Blog `Inca Kola´

2010-02-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

Adios again, Mexico

One of Mexico City’s many organ grinders grinds away on República de Guatemala.

It has been short but sweet, I suppose, but now it’s away from Mexico City I go once again. All in all, this trip has been both very useful and a lot more enjoyable than I was anticipating after having gotten a little over all those long hours spent working away in the National Library. I did get bothered again by the guy who says he’s from Zacatecas and needs money for the bus home many times, the most recent being today (and before that yesterday), but I steered clear of the clown in Chapultepec park who would yell and yell from miles away when he saw my ghostly white face in the distance to pull me up in front of a crowd for their amusement. So, yes, muy bien!

2003: The Dream of a Better Future

After a leisurely Saturday doing some shopping and visting a few museums, on Sunday I decided to see what was on at the movies. Turns out there was not much on, but when I read the description of the new Mexican film 2033, heavily hyped as Mexico’s first sci-fi feature film, I couldn’t resist: Mexico City in 2003, renamed Villaparaíso, has been taken over by a military government which maintained control by medicating the whole populace with a substance called Technapol and, worst of all, banned religion! The protagonist thus has to join with “the believers” (los creyentes) to fight this evil menace. Some right wing Catholic propaganda seemed fun, particularly as just this week the PRI and PRD voted on a constitutional amendment to include “secular” in the official description of the state while the Church’s party of choice, the PAN, used the Attorney General’s office to challenge the constitutionality of the Mexico City reforms permitting gay marriage. So I queued up and it didn’t disappoint.

First Mexican sci-fi film? What about Santo vs. la Invasión de los Marcianos?!?

I guess there is supposed to be some parallel being drawn in this film between the post-revolutionary governments’ anti-clerical measures during the 1920s and 1930s which led to the Cristero uprising. The premise, however, is quite clearly alluding to the present Mexican political situation. During the opening scenes the set-up is that the upcoming 2012 presidential elections are close and the results disputed which provokes widespread protests and unrest, rather like what happened in 2006. The only difference is that an opportunistic candidate with the initials PEC, rather close to those of head of the Mexico City government and likely PRD candidate in 2012, Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, takes advantage of this situation to launch a military coup, outlaw religion, etc, etc. By now he has handed over power to a military general and in another opening scene we see a news broadcast mentioning that the last refinery of state-owned oil company PEMEX, which 2006 PRD candidate López Obrador led a movement to stop its privatization by the PAN president Calderón in 2008, had just been closed. Guess they should have privatized it after all…

If you really like your god paraphernalia, make sure you visit the Pasaje de la Catedral right behind the Cathedral which is full of shops that sell nothing but religious statues. They even watch over you from above the giant piñata!

As well as the blatant political messages of the religious references and general juxtaposition of the good Christians who are concerned with freedom and the welfare of others with the evil regime, the film is also a little racist. Almost everyone who is part of the regime is a güero as white as I am. When one of the evil whiteys ends up hooking up with “the believers” after noticing the Jesus fish with a crucifix tattoo on his arm, it turns out that Padre Miguel and the other Christians all possess a far more typically Mexican hue. As for the white people, not only do they enjoy kicking and shooting poor brown people on the street, particularly if they profess any religious sentiments, they also enjoy hunting them from helicopters for sport.

I knew it! I guess when he gets enough pesos in the little tin he can come back, repay the debts and all will be forgiven.

Why the name of Mexico City was changed by the regime is never made explicit, but I am aware of a lot of Hispanicist nationalist historians and writers over the years who have claimed Mexico’s true national origins lie in Spanish civilization and specifically Catholicism rather than the pre-hispanic origins favoured by postrevolutionary nationalism. Perhaps Mexico City not being Mexico anymore is a result of people like MEC or PEC allowing gay people to get married and women the right to have an abortion. Who knows. Oddly enough, many of those Hispanicists also spell the country as “Méjico”; it’s always a giveaway when you see that spelling! So, yes, more fun and games from the Catholic right. I’ve never really been anti-religion as such as I suppose we all have our own belief systems, but I think I would probably move from the agnostic to atheist column after the past five weeks in Mexico.

Bike Sunday at the Ángel de la Independencia. Although the weather has cleared up, some outlying parts of the city are still underwater as the drainage system failed during last week. You would never know that in this part of town, however.

Anyway, I guess there's not too much more to rant about and I really must pack and get to bed as the taxi comes at 5:45am. Heading off is all a little bittersweet as I have enjoyed the past 5 or so weeks and I wish I had more time to travel around the country outside of the MC. On the other hand, I would like to get stuck into actually writting this bloody PhD now I have all of this research done... at least that's my frame of mind at this point in time. First, though, it's off to see Mickey!

To finish off, here are a few night photos from the Torre Latino (as featured in the giant loop on the 2033 poster!) that I took on Saturday evening.

Looking toward the Zócalo

2010-02-02T20:57:00.000-08:00

¡Viva los héroes que nos dieron patria! ¡Viva México!

Statue of Independence hero Ignacio Allende at the old family home

Friday morning I turned up to the library to find a note stuck to the door reminding everyone that the library would be shut on Monday due to the fact, as one of the ever-friendly ladies at the front desk explained after welcoming me with the usual “buenos días, don Sheppard”, that as the Constitution Day date fell during the week the public holiday would fall on the preceding Monday. So, as it was a three day weekend, I had to find somewhere to go and, after toying with heading up to the border region, I decided a far more reasonable option was to see some of the Independence sights within a 4 rather than 14 hour radius of the city. This also left Saturday free to go to the movies, but unfortunately I squandered that on A Serious Man which somehow just picked up a Best Picture OSCAR nomination. Hmm…

The Parroquia de San Miguel

I ended up catching a bus to San Miguel de Allende which is probably the compulsory “colonial town” stop for most tours that come to Mexico and it has been all nicely painted and restored accordingly. This earns it a reputation for being a bit too much Disneyland and too little “real Mexico”, but perhaps the answer to that is that people need to stop kidding themselves about not being tourists when they travel to the “real” whatever country and to accept places like San Miguel for what they are. So there!

The family will be happy to know that San Patricio, aka St. Patrick, makes a rare appearance in a Mexican church as an apparent tribute to the local Irish settlers who supported the Independence forces against the Spaniards. He even brought along a shamrock and one of the many snakes he chased out of Ireland!

One thing I have always heard about San Miguel de Allende is that it is ground zero (at least south of Baja California) for US expats. The city was indeed full of people from the US, expats or not, and it was interesting to see the similarities between San Miguel and Boquete in Panama (you can relive the magic of Boquete here) which also has a large US expat community. The main thing that stands out is that every third shop seems to be a real estate agency, but other notable signs were that both are ringed by large housing estates and giant billboards for housing estates in English and both also have a café specifically centred around selling bagels. San Miguel did also have a Starbucks, so it may be one up on Boquete I’m sorry to say.

