Take me drunk I'm home

I've been coming to Playa since I was at the impressionable age when wearing a T-shirt with the Corona logo on it seemed like a cool thing to do. There are still plenty of Corona t-shirts to be had here, but the more discerning holiday-maker will typically equip himself with one bearing a slogan not dissimilar to the title of this post.

The 'Quinta' is the main thoroughfare for the acquisition and display of such apparel. Or indeed more upmarket and authentic gear. Just this afternoon I spotted a little notice under a fetching pair of canvas shorts in the window of the Squalo store, which informed interested customers that "If the inhabitants of ancient Mexico had surfed we are sure they used this broadshort."

Seated or standing at the edges of this bidirectional torrent of tourism are dozens of wily modern Mexicans hoping to snag onto something. Some insert themselves into the flow, drifting amongst the dollars for a while. I watched a lone mariachi separated from the rest of his band quietly strolling up and down within the compass of a block, scratching Yesterday on his fiddle.

Most however just call out into the unheeding throng. "Hey buddy!", "Whassup amigo?".

My favourite of these lines is nevertheless "Right here!" I've toyed with the idea of writing a sort of suspense novel set in Playa and this just might have to be the title of it.

I also toyed with the idea of getting a little pied-a-terre here back in 2003. I'm glad I didn't follow up on this, though I gather the real estate prices have since surged considerably.

One condo advertises itself with the tagline "Live Among Life's Pleasures", and therein lies the problem for me. One can certainly gawp at all the gratification taking place all around, but opportunities to partake for the not-so-young-and-trim are apparently limited. Unless of course you fancy asking the Right Here! man what he has to offer.

In 2005 Hurricane Wilma took something away from Playa and I doubt whether it will ever be getting it back* I fancy this was the kernel of its old self, which had somehow survived the dramatic expansion of the 90s. You come across fragments of it still, like scattered shards of a broken mirror, but the pervading mood is now what the late J.D. Salinger's best-known character would probably have dismissed as "phony".

The plane down from Atlanta was a steep-banking 757 packed with the kind of witless vacationers who have to press the button for the stewardess each time it dawns on them that they can't fill out the next box on the immigration form, and who clap like performing sea-lions when the aircraft touches down. This lot are the storm-troopers of the relentless Vegas-isation of the Yucatán.**

They have now almost completely displaced the comparatively sophisticated European crowd, — Frogs and Italians in the main — who, in the years before the town's growth became completely freakish, delivered its unpretentious Saint-Tropez vibe. Such chic beach Bohemians as now remain tend to be the commoditised New Yorky sort. (I've started calling them the OM-lettes.)

Meanwhile those most determined of ersatz Europeans — the Argies — are still here in force. (See pic above.) They appear not to be so turned off by the ghastly Mayan Eco-Disneyland that is Xcaret, just to the south and other paradigms of inauthenticity.

I did find myself sitting opposite a bona-fide Hispanic celebrity in Starbucks the other day. She was on a sofa, staring dreary-eyed at the screen of her Acer laptop. For a quarter of an hour not being able to place her face was completely killing me. I systematically did a mental roll call of former colleagues, clients, people I know in Antigua etc. And then it came....surely it was the lovely Isabel Cristina Estrada who'd played sweet-natured Lizeth in the Colombian telenovela Nuevo Rico, Nuevo Pobre? (V has picked up some lasting verbal tics from the ludicrous Fernanda in that show.)

* I've been reading Maragaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake on this trip and in it Crake expresses the worrying thought that this civilisation we have here right now is the only one we are ever going to get because all the surface metals have pretty much been mined. So anyone harbouring thoughts of an apocalyptic reboot should take heed.

** There's no denying that they were in jolly good cheer however. Which is more than can be said of the doleful bunch of passengers on my earlier flight out of JFK. There had to be something more to such expressive grimness than the mere fact that we'd all had to turn up for a 6am flight and that the plane had to be practically dug out of the snow. (I can count myself very lucky I didn't have to make this connection a couple of days later when 'snowmagaddon' had really got under way up there.)

No, southerners generally seem more upbeat. Whatever else you can say about Atlanta (and there isn't much else to say) its inhabitants tend to smile a lot more than New Yorkers.

And when I got on a Continental flight to Cancún out of Houston three years ago, I was sitting next to a charming young college girl whose first remark to me was "Are you psyched? I'm psyched...."

