Mexico has been described as a developing country with an emerging economy. Guadalajara is the bit which has developed and emerged. Naami, Matt and I found a city more at home in Europe than Latin America; the taxi ride from the airport, which went through industrial areas, then slums, then the commercial district, showcased a city of more refined infrastructure than Mexico City, or indeed, any other city I have seen here.

It's hard to express how an industrial factory district can be more complete than another, as those in Guadalajara had the cracked concrete, reinforced glass windows, and even dirt parking places you would find in Preston, but there was something more than in the D.F. - small things like gutters between the street and properties, less rubbish on the ground, and the idea that the cracked concrete was once properly made.

The slums, also, strangely had a less decrepit feel than in Mexico city or elsewhere. Indeed, they were still tiny little rooms made of concrete beams with brick sections in between, but here they were made of slightly less drab red brick, rather than the bleak gray besa bricks elsewhere in country. They were also not painted the bright contrasting colours – purple and yellow, red and green, blue and orange – seen everywhere else, used as a attempt to disguise the inherent melancholy of the situation, but ultimately increasing it through the feeble nature of the gesture.

The town centre had a series of public rubbish bins, lacking the Mexico City, and no metre-cubed holes in the paving, prevalent in Mexico City. Also, there is little or no flaking paint on the buildings. Most importantly, the abundant public parks had green grass, where in Mexico City the equally abundant parks have mainly gray dirt.

The main reason for this seems to me to be that Guadalajara never experienced the population boom Mexico City did in the 1970s, from which it has never recovered. The quality of life, as a result, appears to be higher, and the public purse more full.

Guadalajara has indulged, in one section, in a glut of architecture reminiscent of Italian fascist design, but largely the buildings are colonial and beautiful. For reasons I can't grasp there is an abundance of Chinese restaurants, and yet no Chinese people out on the streets.

A final cute detail was the LED displays at pedestrian crossings (and the existence of the crossings was pleasing enough) – the red man stands still, as one might expect, but the green man walks, and with the exaggerated motions of a 1970s pimp, lacking just the hat and the big feather. As the time counts down the pimp walks increasingly faster, until at the end he is no longer jive-walking, but jive-running.

So, if you ever find yourself in Mexico for too long, and wish to see somewhere with more familiarity and higher standards of living (what the gringos might call 'going back to the real world'), check out Guadalajara.

Curses! I am falling behind again, for you see, with my departure from Mexico imminent, all folk who have not visited yet rushing to do so, and I am using this to try to reach the remaining corners of this land that yet hold interest (though not all is possible – each place you go interests you in the next town). Fear not though, I’m taking notes on my impressions on each place, so as not to try and fudge entries by looking at photos weeks after the event. Also, there will be more than just archaeological sites in entries to come - I'm aware it gets monotonous to read about constantly.

After Palenque, we went on a little tour that had seemed dangerous, what with the drug and people trafficking of the area in question, but turned out to be quite easy and non-threatening: we got a minibus from the new Palenque town down to Bonampak, a small Maya site known for beautiful murals. From there, the bus goes south to the border with Guatemala, the Río Usumacinta, up which one takes a motor boat with canopy north to the archaeological site of Yaxchilán, which looks out over the river. The setting is sublime. Here, we saw more wild monkeys and the excellent, though lazily-named, Building 19, amongst the other ruined buildings. The later is a 2-level complex with tunnels and stairs and rooms, devoid of light, and teeming with families of bats which whine in warning and then swoop. It was sweet.

However, being a tour across large distances, there was little time at Yaxchilán and once cannot faff, as we did, at the outer building clusters and still hope to see the main complex in full detail. What was nice about the tour, though, is that it is not the usual where your tour guide is your new groovy best friend you are paying to be your best friend and who makes you get up and do the Macarena or some crap; you get a bus driver who doesn’t speak English beyond saying “Back here in one hour” after dropping you somewhere.

While it would have been nice to go to Guatemala, and we could almost reach out and touch it from the boat, but this will have to wait for another day, along with Belize.