The streets of San Miguel de Allende

The city does also have quite a significant place in Mexican history as it is the birthplace of independence hero Ignacio Allende and a hotbed of anti-Spaniard conspiring during the early stages of the independence struggle beginning in 1810. Unlike the rather neglected Zapata sites, the old Allende family home on the main plaza houses a very slick museum recreating life in nineteenth century San Miguel (before the family name was attached to the town) featuring vignettes of daily life, bilingual signs and audiovisual extravanganzas explaining the Independence struggle. While I knew that Allende’s was one of the heads left hanging in a cage outside the city of Guanajuato by the colonial authorities for ten years, I did learn that his skull is now housed inside the Ángel de la Independencia monument I walk past every morning here in Mexico City. As a side note, there did seem to be a bit of a Jan Brady complex surrounding Allende and Miguel Hidalgo, who is the man who received most of the credit for being the father of Mexican independence, with several signs suggesting Ignacio was really the driving force for independence despite the fact everyone always goes on about Miguel.

I guess if I wanted to take the Disneyland analogy way too far I could make some comment about the Parroquia standing in for the castle and the lightening show as the fireworks, but that would be far too irritating for all involved.

I hadn’t booked anywhere to stay, but I figured if I found somewhere I would remain for the night and, low and behold, I did find a room at a reasonable price on the walk into town from the bus station and I did stay the night. That gave time to explore for a while which was pleasant enough. It was a fairly cold and wet day which ended up turning into a torrential downpour and thunderstorm by the time night fell. This impressed upon me the important role that drains play in our major cities as the streets turned into rivers which those of us wearing shoes could not cross. Thankfully the rain stopped after a while and the gushing brown torrent eventually subsided, but for a while there everyone was trapped on whatever side of the road they were on when the rain started except those in thongs and the people they would piggy back across.

The house of everybody’s favourite independence hero, Miguel Hidalgo. And someone walking a very lazy schnauzer.

The next morning it was still raining very heavily, but I thought I would stop off at the nearby town of Dolores Hidalgo to see another one of the key pilgrimage spots for those interested in Mexican history.

Only in Mexico would you find a presidential decree in decorative tile form. This one establishing Dolores Hidalgo as “the cradle of Mexican Independence”.

Dolores Hidalgo is the official cradle of Mexican independence as it was here on the 16h of September 1810 that father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla issued the famous grito, or “cry”, calling the locals to rise up and cast off colonial rule. This is the event commemorated every 16th of September in major plazas around Mexico, most notably by the President from the balcony of the Palacio Nacional over the Zócalo in Mexico City where the original bell now hangs.

Here is my grainy video of President Felipe Calderón’s grito in 2008.

Above is the church itself where the original ringing of the bell and grito took place. The eagle head monument came 150 years later.

The president will also make the pilgrimmage to Dolores Hidalgo at least once in his presidency to conduct the Grito from the above balcony.

Statue of Hidalgo in the main plaza

As it was a Monday and all museums close on Mondays in Mexico, public holiday or not, there wasn’t so much to see and, anyway, I think you can overdo the museums! Still, Dolores Hidalgo was a nice little town and I’m glad I stopped off on the way back to Mexico City to have a look around… even if this did end up elongating the trip back quite a bit due to my error in choosing the Herradura de Plata (Silver Horseshoe) bus company rather than one with which I was familiar. After a long 2 and a half hours of standing on a bus that was over-sold and left almost an hour late, I ended up jumping off in Querétaro and changing to an ultra-comfortable ETN bus. This then blew a tire on the freeway which meant hobbling to the nearest bus terminal to wait for a replacement bus, so it was a good 8 rather than 4 hours back to Mexico City all up.

In the main plaza of Dolores Hidalgo, this is supposedly a sapling from the tree under which Hernán Cortés and the conquistadores wept after the Aztecs initially ran them out of Tenochtitlán.

In one week I guess I’ll be flying out of here back to sunny Melbourne via the San Miguel de Allende of the United States, so who knows if I’ll get a chance to update this or do anything worthy of putting up here between now and then. It has all gone very quickly so far!

Pharmacy, Dolores Hidalgo

2010-01-26T20:42:00.000-08:00

¡Viva Zapata!

Not too much has been happening in the MC as I’m continuing to plug away to try and justify my scholarship (it’s gone up I see; thanks, Kev!) and I’ve been battling a bit of a cold or allergy which I am positive is not the swine flu as I have been vaccinated! On that score, as well as litres of anti bacterial disinfectant hand wash in even the most humble of stores and restaurants, the swine flu threat is being attacked full-throttle by the Mexico City government who are holding free swine flu vaccinations in the Metro stations where from time to time I’ll pass a long queue of people with a nurse up the front giving the jabs one by one. The other new initiative in the Metro since I was last here are metal detectors, with the bigger stations having an airport-style set-up with the scanners and a walk-through metal detector and the smaller ones just having a lone police officer who may or may not wave a portable metal detector over your bag. It always goes off and I always get waved through without any kind of check. Not 100% why they’ve instituted this. There have been some mutterings from US sources about the risk of drug cartels attacking civilian targets and then there was also a police officer who got shot by a mentally ill graffiti artist at a Metro station a few months back. Who knows. On another note, the mechanics of this blog entry have taken days due to the virtual impossibility of uploading photos through flickr using the crappy Internet connection at Hotel Principal. Next time I may have to head to Starbucks for the free wireless I’m afraid!

The Heroic City of Cuautla

After nursing my runny nose, watery eyes and headache at the movies on Saturday, I figured on Sunday I should venture out of Mexico City. As 2010 is the centenary of the Mexican Revolution, I decided it would be fitting to head down to the state of Morelos for a pilgrimage to the old stomping grounds of revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. The other reason for doing this is a large part of my time is spent looking through old newspaper reports of government officials delivering stirring nationalist speeches on patriotic commemorative dates such as the anniversary of Zapata’s death trying to justify, for example, changing the constitution in 1991 to eliminate the responsibility of the government to distribute land to rural peasant for communal agricultural plots know as ejidos. This, of course, was the great contribution of the Zapatista fight for “land and liberty” to the Constitution of 1917. Precisely because of that, the president would announce the change in front of a portrait of Zapata and come down to Cuautla in Morelos on the anniversary of Zapata’s death to watch government officials justify the change in front of the statue of the caudillo del sur which also houses his remains.

Zapata was perhaps the most radical and uncompromising of the revolutionary leaders in his demand for land and liberty for rural peasants and he has also proved the most difficult of Mexico's national heroes for the government to co-opt. By the 1980s the anniversary of his death was already an occasion for large protest marches by rural peasant and allied groups around Mexico. The reform of Article 27 in the lead-up to the coming into force of NAFTA was also one of the detonators for the Zapatista (or neo-Zapatista) rebellion which broke out in the southern state of Chiapas in 1994 and continues bubbling away. A rallying cry that I've heard used by all sorts of groups from rural peasants to the supporters of López Obrador following the 2006 elections going up against the state is "If Zapata were alive, he'd be with us".

Bust of José María Morelos in the Zócalo of Cuautla

While Cuautla is now a pretty average hot and dusty medium-sized Mexican town, it’s has been remarkably central to both Mexico’s independence and revolutionary struggles. As well as Zapata, one of Mexico’s other great national heroes, José María Morelos and his forces were besieged in the town during the aptly-named Siege of Cuautla in 1812 before eventually breaking through Spanish royalist forces after 58 days and continuing on his third campaign. He was eventually caught and shot by the pinche gachupines (Spaniards), but they named a state and a city after him (the capital of Michoacán state where he was born, Morelia) once Mexico gained its independence in 1821, so it wasn’t all bad in the end for José. Cuautla also earned the title of “The Heroic City of Cuautla” following independence, and it proudly retains this title.