Trancers

Chucking shapes on the fabulous white sand dance floor at the rear of the Blue Parrot in Playa. (Newsweek once selected this as one of the ten best bars in the world.)

I tried to upload this clip to Revver but they kept rejecting it for copyright reasons. A pity because the quality of the conversion on YouTube was too poor to share, but this version on Metacafe ended up just about ok, though still much darker than the original.

I have in a way created my own mix here as the five clips in the compilation were originally shot at various stages in the evening when the DJs were playing different tracks. The gringa hopping around artlessly in the background amused V.


Trancers At The Blue Parrot - video powered by Metacafe

Tulum's peerless beaches

I wrote about Las Ranitas when I passed a couple of nights there in December. It's one of those places one might be reticent about recommending too strongly in case it were to be spoilt by 'them'. The French owners spoke of their own concerns that the airport at Tulum might soon be upgraded to cater for international flights.

Nevertheless, you can already get a cheap return flight to Cancun from London from as little as one hundred and fifty pounds, and the peerless beaches of Tulum are just a couple of hours' ride further south.



Before departing for Belize I got up around six and went for a last stroll along the beach...

Toritos and Mariposas

The journey in was just that little bit more bearable this morning. Soon I won't even be noticing how bland the bananas are here.

On the other hand, I am feeling a sense of release at having put some distance between myself and V's Guatemalan cocoon of light-hearted, yet still profound paranoia.

No longer is every human shape on the road ahead a potential perp. Motorbikes are especially sinister for her - undoubted harbingers of approaching doom. She spotted one the other night and recoiled. "He has a little kid on his back," I pointed out. "It could be a dummy," she retorted. It was kind of inanimate.

A couple more videos. Not in fact a cruel form of public execution, but standard entertainment for evenings of great celebration such as New Year's Eve - the Torito (Little bull).



Followed by the Mariposa (Butterfly).

Fire Dance

My first night in Mexico; the Blue Parrot. I had wanted to post a fun little clip I made of trancers chucking shapes on the white sand dancefloor, but Revver seems to think I lack the necessary copyrights for the music! So instead, here are the fire dancers that perform every Saturday at Playa's famous nightspot, giving the amateurs a chance to pause and watch:

Silent Night...

...unholy racket.

You'll need headphones to appreciate the din that attends the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve in Antigua. I saw some gringos apparently fleeing for their lives!

Beach Club

No need for an iPod at Mamita's Lounge, Playa del Carmen.

Goodbye again

My final evening in Antigua is always such a melancholy experience - I hate it when the light starts to seep away and I have to come to terms with the fact that I have yet again used up my precious supply of luminous, birdy-trilled mornings.

On Friday the twilight found us in the market stepping between the candles the last few sellers use to illuminate their produce. On previous final-night occasions we have made for Lloyds' (now Cuzcatlan) corner in the parque − our corner − as the old bank's steps are ideally placed to absorb and retain the warmth of the sun from early in the morning until the time it drops behind Fuego.

I have reorganised the sets of images I took in Central America this Christmas to make them a bit easier to review.

New Year's Eve in Antigua was particularly spectacular this year. The main event was the seventh annual Festival of the Calle del Arco and such is its regional fame these days that many hundreds of visitors came from neighbouring countries and beyond. There was hardly any room to throw fajas de cohetes. ("¿En donde estan nuestros amigos de Mexico?" a an organiser asked into her microphone. "En Pollo Campero!" a member of the crowd shouted back.)

The festival began the year after the Millennium celebrations. They had been pretty good, but the main engines of fun had been the myriad of semi-private parties dotted around the city. At the end of 2000 the committee of the Calle del Arco formed and Antigua has seen in the New Year in an increasingly loud, colourful and public manner ever since.

In London you get about ten minutes of premium explosions shortly after midnight courtesy of the mayor, then everyone troops home in the cold and damp. In Antigua the fireworks are still lighting up the sky several hours after midnight. On Monday morning at 2am the parque central was as packed as it gets on a Saturday afternoon. I've been to Rome and Seville on the 31st of December during those seven years − riotously fun nights both − yet still a notch or two short of Guatemalan exuberance.

Time for me to hit the sack now. I didn't get any sleep on the plane last night and have been doing all I can to last through to a reasonably nocturnal hour tonight. I've started to notice the strange lacunas in the flow of my consciousness over the past hour or so...

