Timehop.

2011's #southernroadie in tweets and pictures!

Thanks, Brock! I'm glad one of us is a closer.

And so it is and so it goes.

I read a blog this morning about how a new year looks like a field with a fresh layer of snow on it: all fresh, tidy possibility. The author was talking about the urge to set out to create the perfect path across it—a single, dainty set of deer tracks etched crisply into the frost. And how life isn’t crisp and dainty, so that isn’t life. Life is mess. Life has substance. Life is weaving boot tracks and snow angels and churning up the mud below the surface.

The fun stuff makes a mess. The big stuff doesn’t happen in a straight line or an orderly pattern. Life is stamping and running and falling and kicking and tasting and making and destroying. 

I’ve run, this year. I fell. I tasted and made and I destroyed.

Yesterday, my aunt said to me, “resolve to make mistakes. If you’re screwing up, you’re trying. You’re living.”

By that definition, I lived my ass off in 2012. I lived it like a bullet train (occasionally while on a bullet train).

In 2011, I lost my oldest friends in exchange for my newest. In 2012, I traded back again. My best friend is back in my life (amazing how far the words “I’m sorry, I was an asshole” go once you can both say them) and the person I lost her over isn’t. They’re not connected, although they are related, and to her eternal credit, Old Friend has never said “I told you so”. I think she understands now that I needed to make my own mistakes. Everyone I know could see the train barrelling at me, but trying to push me off the tracks just made me cling harder.

In my head, my dad is chuckling. 

I’m a thousand people trapped in one thin skin, and sometimes, none of them have control and I feel like I’m lurching from one fuck-up to another—too much money, too much wine, too much too much toomuch—dazed and drunk and with no idea what day it is, let alone what I’m trying to do.

The urge to make dainty deer tracks is huge. It’s control, in the end—it usually is, with me. The urge to retreat; to make lists, to set plans, to regulate and regiment. To grab the tattered ends of my life and wind them up on a spindle of self-discipline and order, until all the pieces fit back in their boxes. No sharp corners. No frayed edges. No rogue feelings.

It’s funny: I feel so out of control, and yet I’m still so locked in it. I still can’t hug people comfortably. I don’t trust compliments. I edit myself until I’ve taken out everything but the proper nouns. I don’t want to be that person, and I feel like I’ve already worked so hard not to be. And yet. 

And yet.

I can't stop thinking about the part in The Perks of Being a Wallflower where Paul Rudd says to Charlie, and then Charlie says to Sam, “we accept the love we think we deserve”. That, and the ferocious crush I‘d have had on Patrick if I was Sam. 

Those points are both connected and related.

I fell and ran and destroyed, and all of it was inevitable. And all of it felt so unfair. I didn’t deserve it—but I thought I did. I played chicken with the only possible ending, and it was the happiest and the most miserable I’ve ever been—often on the same day. Often in the same hour. It’s all so painfully ironic, if you know the whole story.

Everything makes me cry lately. Refugee stories on a museum wall. Animated movies. Tweets about cemetery trips. People visiting. People leaving. I said to a friend, “I was trying to have a few feelings, and instead I appear to be having all of them.”

She said, “going from one extreme to the other? You?” And then she cackled like a hyena.

Once again, I don’t have a dial so much as a switch.

It’s a resolution, even if nothing was really resolved. I thought I deserved so little that my heart tried to settle for something awful—and in doing so, ruined something great. I feel bad about that, because it wasn’t his fault. But in wavering on whether I can write about it, I realise that not to do so—to ignore it or avoid it or gloss over it—is to keep pretending that what I felt wasn’t worth anything. Wasn’t valid, or was stupid, or should never have been. I dealt with it terribly, and I made a mistake—but it turns out that’s allowed. In circles other than my own head, it may even be encouraged. I tried, and I screwed up, and I lived.

And next time, maybe I won’t make it. But I hope I do—and, despite everything, I’m glad I did. It was kind of a beautiful mistake to make. Just misguided.

