same on Sunday, then we set off into the hills of Antigua. Was bloody good fun, and boy, a 2-stroke engine sounds like a nest of hardcore hornets that have just been challenged to a fight by the local competition. I didn't realise it was possible to accelerate up through the gears when going up a 50% gradient, but with this rocket-powered device, you can. Doing 60 miles an hour down the free way put my underwear to the limits of its capacities, but it was all fine in the end... Mine is the Yamaha on theft...

Myself, Dave, the very large, unflappable teacher from Portsmouth and a pleasant Yank called Mark visited various lookout points and a local village taking in some dirt track stuff as well. Awesome...thankfully, no emergency stops required

And this is why most people go to Antigua, for the pretty buildings and such like. As I realised I was still pretty knackered and feeling like things just hadn't been as good in the people department since Mexico, I sacked off two world-class tourist destinations (natural splendours of Semuc Champey and the amazing Mayan ruins at Tikal) and headed back to Mexico to see people who I had met in DF (Luke & Drew) who were at a beach which would be just striking distance from Oaxaca where I had agreed to meet my parents for Christmas from the 17th...

More about Zipolite, nude beaches and poetry nights next in Steve's Latin American Adventure :))))
Tara,
luv
s
xx