Marimbas Voz del Valle

This lot were accompanying the dance of the viejitas in the Calle del Arco on New Year's Eve in Antigua. I have many more little clips like this, from that night and others and will try to get them uploaded over the next week or so.

La Tierra del Quetzal

There's been an acute shortage of Quetzales in Guatemala this Christmas. Visitors turning up with the expectation of living off the funds they can take out of the ATMs have been in for a nasty surprise. When not unplugged the cash machines in Antigua have been acting briefly as the omega points for monster queues.

A friend of ours went to withdraw money from her bank account and was handed US dollars as there weren't enough Quetzales, she was told, while another was given a wad of billetes shucos, that should have been sent to the furnace ages ago.

The underlying cause of the cash crisis has been the collapse of Bancafe followed by a run on Banco G&T which was deliberately targeted by malicious whisperers. Come Christmas most of the dosh in Guatemala was sitting in suitcases under people's beds. I have also heard it rumoured that the government has somehow found a way to simultaneously cock-up the process of printing new notes.

UPDATE: 80m Quetzales worth of new bank notes will be hitting the streets in the next few days.

Had another bank gone tetas arriba before the end of the year the consequences for the Guatemalan economy would have been serious indeed. However, there are positive signs around. Citigroup recently purchased both the bank we use, Banco Uno, and Banco Cuzcatlan. They are the only two banks with comprehensive representation across Central America and although they are competitors, the American financial giant clearly wished to prevent any of their own rivals getting hold of a group with that kind of geographic reach. As a result the other banks in Central America are looking to consolidate in order not to get left behind.

Some notes from my trip

Back in Tulum I was discussing land acquisition with Yannicke, the co-owner of Las Ranitas.

The story he had to tell sounded fairly familiar - the coastal strip around Tulum has been subject to a multi-layered land scam dating back to the late eighties at least. Nobody has clear title to their property and every few years a wave of intimidation and other unpleasantness rolls in.

His wife also told me how Cancun aiport was shut for a month after the hurricane last year which hit Tulum pretty hard. Ottie also described how hundreds of tourists had to sling their bags onto the back of local trucks and head across the peninsula to Merida to make their escape.

In Cayo (San Igancio) it was obvious that the Macal river isn't quite the pristine rainforest waterway that it once was. Locals blame the swirling dirt on the Canadian dam project. Oddly enough there are also crocodiles in the river now. Luckily there weren't any when Surfer and I did our little canoe trip to the Black Rock falls in '89. Thanks to a heavy storm over the Maya Mountains there was a flash flood on the Macal and we ended up having to carry the canoe over our shoulders for a good part of the distance as we waded up river against a raging current.

There are apparently only around one thousand British troops left in Belize, all camped up in the Mountain Pine Ridge.

Having made it across the border into Guatemala I decided to escape the backpackers and make up some time, so I made a deal with a local driver called William (originally from El Salvador) to take me from Melchor to Santa Elena. His pitch to me when we first met was that it had been drizzling steadily in the Petén for about a month and the colectivos were struggling with the road. It wasn't exactly unpassable, but he hadn't been exaggerating completely.

There aren't many attractions on this route other than excessively large potholes, but the Kaibiles base is still there just outside the township of La Polvora (Gunpowder), so called because of the many confrontations that the special forces unit had there with the guerrillas during the civil war. When I passed in '88 the military zone was marked off with signs featuring grinning skulls and other hostile motifs, and we were forced to get down from the bus twice, once on each side of the town, first by the troops and then by the insurgents (Mostly teenagers). The Kaibiles base seemed fairly deserted on Wednesday morning. They must all be on tour up in the northern states of Mexico!

William also pointed out a salt-water lake next to the village of Macanche and claimed that every year all the fish die off due to a strange underwater eruption of a sulphurous nature. If you didn't know it was a natural phenomenon you'd have to think some local Guatemalan official was responsible.

Yesterday V cooked our eggs with cilantro, freshly ground nutmeg and melted cheese fresh from the Finca. Now, without question Las Ranitas was a great discovery - perfect, near-deserted beaches, great hospitality and genuine French chic, not the manufactured glossy magazine sort. Yet if it had one fault worth reporting it would be the quality of the breakfast. There wasn't anything wrong with it as such, I just think it's such an important meal in the tropical day, and for any guest house there's perhaps no better opportunity to make a lasting impression. The breakfast at Lunata is more memorably presented, though I didn't stop for it this time.

