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Hey everyone! Its been a while since my last blog post, we’ve been in Medillin just under a week now, last weekend we just had a walk around to get our bearings and on Monday we started Spanish school at Nueva Lengua language school.

We initally decided to stay for a weeks course, but we’ve really enjoyed our lessons and feel like we’ve made so much progress, so we decided to stay for another week of lessons. Unfortunatly that’s not very interesting blog wise, as we spend 9am-1pm in school and then 2pm-4pm doing self study and homework and then just chill with a few beers in the evening.

We have met some really nice people on our course and el Poblado, the area of Medillin were staying in is super lively and fun and were out most evenings.

The spanish itself is going well, although it was frustraiting at first to have to re-learn a lot of words for things, the spanish is here is different to the spanish (used in spain) which we learnt before we came away. So words are different for things, telling the time is different and even the way you pronounce words. Words with ‘ll’ go from a y sound to a j sound here (Medellin is Med-e-jin). But once we got used to that it beacame a bit easier and were finally starting to put sentances together! It’s actually a lot harder than it sounds! As in spanish as well as having I/you/he/she/we/they you also have to change the ending of each verb, this is not so bad if it is a regular verb but for some verbs there is no pattern, so for each verb you learn you have to memorise 5 versions of it and thats just for the present tense! Theres another lot for past and future tenses and you also have to watch your pronunciation or you end up accidently saying something rude. But we’re finally starting to get it, so even though the course is very intense it’s worth it.

I appreciate this post isnt the most exciting so I’ll let you in on some interesting mistakes we’ve made/learnt so far in spanish….turns out spanish speakers are obsessed with all things rude…

Cuantos años tienes- how old are you? / Cuantos anos tienes- how many anuses do you have?

Estoy – I am, caliente -hot / Estoy caliente – im horny

Me caigo – I fall / me cago – I shit myself

Estoy – I am, buenos – good / estoy buenos – im sexy

Necesita una paja – I need a straw or I need a wank

Getting to Colombia was a stressful mess, our flight was just before ten so we arrived at the airport around 6:45 am and joined a queue, as soon as we were in the queue an immigration officer started handing out forms, I asked her if we needed one and she said they were for Mexican citizens only and we didn’t need to do anything immigration wise (spoiler alert – she lied). So we waited in this queue for 2 hours and honestly it made Gatwick queues look light speed, the staff had no sense of urgency what so ever.

An hour before our flight we asked one of the staff if we could join the designated queue for people whose flight was leaving in the next hour only for him to ignore us, then when we persisted, said no. Eventually with 30 minutes before take off our flight was called to join the queue, after a further 15 minutes of queuing we got to the front only to be told we hadn’t completed our immigration checks, even though several hours ago we were told we didn’t need to do anything. So we had to run to the immigration office 2 floors below and queue there to pay an exit fee. We didn’t have enough Mexican money for both of us, and after frantic scrambling we found some American dollars we had for emergencies, and they agreed to take those. Once we had our stamp we ran back to the front of the queue, got our boarding passes, rushed through security, ran to our gate and just made the bus to the plane.

I’d finally started to relax when Grace pointed out we didn’t have an exit stamp in our passport like we did last time we left Mexico and as has been routine for every country we’ve been to so far. We were unsure whether to keep quiet until Colombia and hope for the best, or to ask now and probably miss our flight. We figured it best to ask now rather than risk being denied entry and having to pay for a flight back to Mexico and then another one back to Colombia. So we asked a flight attendant if we needed an exit stamp and he told us Mexico didn’t do them (even though we had one previously). We decided not to argue and just hope for the best! Whether he was right or Colombia didn’t bother to check I don’t know, but we made it here.

Colombia airport is the only place I’ve ever flown to that you have security and bag checks when you enter; our bags were re-scanned and swabbed and we had to go through security gates and be patted down, and then had to walk past drug dogs – you can tell they’re really trying to crack down on the drug trade that’s done so much harm to the country.

We tried to order an Uber to our hostel which would cost us about $19000 COP (£5) but our internet was patchy. Being a tourist in Latin America gets you a certain amount of attention, but being a blond tourist is like wearing a sign saying that your not from here and people start to come over. In Mexico this was great, as everyone was super helpful, but in this airport it just meant people harassing us to buy things. We ended up agreeing to get a taxi to our hostel for $30000 COP (£8). When we got to the taxi people started grabbing our bags to put into the taxi and then demanded tips. When we got into the taxi the driver told us it would be metered, but only turned the meter on 2 minutes before we reached our hostel and tried to charge us $42000 COP (£11.00). When we tried to argue he locked the door and turned the engine off – we tried to explain to him in Spanish we knew this was far to much and he was just saying he would sit here until we paid. He underestimated how stubborn we are, if you want to wait mate we can wait, were in holiday it’s you that’s now not working and losing money! After a little while we said that we would go up to maximum price that a taxi should cost to get to the hostel – $35000 COP (£9.20) and he agreed in a heartbeat.