I like that word. Misguided. Like my heart is a missile, and I gave it the wrong coordinates. 

Which I did. We accept the love we think we deserve—and I deserve so much more than I’ve let myself have.

As the new year ticked over, we were lighting flying wishes. Our wishes flamed, and the wind carried them away. I wished three things: a creative goal, a personal one, and one for the people I love.

We had one paper left over. I wrote “HAPPY!” on it in big block letters, and we rolled it up and lit it. As the wind carried it away, a cheer rose up from the city underneath us, and just like that, 2012 was gone.

Happy new year.

Resolution 2012: Read 52 books

Final count, including the three books I’m reading right now: 68.

Here’s the final tally — I’ve bolded the new books I liked the most. Books with asterisks beside them are books I’d read before.

Turns out half the books I read this year were re-reads: one of the things I wanted to do while I wasn’t writing much was to re-read all the books I really love, and think about what I love and why I love it. Trying to pick out the common themes in your influences is a really interesting task — and really helpful. Moral grey areas, lanky men, foreign-feeling worlds with solid internal logic... those things weren't surprises. But it also turns out I like anything exploring what it means to be human (or not human). I like the human cost of war. I like funny ladies and sharp dialogue and horrifically, tragically doomed love stories. I like crows and bones and books with weather.

I also like lots of people to die or be horribly maimed. Just sayin’.

Currently reading

• Insurgent (Veronica Roth)
• Plain Kate (Erin Bow)
• 11/22/63 (Stephen King) - I have to stop listening to Stephen King books on audio. I love them, don’t get me wrong — he has the perfect writing style for audiobooks — but it takes me all year at the gym to get through one.

Read 2012

Fantasy/Sci-fi/Magical realism

• The Night Circus (Erin Morgenstern) - Gorgeous. Haunting. Lovely.
• Anathem (Neal Stephenson) - The only novel about quantum mechanics I’ve ever enjoyed. Let’s face it, the only novel about quantum mechanics I’ve ever read.
• Pyramids (Terry Pratchett)
• The Road (Cormac McCarthy) - Short. Horrible. Kind of lovely, for all of that.
• The Magicians (Lev Grossman) - WEIRD. It’s grown-up Harry Potter in Narnia. Like, actually, they GO TO NARNIA.
• Zoo City (Lauren Beukes) - After meeting her at Webstock, I had to. She’s great.
• The Alloy of Law (Brandon Sanderson) - I’m still getting over Mistborn. 
• The Way of Kings (Brandon Sanderson) - This book took me months to finish. I chewed through the Mistborn series in about 10 minutes flat, but I picked this up and put it down for weeks. Once I got into it, I loved it. But it took some work. 

A Song of Ice and Fire (George R.R. Martin)

• A Game of Thrones
• A Clash of Kings
• A Storm of Swords
• A Feast for Crows
• A Dance with Dragons

Rain Wild Chronicles (Robin Hobb):

• *Dragon Keeper
• *Dragon Haven
• City of Dragons

*Liveship Traders (Robin Hobb):

• Ship of Magic
• The Mad Ship
• Ship of Destiny

*Tawny Man (Robin Hobb)

• Fool’s Errand
• Fool’s Fate
• Golden Fool

*Assassin’s Quest (Robin Hobb)

I LOVE Robin Hobb. Have you read Robin Hobb? GO READ ROBIN HOBB! She writes the best characters inhabiting the best worlds. She is the MASTER of the grey area. I dream about writing characters as nuanced as hers. The think about The Fool and Kennit for months afterward every time I read these. (Yeah, I read them a lot. They’re worth it.)