Eeeeee gad. This I will justify under travel issues as it takes foreign eyes to see something Australians can't see for themselves: Joris has just commented on his journal regarding Australian safety paranoia.

See it here.

My comments on what he has said, also mostly reproduced there, are these:
For the last couple of decades there has been the growing popular belief that not only is a zero-risk environment possible, but more so that it is desirable, regardless of what impact such moves have on lifestyle; in terms of safety versus enjoyment, the scales must seemingly be massively unbalanced in the direction of safety. The individual is not competent to strike this balance themselves, so it must be done for them. There is, in fact, an entire class of managers whose very existence depends on this garbage, not to mention the lawyers and insurance companies. This program is pushed despite the law of diminishing returns with regards to funding - "If we spend an extra 50 million dollars on advertising, the annual nation death toll of blah-blah-blah will go from 114 to 105!". And, Australians being Australians, this is never questioned.

Also, be sure to never let your kid eat dirt or play with filthy dogs! Oh my lordy lord, now Jimmy has an under-developed immune system because I kept him from all pathogens and sprayed him with disinfectant every day, and now he has an allergy that never existed before pressure-pack disinfectant was invented. We best stop everyone from eating that food to which he is allergic.

Nae, Matt (whom readers will know from the second Italian adventures) and I flew to cursed Villahermosa to avoid a 13 hour bus trip, and leaving as soon as possible headed to modern Palenque, donned citronella patches, bathed in DEET, chewed down bitter anti-malarials, and headed to the archaeological site.

One is told from Day Number 1 of residency in Mexico that Palenque is one of the most important archeological sites in Mexico. This is largely because the Mayans here built the site not as a city, but as a necropolis, and so many lavish tombs, complete with hermitically-sealed mercury vapour clouds, have been built into the area. These are often built into the pyramids, at the end of tunnels, making them distinct from the pyramids of other Mesoamerican cultures, who built in layers, but solid. Many rivers were also diverted to run under the one domicile, the palace, into which toilets, visibly corroded by royal uric acid, dropped. Sadly though, while of archaeological value above that of many other cities, it is less impressive a city to walk amongst than many others.

However, as I grow older and more cranky, I'm more wont to be lazy and do things the easy way, dropping the independent traveller shtick. This manifested in Palanque as the hiring of a guide, which made for a richer experience than the stubborn backpacker would get, as he took us into the jungle amongst the unexcavated tombs (along a well beater track, it is true). Inside, we saw wild howler monkeys, thus completing one of Naomi's quests, dearly held for many months. For you see, in the imagination of Naomi, the power of Monkey was irrepressibur! We did not stand too close underneath, as apparently they tend to take a leak on the overly-curious human. We swung on vines strong enough to hold our weight (action shots ensued) and we also saw in the jungle mahogany trees, almond trees, guava trees and balsa wood trees (and others I've forgotten because I didn't write this immediately). Balsa wood!

Considering that the Americas had the chocolate, vanilla, strawberries, mahogany, tomatoes, potatoes, tabacco, peanuts, and now I find the balsa, maybe one day our descendants will look more kindly upon our current nasty imperialist adventures aimed at getting our oil out from under “those people over there”, as it is hard not to look kindly upon our forebears who went and got our stuff from those American natives who were sitting on our furniture while eating all of our Neapolitan ice-cream, and our mixed nuts, and our bloody chips, simultaneously smoking our smokes and flying our goddamed model aeroplanes.

Ahem. Anyways, in the site itself, there is one temple which, if you look from a distance and at a certain angle, and squint, you can see on the roof a crucifix. It turns out, according to some bible thumpers, that this is proof-positive that Jesus came to the Mayans. This is despite no reference to such a figure in any documents, myths, or other buildings, and the existence of a full pantheon of other gods, apparently tolerated by 'A Jealous God'. If you look hard enough, you will see anything you want everywhere.