Las Ranitas wasn't the sort of place to have a TV in the bedroom. When I got to San Ignacio and turned on CNN, I discovered that the most important piece of news I had missed was the fact that Miss America was not going to be sacked by Donald Trump for under-age drinking after all.

The Christmas swell is peaking

Though it's a bit quieter than usual as this is Guatemala's first cachinflin free Navidad.

Yesterday we had a perfect afternoon, caressingly warm, with a soft haze and a gentle breeze. We spent it tidying up the garden at the back of V's brother's house next door in preparation for his visit on the 25th. I have a blister at the base of my right index finger from over-keen use of the machete on the lawn. It was overgrown as Felipe hasn't been back to Antigua since V returned to London in July (mostly, he says, because they have been digging up and resurfacing the main road to Guate for the past three months.)

Today is much hotter and I'm over at Alexandra's house waiting for a game of kick-ball to get going.

On Wednesday afternoon I caught the 2pm Maya de Oro bus from Santa Elena and as it was a predominantly daytime drive I managed to avoid the worst of the snoring, but I had forgotten about the merciless aircon on these buses, which has to approximate the experience of travelling in the under-carriage of a jet airliner.

It took eight hours in all, with the unfortunate consequence that I arrived in Guacamole City earlier than scheduled and had to hang around in one of the least savoury parts of Zona Una: 17 calle, 9 Avenida.

By the time V arrived with Alexandra's driver Esau and the retahila I had been fighting off the attention of assorted druggies and loons for around forty minutes, and the little bar where I had sought refuge was threatening to close when the last bus left the 'station' in front. "La cueva de los ladrones," said Esau later, chuckling at my rather worn-out expression.

When I next do the overland journey I think I will bypass Belize by jumping on the ADO bus bound for Chiapas at Tulum. The way I did it this time involves too many points of discontinuity, where vehicles have to be changed and new negotiations made. The alternative is one monster bus ride to San Cristobal, from where a private shuttle service takes you direct to Antigua via the border close to Huehuetenango.

(I have updated my Flickr page.)

Cayo (San Ignacio)

You are never very far from a puddle of green slimy stuff in Belize. Cayo's drainage is pretty much state of the art in that sense.

I haven't stayed here for seventeen years, though I passed through in 2004, long enough to get some Duurly's Parrot rum from a Chinese supermarket. (All the supermarkets and most of the restaurants in Belize are Chinese.) Repeating the transaction last night I asked how much rum I could carry across the border with me into Guatemala. Answer, "a rotta lum". It's not exactly Ron Zacapa Centenario, but the Duurly's bottle fills me with nostalgia.

I thought San Ignacio would too, but it doesn't. Back then it had this last outpost of the British empire feel to it, a real frontier town surrounded by the hootin' howlin' jungle in Belize's wild west. It's still kind of rough, but some of the old clapboard hotels on Burns Avenue have been torn down and replaced with unprepossessing offices made from concrete block. The heart of Cayo is a pot-holed five-way junction that is extremely perilous for pedestrians. I don't suppose that the guests of Francis Ford Coppola's Blancaneaux lodge and the other jungle resorts that now line the Macal river spend a great deal of time here.

Eva's on Burns Avenue describes itself as "the first cyber cafe out west". It is run by a former British squadie that married a local girl. I remember when I first crossed the bridge over the Rio Hondo in the far north it was manned by members of the Parachute regiment in their red berets. Now it is little more than the on-ramp to the bizarre duty free zone that straddles the border with Mexico. There's even a big white casino doing its best to look like a little piece of Monaco in the heart of Central America.

Yesterday was one long bus ride. First the ADO GL service from Tulum to Chetumal. GL means aircon and fabulously comfy seats and a little red light that comes on every time the driver reaches the official speed limit. It also means rubbishy films that play at full volume from little flat screens all down the aisle which makes either reading or quiet contemplation of the narrow green tunnel of scrub around the coach all but impossible. (I tuned into one with Val Kilmer and Neve Campbell set in New Mexico and involving an amnesiac would-be Presidential assassin. It kept me awake, just.)

Chetumal looks remarkably prosperous these days. On our way in to the city centre we passed a huge mall-cinema complex that puts to shame anything we have on the east-side of London. There were no obvious colectivos to negotiate with at the ADO terminal, so I signed up for a bus which appeared to be run by a newly-nationalised Belizean company.