The hostel we’re in is really lovely and the staff couldn’t be more friendly, the city itself can be quite dangerous when it’s dark so they advised us to not go to certain areas and to only carry small amounts of cash and no cards with us.

The next day we decided to head to the Gold museum and have a look around, it was full of various different gold artefacts from around the country and was really interesting (I particularly enjoyed the face masks that looked like bad Dr Who villains). It explained how early indigenous people got the gold, the process they used to work with it, the significance of the things they made and the archaeological techniques used to uncover them. We really enjoyed the museum apart from one weird bit where we were locked in a dark room and then the displays were lit with changing flashing lights and a soundtrack of wailing people was pumped out through speakers, we’re still not sure what the aim/significance was and I had to check with Grace that someone hadn’t spiked our water!

We were planning on a bike tour around the city in the afternoon but Grace had been feeling awful all day. She had a headache, felt sick and her heart was beating really fast – we later found out it was altitude sickness as we’re at 2640 metres above sea here. So we came back and she slept for a while and in the evening we went and sat by a fire outside in search of a bit of warmth and met some nice guys from England and Germany and just spent the night chatting away with them.

On Thursday we headed out to climb to a view point of the city, but we decided against climbing it by foot when we saw the size of it, the sides were almost vertical! You also really notice the altitude here when ever you do anything energetic, the low levels of oxygen mean even walking up a steep hill to get to the base left us a bit puffed! So we got a cable car up, there was an option to get a train up but again the track was almost vertical at points and I didn’t fancy it’s chances of carrying my fat bottom up there!

The top of the view point was 3200 m high and gave beautiful views over the city, although it was very cold and raining, we got some very flattering photos in our anoraks. After that, we decided to have a walk to the nicer parts of town and finally the sun came out! At some points we even took our jumpers off!

The city was really pretty to walk around, with huge impressive buildings. We decided to go to a police museum where we heard you are shown around by young police recruits and they explain about Colombia’s issues and how they have started to turn the tide on the drug wars there. Unfortunately it was the day the old Colombian president hands over to the new one and even getting to the museum was a struggle, many roads were blocked off and on others the military were redirecting us away from, we ended up getting to the museum 30 minutes before it closed and everyone in the station/museum was rushing about like headless chickens, we decided they had enough on their plates and didn’t need us asking for tours so we just took a scenic walk home.

All in all we had a bit of a mismatch time in Bogota, but we still enjoyed it despite not feeling great due to the altitude. We’re off to Medellin now (I’m writing this on hour 12 of our supposedly ’10 hour’ coach journey) and planning to do a week Spanish course there as the Spanish in Colombia is spoken a lot slower and clearer than in Mexico, so we thought it would be a good place to try and improve and practice.

As always I’ll keep you updated.

Lots of love,

Alice x

On Sunday we didn’t get up to much, we were recovering from a late night out with Antonio. We were going to go on a walking tour from our lonely planet guide but we did a bit, stopped for lunch and couldn’t be bothered to continue. So we headed back to the hostel to have a bit of a chill out. At 4 pm we headed over to Arena Mexico as we had heard there was Lucha Libre on.

Lucha Libre is a type of freestyle wrestling in Mexico, but watching it it feels more like a cross between wrestling and pantomime. Wrestlers wear masks and there is little effort to disguise the fake punches and kicks, there is an obvious split of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys that you don’t need to speak the language to spot and the crowds go wild cheering and booing on queue. Even though it’s all faker than the ring girls boobs, it’s still a lot of fun! Yes the jumps of the ring and opponent throws are fake, but you still have to admire the gymnastics that go into them! They’re leaping onto each other and being thrown across the ring, they play in teams of three so there’s so much happening, it’s very exciting and at times comical to watch! Although it’s obvious they’re not really fighting, for me that makes it more enjoyable as no-one is getting hurt, well except one guy who had to be taken off in a stretcher after he fell awkwardly. Even then we were unsure if it was part of the show as the medical team were all ridiculously overdressed in lab coats. Apart from the injury we really enjoyed the evening, we even got a bit to into it and bought a mask!