A note on accents. Specifically our accent. Many of you have heard this tale, but I will lay it down nonetheless. On my first trip abroad I was awaiting my flight back to Melbourne from Beijing, and sat back to watch as when the gates open most people rush to be at the front, as though the concept of allocated seating doesn't apply, or that they can somehow leave earlier. When the queue started to move with some alacrity I, with the rest of those who knew that it's more comfortable to sit down for the extra minutes, wandered over and jointed the end. There was a Chinese couple, book ended by myself, towering over at the back, and another Australian gent in front who towered over me. He had his bright red HSV racing team jacket on, his hair was spiked up and peroxided short-back-and-sides, and the shock-white of the hair and the bright silver earing clashed violently with the severely over-tanned scrotum-consistency of the wrinkled face. I took all this in as he turned around and drawled out in the most nasal Queensland accent imaginable "Daaahnt ya hate long flaawts?". "Ah!" I thought, "Like nails down a chalk board!" The lady whom he addressed stammered back "Ow... don't speak Engrish" (hey, if I phoneticise one accent, I can do the other). The banana bender makes a grandiose gesture of dismissal, doing the clicking thing with his tongue on the roof of his mouth, and says "Ya knaa whad I meeeeeeen." "Ah!" I again mentally yelped, "I don't want to go back to a country of 26 million of them!"

And so it is. Sometimes. When Naomi is here in Mexico, people marvel that we grew up within twenty minutes drive from each other and yet, while both clearly intelligible, our accents are so distinct. There are, I think, two reasons: firstly, I suspect some small measure is owed to a decade at a fancy-pants university; very few of my contemporaries speak in what could be called a drawl. Secondly, Having lived overseas for some time, I early on got jack of not being understood and made a vaguely conscious effort to annunciate more carefully than two Australians would with each other. All tees stay as tees, not dees, and all sentences contain discrete words, instead of one long German-style uberword. This of course drops away with people who speak Australian, British or New Zealand English. Important for use with the yanks, though.

So today, my new Uzbek colleague came to me asking why he can understand me, but not his Australian housemate, also hailing from Melbourne. I laid out my above two reasons and he said no, he doesn't think that accounts for all of it. He said:

"Say the word 'later'".

And I said

"Later, but normally it might be 'lada'".

He said

"No, he says something more like 'law-da'".

I laughed.

"You, my friend, live with a football bogan".

"Ah yes," said he, "he is always on the phone talking about football."

"And he also doesn't say 'night', no, he says 'nauwt'? Not 'time' but 'tauwm'? And not 'goal', but 'gaw'? Speaks generally quite slowly? Every sentence goes up and the end like a question? And there's lots of 'yeah... naah'?"

"Yes! And theres lots of 'ahhhh... ummm...'".

So we sat down to watch video clips of footballers not talking well. However, I can't find a perfect example. Fevola, while not articulate, does not have that certain accent outlined above. Judd does the uberword sentence with the ahs and umms, but not the full accent, or zombified lack of sentience. Cousins is always too busy affecting remorse to do the full bluster associated. Crawford doesn't have the full deep register. Carey is pretty close, but, friends, tell me: whom does that full pre-game "Yeeeeeea, sa big nauwt fer us. Gaana givut ahunredanten percent... S good fah th club, th seige mentality... yeeee. Law-da wol get out, yano, jus may tha baws."? Who is the biggest user of this accent (asides from a Kenworth employee I went to school with)?

Anyway, I'll leave you with this.

Xochimilco is home to La Isla de las Muñecas – the Island of the Dolls. The story basically goes that some local fellow named Don Julian Santana, upon leaving his wife with their kid, moved to an island in Xochimilco, became a bit weird and spent 50 years fishing broken dolls out of the canals and trading yet more for the produce he grew on the island. He would then tie them to or hang them from the trees on the island, and let them decay. He said that this was to appease the spirit of a little girl who drowned in the canals, but this is apocryphal. Then he drowned in the canals, and is buried on the island.

Is this more creepy than the Cappuchin catacombs in Palermo, claimed by the guidebooks to be the creepiest place on Earth? Sadly, no. Firstly, Don could have chosen a real island, that you need to view from a distance in all directions. The island he chose only has real canal frontage on one side (though dramatic it is), with tiny drains on the three remaining, the back end facing solid land. This somewhat diminishes the mystique. It is also slightly too open-air, robbing the sense of foreboding that a dense canopy of trees would provide. It also suffers from what the afore-mentioned catacombs suffer: it's just not as big and with as many bodies as in the image your mind conjures up.