The plaza across from the ex-convento also seemed to be where you go to hire a mariachi or, as you can see in this photo, norteño-style band for your festive occasions.

The above Ex-Convento de San Diego was occupied by the independence forces and the scene of the fiercest fighting and now houses a little museum dedicated to the independence struggle…

…and to one side you can also find the old railway station which was the scene of the great meeting between revolutionaries Francisco I. Madero and Emiliano Zapata following the initial victory of the revolution in 1911 and Madero’s ascension to the presidency. The happy times didn’t last long as Madero proved quite conservative in power, the Zapatistas took up arms again against Madero’s government and, finally, the many officials in the army and elsewhere that Madero retained from the dictatorship the Revolution had overthrown launched a coup and shot him in 1913. Thus the Revolution began all over again.

The significance of Cuautla to Zapatismo is that it was the first major city occupied by Zapata’s forces and thus became the headquarters of the Zapatista forces during most of the revolutionary struggle. After his assassination, the government decided to construct a monument in the town in a central plaza where his remains were kept and this has been the scene for countless commemorations of Zapata’s death on many April 10ths since.

As 2010 is the bicentenary of the beginning of the Independence struggle and centenary of the outbreak of the Revolution, the government has put into place the “Mexico is My Museum” initiative whereby signs such as this one beside Zapata contain a mobile number to which you can text the location’s key word and you get a text message telling you what happened in that place. This sign also displays a picture of Zapata’s corpse surrounded by onlookers from when the government put it on display to prove he had really been killed. Not too many memorials feature a picture of the dead body of the person being commemorated, but I suppose it is a good photo.

From Cuautla, I hopped on one of the little combi vans that rattle around those parts to travel onward to the town of Anenecuilco where Zapata was born and where, preserved much as you might expect would be the house where it was suspected Mary and Joseph once lived, are the remains of the house where Zapata was born and raised. There is also an adjoining museum, but what is in that museum I’m not sure as it was closed for remodeling.

The dramatic mural at the site explaining the Zapata story was worth a look, though, as it explained the agrarian struggle right from the Spanish conquest through to Zapata’s untimely demise.

Zapata statue in Anenecuilco

In all of the towns you pass through in these parts there are statues of Zapata in various poses. This is Anenecuilco’s version which, sadly, is not one of the better ones. The town itself was quieter, smaller and more colourful than Cuautla and I did get to see quite a bit of it as I wandered around asking people where I could get a combi to the next stop, Chinameca. Thankfully some ladies making tlacoyos (tasty fried corn things with various toppings to choose from) were eventually able to point me in the right direction and along came the cramped little van in short order!

Chinameca was the site of Zapata’s untimely demise which was largely as depicted in this fragment from the mural at the site of the other end of his life.

This monument of Zapata stands more or less where he ended up being killed after he was tricked into meeting a general from the Mexican army who sent word he was planning to defect and join Zapata’s forces. He was, in fact, laying a trap on behalf of another revolutionary leader and then-president Venustiano Carranza and when Zapata rode through the arch of the ex-hacienda San Juan Chinameca where they had agreed to meet, he was greeted with a hail of gunshots which brought about his untimely demise. The claim is that those are the gunshots you can see on the back of the arch to this day.

As for Carranza, he was eventually run out of government by another revolutionary and former ally, Álvaro Obregón who had Carranza chased down and killed and allied himself with the remaining Zapatistas, thus ensuring the official rehabilitation of Zapata´s image. Obregón later saw to it that Pancho Villa met a similarly bloody end and in 1928 after being elected to the presidency a second time, Obregón himself was assassinated by a young Catholic fanatic. This never-ending spiral of events lead to the creation in 1929 of the National Revolutionary Party as a unifying state party to incorporate all the different groups who had fought in the Revolution, and this later morphed into the Institutional Revolutionary Party which held the presidency until 2000 and looks like regaining it in 2012.

Ex-hacienda San Juan Chinameca which houses a small museum

This whole process of unifying the revolutionary factions also led to the creation of the Revolution itself as a unified movement in which both Carranza and Zapata, Obregón and Villa all fought together. In the 1970s the PRI even tried to move Zapata’s remains to the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City where he would have rested alongside Carranza and Madero, but the locals would have none of that nonsense and the goverment had to back down!

Remains of a mural at the Chinameca memorial

Overall it was a hot, dusty and bumpy but worthwhile trip to Zapata country, though it did strike me that, for one of Mexico’s great national heroes in the year of the centenary of the struggle in which he was a main protagonist, the museums and memorials all seemed a little neglected. There are signs on the roads for the “Ruta Zapata” and “Ruta 2010” between the different towns and I did see a (very) few Mexican tourists wandering during the day, but overall the Ruta Zapata felt like it no longer received much attention from the government. The area itself, although only about 2 hours from Mexico City, also seems a little that way and it’s an odd mix of very rural small towns with locals who speak a very heavily accented Spanish with the odd spa resort and big new housing estate dotted around. At any rate, I feel now that I can take this weekend’s experience with me to add greater depth of understanding when next I find myself musing over a speech by the Secretary of Agricultural Reform during a commemorative ceremony for Zapata’s death. See, I am earning my scholarship!

The only thing that's happened since is that I was sexually harassed on a crowded Metro carriage today which is a new one! I now know why women and children get their own carriages up the front... though, come to think about it, they may not be so much at risk if that little man in a suit I encountered today is anything to go by!

Some of Zapata's greatest hits from the blog over the past few years

2010-01-17T20:07:00.001-08:00

Real de Catorce

Where in the world is Real de Catorce?

As I didn’t spend nearly enough time outside of Mexico City last time (with the slight exception of over two months in South America… and a week in Panama), I had resolved to spend my weekends venturing out of the Distrito Federal and this week headed up to the old mining town of Real de Catorce in the north-eastern state of San Luis Potosí. Getting there involved an overnight bus ride of about 7 ½ hours up to the town of Matehuala about two hours south of Real and then a cold four hours waiting in the bus terminal until the first bus to Real left Matehuala at 7:45am.

Daybreak in Matehuala

The final stretch involved transferring to a smaller bus that could fit into the tunnel that serves as the only entrance to the town for a final stretch that resembled the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland as the bus bumped and jerked through the tunnel, except on this adventure the seats are unfortunately hard plastic rather than being nicely padded for the guest’s comfort. One further note about the bus journey is that I was reminded once more of the fact that you let anyone exit a bus before you at your own peril as chances are you'll then be left standing in your seat waiting for the entire bus to empty out.

The story of Real de Catorce is that it was a barely accessible town that sprung up around a silver mine beginning in 1779 and enjoying its heyday during the late nineteenth century into the first decade of the twentieth century. Around the time of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 when silver prices collapsed and people began to leave the population wound down from around 15,000 at its peak to roughly 250 residents, turning it into a virtual ghost town. In recent years the population has begun to grow again as visitors started showing up, first for the peyote which apparently grows around the mountains in the 1970s and now for slightly more wholesome pursuits.

On Friday when I arrived it still felt very much like a ghost town as the visitors don’t seem to turn up until the weekend and as it’s still the slow winter season a lot of places such as restaurants were closed. The army did show up at one point during the day and I ended up being a lone güerito surrounded by army officers when they ended up picking the same tiny place to have lunch where I was having my gorditas which was something of a unique experience. I did hear one begin to say something about Güeros before another person told him to cut it out.