The wrestling finished at about 7 pm and on our walk home we saw lots of people in the park and went to investigate. The park was full of people dancing – on Sunday afternoons people take music to the park to dance and people join them. There were groups of people dancing to salsa, waltz and pop music, the groups were a mix of ages from 16 to 80, old and young dancing together and teaching each other moves, it was so nice to see! We even had a join in of a few.

On Monday we met up with Antonio again and went to visit the pyramids at Teotihuacan, you’re probably sick of hearing about how we climbed another set of ruins, but it seemed only fitting for our last day in Mexico to visit the largest ones here. Boy was it big! People looked like ants on the ground and I felt like I should have legs like Arnold Schwarzenegger after climbing not one but two of them! As always the view from the top was incredible and you got a real sense of how huge the city must have been in its prime, even if half of it still hasn’t been excavated yet!

On our way around the pyramids we were chatting to Antonio about all the traditional food we had tried, tacos, mole, tamales, tortas, etc. and he mentioned barbacoa, a lamb dish where the lamb is cooked underground for 8 hours in cactus leaves. The region we were currently was apparently known for its barbacoa, so we headed out in search of it for lunch. The slow cooked lamb was served with a delicious lamb soup made from the juices, rice, cactus leaves and some thick corn tortillas. It was a big meal but I wasn’t a huge fan of cactus, it tastes a bit like a huge watery gherkin and I was sick of tacos so I just made my way through the lamb, rice and soup.

In the evening we met up with another friend, Anatolio, a Spanish doctor we had met in Bacalar who worked in Mexico city. We went for a wander about the city and a few drinks before heading home to bed and setting an early alarm for our flight to Columbia!

We’re excited for country number four of the trip, hopefully it will be fun, we’ve heard great things.

As always I’ll keep you updated,

Lots of love,

Alice x

We decided to take an overnight bus to Mexico city as it saves us a nights accommodation costs and normally you can sleep through the long journey and arrive around 7-8 am. However it didn’t quite go to plan for this trip. We booked late and got the seats right next to the toilet so spent the night kept being woken up by people going to the loo. The trip itself was shorter than we thought and we ended up getting into Mexico city bus terminal at 5 am, while it was still dark. Due to the high altitude here, when it is not sunny the temperature really drops, so we sat in several jumpers trying to keep warm (I even had my towel wrapped around me) until around 8 am when the sun came up and we could travel around the city in the light, it’s always better to travel around somewhere unknown in daylight.

We used the metro to get to our hostel – it is a bargain at $5 MX (20p) per journey – but ended up trying to get a train at rush hour. It was absolutely packed, there were queues for each train door, a woman passing us saw we looked a little phased and said to follow her to the women only section, here the queues were a little shorter and we managed to get (be shoved) into a train and again some local women helped us work out our stop and indicated to the other people we needed to get off – really helpful given how packed it was.

Mexico City is absolutely huge and a lot nicer than I was expecting it to be, although it is packed with people. Trying to cross the road feels like a giant game of bulldog. But we managed to get through the crowds and reach our hostel, which is very nice and spotlessly clean, a lovely surprise after the ones in Oaxaca that looked like they needed a bit of a scrub in places. We decided to spend the day doing boring domestic tasks as we were too tired for sight seeing. We went shopping to replace various broken/used bits (shower bag, earphones, soap, etc.) and we also bought some new clothes, I’ve lost weight (Woo! Who knew exercise was good for you?) so needed some new shorts and tops and we both needed to get some jumpers for South America as it’s in the southern hemisphere and the middle of winter there. We didn’t do much in the evening, we went to a bar for dinner and then headed home. Grace wishes me to note here she wanted to dance to David Bowie but I was to tired and stingy to pay the entrance fee and alcohol to get us drunk enough to dance. I wish to note her dancing sucks anyway, so there.

On Saturday we decided to do a day of museums, we first looked around the national anthropology museum, it was free to get into and huge. The ground floor covered the past of different indigenous tribes in Mexico and their ways of life and artefacts and the floor above showed how they live now. It was really interesting, especially as this one was in English and we could actually read about what we were seeing. There were so many impressive artefacts from tiny clay models and obsidian tools to huge stone statues. After the anthropology museum we went to see Templo Mayor, today it is an archaeological sight being excavated, it once was a large temple where the Aztecs are believed to have seen the symbolic eagle perched on a cactus with a snake in its beak, which can still be seen in the Mexican flag. The Spanish settlers had demolished the temple and built over it and it was only in 1978 when electric workers unearthed an eight tonne stone carving of a Aztec goddess that the sight was rediscovered and the decision was made to demolish the colonial buildings and unearth the temple. After Templo Mayor we had a walk around Mexico city watched some ‘traditional dances’ which felt more like tourist traps than tradition and looked around a few pretty churches that were enormous, sectioned off into smaller sections for worshipping different saints. The church also had a gift shop/convince store which is a first, but I guess they’ve got to fund new gold ceilings somehow.