Still, it turns out that dolls decay in a way one would expect real bodies to. Their eyes cloud over. Crevices become filled with dirt, adding dark circles around the milky eyes. Pigment is bleached from the skin and hair. The hair becomes matted or filled with cobwebs. Clothes become filthy and rot off. Those attached to trees become infested with colonies of beetles or caterpillars, the later constantly moving. Often they have been posed in a fashion that adds to the sinister effect of the above; arms have been raised in some beckoning gesture, or legs turned up as though writhing. Most have been hanged by the neck, or strapped up by the neck, and some are just impaled heads. Being that most dolls are modelled as infants or women, their being in this condition adds starkly to the sinister air of the place.

Xochimilco is also the only natural habitat of the axolotl, pronounced ah-ho-lot-ey, or Mexican walking fish. One of my fondest memories of being a kid is going to the Croydon market and seeing these things in pet stalls, so it is quite special to visit where they come from. But sadly, although they are in fish tanks all over the world, in the wild they are pretty much pooched, owing to doofuses thinking they can dump goldfish in any body of water, which then eat the young and the food of the walking fish.

The axolotl has the interesting ability of staying larval all its life and turning into a salamander only if the water level is reduced, though this is really only possible for wild ones; the captive ones have a reduced instance of this trait, and most die in the attempt. Even if successful, the process reduces their life by two thirds. Don't do it kids. They also regenerate limbs rather than scarring. These features make them interesting to study, hence there are many more in captivity than just those in aquariums.

There is an Axolotl museum near the Island of the Dolls, but it consists of a shed with a few fish tanks in it, some weird taxidermied souvenirs, and a guy who talks about the conservation of the axolotl. As I said before, pooched. There is no removing the carp and other introduced fish, just control. And, even if they could remove them, some doofus would just put more goldfish in. Anyways, the museum may be poxy, but it costs about a dollar to visit, and it is better than the axolotl exhibition at Mexico City zoo, which is just a field with a single fish tank in it, with one axolotl swimming about.

I suppose I should now put up pictures of creepy dolls.

Once this topic is down, and photos done, I'll be pretty much up to date before the onslaught of touristic adventures in the months to come.

Lake Xochimilco is one of the last remnants of the greater Lake Texcoco complex that was in the middle of the Valley of Mexico before being drained in fits and starts between the 13th century and 1967. Before the Spanish, it was used as a kind of farming bread-basket for the Aztecs, once they stole it from the guys who set it up. Thus, it is a series of islands and canals, and owing to its long history, Xochimilco is a UNESCO world heritage site.

These days, trajineras, little boats steered by guys with poles, make their way around the canals, forging the inescapable comparison that the whole place is something of a crude mud-and-grass Venice. The trajineras are much more rough-cut than the traghetti and gondola of Venice, but possess a kind of ostentatious charm stemming from the fluorescent paint jobs they possess. Similarly, the Mexican trajinera captains are more rough-cut than the conceited northern Italians (for example, you would never hear a gondolier say “¡Mira las chicas! ¡Oye! ¡Una gordita!”, being “Look at the chicks! Ah! A little fat one!”). While the tourists in Venice are amongst the poorest examples of affluent effluent one encounters out in the world, they can't hold a flame to drunken Mexican teenagers out for an evening of boating, eating, drinking, Mariachi-listening, and near public fornication. The boat of myself and my companions passed one such crew from which I received the usual

“¡Hey gringo!”

replied to with
“¡No soy gringo! ¡Soy Australiano!”

which elicited the unexpected
“Ah! Kangaroo! I had sex with kangaroo!”

Good for you kid. Just watch the claws.