Capilla de Guadalupe up in the old cemetary

As well as the silver, a cult has developed around the image of Saint Francis of Assisi in the town for reasons I don’t know which has brought people to the town for decades. The whole town in fact is pervaded with religious imagery.

Notes and pictures all for St. Francis's consideration.

The old graveyard is divided into a San Francisco and a Virgin de Guadalupe section which pretty much goes for the whole town, as both the Virgin and San Francisco are everywhere you turn.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is naturally the focus inside the Capilla de Guadalupe...

... but she also makes plenty of appearances around town.

In the main church, the Templo de la Purísima Concepción, there is a fascinating room displaying all the various retablos that people have offered up to either Saint Francis or the Virgin over the years going back to the early 20th century. The retablos are a particularly Mexican form of religious devotion where people create little images representing favours they have asked of a particularly religious figure with a short message as a way of giving thanks. The following pictures and translated inscriptions give some insight into the kinds of favours people around that part of the world have been asking over the years.

"I was caring for my livestock when I noticed that said livestock were suffering from a strange illness. Seeing them in such a state, I offered them up to the care of Señor St. Francis who gave them back their health and as a sign of my gratitude I dedicate this retablo to him."

"Thank you St. Francis,
When I lost 28 goats they were found healthy the next day. In thanks I offer this retablo.
Ernestina Martinez"

"We give thanks to St. Francis for the grace of having allowed that our daughter emerge safe and sound after falling down a well on the 6th of November, 1969."

"I give thanks to St. Francis for a great feat when I asked him, my car already being in the hands of the Federal Transit authorities as I did not have any documentation, that he have mercy on me and it was returned to me without any charge."

There are not a whole lot of sights in Real de Catorce, but the idea is that you can occupy yourself by picking a trail and basically walking (or horse riding) in any way that takes your fancy into the surrounding mountains. As wandering aimlessly is a favourite past time of mine, it seemed like a good spot to go for the weekend and it turned out that indeed it was a good place to head out in the fresh air for a bit of exercise.

The great open spaces of San Luis Potosí state

The surrounding countryside is quite stark and you basically just walk until you get tired of it as there isn’t much in the way of destinations as such, but I was glad I got out of the big smoke for a few days and saw another part of Mexico. After a long time in Mexico City, the change in how people looked, dressed and what they ate was indeed quite noticeable.

View from behind the Capilla de Guadalupe

View back toward town

Mexico has been going through a cold snap lately and just as one cold front had passed another was due to roll in precisely on Thursday night as I headed up to Real de Catorce. As Real is further north, at a higher altitude and in the desert I probably should have realized that it would be colder than Mexico City, however I wasn’t quite prepared for the inability to ever find anywhere that was warm. After a fairly painful night freezing away in my hotel room, I awoke to find a fine layer of snow covering everything.

After one night, I decided two days in Real de Catorce might be enough and to do some more walks before taking the afternoon bus to a warm bed in the state capital of San Luis Potosí from where I had to catch a flight back to Mexico City on Sunday evening. I ended up walking up the mountain above town to the “ciudad fantasma”, or ghost town, which is basically just a set of ruined old buildings. It was a nice enough walk, with the frozen desert scenery making it all a little more unique as half the town seems to look not unlike the abandoned old buildings!

Icy walk up to the Ciudad Fantasma featuring frozen cacti.

I did end up making it to San Luis Potosí in the evening and, after a warm night’s sleep, headed out to see what was around the town. In all honesty, I was scratching my head looking at all the tourist information as to what I actually wanted to see as there are a few local museums but nothing you’d really go out of your way to visit. I was a little surprised at this as the city is both the site of the alternative capital of Mexico under Benito Juárez during the French occupation in the 1860s and where and imprisoned Francisco Madero drafted the Plan de San Luis Potosí, thus initiating the Mexican Revolution, with the date he set of November 20th, 1910 still the date upon which the Revolution is commemorated. This all seems pretty much ignored around town and the museums tend more toward things like the National Mask Museum and regional museums dealing with the local pre-Columbian population.

Plaza de los Fundadores

Plaza de Armas

Plaza del Carmen. Thus concludes this brief tour of the plazas of San Luis Potosí

While I’m not sure I’d advise anyone to make a special effort to see it, San Luis is a nice enough city with an attractive historic centre comprised of a series of plazas linked by narrow streets which have been converted to pedestrian walkways. As the town was founded on local silver mining wealth, it naturally took its name from what was at the time the wealthiest silver city in the world, Potosí in Bolivia. While time seems to have been a lot kinder to Potosí’s Mexican shiny, well-scrubbed offspring, both cities are very similar in that they are dead on Sundays when most things are closed. Still, at least it was relatively warm!

Not too busy

I guess now the only question is what to do next weekend.

2010-01-11T19:04:00.001-08:00

Return of the Smog

Just so you know that I wasn't exaggerating about the rain clearing away the pollution, as it didn´t rain today I present here a comparison between the view from the National library at the southern end of Mexico City as shown yesterday after rain:

And here is what the view from more or less the same vantage point was today:

2010-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

Return to México

Cold and wet streets of Mexico City

The always-fascinating blog is back by popular demand!

I arrived just in time for the Día de los Reyes Magos (Day of the three kings) on January 5th when the kiddies get their presents from the three wise men and everyone eats a circular bread confection called the rosca de reyes similar to those on display at this stall in the Alameda Central park.

It´s been about seven months since the dramatic evacuation from Mexico to Disneyland due to the swine flu and for the most part everything is how I left it with the exception of anti bacterial hand sanitizer dispensers in every restaurant, shop, cinema and other establishment excepting the taco stands.

The new high-tech Federal Police headquarters is supposed to be part of the strategy to beat the narcos.

The war against drugs, which in Mexico does resemble a real war, continues to roll on without any end in sight. Yesterday was apparently the most violent day yet, with at least 69 deaths reported. That takes the total for the first nine days of the year to 283 and makes Ciudad Juárez, up on the border with Texas and where the most deaths occurred, a good bet to hold onto the crown of the city with the most violent deaths per 100,000 citizens, above Baghdad and Kabul.

When in Mexico City, the Café El Popular on 5 de Mayo is a great breakfast option as it´s cheap, tasty and open 24 hours so you´re never too early!

The other main stores floating around here at the moment seem to be the legalization of marriage and adoption for same-sex couples by the Mexico City government, a pair of women who tried the old chestnut of taking out multiple life insurance policies on their daughter/sister´s 20 year-old boyfriend who was foolish enough to knock back an international scholarship to stay here with his girlfriend only to then get murdered by the future in-laws, and depressing revisions of a year and decade that haven´t gone very well for Mexico. On the first issue, the Catholic Church is out in full force recommending that the ruling PRD party in Mexico City submit themselves to psychiatric help, arguing this confirms the party is acting on behalf of evil forces and explaining why homosexuality is deviant behavior (¨a dog doesn´t have sex with a dog of the same gender¨ is one example). They´re particularly scathing about exposing children to these people, which does bring to mind the old saying about those in glass houses. On the final point, I must say that Mexico is beginning to rival Peru in the pessimism stakes and the theme of Mexico as a mediocre country seems to crop up in opinion piece after opinion piece day after day in newspaper after newspaper. In fact, one article about how the first decade of the 21st century was one in which to ashamed of being Mexican even lamented that Mexico didn´t even enjoy the statistical success of Peru´s economic growth.