In the evening we met up with Antonio, a friend of mine from university who is from Mexico City. He showed us a nice restaurant in a beautiful old building and we asked him 101 questions we had stored up over the last 6 weeks about Mexico (and complained a lot about tacos and sweet bread). We had a really nice evening chatting about all the differences between food and culture in Mexico and in the UK, and funny stories of misunderstandings and culture shock in each others counties among other things. We also went to a nice rooftop bar, and we finally got to ask about bar snacks, in bars they always give you free popcorn which is great, but why do Mexicans insist on putting hot salsa on it? Salsa goes on literally everything here. We managed not to insult Antonio’s culture too much and will hopefully be seeing him later this week.

I’ll keep you updated,

Lots of love,

Alice x

We decided to get a Collectivo to Oaxaca because it was much cheaper than a coach and also a lot shorter journey, the Collectivos can go though the mountains on the small roads where as the coaches have a much longer journey around them. So after an 8 hour journey full of twisty roads and sitting with my knees around my ears we arrived/fell out of the Collectivo about 6 pm, after regaining use of my legs we made our way to the hostel. We had a few drinks on the roof top bar, which felt like a risky activity as the stairs up were made of old pallets and swayed in the breeze, but our bravery was rewarded as we met some nice people at the bar, and then when they headed out clubbing we fell into bed.

The next day we headed out into Oaxaca to explore the city. After checking out the cool architecture of the city and various churches and markets we decided to head into the museum of culture ($70 MX / £2.85) to have a look around. Looking was pretty much all we could do as everything was in Spanish and our reading skills are limited to mostly menus and age 7 vocabulary, were not so hot on precolonial anthropology.

After the museum we decided to head to a Mexican restaurant which specialises in Oaxacan food, we had the meal of the day- a starter of a really tasty tortilla soup – because God forbid we have one meal not containing a tortilla, chicken, rice and salad main and rice pudding for dinner, accompanied by a super sweet drink which we weren’t fans of.

After lunch we walked around the city a bit more and came across a Mezcal festival, we paid $50 MX (£2) each for entry and expected it to just be about the process of making the alcohol but it was actually a fair with lots of different companies giving out tasters of their mezcal products, we saw some guys we had chatted to the previous night there and we spent the afternoon tasting different shots and cocktails. We definitely got our £2 worth! Although the payback for the vendors was trying to shock you with unexpectedly strong shots or drinks with crickets in. They seemed disappointed Grace and I weren’t grossed out by insects and then proceeded to pretend to try and put crickets in our mouths until we called their bluff and just ate a cricket, after that they went off in a disappointing huff and left us alone. Once we had our fill of Mezcal we stopped to watch a show of the traditional dances of Oaxca which was very entertaining, they had these giant papier-mâché heads and torsos of a male and female in traditional clothing, the person in the male one had little spacial awareness and kept smacking the papier-mâché head into things which in our drunken state we found hilarious and even in my non-drunk state now is still pretty funny. The rest of the evening we spent walking around Oaxca. We had arrived at the tail end of a festival and every night the streets were armed with people, street entertainers and singers on a big stage. Then after all that fun, we headed to bed.

The next day we decided to head to Mounte Alban, which despite the name is not actually a mountain but a collection of Zapotec ruins on top of a hill, despite not being Mayan ruins there were still a lot of steps, which gave us a stunning view over Oaxaca and the site. We also became a bit of a tourist attraction our selves when a Mexican mother and daughter requested photos with us as we were white and blonde, or that is at least what I hope was going on, otherwise we just obnoxiously ruined a nice family’s photo. In the evening we again had a wonder around Oaxaca city, I had been moaning at George (my brother) about eating tacos again – apparently he’s as sick of me moaning about them – so he said he would treat us to a fancy (i.e. non-taco meal). We went to this posh Italian place and really pushed the boat out, we had wine, seafood pasta and a chocolate brownie for desert and George generously footed the expensive bill at the cost of £6 per person.