After the hicks and the chics, I had a new bunch of fellow travellers to contend with: the oh-so-pleased with themselves backpackers. From Orange Walk south I was sitting next to a local guy playing thumping reggeton tracks out of his mobile phone, but by far the loudest thing on the bus was a pair of sun-reddened New Zealand girls competing frantically with rtwo all American boys for mochilero kudos: "Have you been...did you do...and we saw..what's your major?" Fortunately when I switched buses in Belize city I was the only non-creole.

No speed limiters on that one - we made our way to Cayo along the Western Highway in the dark at break-neck speed. The skin on my face is still feeling wind-dried.

Belizeans are a fabulous mix of different bloods, and probably around one in every twenty or so individuals is neck-turningly interesting to look at; men and women, young and old, especially the very young and the very old.

So, I now have my Duurly's and yet more habanero chile sauce (the famous Marie Sharpe's) and I am off to the border just beyond Benque this morning, where I will catch another - even more chicken flavoured - bus to Flores on lake Petén Itzá; Guatemala proper, but still an eight hour ride from the highlands and home.

I think I'm carrying more Christmas presents for the dog than anyone else!

Au revoir to Eco Chic

Sadly I have to say tatty bye to all this tomorrow. Tant Pis.

This place is a bit like a biosphere reserve for Mac users. How they roam freely...

In a matter of days I will be in a less protected area where quite natural behaviours, like walking around with an expensive computer, are likely to result in a violent death. I'm sure that the free wireless internet at Pollo Campero is a cunning ruse to get the laptop users out in the open where they can be picked off more easily!

It's been more "bonjoooour" mwuah mwuah here than "hey, are you guys from Philly?" The twitching NFL addicts don't get much further south than Playa. Not much chance here of finding one of those bars with folks shooting pool to a soundtrack of B-b-b-bad to the bone.

Right now I'm listening to a bit of Django Reinhart and the Hot Club of Paris. There's a very pukka English family playing Scrabble around the sofa next to me. The waitress asked if they wanted some music and when they said "no thanks" on it came.

Ottie, my taxi driver here in Tulum (#142) agrees with me on two key points. Playa has become spoiled, and Cancun was always a shithole. It appears that the European sophisticates have finally abandoned Playa and its environs and drifted down here as their old playgrounds have been swallowed by the barbarian "hey y'all" hordes from the north.

When I checked into Lunata on Saturday night there was a very pleasant American couple enquiring about the availability of 'eco-tours'. The girl at the desk gave them a blank look then handed out some brochures to the sort of places where you can molest a dolphin along with hundreds of other like-minded punters. But, they whined, we wanna jag-oo-ar.

They were just a bit too ensconced in Vacation World. The road I will take south of here tomorrow pulls away from the Caribbean leaving one final corner of the peninsula to unspoiled habitats, where even the eco-friendly hotels with their solar panels are barred: The Sian Ka'an ("Where the sky begins") biosphere reserve. Here you might find all five species of Central American big kitties - Jag-oo-ars, Oscelot, Margay, Puma and Jaguarundi.

Photo-Blogging

Will be posting some pics to my Flickr page as I go along.

Las Ranitas

I asked the waiter last night if the name of this place had anything to do with the fact that it was owned by a French couple. He gave me an evasive spiel about little frogs that croaked away in the night and I decided that I wouldn't be repeating the question later to le patron.

Back in 1988 when I first came to Tulum there was nothing here other than what the Maya had left behind. Nowadays there's a 10 km row of boutique beach huts along what is probably the Yucatan's most perfect stretch of white-sand beaches.

Anyone that knows me will know that, in Spanish-speaking lands at least, smart little hotels run by smug foreigners that speak the language rather less well than I can, are not really my thing; But I will make an exception here. For a start the restaurant is superb. Wherever you stay here the only place to eat is the hotel's own dining room, so it's a very important aspect of choosing where to sling your hammock, so to speak.

I made the mistake of asking the the chap that carried my bags to my room what was on the menu tonight and he went off on a long discourse involving a multitude of unusual local ingredients. Of course when I got to the table later I could hardly remember any of them and when he appeared again as my waiter with a stern "Ya se lo dije" (I've already told you...) sort of look, I opted for "the fish". This turned out to be an excellent choice: Boquinete entero a la plancha with a sauce based on a local dry chile called Guajillo. (Boquinete is what the Belizeans call "Ssnappaaar!". )

It really is so nice here that I almost can't be bothered to go and see the ruins again this afternoon. But I will take this sudden onset of perezitis agudo as a good sign.