Young Adult

• The Monstrumologist (Rick Yancey) — Gross. Heavy. Really interesting.
• Divergent (Veronica Roth)
• Pure (Julianna Baggott) — LOVE the world in this.
• Clockwork Angel (Cassandra Clare)

The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)

• *The Hunger Games
• Mockingjay
• Catching Fire

Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Laini Taylor)

• *Daughter of Smoke and Bone 
• Days of Blood and Starlight 

Laini Taylor is just amazing. My favourite book of 2010 was Lips Touch: Three Times, and the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series is also phenomenal: gorgeous, gorgeous prose, an incredible, rich world, a complex, delicate story. I’d steal her phrasing if I could — and then I’d steal her ability to put the most disparate groups of awesome things together and turn them into a cohesive whole that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. Marakech, human teeth, fallen angels, men with the heads of wolves... it’s amazing. I am consumed with jealousy. CONSUMED.

 *Song of the Lioness (Tamora Pierce)

• Alanna
• In the Hand of the Goddess
• The Woman Who Rides Like a Man
• Lioness Rampant

*Immortals (Tamora Pierce)

• Wild Magic
• Wolf Speaker
• Emperor Mage
• The Realms of the Gods

*Trickster’s Choice (Tamora Pierce)

* Trickster’s Queen (Tamora Pierce)

Tamora Pierce has been one of my favourite authors since I discovered the Alanna books when I was about 11 or 12. I’ve read them religiously every couple of years since — she writes kick-ass girls with agency, and I love everything set in the world of Tortall so much that I haven’t actually read all her other books, because it upsets me too much that Numair and Aly and co won’t be there.

*Confessions of Georgia Nicolson (Louise Rennison):

• Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging
• On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God
• Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants
• Away Laughing on a Fast Camel
• ...Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers
• Startled by His Furry Shorts
• Love is a Many-Trousered Thing
• Are These My Basoomas I See Before Me?

FUNNIEST. BOOKS. IN. THE. WORLD. I don’t even care what you think: go and read them. Do it. They’re hilarious.

Other

• *Bridget Jones’ Diary (Helen Fielding)
• *Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Helen Fielding)

Probably read these every year. Still best books ever written about being single woman with tendency to fall over after excess of wine. Always obv. when have just read as write in manner of Bridget for solid month. V.G.

• Freedom (Jonathan Franzen) - Liked it. But, like most contemporary fiction (for me at least), the gravitas and the hype didn’t add up to a world I wanted to spend time in. I still read to be entertained — I still write to entertain.
• The Affair (Lee Child) - I tend to chew through these when at my parents’ for more than five minutes. They’re about the only books in their house, and to be fair, they move like stink.
• Explosive Eighteen (Janet Evanovich) - I love Stephanie Plum. If I could write dialogue like Lula’s, I could die happy.

Walsh Family (Marian Keyes)

• The Mystery of Mercy Close 
• *Watermelon 
• *Angels 
• *Rachel’s Holiday 

Calling these “chick-lit” is the root of all the problems I have with gender in literature. Marian Keyes was the top-selling author for all five years I worked at Whitcoulls, and her books are fantastic. She writes hilarious stories about sad things and real things, and she does it so freaking well. Jonathan Franzen could dream of this, that’s all I’m saying.

Non-fiction

• How to Be a Woman (Caitlin Moran)
• You’re Not Doing It Right (Michael Ian Black)
• Committed (Elizabeth Gilbert)
• The Bedwetter (Sarah Silverman)
• Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea (Chelsea Handler)
• Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (Mindy Kaling)

HOLY BALLS THAT WAS LONG. Does it make up for all the times I didn't blog this year?

No?

Oh.

30.

I'm not an adult. I'm not even close. I veer wildly between eating whatever I can find in the fridge, in whatever form it fits in my mouth, and spending extravagant amounts of time and money creating gourmet cuisine from scratch. Last week I made gyoza, including the wrappers. The last time I was home for dinner (six days ago, which is a different point) I ate something that included the instructions "just add water".

Of my four oldest girlfriends, one is a mother of two. Two of the others are pregnant, and the fourth just got engaged. All of them own their own homes. They have diamonds and lounge suites and lawnmowers. I'm willing to bet there’s milk in all their fridges, and it hasn't even expired.