The next day we divided to go to Hierve el Agua, an area that used to be a waterfall, the water has now dried up leaving a petrified waterfall and two large natural pools of water formed from the eroded water path and the few small streams that still flow there. The views and pool were amazing, it felt like we were on top of the world, looking down, but by far the most unusual part of the day was the journey to and from Hierve el Agua, we had to take a 2 hour local bus to a small village and then in the village we had to get a modified pick up truck for the last hour of the journey, it was basically some seats fitted into the bed of a small pick up truck with a cover over it. We started with 6 of us in the back, 3 on each bench, then another 2 people got on the bench, then another two were added on stools in the centre between benches, then another two fit laying down in a small alcove above the drivers cabin and then two more hanging onto the back of the van. Every time the driver stopped we thought there was no possible way he could fit more people in but he did, I’m just glad we made it there before anyone else needed a lift! We also paid the gringo tax of $50 MX (£2) per person and locals paid $5 MX (20p) but I didn’t feel too robbed and it was a nice ride apart from trying not to fall into people’s laps, at one point we even overtook some cool looking cattle.

Sorry for the long post but we had a busy time in Oaxaca, hopefully update you on Mexico City soon.

Lots of love,

Alice x

P.S. I mostly wrote this at 5 am in the cold sat in Mexico City bus station, so I’m sorry if it’s blabbering on a bit but I’m too tired to proof read it. Hopefully this video of Grace pulling a parrot will make up for my laziness.

So we’ve probably spent to much time in Puerto Escondido doing not much apart from sitting on a beach relaxing which doesn’t make for an interesting blog but does make me happy so screw you lot!

We decided to stay a few extra days as we have space in our schedule to use up. Our next stop is Oaxaca which is a city inland and apparently it’s going to get up to 40°C next week so we aren’t in a hurry to rush into that. We did decide to move hostels though so we were close to a different beach, probably a good job as the night before we left grace dropped a litre bottle of water on the guy sleeping in the bunk bellow, which made him scream and me and Grace had to try not to laugh and pretend to not know what happened. The new hostel is lovely and also has a pool which we appreciate in the heat.

On Friday we signed up for a ‘1 on 1’ surf session with the Mexican surfing champion, but to be honest he could of been anyone as were not big on surfing celebrities. The ‘1 on 1’ session cost $600MX (£24) per person and ended up being a group of 6 of us. We were taken to a beach a 20 minute drive from the hostel which had large waves and no-one else about, we were shown the basics of how to stand up on a board and then sent into the water.

It’s safe to say I wasn’t a natural. My first mistake was putting sun cream on the front of my legs, every time I’d finally get on the board I’d soon slide back off, the instructor did mention not to cream the front of your legs….just after watching me do it for 5 minutes. My second mistake was being too tall for the board, to balance the board so that it doesn’t wobble too much on the waves, you have to get right to the back, in my case so much so that your feet hang off the edge of the board, which is fine until you need to use said feet to stand and have no surface to stand on. The instructor took my ineptitude as a personal slight and kept encouraging me with useful tips as ‘Just stand up’, ‘don’t think about it just be good’ and my personal favourite ‘you just have to try’ all good points which I obviously hadn’t thought of or been trying to do until he pointed out the error of my ways. I did manage lots of crouches on the board and even stood up for a brief nanosecond before face planting the water. I seemed to spend more time paddling back in against the waves and trying to stay on the board than I did actually surfing. For me it was less surfing and more fighting a wooden board and trying not to drown, at one point I fell off the board and it hit me in the back if the head causing me to gasp and breath in lots of sea water, as soon as I reached the surface three big waves hit one after another and I couldn’t get to the surface, I honestly thought I might drown. Luckily the instructor saw and raced over to save…the board, but once he had taken that back in it made it easier to for me to swim in against the current. Despite all of my complaining I actually did really enjoy Surfing! I think if I went again I would be a bit chooser with instructors and get a bigger board, but I can see why people like it, although it’s knackering it’s so much fun, especially when you’re riding a wave.

Yesterday we decided to just have a chill day, we needed to get laundry done and get money out so we did that and then had some falafel for lunch at our new favourite restaurant here (which we may or may not have eaten at every day…were sick of tacos Okay, don’t judge!) And after just went to the beach.

Today we went shopping for swim wear as I’ve lost weight and my bikini is now too baggy and keeps falling down when ever I jump in water, which happens more often than you would think, I’m still a little kid around water. We ended up both buying what I refer to as a DIY bikini, basically two strips of fabric which you can tie various ways to make different shave bikini tops or bottoms. I left the shop slightly concerned it would be one of those items that looked great when a sales person was around but was almost impossible to do yourself, but as Grace was treating me as a late birthday gift I went for it, at least it would be adjustable if I lost more weight and hopefully we can change styles to avoid than lined too much.