While Melbourne is just beginning to roll-out the ultra-expensive and sure to be a debacle Myki, for a charge of less than $1 the Mexico City Metro has its own rechargable card.

It has also been freezing cold and wet here over the past week, particularly at night. The hotel I´m staying at is all ok for the price, but it does not feature any kind of heating mechanism as far as I can tell and my glasses are fogging up every time I breath as I type this. The cold nights and the erratic internet (¨Yeah, the Internet has stopped working. Hopefully it will start up again soon¨ is the attitude to the fact it barely works for more than an hour at a time) are making me question whether it might be worth upgrading when the two weeks I´ve reserved here are up.

Back to the Biblioteca Nacional.

I have quite a lot of work to get through which has meant long days at the library, but overall I´m enjoying being back here more than I thought I would. I´ve been a little surprised at how much more I´m out and about staying at a hotel rather than having an apartment, but then I don´t get many channels and the Internet is unpredictable! This weekend has been pretty relaxed, involving visiting a museum today (Sunday) and heading off to see Avatar in 3D yesterday (which I enjoyed a lot more than I was really expecting to).

The good thing about the rain is that it clears away the thick winter pollution. Turns out there were mountains covered in snow nextdoor to the National Library behind all that haze!

The week ahead will involve much the same traipsing to and from the library and next weekend I´ve organized to head up to Real de Catorce in San Luís Potosí for a few days of wandering through the mountains. As there are few buses to that part of the world, I had the bright idea of catching the 20:30 bus on Thursday so I can theoretically sleep and arrive at Matehuala, where I have to change buses, at 4am. As the first bus to Real doesn´t leave until 8am, this may end up involving a long, cold wait and perhaps I should have gone with my first plan to head to sunny Baja California rather than further into the cold mountains. I was all set to book a flight but started coming across a lot of websites from annoying Americans (not that all Americans are annoying...) with information on Baja who I began to suspect I would end up surrounded by. Then I came across this as a reason the website owners kept going back to Baja and off to Real de Catorce it was:

¨How a person smiles or if they smile at all can unravel their own story....People sometimes hide behind a smile, not realizing we see through the disguise. Mexico doesn't hide behind it's steadfast smile. It is there for the taking. We receive smile after smile, everyday of our visit. Even in the face of adversity, we can depend on Mexico to give us the gift of a warm smile. And we respond with our hearts.¨

No hiding behind warm smiles here.

Well, that´s it for now. I´ll try to update this every week which will give me some motivation to do something each week for at least the sake of a photo!

Che Zapata!

2009-04-30T22:17:00.000-07:00

Escape from the swine flu to the happiest place on earth

Well, after an email from the risk management people at uni banning all travel to Mexico and recalling staff and students from the country I decided it was time to give up and get out of town as quickly as possible. I booked a Mexicana flight to LA on Tuesday afternoon for the following morning and have managed to bring my flight back to Melbourne forward to the 3rd arriving on the 5th. It was not the best way to leave after about a year in Mexico, but I suppose at least I had the option of getting out of town to places where I can roll my eyes at people getting so worked up about something that statistically is probably the least of their worries when it comes to things that could kill them! Who knows if I´ll see the deposit for the apartment returned, though I am guessing not.

The mad dash from Mexico did hit a minor hiccup when I called a taxi as you´re meant to do and, after 40 minutes of standing on the sidewalk with all my bags, rang up to find that no-one had taken the job yet and I would be waiting another hour for a taxi to show up! As it is reasonably common for taxi drivers to be working in cahoots with theives who will hold you up, knock you around and take all your things in Mexico City, you´re not supposed to hail them from the streets but I felt I had little option and ended up getting a lovely guy who even spoke fluent English as he had lived in New York. At the airport I also had a brief conversation with someone from Reuters which ended up getting quoted in news articles I read on a Mexican site (with the English language original here). Sadly, my new location will likely attract far less attention from the media!

As I now have three days in Los Angeles before getting on the plane home, there was really only one place I was ever going to go to spend them. Of course that place was the happiest place on earth: Disneyland! While I was taking precautions and mulling over my options a lot during the final few days in Mexico City, I never quite realised how much it was all weighing on my mind until I was walking to my hotel room and looked over the pool to see Space Mountain and it hit me that I no longer had to worry about what I was going to do as I was now at Disneyland! The feel of relief was quite amazing and I would imagine the contrast between where I was and where I am will be made quite evident comparing the photos in the past few updates with those in this one!

The past day and a half have thus been spent wandering around enjoying the many amusements of the Disneyland Resort. Although Disneyland itself seems to have a relatively short 10am - 8pm day at the moment, the place is quite packed and from all the groups of teenagers around I can only assume that this must be the tail end of spring break in certain parts of the US (Washington state seems to be one such part).

The theme of this year´s celebration is ¨Celebrate today!¨ and this is the ¨street party¨ parade they have to go along with it. Slightly reaching, today the MCs on the floats announced ¨There´s always something to celebrate every day! For example, did you know that it was on this day that Lousiana became a state?¨

I must be getting old because I do find myself wanting to shake my fist at the damn teenagers who are running around (literally) everywhere, play fighting in crowded queue areas and generally being loud and annoying. There must be something to this whole southern manners idea as I think the Disney World crowd in December was far more polite than the Californian crowd. Whatever the case, it certainly doesn´t seem that the economic crisis or swine flu are hurting Disneyland´s business.

Too many people, but at least there are no face masks

It has all been fairly liberating to be able to wander around without a facemask on, though I did see a group of 3 people wearing them today in Disneyland... but I did notice they were speaking Spanish to each other. I have also noticed that people in this part of the world speak Spanish when they don´t want people around them to hear what they´re saying. For example, today I overhead someone saying that they´d heard they´d modified the boats in It´s A Small World and then switch to Spanish to explain that it was because Americans have become too fat so the boats kept getting stuck. While the official version is that this is not true, from what I hear it is!

All the classics

Interesting to see is how many of the youngins were wandering around in Barack Obama t-shirts yesterday which I assume had something to do with his first 100 days in office as I don´t think I saw even 1 Obama t-shirt today. There was a lone dissenter yesterday who had a ¨Hope¨ t-shirt on that was in the style of the blue, red and black Obama image except with Jesus´s face in the place of Obama. I did fly over a big white dome and a carpark with ¨Home of the Faith Dome¨ written in big white letters for all of us flying over to see when coming in to LA yesterday, which was another sign from up above that I was now in the States and no longer south of the border. Another sign was that all the streets and houses seemed far more neat and orderly than they do flying over Mexican cities.

Of course, none is more classic than the Enchanted Tiki Room!

Anway, I am well and truely rambling now so I will leave it at that! Needless to say, I am enjoying all the classics in spite of the damn kids and may or may not get a chance to update this if anything interesting happens between now and getting home. The weather is nice, the sun is shinning and tomorrow I´m off to enjoy the Beers of the World walk taking place at Disney´s California Adventure as part of the Food and Wine festival they´re currently having.