Meanwhile, I woke up hungover for the second day in a row and my car hasn't run since New Year's Eve. However, the fact remains that I'm about to turn 30. And I must, at some point in the last 30 years, have learned some things about life.

So.

On the eve of my 30th birthday, here's what I know:

Everything changes. Everything stays the same.

You're in charge of both and neither.

Too much and too little are as bad as each other (wine, productivity, Ian Somerhalder, feelings). Have fun. Follow your heart. Accept that sometimes your heart's an idiot. Forgive it. Make mistakes. Apologise. Care. Say yes to things that scare you and no to things that bore you.

There's no such thing as "just one lolly".

Be nice.

Self-control is something — it's not everything. Always sleep on it. Don't argue in email. No, really: don't. Never comb naked if your hair is longer than your nipples. Credit cards are the devil's work. Don't confuse fear with a lack of desire. Everyone else is as weird as you are. You'll feel better if you go to the gym.

If you figured it all out, you'd be bored.

Merida (05/09/12)

I’m sitting outside a fake Italian restaurant drinking my first glass of white wine in weeks. It’s 8:45pm and probably still 30 degrees. The heat is bruising but at least it’s drier – I was tired of being shiny all the time.

I’m so happy today – I hate how it always seems to take right until you’re about to leave a place to settle into it. I succeeded in trying on clothes, ordering this wine and buying a hat today. There’s a lot you can do with mime and apologies once you lose your sense of shame.

Today was magic. Possibly the best day of my life – or up there. We visited the cenotes, which are a system of freshwater sinkholes that run all over under Yucatan.

Getting there required an hour in a public van – after we’d waited almost an hour for it to fill up in stifling city heat. It was so hot and so full that the driver eventually opened the van door and left it open as we drove. A mother sat in the dickie seat by the wide-open door with her toddler crawling around her lap. The NZTA would lose their minds.

[Author’s note: in Playa I saw a lady with her baby lying in the footwell of her scooter, which beats even this.]

After the van, we (Ian didn’t come, of course. He was “exhausted. Simply exhausted. Oh, it was so hard!” from the jungle) climbed on the front of modified motorbikes – like front-facing motorised tuk-tuks. It would have been worth it for this ride alone - being tacked on the front on a bench made every pothole and speed bump an adventure.

The houses were a haphazard collection of tiny concrete bunkers and thatched cottages, all piled higgledy-piggeldy around the road. Every dog I saw looked dead, lying prone in any shade they could find.

When THIS ride stopped, we were at a tiny railway track, like the ones you see in kids’ playgrounds. It ran off into the jungle around us. We climbed on a little rail cart, and our driver hooked up a horse to it. The horse then pulled our cart along the rails at a gallop for a tooth-loosening 20 minutes, bursting through clouds of milling butterflies and startling iguanas. If we encountered a cart coming the other way, everyone piled out and derailed the cart. The horse would take a minute to snatch some grass, and the little biting yellow flies would take a minute to consume all our exposed flesh. The other cart would rumble past, and we’d lift ours back onto the tracks and our horse would resume its gallop.

The first cenote (we went to three) is the easiest to get to. We had no idea when we got there what we’d see. Ivan had just told us it was a pretty place for swimming, and it involved a cave somehow. In my head, I’d been picturing a hill (even though I knew the Yucatan is completely flat) with a rocky overhang and a little deep lake to swim in. Instead, we saw a signpost that seemed to lead nowhere.

When we got closer, we realized it was a staircase down into the earth. At the bottom of the stairs was a diving platform down into the bluest, deepest, most perfect pool I’ve ever seen. The sun streamed down the stairs, steaming all the water it touched. In the deep cave past it, little birds and little bats flew and rustled around in the ceiling, and tiny fish flittered around our hands and feet, so unafraid in their predatorless paradise that you could cup your hands around them and feel them flick.

It was magic. Magical. Just mind-blowingly amazing. And soon after we arrived the other couple of people there left, so the three of us had it to ourselves for a good half an hour. I floated around, watching the bats wriggle and the birds flit, and thought I’d never been anywhere better.