We headed to the beach in our new bikinis and had an afternoon sunbathing, at 4pm we decided to walk to the next beach along to see if we could take part on a local conservation project releasing baby turtles into the sea but after an long scorching, sweaty walk it turned out no turtles had hatched that day so we headed home again. Hopefully we will be able to go again tomorrow with more luck.

Keep you updated.

Lots of love,

Alice x

P.s. here’s an action shot of me getting hit by a wave while sunbathing that grace decides to take rather than warn me. Hope you enjoy it as much as she did.

We finally reached Puerto Escondido on the coast! What was already a 12 hour overnight coach became even longer when about 2 hours away from our destination the coach had to stop, there was a protest going on and the road had been blocked by a barricade of four big lorries. Apparently there had been a local government official killed by the police and locals were rightly not happy about it. After 4 hours of waiting in 35°C in a coach car park we decided to try and make our way past on foot. We got a taxi to the barrier and walked through and then tried to figure out how to make the rest of the two hour trip. The local taxi drivers were having the time of their lives and were charging ridiculous amounts to take us there the lowest offer was about $2000 MX (£80) per person. Luckily we saw a local bus and in broken Spanish explained where we were going and he told us he could drop us at a bus station about an hour away so we jumped on and hoped we’d managed to understand and explain correctly and wouldn’t end up in the middle of nowhere. To the credit of the Mexican people though, in any place we’ve visited all you have to do is look white, or gringo as they call it, and appear lost and many locals will come over and try and help you or find someone who speaks English for you, so we easily found the correct bus and got to our new hostel 18 hours after leaving the previous one, and it ended up costing us $200 MX (£8) not $2000 MX (£80).

We were knackered after arriving at the hostel but there were free salsa lessons in the evening that we didn’t want to miss so we had a quick lunch and took a nap until the evening. The salsa class was so much fun, although I’ve never felt so white and British in my life, I have to shake my hips like that?! In public?! While sober?! Safe to say we aren’t naturals but it’s actually not that hard, we learnt three variations and even a basic spin. We then had to get a partner which took me back to a primary school disco, with all the guys stood on one side of the room and women on the other, but after a free round of shots we all maned up, quite literally, and got in pairs. The dancing was a lot of fun although how salsa got invented in such hot climates I will never understand, it was 30°C and very humid without any breeze and in a room of 40 people dancing, it got very hot and not one person had a dry piece of clothing by the end. The Latino people there seemed very comfortable with it and kept putting their arms around us while chatting, which almost made me and Grace gag and quickly move away in sweaty shame! As an apology for our obvious discomfort one guy offered us some cerviche he had made from a fish he caught that morning, so we gave it a try and it was actually really good. Although he didn’t know what fish it was so if we get really sick later well know it was from trying mystery fish from some guy’s bag…

Today we decided to check out the local beach which was about a 20 minute walk away, it was beautiful there and the sea was like bath water but there was absolutely no shade unless you paid to sit in a restaurant, so we got tacos for lunch…again. They’re always the cheapest thing on the menu but are usually just corn tortillas, which I can no longer stand, and meat, safe to say I’m sick of tacos. We sat in the restaurant from 3-5 pm until it was cool enough to ascend the 200 steps to the beach and complete the 20 minute uphill walk to the hostel. In San Cristobel we were freezing cold and couldn’t wait to get here, now were here we’re longing for the cool of San Cristobel!

When we got back we booked a 2 hour surfing lesson for tomorrow and decided to cook dinner for ourselves to save money and hopefully eat a bit healthier, the food here is so greasy and 90% carbs. But it ended up costing us twice the price of eating out and was a bit shit, as they seem to sweeten everything here even tomato puree and cheese! (And don’t get me started on our quest for unsweetened bread!)

Anyway I’m rambling on and we have to be up early for surfing! I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Lots of Love,

Alice x

On Sunday we got on a shuttle to take us back to Mexico from Guatemala, the journey took 11 hours in total, including a very anxious wait at the Guatemalan border when our shuttle left and assured us someone would be there to pick us up in 10 minutes, 2 hours later another shuttle arrived and we eventually got to San Cristobal on Sunday evening.

San Cristobal is a colonial town a few hours from the Mexico – Guatemala border, it has a similar look and feel to Antigua but is much more busy with tourists, Mexican and foreign.

On Monday we decided to go on a free walking tour of the town, it took us around various parts of the city and showed us different churches and view points of the town, we also got to go to various restaurants and bars and try traditional food and drink, soups, juices, tamales, molies and posh alcohol. Not that it’s fancy it’s just called posh and is an alcohol made from corn and sugar cane. We also visited a market and our guide explained that each little town around San Cristobal specialises in different crafts, leather, metal work, pottery, amber etc. And how San Cristobal acts as a hub for all these places to sell their goods.