Captain Nemo has moved aside for a Finding Nemo submarine ride and his seagull buddies are also there chirping out ¨Mine! Mine! Mine!¨ in Australian accents

Either way, this is acting as a nice depressurising and reaclimatisation excercise between Mexico City as it was when I left and Australia as it is both quite fun and carefree and I´m getting use to hearing Australian accents and so the cringing is already beginning to become less and less each time I come across a group of Strayans!

2009-04-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

First a plague, now an earthquake...

Today was a little less surreal than the weekend here in Mexico City as people had to head back to work and everything returned to relative normality with a blue face mask on top. While most restaurants and cafes and almost all stores are still open, it is still striking to see rows and rows of empty tables in normally busy cafes around town. What is even more difficult to get your head around in all of this is the gap between a lot of what the government is saying and a what the figures and precautions seem to suggest. For example, in one sentence officials will be stressing that this flu has a cure and then in the next announcing that 7 more people died overnight in Mexico City, 2 of which were already in a serious condition when they arrived at hospital. This, of course, raises the question of what happened with the other five? The government has generally been careful not to give any specifics of those who are dying from this, so nobody really has much of an idea of the age, sex or locations of the victims. I was also surprised that the health minister just dropped a revised death toll of 103 people, up from 86 earlier in the day, into a brief phone interview with a short news update on Televisa last night with very little context. It was up to 149 by this morning and who knows what it will be tonight. They´re also weighing up whether to order an almost complete shutdown of Mexico City tonight, including suspending all public transport.

Not content with a global pandemic, Mexico City also rolled out an earthquake this morning which led to buildings being evacuated thus creating the crowds of people we´re being told to avoid! It was apparently 6.0 on the Richter scale and centred in the state of Guerrero somewhere between here and Acapulco. I didn´t actually feel it as I was out at about at the time, so I was a little baffled as to why all these people in suits and blue face masks were congregating on the sidewalks.

Chefs at the Sheraton head back to work.

Now that the School of History at uni has weighed in with their advice to leave town as soon as possible and more and more countries seem to be trying to disuade their citizens from visiting Mexico, I am weighing up my options and wondering whether I should just bugger the deposit on my apartment, get on a plane tomorrow and be on Splash Mountain by sundown. I sent off all the things I was planning to today and have got things more or less organised here should I need to go, so I guess I have some pondering to do. My main concern is that the global hype surrounding this seems to be growing by the day and I do wonder how long it will be before some kind of travel restrictions are put into place. Hmmm...

2009-04-26T16:33:00.000-07:00

Mexiflu lockdown continues...

Well, now even the morning walk is off the cards as the Bosque de Chapultepec shut its gates this morning for at least 10 days as the flu lockdown continues to roll out in Mexico City. Sunday masses were also cancelled this morning and the Mexico City government apparently has a ´plan B´ on the cards which would suspend all activities including public transport should the number of cases of the swine flu continue to rise. I also noticed today that cinemas seem to have shut their doors after remaining open to low crowds yesterday.

I think Mexicans are generally a fairly stoic lot and I don´t think there´s any kind of panic breaking out, but the streets are quiet and there seems to be a widespread suspicion the government isn´t being 100% forthright in revealing the number of cases involved. Who knows, but what is obvious is that governments at all levels are taking this incredibly seriously.

This all leaves me in a very difficult spot as I try and figure out what my next move should be. On the one hand, I can´t even go for a stroll around Chapultepec in the morning anymore as even that is now shuttered and I have no idea how I´m going to spend the next few days as I am trying to stay away from cafes and restaurants in line with the recommendations of health authorities. International concerns also seem to be growing and I must say that the constant reports of ¨international flights are continuing from the Benito Juárez International Airport in Mexico City¨ do more to make me wonder whether there exists the possibility these will stop in the coming days than reassure me! If I leave precipitively, however, I will almost certainly never see a peso of the $1000AUD deposit on this apartment. Interesting times, I guess!

Save me, Kevin07!

2009-04-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

Get ready for the Mexiflu

As of Friday when this photo was taken, school and universities had been closed and sales of face masks or ¨cubrebocas¨ had skyrocketed.

There is never a dull moment in Mexico City, and as of Friday things have become even more interesting due to the outbreak of a new strain of influenza which apparently combines human, avian and swine flu. Up to today (Saturday), the figures being offered are over 1,000 infected and 68 likely deaths in Mexico centred around Mexico City, but also a few cases in other states. It also seems to have crossed over to the US, with cases now reported in California, Texas, New York and Kansas.

By Saturday morning, the army was out distributing free face masks.

Late Thursday night at around 11pm it was announced that all classes from primary through to university level would be suspended for the following day, something of which I did not become aware until I started reading the paper on the Metro on my way out to the National Library which is on the National Autonomous University (UNAM) campus. I also noticed that the government was advising people to avoid large concentrations of people, such as the Metro carriage I was currently on. This did explain why there were so many people wearing surgical masks around town that morning. When I arrived at the library it was closed, at that stage until Monday, so I headed back to the apartment to see what exactly was going on.

CLOSED! National Anthropology Museum

National History Museum/Chapultepec Castle is also closed, much to this man´s apparent dismay.

It turns out that the Mexican and US governments as well as the World Heath Organization are taking this outbreak quite seriously due to the fact it is a new strain of influenza and it seems to most effect those of us who are otherwise seemingly healthy and in their late teens into their thirties. It was announced on Friday afternoon that all public buildings such as museums and libraries along with schools would be closed for at least 10 days and the big football matches taking place in Mexico City this weekend will also now take place in empty stadiums. The TV and newspapers are full of information on this outbreak as you can imagine, with hygiene recommendations, advice to wear masks over your mouth and nose and people being told to avoid large concentrations of people. I did notice that the flagship news program on the top rating network Televisa was working quite hard to suggest that it was America that exported the virus to Mexico and not the other way around. I guess Mexicans are a little tired of getting the blame for everything from US drug habits to crime and every salmonela outbreak that ever occurs north of the border!

Normally packed on a sunny weekend day, the Bosque de Chapultepec was a bit of a ghost town this weekend.

By way of comparison, this is a picture I took one weekend last year (as also seen in the last entry!)

Heading out on Saturday for a morning walk, it was obvious that the Centro Histórico was far less crowded than it would be on a normal Saturday when it can be quite hellish. By Friday night, soldiers had been placed at various points around town to hand out face masks and they were indeed out in force around this part of town in particularly crowded areas such as the Zócalo and around the Alameda park and Palacio de Bellas Artes. This meant that the blue face masks that were already popping up everywhere on Friday were far more prevailant, though I must say that a lot of people still seemed fairly unconcerned and were wandering around and sucking in the Mexico City air without any filtering.

Around the Zócalo on Saturday afternoon.

The Bosque de Chapultepec was fairly empty, particularly for a Saturday, which I guess makes sense as all its museums were closed. Curiously, though, the zoo did remain open. As I guess there are very few English speaking people around, I did get briefly interviewed for the NBC Today Show on my walk but I do hope they find someone else to show as I had no real insights to offer on the whole issue as I was a little lost in the Cliff Richard Japan Tour ´74 blaring from the old iPod. Combined with the Epcot Center t-shirt I was wearing, I´m sure I seemed a model of cool sophistication strolling through the streets of Mexico City to the NBC crew!

A medical centre set-up next to the Cathedral at which information about the flu was provided along with free face masks and bottles of water.

Here is the low-down on how to minimise your risks, from dietry recommendations to instructions on how to sneeze.