Eventually we got back in our cart, and thundered our way to the next sinkhole. This one was a tiny hole in the ground – so small that it was a squash to get down the ladder with my backpack on. The ladder seemed to wind down this tiny tunnel of limestone forever – I don’t love small spaces, so it was almost as hard as the tomb I crawled into in Oaxaca, but once we popped out the end, it was amazing. This one was bigger and deeper. The bats were more active, the dive in was higher, and the long, twisted roots of the trees above reached down for the water like long vines.

Periodically Brenda would ask me what I was doing, and I’d say “nothing”, because “pretending I’m doing synchronised swimming in a cave under Mexico” didn’t seem like a good reply.

At the third hole, the dive was even higher and the climb in and out was even harder, involving a knotted rope and more upper body strength than I’d usually use in a week. But this one had mini caves around the cavern, with little warm pools in them, and people had etched their initials and their who-loves-whos all over the walls.

The only bad bit: my bikini bottoms fell pretty much to my knees every time I dived. For the record, this didn’t stop me.

Eventually we clambered our way back to the surface and the horse and the bitey yellow flies, and then our friend with the motorbike and our other friend with the stinky, sweaty van. And then Brenda and I parked ourselves at a restaurant and ate EVERYTHING. Guac and chips, a mango daquiri, an enormous and supremely delicious plate of the incredible local pulled pork. When we couldn’t eat another bite, we declared this the best day ever, and retired to our rooms to wallow by the AC.

Note: There’s a breeze in the square I’m sitting in (and a kid screaming as his sister keeps knocking him over, but that’s another thing) and I have a second glass of averagely excellent white wine and some pasta on the way. Today is very good. I’m excited to get to Playa and the beach tomorrow, and hopefully be in enough of a tourist town that I can work out where to find eye makeup remover and shampoo and someone will be able to tell me in English what my shoe size is here. I’m excited to spend a few days lazing on white sand before I head to Japan to eat too much sushi and conquer Tokyo. This is all going much too fast. In three weeks I’ll well and truly be back home and at work. I both feel like I’ve been here forever and can’t believe it’s gone so fast.

Palenque

The trip to Palenque was about the most miserable of my life. Ivan warned us that it was nine hours on a bus on the windiest, bumpiest roads in Mexico, and so we upgraded to a tour that included stops at two waterfalls – and transport in a van.

Sounds good, right? A van over a public bus?

No.

I repeat: no.

The van was packed full. There were no seatbelts, no AC, and it set out at 6am. Ivan once tried to count the speedbumps between San Cristobal and Palenque, but got bored at 300. And that’s not including the potholes, the tight corners, and the altitude.

I was sitting between Ian and Brenda and we’d all taken Dramamine to stop ourselves getting motion sickness, especially since Brenda, Ivan and I may have been a tad hungover after two buckets of margarita and two glasses of wine at dinner the night before. Also, Ian had asked Ivan to wake him up at five – and his room was between mine and Brenda’s. And he’d prepared himself for his 5am wakeup. I know this, because I was already awake and listening to him banging around and making his Ian noises when I heard Ivan knock on his door at five.

So we were hungover, sleepy and drug-induced drowsy, but we were playing an involuntary game of corners that was only interrupted by the frequent speedbumps, popping in our ears as we gained or lost altitude, and dips into potholes. It took all our energy just to stay upright and on our seats. FOR THREE HOURS AT SIX AM. Our first stop was at the weirdest breakfast buffet ever: an open-air tent where all the servers wore surgical masks. It’s also worth mentioning that my stomach had finally got REALLY, REALLY sick of me abusing it, and was kicking off a revolt that would last several days. So I watched, hungry but knowing I couldn’t eat, as Ian polished off plate after plate of breakfast with his long-nailed, fluttery hands.