Our guide also explained to us about the tensions and history between the indigenous Mayan population in the area and the colonialist government and how the various Mayan groups bound together to take control of San Cristobal in the 90s until an agreement to more rights for local people lead to a somewhat peaceful resolution, although natives still feel sidelined by the government.

The walk lasted about 4 hours and afterwards we went back to the market to try and buy some jumpers. San Cristobal is elevated 2200 m high so in the evenings it gets very cold here. We found some jumpers but they were expensive and itchy and as we’re off to the beach next we decided to save money and be cold for one extra night. Something we regretted later on, but we ended up going to a wine bar with some people from our hostel as they had been the previous night and said it was nice and also they had outdoor heaters, so it wasn’t too bad in the end.

Today we booked our bus tickets to Puerto Escondido by the coast, we were going to go to some local villages by horse this afternoon but it was expensive and we both feel a bit knackered after all the late nights and early mornings, so we’ve just had a chill day reading and sunbathing in the hostel.

Keep you updated on what we’re up to next.

Lots of love,

Alice x

We had heard from a pair of American travellers about a Mayan cooking class in San Pedro that they really recommend so we decided to give it a go. It was run by a woman in her 30’s called Annetta, she met us at 9 am by the dock and we walked with her up the steep streets away from the tourist trap by the lake and into the local market. While we were there she brought all the ingredients fresh for the meal we were going to make, she explained to us that most of the locals don’t speak English or Spanish, just native Mayan dialects so encouraged us to ask her any questions we had about the food or people we saw while in the market.

She showed us all the different types of bananas  and avocados they have, and explained we normally only get one kind of tough skinned avocado in the UK as it is the only one that travels without bruising easily, she also brought dragon fruit for us to try along with other ingredients needed for the meal we were making. We had noticed in Mexico and Guatemala that sometimes tortillas are a grey colour and she explained this is just because they use grey coloured corn, and in Guatemala they have white red and grey corn but only white and grey are used for cooking as the red corn is considered sacred and is only used in Mayan ceremonies. We also noted how nice it was that no plastic bags were used in the market, apparently this was a new thing, they had recently been banned with a fine of 1500Q (£150) for using one, which is pretty hefty as the average weekly wage in the area is ~40Q (£4). Apparently there used to be plastic bags everywhere in the streets which got swept into the lake every time it rained and as the lake is effectively just a valley filled with rain water they just stay in the lake, so a big effort was made to stop the pollution. We also asked her why throughout Guatemala women seem to wear traditional dress while men rarely do, apparently it is due to the civil war in Guatemala, the men used to be recruited and would kill men from opposing areas that were distinguishable by the slight variations in traditional clothing so they changed to wearing western clothes that are imported cheaply second hand from the US.

After we had all of our ingredients we headed back to Annetta’s kitchen, a large room with two open sides looking out over the lake. The meal prep wasn’t exactly a cooking class as we didn’t all cook our own meal from start to finish but instead was more like communal cooking where we all had different tasks overlooked by Annetta. Some people got to cut the exotic fruits and vegetables and some people were shown how to peel an avocado with out a knife but I of course got the very exotic task of peeling and chopping potatoes, then carrots and then beans. We did all however get a go at making tortillas (which is much harder than it looks!), potato and herb pancake type things and also a tamale type dish of mashed potatoes and vegetables wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. We ate these with rice and a type of chicken and vegetable stew and for desert we had fried plantains covered in a sauce made from blended chillies and chocolate.

The food was nice and while we ate Annetta told us stories about her life, how she taught herself English at 7 by learning phrases from tourists and how when her mother got sick she became the head of the house aged 8 and how she married a man who cheated on her, (which is apparently very common in Guatemala as woman are seen as subservient to men) and when she tried to leave him was told she was just lucky he was a good husband and didn’t beat her, which he later went in to do and when she chose to divorce him her family disowned her, then when she tried to get a job rather than go back to her husband her society disowned her for disrespecting her husband. She eventually became successful and her family, community and husband wanted back into her life, she told us how she forgave them and tried to change the community’s view on women supporting them selves and had opened a weaving co-op where local women could make and sell there goods. After we had finished our meal she took us down to the weavers co-op shop and showed us the different types of cotton that grow in Guatemala and how the colour of the plants flower indicated the colour of cotton, how they cleaned the cotton and turned it into thread and how they got a wide range of colours from natural dyes such as beetroot and barks. It was a very interesting and informative day and Annetta seemed like one bad-arse woman!