What happens from here is difficult to know as I am due to fly out on Monday the 4th and am just hoping no travel restrictions are put in place following the declaration of a public health emergency here in Mexico by the World Health Organization and as international concerns seem to be growing judging by the coverage on CNN. I obviously can´t do any more research here as all libraries and universities are set to be closed until at least the 5th. If I didn´t have to chase up a hefty deposit on my apartment I would be very tempted indeed to leave early before any possible restrictions are imposed. As it stands, I will give it a few days and see if things improve before seeing if I can head off to LA and ultimately Melbourne at least a few days early.

As you may be able to spy in the bookshop window, Nazi books are strangely popular in Mexico. Mein Kampf seems to be on just about every book stall in town.

2009-04-23T19:03:00.000-07:00

And the winner is...

As I showed the biodome at the entrance to Chapultepec in the last update housing the exhibit unveiling the winning design for the Bicentennial Arch to be built over Reforma for the Bicentennary of Mexican independence in 2010, I figured you´d all be waiting with baited breath to see the winning design and so I stopped in to the tent to see who won.

The display features videos and sketches of all the finalists, which ranged from what I thought were decent proposals:

to some which, while they had their charms, were perhaps a little impractical:

As the video playing behind the model of the winning design reminds visitors of all the great monuments along the Paseo de la Reforma boulevard that were built to represent the nation, I might as well include the photos I´ve taken of them through the year.

So, starting from the Historic Centre, you would first come across the Monument to Colombus:

The next monument would be the monument to the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc:

Beyond that is one of the major icons of Mexico City, the Angel of Independence erected to celebrate the centennary of independence in 1910:

Just before reaching the 2010 bicentennial monument you would come across the fountain of Diana:

And just behind the new arch in the Chapultepec forest is the monument to the Niños Heroes who fought to the death to protect Mexico from the gringo invadors:

So, what did the judges from the Mexico City and Federal Governments choose as, to quote President Felipe Calderón, a ¨symbol of pride and unity for Mexicans¨ to commemorate 200 years of independence?

The winning design for the Bicentennial Arch is...

From the other side:

You may have noticed that this is not an arch at all. That has caused quite a bit of controversy, with one Mexican architect commenting that you can´t have a competition to design a stadium and announce that the winner is a hospital.

Here is a look at the concept art:

All I can assume is that this was the cheapest and quickest design to build in time for the anniversary as it was also by far the least interesting. I don´t quite know what statement this is supposed to make about Mexico as a nation 200 years from its independence, but I suspect it´s not making the one the judges of this competition think it is making. It does look like it would fit right in back in Melbourne as a miscellaneous adornment to a walkway around the Docklands or maybe the Exhibition Centre, but I´m not particularly convinced of this as the grand monument to the 200th anniversary of Mexican independence.

Ah well, to quote Emiliano Zapata, see you in 2010...

2009-04-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

¡Hola Barack!

Hot on the heals of Hillary´s visit a few weeks back, Barack Obama has finally made it to Mexico City which has caused quite a commotion and resulted in even more CNN stories about Mexico´s drug war for me to watch every morning. On that front, there are no running gun battles in the streets of Mexico City I´m sorry to say as most of the violence is going on up north in the border states or slightly closer to home in the central-western states of Michoacán and Guerrero.

President Felipe Calderón is getting a lot of praise heaped on him by people such as Obama for tackling the problem of narcotrafficking head-on, but in reality the current violence was set off by a poorly thought-out attempt at asserting his legitimacy as president following the disputed result of the presidential elections of 2006 which brought Felipe to power. At least outside of Mexico, no-one seems to mention the context in which this began, with Calderón barely managing to get himself sworn in amidst scuffles in the Congress as members of the PRD party of candidate López Obrador attempted to take control of the tribunal to prevent what they saw as the consummation of a fraudulent election. Meanwhile, López Obrador had staged his own swearing in ceremony on Revolution Day as ¨Legitimate President¨ of Mexico.

Among Calderón´s first acts were raising military salaries and reinstating the inaugural military parade of the incoming president before the armed forces which the previous two presidents had foregone. He then announced dramatic military operations in a few states such as Michoacán against drug cartels. While at the time all of this was an obvious attempt to ensure the support of the armed forces, assert his authority and affirm his status as the one and only president of Mexico, the operations quickly set off a spiral of violence that has become worse and worse and spread further and further ever since, giving Mexico a higher death toll in 2008 from the drug war than the ongoing war in Iraq. Ultimately it will go on until Mexico quietly decides to pull back the military and the cartels manage to work out a new equilibrium, but the ultimate longterm solution of legalising and regulating the trade is unfortunately unlikely to be on anyone´s radar anytime soon.

Anyway, I figured it might be worth taking a few photos on my morning walk today of what´s going on around Mexico City these days.

The Norwegian government has put up quite the display of photos around the Chapultepec forest of a land of snow, fishing, oil and vikings which people seem quite taken by. I must say it does make me want to hop on a plane to Norway far more than the boat ride at Epcot past trolls and oil rigs.

The British government have also got in the act by having children of Brazil, Mexico, the UK and China make little displays about the importance of rivers to their community to celebrate the Festival of the Thames.

Conveniently located near to Chapultepec and the Mexican presidential residence of Los Pinos is Obama´s hotel...

... where he appears to be reasonably well-protected.

You can always tell if some foreign dignitary is in town as they string up the flag around Chapultepec and down the Paseo de la Reforma.

There were a few protesters outside the US embassy on Reforma to coincide with Obama´s visit and banners dealing with understandable topics like migration reform...

... or renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

This small protest about environmental damage by the state oil company Pemex and corrupt Mexican governors was a little harder to relate to either Obama or even the US embassy generally. To be fair, they did describe Pemex executives as gringos presumably to make it a little relevant.

On the Mexico front, they are preparing in a big way for the BiCentennial celebrations of 2010 for the bicentenial of the independence movement and centennary of the Revolution (note the clever little 2010 design). Here the winning design for the Bicentennial Arch that will sreatch over Reforma from this very spot will be revealed in a day or so in this biodome.

Federal legislative elections are also to be held in July and one new party to emerge is the Social Democrat Party, or PSD. They are making the point here that people need to ¨think differently¨ (hence the sheep!) and have quite good ads on in cinemas in which people discuss why governments should look at legalising drugs. They are promoting themselves as ¨the left that Mexico needs¨ in the wake of the virutal collapse of the PRD into in-fighting and in general I think they would go down quite well in a country like Australia where young middle class university students such as myself like to have a party on the left to vote for which preocupies itself with promoting ideas that seem quite sensible to us but are a little too radical for the mainstream voters the major parties need to win over. In a country like Mexico where there are still major economic divides and close to 50% of the population living in poverty I suspect they´ll have more trouble taking up the banner of the main party on the left by putting forward a drug legalisation and gay marriage agenda, but I am sure they will do very well in a few Mexico City suburbs.

An older party competing is the Mexican Green Ecologist Party who you might assume would be campaigning on environmental issues, but you would be wrong. The main thrust of their campaigning is bizarrely the re-introduction of the death penalty in Mexico through fear campaigns such as this one which reads ¨Fear is knowing that they could kill or kidnap someone in your family¨. As a party that has always needed to form an alliance with a bigger party, be it the conservative PAN in 2000 or the PRI in 2006, hopefully it is sounding its own death knell with this strange campaign.