When we got to the first waterfall, I was hungry, shitty, tired and nauseous. I couldn’t have cared less. It was pretty – so what? I’ve seen pretty waterfalls before. I was prepared to enjoy nothing but getting 45 minutes away from that fucking van.

And then there was the snake.

I’d had a wander and taken a few pictures of the falls, and was preparing to park myself in the café by Ivan and clutch my stomach until we left. My diet at this point was down to unflavoured chips and flat coke (again), and, oddly, even that wasn’t doing me any favours. Mexico as a country is not a fan of vegetables unless they’re firey hot or ground into tortillas. I don’t think you’d want to be a vegetarian here.

I was walking back from the unused swimming hole to the café when I saw a little boy crouched beside what I initially thought must be a really big toy snake (like 3 metres of toy snake? What was I thinking!). It was a green that couldn’t possibly be real… and a snake couldn’t possibly be curled in the bole of a tree that had a SOUVENIER STAND on the other side of it.

And then the snake moved.

It was eating a frog. Because of the way it was screaming, I thought it was a bird until I looked at my photos. The frog-bird disappeared slowly down that yawning green throat, and I was transfixed. The little kid and I stood there, me taking photos and him just staring, until the frog was swallowed up. By this point a crowd of locals had gathered. The snake swallowed, paused, and then shot across the grass. The crowd screamed in unison, and people ran like startled birds, fleeing in all directions. The snake, quicker than I would’ve thought possible, slid over the grass and twined itself up a tree.

The other waterfall was cool – you could walk behind it, blah blah. The van never stopped sucking. After a millennia of awfulness we arrived in Palenque – and I realized our “hotel” was a hippie jungle commune of awesome.

Hotel Panchan would be more at home on a Pacific island than in Mexico. It’s a serious of random, independent buildings dotted throughout the jungle and criss-crossed by a stream. There’s an open-air restaurant, nothing has windows, and about ten different dogs amble around at all times. There’s a body-modifier on-site, live music every night, and the biggest collection of unwashed hippies you’re likely to see outside of Burning Man. It’s the kind of place that’s already preparing for its December 21st end-of-the-world party.

So, basically, for normal humans it was loud, and hot, and humid. And amazing. The howler monkeys screamed all night over the strains of Eminem, and a water pump outside my room sounded like someone vacuuming in the next room ALL NIGHT LONG. Combined with the mosquito-netting windows, it really made for a restful sleep. Also not helping was Ivan’s caution to check our blankets because of that one time someone found a scorpion IN THEIR BED.

It was so humid that I woke up in the middle of the night and my pillow was damp with my own sweat. We were sticky the whole time we were there. The jungle is amazing, but there’s only so much I’m willing to do while sticky.

The ruins at Palenque, however, were definitely my ancient highlight – far better than Chichen Itza, in my opinion. They’re set deep in a clearing in the jungle, and there are far fewer tourists. You can also go inside one of the main structures, and walk around in ancient stone bedrooms (with ancient stone beds and ancient stone toilets), while listening to the howler monkeys growl in the jungle, sounding more like a dozen jaguars fighting than anything to do with a monkey.

Because of my stomach, this was the hardest day physically. After my chips in the van, I’d managed a small dinner and gone straight to bed at 6pm the night before, and that dinner had spent the night making itself felt. I figured I could go to the ruins because there was literally nothing that could possibly be left inside me, but two days without food doesn’t marry well with three hours climbing ruins in the blazing hot sun. I walked slower that day than I’ve ever walked in my life. I also knew the heat and humidity would be dehydrating me, but I was too scared to drink much water in case my body decided it had something to eject.

Still, I’m glad I did it – and glad I made the effort (with a couple of stops to sit down (although I still made it up faster than Ian, who was puffing and blowing and mopping sweat from hmself all day)) to climb the temple of the cross and look out across the jungle. The view was incredible.

Luckily the next day we were on a bus for nine hours (has anyone ever felt lucky for a nine hour bus ride before?) so I could sit still, watch Camp Rock 2 in Spanish for the second time (oh, Joe Jones… I hate that I love you), and drink my hoarded supply of Vitamin Water.