There was an uptight American intellectual type on the bus last night. He might just as well have been wearing an "I'm an anthropologist not a tourist, OK?" t-shirt. I had an hour of schadenfreude watching him sitting next to a woman with two howling brats on her lap. It got better still when the cholo standing beside his seat leaned over him whilst playing a racing game on his SONY PSP at full volume. In contrast all I had to distract me were two young Maya learning German en voz alta right behind me. "Orale...Ich heisse.."

Mobile phone update: apparently if I take the stairs up to the high terrace I might get a signal. Using the Chocolate phone when your hands are sticky with factor 30 is quite a challenge. It gives new meaning to the term slider and the touch sensitive buttons on the front panel just aren't any more.

George Bush Innerconinennal

Houston airport was its usual charming self on Saturday.

"At this time we are ready to board rows 20 through 34. Please have your passport, boarding card and half-eaten pizza ready for inspection."

Looks like all the old-fashioned CRT televisions in Texas have found a home in Continental's new terminal E.

Win some, lose some

This morning I have wireless Internet in my bedroom but no mobile phone coverage. For anyone that is wondering why they can't get hold of me (my wife included) that will teach them to read my blog more regularly!

"Hey Amigos"

It's the the end of a long Sunday soaking up the sun's rays and the spirit-warming hedonistic vibes of the Mayan Riviera.

There's nothing quite like this in Guate. Down there there's a certain amount of honest grot wherever you look, an attention-grabbing lack of uncorrupted artifice.

But here you are in Vacation World; an ersatz gringo playground. And if you are not part of it you are in a way forced to act like a cockroach scurrying out from the cracks whenever opportunity permits.

V reck0ns that one reason that there are no recycling bins in Antigua is that there are loads of 'unofficial' recyclers on the prowl. You have only to drop that Coke can in the dust and not long afterwards some hungry fingers have whisked it up into a carrier bag. Well this pic shows what happens in Vacation World, which of course must keep up the pretence of local adherence to First World mores - open war between unofficial recyclers and the municipal recycling bin. I passed this one three times at different stages of the day today and each time it looked as if it was eating a man's arm.

I'd been up for 24 hrs when I called it a night at the Blue Parrot last night - midnight - not late enough to observe the women on the ground beneath the bar's swing seats sifting through the sand in the hope of finding a 5 peso coin...

The B.P is pretty much all that's left of "old Playa", that hip, rather Bohemian stretch of palapa-style hotels and bars that sat on the white sand between the two piers. It looks like Wilma gave the developers a bit of a head start, but beach-front property aside, there's little to support the mayor's assertion the day after the hurricane struck that Playa had been "destroyed". I hadn't been expecting to see the towering palapa of Madre Tierra, but there it was, and now here I am in the Zoo cybercafe underneath it.

Earlier in the day I watched West Ham play Manchester United in this same bar. One of the two Argie commentators on FOX started singing (to an imaginary hard rock beat) when Rio-Coker scored, and then didn't really stop. Simon Cowell would have been sitting with his arms folded, smiling knowingly. Talking of Argies, "gwess-hum" won because they didn't play that pair of hopelessly slack economic migrants Tevez and 'Rasca-ano'.

I get more smiles here when I don't roll out my colloquial Central American Spanish. It tends to throw them a bit. Firstly, they don't really like Guatemalans, and secondly it spanners their whole "hey amigo" patter. Still, they are an impressively industrious lot these Yucatec Maya.

I don't know another place in the world with such a concentration of opportunities to buy things you don't really want or need - including stuff that nobody could need, not here at least. What's with the surf boards? Are you supposed to wander up La Quinta with this fetishistic lifetsyle symbol under your arm, occasionally taking out a Mariachi with a deft side-swipe? It's no use in the Caribbean Sea for sure, the waves just aren't gnarly enough.

Actually, there is one useful item on sale here: Indonesian sarongs. V has bought loads over the years and I offered to add to her collection yesterday, but she has more than she knows what to do with, she told me last night.

And my bags have a lot more Habanero sauce in them now than when I arrived. Melinda's.

Blogger.com has gone all "no maaanches" on me - it seems to know that I have plugged into a local area network in Mexico and has displayed all the menus in Spanish.

Anyway, it's almost time to catch a bus that will take me another 50kms or so further south to Las Ranitas. If there's wireless there I may get in another post before Belize.