The above list of activities is serviced by smaller boats that come up to your boat, selling beers from ice-buckets, selling hot food preparing on-board on little burners or in little ovens, or shipping full Mariachi-bands that rock their boats perilously back and forth while singing my favourite, “El Mariachi Loco”. As we learnt, and have learnt repeatedly in Mexico, one must negotiate price before taking beer, food, or music, or one pays the ubiquitous güero tax. This also goes for the hiring of the boat in the first place – some targeted walking off to be chased down the peer is in order.

Just before conceding defeat at the hands of Naomi's influenza, which has since been identified to me (in an unsubstantiated manner) as round 2 of the swine flu, we made for the ruins of Uxmal, another Puuc Mayan city. By now they all of these cities sound the same, though to be there they each have their own charms. This one was extremely large, and after several hours we still had not seen all the extant buildings before the bus was due to come (but of course it was late).

The stonework, of a beautiful orange stone that stood out strikingly against the clear blue sky, is extremely well preserved, with some almost perfectly preserved, cleared and restored plazas with Chaak sculptures often retaining their nose, intricate geometric lattice patterns still vibrant, inlaid sculptures of the serpent god still clear, and straight edges still straight. In the places where masonry has collapsed but has not been reclaimed by the trees, it gives an interesting account of the construction techniques employed: seemingly, build the cut stone of the outer walls up, dumping rubble in as you go. Many buildings retain their internal structure of rooms, though those not barricaded off are often full of that nasty black mould that plots the demise of your respiratory system. Of all the ruined cities we have visited, this one takes the least imagination to envision as populated by daily affairs; you don't need to mentally rebuild the buildings, you just need to add paint and some tents and market stalls.

And yet, there is daily life here. The site is swarming with iguanas, the behavior of which is itself fascinating. Very quickly, one notes that this species mates strongly, with one always encountering pairs: a female with a larger, bearded male. Where they bask, they all face the sun, seeming like a congregation worshiping its god. The effect is magnified by the setting.

The most famous and unique structure here is the Pyramid of the Sorcerer (and yay for invented names), unusual in that instead of many rectangular layers, it has only two layers, tapered and elliptical, below the temple structures. Thus, it is somewhat reminiscent of an up-ended old-fashioned bathtub.

A visit to Uxmal is of definite value when one is in the area.

As said above, after Uxmal we abandoned plans to push on to Valladolid and its cenotes, and returned whence we came, with my acquiescing to a stop over in hated Villahermosa to break up the trip. Naomi claimed Villahermosa was quite nice, but this is because, firstly, the humidity was down from when I was last there, but secondly, she stayed in the hotel and avoided the seething crapness of the place. To my despair, everything worth seeing I had already seen the last time, and the last remaining item of interest, a local museum, was closed. As I was told by workers sitting about with not much apparent interest in getting it open. When Nae recovered slightly, by which time I had the flu, we went to Parque La Venta and to a local African safari park – with tigers rather lions – and then we left, and went back to Mexico City. At least I saw manatees.

We return now to our adventures in Yucatan from September last year.

The half-arsery witnessed in the early closing of everything in Mérida extends to the local bus services. After midday, you have stuff-all chance of getting a bus to anywhere, in between cancellations for the day, and total cancellations of routes. So, on our second last day in Mérida, after trying to get to get the bus to the Mayan site of Uxmal, and finding due to cancellations there wasn't an bus for another 3 hours, and that would take 1 3/4 hours to get to the site, which closes at 5, and that the next day's bus to the Puuc Route of 5 little sites was canned forever (though I've since learnt it was a woeful bus tour of this great attraction), I chucked an unbecoming wobbly right there in the bus terminal, scaring off some nice German man to whom Nae had been speaking. Not my finest moment, granted.

After my eye stopped twitching, we gathered our stuff, headed to yet another bus terminal (there are three, I believe) and caught a bus to Mayapan, harshly considered the ugly sister of the big sites in the region, but still far more elaborate and appealing than many near to Mexico City. In general, the Mayan sites seem to be far better preserved, with their intricate stone work still in place, where elsewhere in the country the buildings are more just rebuilt piles of stones.

And so, with the exception of a family that left within a quarter hour of our arrival, and some French-speaking rubes insistent on being in every photo, we had the place fully to ourselves until the sun went down.