San Cristobal de las Casas

I slept more than I thought I would on the bus – eventually, stretched over two seats with a spare blanket cushioning the armrest in the middle, full of Dramamine and over-the-counter sleep goo – but I still felt delirious and out of touch the whole first day in San Cristobal. Sound would rush in and out or my head would suddenly drop and I’d realise I’d been on the verge of drifting off.

The town of San Cristobal is beautiful – probably the prettiest town we visited. It also has the biggest split between the rich and the poor. The town was gorgeous, and decked out for tourists with fine shops and great restaurants. But the native people of Chiapas are very, very poor, and lined the streets begging or selling embroidery or crafts.

(I wanted to say ‘handcrafts’ there, which is Ivan’s word. Everyone has handcrafts, and we can do “many varied (va-RYE-d) activities (ak-TEE-va-ties)”.)

I couldn’t get past it. Women try to push woven friendship bracelets into your hands while their babies sleep strapped to their backs, dirty toddlers drifting along behind them. Old men with one arm or no legs shake cups in your face in the restaurants. A stooped old lady shoved her stump between my face and my latte inside one café, and I was so grossed out – and so upset at BEING grossed out – that I gave her all my change and ran.

One night, as it hammered with rain, I watched a woman matter-of-factly cutting up plastic bags to spread over her sleeping children.

Ivan took Brenda and I out to a canyon where we rode in a boat down the river. Gators sunned themselves on the banks and vultures circled high on the cliffs above, pelicans perching in the trees and monkeys hiding out of sight. It was beautiful, but the river was choked with trash and coke bottles, to the degree that a few times we had to steer around islands of tangled rubbish.

Oaxaca the last

I got another excellent coffee and a mango smoothie from the place across the road from our hotel. Despite the fact that latte, mango and smoothie are all the same words in English as in Spanish, I still had to point at a menu to order after the girl behind the counter and I had traded confused stares and shrugs for a while. Pointing at the door works pretty well for “to go” though, a phrase Ivan has tried to teach me but for some reason I just can’t get.

Brenda is beside me wetting her pants watching An Idiot Abroad, trying to muffle her giggles into her thoughtful travel blanket because the rest of the bus is trying to sleep already.

All three of us caught the bus up to Monte Alban – a huge Aztec ruin. It was beautiful and so peaceful – it’s thought the Aztecs actually flattened the top of the mountain to build it, and the scale of that project once you’re up there is flabbergasting. It was boiling, boiling fucking hot though, so after about 20 minutes I was all full up of ruins and ready for some air conditioning.

A team of guys were weed-whacking the pyramids, which was amazingly surreal.

Went back to the big markets Ivan showed us on the first day – home of the grasshopper vendors and meat-bit sellers and chili growers. Outside, I got genuinely lost for about the second time in my life – if I hadn’t looked at a map I wouldn’t have even known -- I thought with every fibre of my being that I was headed in a direction I absolutely wasn’t. The grasshopper labyrinth confused me.

I got back to the hotel a sweaty, fried-up mess, and then it poured and poured with rain. An excellent excuse to sit in the lobby and eat tamales.

Now we’re on the night bus to San Cristobel de las Casas. The bus is better than a plane – footrests, huge comfy seats, pillows and blankets and tea and coffee and a can of pepsi on arrival. There’s even an entertainment unit, but all the movies are dubbed in Spanish and they don’t have Camp Rock 2, so.

Oaxaca the second

We hired a van with our tour guide, left Ian to his own devices, and headed out to explore. We stopped at one of the largest trees in the world, which was suitably fat. The gardeners had trimmed the other plants into a dilapidated collection of animals – a duck, a boy riding a bull, a kangaroo.

A dog sunned itself in the street.