The course finished about 3 and some girls we met on it suggested we went to their hostel bar after, it was a cheap bar and you could jump straight from the bar into the lake, they also had an inflatable in the water and people were taking it in turns to sit on one end while someone jumped on the other launching them into the air. It was a really fun afternoon and we ended up going out, which seems to happen a lot these days, but it’s just so much fun going out here it’s a mix of locals and tourists, young and old, salsa and Latino club music and everyone is so friendly and dancing with each other it’s a lot of fun and like nowhere I’ve ever been out before. It’s was also very strange as around the lake they close everything down by midnight so people start going into clubs at 8 pm, leave at 12 am and have a good night’s sleep, I don’t see why we can’t do that in the UK to be honest!

We got to sleep at 1 am and were up at 5 am to catch a shuttle from the other side of the lake back to San Cristobal in Mexico, an 11 hour trip in a small shuttle on 4 hours sleep. It was a very long day to say the least but we’ve made it here!

I’ll keep you updated as to what we get up to.

Lots of love,

Alice x

Ps. We’re in the attic of the hostel which has huge windows; look at my view from bed!

We decided to head to Lake Atitlan for my birthday because the lake itself looks beautiful and San Pedro, we were told, was a lively town that would be nice for a meal and drinks in the evening. We had a three hour shuttle ride from Antigua to get to the lake, the last 30 minutes of which was spent on winding roads down the volcanoes surrounding Lake Atitlan. The views were breathtaking, I felt like I was in a painting. However after a small taxi boat across the lake to San Pedro we realised it was less than picturesque.

San Pedro is the worst kind of tourist trap, it’s one step up from a shanty town except with added tattoo parlours, blaring music and people trying to sell tat, everything is crammed in and made out of any spare material and you feel like sitting down may lead to catching an STD. Our hostel felt more like a building site, although at least it was clean, other travellers seemed to agree that it was less than pleasant and some even cut their losses and paid for a second hostel in another lake town. Travellers who had swam in the beautiful lake also advised us not to do the same, apparently it contains parasites and nasty bacteria and makes you sick, also local tap-water is drawn from the lake so best not to shower while here. Happy Birthday me!

So as you can imagine I was not optimistic about my birthday, but I awoke to lots of lovely Facebook messages and cards from family that Grace had been carrying with her for the last month, which cheered me up. We decided to avoid the lake and San Pedro and check out another town on another part of the lake which we heard was nice and that had a pretty pool bar and decided to take a hike there.

The hike started in San Marcos and began as a road that slowly turned into rubble and then a dirt path, and climbed higher and higher until it finally was a tiny path cutting across the steep volcano side. I would like to complain more about how steep it was and how scared I was but there were locals planting crops up the steep sides and several carrying huge bales of sticks and some even carrying several large rocks across the thin path, making us look like wimps sweating away when all we had to carry were our backpacks containing water and swimming stuff.

The hike was actually a lot of fun and turned out to be one of the most enjoyable things we’ve done so far, the views where breathtaking and the trail switched between high and low points (although it was very annoying to spend 10 minutes puffing up a really steep uphill part only to head straight down again as soon as you got to the top) and changed between roads to tiny side of volcano paths to climbing rocky edges and river beds. We also didn’t see any other tourists and each village we passed through there were lots of young children trying to ask us questions in Spanish or shouting any English words they knew, it was very cute! The trail was supposed to take about 3 hours but we made it in 2, although we did have jelly legs by the end, whether that was all the rock climbing or just the fear of heights I don’t know! We found the pool bar alongside the water’s edge and stopped for 2 hours for lunch, cocktails and a swim. Grace even managed, with the help of Google translate, to get me a chocolate brownie with a candle in, all in all a lovely afternoon!

We decided to continue around the lake hiking to the next town after lunch but unfortunately even though it’s my birthday my body didn’t want to give me a break. As you may or may not know, I have Crohn’s disease, which is where my body attacks itself, especially the digestive system, so whenever you get stressed or ill the body goes into overdrive and in my case this means I vomit a lot. So after out lovely meal in this fancy pool bar I had to rush to the bathroom to throw up (the staff probably thought I was the fattest bulimic they had ever seen) which was annoying and made me feel super weak, but on the plus side my birthday cake and lunch was pretty much calorie free! So after that we decided to just head home on a water taxi.

Back at the hostel we met up with some friends we had made in the previous hostel who also ended up here and spent a nice evening playing cards and discussing the difference in the US and UK political systems, they had been on a cooking course all day so we decided to do that too the next day on their recommendation.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Lots of love,

Alice x