As context for you, when Quetzalcoatl took an army of Toltecs and left Tula, heading to the Yucatan peninsula, he eventually conquered Chichen Itza and built it into the giant city the remnants of which are famous (i.e., swarming with gringos) today. But, when that went pear-shaped, he founded Mayapan to the north west. This means that the city is indeed very Mayan, but with strong Toltec influence.

This illustrates something I thoroughly enjoy about Mexico – the history is so layered and interwoven that still, after a year and a half, I am still connecting things I have learnt across the country together. I believe it would take years of reading and travelling and speaking with people to be able to walk down the street and understand the significance of all of the imagery around you.

In the same vein, in Mayapan for the first time I saw the face of Chaac, the Mayan rain god (equivalent to Tlaloc of the Aztecs). Or rather, the first time I understood it. Before going to Yucatan, I had been to the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City, built in the early 1900s, and had noted it was beautiful, but not understood the imagery. Returning there this weekend passed, I noticed high in the foyer the visage of Chaac. I really do feel fortunate to visit Mexico for a period of years, as there would be so much missed in days, weeks or months.

Mayapan had some features we had not seen before – the Mayans were more interested with geometry and space than the other cultures of Mesoamerica, and more advanced than most, so they have nice buildings where their version of the arch has been rotated in space to form ring-like rooms. This site also had a cenote (water filled sink-hole), and the main pyramid still has, preserved on its sides, stucco sculptures of human sacrifices, with niches where the head should be, so a real head could by placed inside. Interestingly, there are also no ball courts.

As the sun was setting, and the frogs had left, Nae overcame her flu long enough to climb to the top of the main pyramid, and we looked over the canopy of forest stretching out unbroken in all directions.

Wow. 10 posts straight with no comments. Does anyone read this? As punishment, here is something boring. But, being like that bizarre parent who punishes a naughty child and then cuddles them when they cry, I will compensate you by bringing the photo gallery up to date - some has already been done.

As with the English language, Spanish is under assault from the internets and text messages. This need to abbreviate is the same: 'see -> c', 'you -> u', 'are -> r' have equivalents in Spanish. There is 'of = de -> d', 'that/than = que -> q', and there is also 'also = igual -> = sign'. Best of all, 'because = porque -> xq', q from que, and x from something like '2 for 1', which is '2 por 1' which is abbreviated to 2x1 in Spanish. Of course, if 2x1 means '2 by 1' to you, this chain of logic makes no sense.

However, Spanish is immune from one bastardisation that English isn't, because being Latin based, its verb have a different conjugation for each person, and thus personal pronouns are irrelevant to begin with. Not so in English.

"What are you talking about? I went to school in Straya where they don't teach grammar. Explain, Liz Lemon."

Well, our verbs have 2 conjugations in the present tense: the infinitive, and the infinitive with an s at the end. For example, 'to walk' or 'walk' is an infinitive. This conjugates, of course, in present tense to 'I walk', 'you walk', 'he/she/it walks', 'we walk', 'you walk' (or 'yous all walk' if you're from Broady), and 'they walk'.

In Spanish, the infinitive is 'andar' (which should look familiar to any I-talians), and this conjugates to 'yo ando', 'tú andes', 'él/ella anda', 'nosotros andamos', 'vosotros andáis' and 'ustedes andan' (which will not look familiar to Italians - the Spanish here is purer Latin that your ugly irregular andare).

So, the point is, in Spanish you don't need to say 'I', 'you' etc before the action because the action tells you who is acting. But in English, you have 'walk' for 'I', 'you', 'we', 'you' and 'they'. So when someone says on the internet "Looks good, can't wait"; who or what looks good? Who or what can't wait? Or, my favourite from a shopping centre "Hope you enjoyed your visit!"; is that a threat?

Now, next time you are about to assault the language to save half of one second, put yourself where I am - put yourself overseas and imagine yourself trying to learn a language with all the interference of people being lazy and making it difficult for you to know what is correct. Now look outside your window and see how many folks around you have to put up with just that from you.