We went to a tiny village that has the ruins of a Zapotec temple. I climbed down inside the tomb, which involved crawling along a tiny concrete passage with the weight of the temple above pressing down on you. It was stuffy and tiny and close, and we got tomb water in our shoes. The catholic church in the town was plonked right on top of the ruins of a Zapotec structure, geographic designs and heavy blocks underneath a towering old church.

I saw a lizard scurrying away dragging a fat caterpillar.

We drove up into the mountains, past staked-out or hobbled donkeys and fields of corn and cactus. Villagers farmed, herding goats or leading laden donkeys. At the top of the mountain we found Hierve de Agua (?), a petrified waterfall. The springs that feed the falls are tiny, and the water is full of calcium, so over the years the calcium has cascaded down the side of the mountain with the slow-dripping water, creating this frozen white mass of a waterfall. At the top are pools you can swim in. So we did. It was amazing, floating in a blue pool on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.

We ate a traditional Oaxacan pizza for lunch at a stall by the falls. A very old, very fat little lady cooked the pizza on a wood-fire stove, and a skinny little dog nosed about under the table. It got half my pizza.

Then we went to see a traditional Zapotec weaver, who still uses all-natural dyes in his weaving. He showed us how he gets each colour – the bright red all our chemical colours are derived from comes from a bug that lives on a type of cactus. He put one in Brenda’s hand and squashed it, and a pool of violently red liquid gushed out.

 Making bug colours.

Finally, we visited a mescal distillery – a family operation that still makes everything on the premises. They use the heart of a type of agave (a different type than tequila). It’s chopped up and then cooked in a big hangi – buried underground for up to a week with hot rocks and a fire. Then they use a donkey pushing a huge stone wheel to smash the cooked hearts up, and the pulp is fermented before it’s distilled. They make a number of flavours of liqueurs as well as straight mescal (the aged stuff is smoky like whisky but burns like tequila – delicious!), and we may have tried one or twenty.

Taste tests.

At dinner, over two for one margaritas that were all of $2.25 each, a photographer approached us and asked for help – he’d been traveling Mexico taking photos for five years, and wanted us to tell him which of his photos we each liked best, to help him choose pieces for his next exhibition. His pictures were gorgeous, and after we were done Brenda and I each bought a print off him for a measly donation of $50 (five NZ bucks). Ian spent ten minutes telling the guy that he liked the picture of a cat because he likes cats. So much. So very much.

Ian quotes:
“I bought a postcard when I was here fifteen years ago. I should have brought it to show you! Oh, you’d have liked it so much.”

Oaxaca the first

With my lame but stomach-friendly chicken broth.

After serious study, I’ve concluded the following about Mexican road rules: there are none. Dodge or die. Many of the main highways are one and a half lanes in each direction, and everyone drives wherever they fit. The road will yawn out or creep in at will, and people pass everywhere, all the time.

One stretch of highway was filled with butterflies. The bus drove through clouds of them, spattering them all over the windshield.

Oacaxa is beautiful – the streets are narrow and cobbled and the buildings old and intricate and every colour, with wrought iron windows and huge old doors like the buildings in Paris.

My stomach was in serious rebellion this morning, so most of the day was spent on a strict diet of flat coke and ready salted chips (it sounds bad, but it’s proven effective over many years of annoying IBS) – but I did eat a grasshopper.

It was lime flavoured and crunchy.

Grasshopperia.

I could spend a lot of time in this town. The markets are insane – selling chilies and meats and cheeses and, of course, huge bins of fried grasshoppers. There are chocolate factories, where you can go and buy the raw ingredients and then churn (is that the right term?) your own chocolate. The samples we tried were amazing, like chocolate condensed – less sweet but more powerful. Delicious.

Just drank only my second glass of wine in five days. I’m so parched I’m like a desert – but the margaritas are delicious. It’s storming outside again. Ivan has promised good coffee tomorrow, and I’m considering throwing myself in the adorable hotel pool before we head off to see some ruins… maybe it’s time for bed.

Ian quote of the day:
 “Have you tried the English delicacy ‘Yorkshire Pudding’?”