2009-04-07T14:27:00.000-07:00

I went to Rio... quite a while ago

The festivities begin in the Sambadromo

It has been a while, but I figured I might as well add some pictures from our last stop in Rio De Janeiro for Carnival at the end of February for those who haven´t seen them on Flickr.

Momo, king of carnival!

The big reason for going to Rio I suppose was to see Carnival which is one of those things they tell you´re supposed to do before you die. The centrepiece for the carnival celebrations is the samba parade in the Sambadromo during which different samba schools compete and one is named the victor.

Tickets to the samba parade are quite pricey even for average grandstand seats as we had, running into the hundreds of dollars. We had pre-ordered the tickets online and arranged for them to be delivered to the hotel. Nothing in Rio ever seemed to be all that straightforward, and true to form upon arriving the night before the parade we found the tickets were not at the hotel and the next day the company from which I had ordered them had all their phone lines and live online help service out of order which all seemed quite ominous. As the day moved on and there was no sign of the tickets, the people at reception suggested we visit the Sambadromo to see if we could pick them up there. This all seemed odd to me as I didn´t think the company had offices there at all, but that´s what they suggested and even as a longshot it seemed worth a try, so Boheme and I hopped on Rio´s very efficient metro system and made our way over.

The Sambadromo doesn´t seem to be in a particularly good part of town and there weren´t really many people around, however Boheme and I soldiered on and ended up winding our way around the place and never finding anything that even remotely resembled somewhere we would have been able to pick up the tickets. So it was back off to the hotel and, as it was getting late, we figured we´d just have to write off the $500 or so per person we´d already paid and buy scalper tickets for the next night. At literally the last minute, somewhere around 6 or 7pm, the tickets did finally show up at the hotel so we had to madly get ready and rush back to the metro and back over to the Sambadromo with great relief!

The parade itself was indeed spectacular, but I will say that it is a long evening. From memory, it started at around 9pm and was supposed to last until 6am. We, unfortunately, only lasted until about 5am when we decided our feet were sore enough and we were all tired enough to take the metro back to the hotel. Those trains were about the one thing that did seem to run smoothly in Rio and during Carnival they ran them 24 hours which was handy, even if the walk back to the hotel through the deserted streets of the Botafogo district was perhaps something we shouldn´t have been doing!

Nemo!

Planes!

We didn´t end up seeing the winning team, Salgueiro, which paraded through the Sambadromo on the second night. I am happy to say, though, that I was about the only person who bought the t-shirt for that samba school as almost everyone went for the favourites Beija Flor (Hummingbird in Portuguese), or at the very least a team that was actually parading that night. Josie and I, on the other hand, just went with the ones we thought looked the nicest without any idea of what they were all about. I was ultimately vindicated in my choice, though, while Josie, sadly, was not!

Go Salgueira and penguin beer

After spending the next day recovering, we ventured out to explore the area around Botafogo were we were staying. Botafogo is outside of the main tourist areas of Copacabana and Ipanema and we stayed in that part of town it was supposed to be a little cheaper and overall it was a pleasant area to wander around, even if it was generally necessary to take a train or taxi elsewhere to get something to eat.

Praia de Urca with Sugarloaf peeking over the mountains in the background

View from Praia de Urca

As well as the pleasant little area of Urca, Sugarloaf was within walking distance of our hotel and so we took the cable car up there for a look over Rio, which is indeed as spectacular as it appears in pictures.

Looking over toward Copacabana and Ipanema

Looking back toward Botafogo with Christ the Redeemer watching over everything

From what I can remember, the next day started off with a short walk through the jungle around the base of Sugarloaf to see if we could spot some monkeys before heading off to Giant Jesus, otherwise known as Christ the Redeemer, for sunset and then dinner at a very nice Japanese restaurant in yet another neighbourhood in Rio. One of the many things Rio seemed to have in abundance was very nice restaurants, even if we did have to almost always take a taxi to reach them!

Yes, there were quite a few of them

And He shall smite the wicked...

Cloudy view from Giant Jesus

Another day was spent wandering around the historic centre of town which was all fun, though I can´t really think of all that much to say about it!

Downtown Rio

Crowded downtown streets selling everything from Hawaiianas to piñatas

Reflection of the Rio de Janeiro cathedral

Overall, Rio was really quite a fun and interesting city and it was worth seeing it during Carnival when, apart from the parade, there was also the odd concert and banda (mobile street party) that we would stumble upon from time to time. That said, as we were getting to the end of over two months of travelling, and a whole year of being overseas for the girls, we were a little warn out by that point. Brazil also has to be the only country I´ve ever visited in which almost no ATMs would accept Australian cards regardless of whether they were Maestro, Cirrus or whatever else. Some of the big chains like HSBC and Citibank did accept our cards, but they were few and far between and other chains that I use all the time in Mexico (and elsewhere) also just wouldn´t accept any of our cards. This at least initially made things a bit difficult as we had to plan quite carefully what we´d spend and how much money we would withdraw if we found a working ATM as it may be a while before we´d come across another one. In the past few days it has also turned out that someone must have taken an imprint of Boheme´s card and her pin number at one of the many ATMs we tried as it was drained of all its funds in a series of transactions around Rio over the past week. Thankfully Josie and I have so far been ok.

Copacabana beach

The hotel was also an annoying experience. I had booked it through an online service (priceline.com) and twice, in December and January, confirmed the rate, number of people and room with the hotel via email. It was part of the Mercure chain which is in turn owned by Accor who also run hotels like Novitel and Sofitel so you would have assumed they had their act together, but from day one we had problems getting anyone who could speak English, getting repairs done in the room and sorting out the bill. Day after day I was assured that they would correct the bill as I went down with all the print outs of emails and booking info, but the inevitable happened when checking out and they ended up insisting it was over $600 more than they had confirmed and, of course, they had one guy on reception who didn´t speak English. Again, I´m surprised the follow-up response from Mercure and Accor has been so bad as all they´ve done is apologise and offer up a range of bogus excuses, with changing exchange rates as my favourite, while refusing to refund any of the money. So, not a great way to end the trip I´m afraid!

Off to the Mercure Botafogo...

While I was kind of looking forward to getting back and finishing up my work in Mexico City, I arrived at around 8am after a long flight from Rio via Santiago and Lima to find the electricity had been cut off from my apartment meaning I had no hot water for a shower and the fridge was full of mould and water. It took me the better part of the day to get an explanation from anyone here as to why that might of happened, with it ending up having to do with someone having moved out and for some reason I don´t quite know their contract also covered my apartment. So it was off to the building admin and then the electricity company the next day... only to arrive at around 1pm which was aparently too late for the Luz y Fuerza del Centro energy people as they were preparing to knock off for the day and so I had to come back the next morning! Thankfully I was able to bribe one of the people working here at the building to hook me up illegally as otherwise I would have been without electricity for a good 4 or 5 days more, but it did involve the annoying ritual of the electricity being disconnected every morning and reconnected when I came back in the evening just in case the electricians came around and caught on to our little caper.

Back to the land of protests. This time it´s centre-left head of the Mexico City government, Marcelo Ebrard, being compared to Hitler by some conservative group who are quite squarely targetting his possibilities as a presidential candidate in 2012 with their propaganda. It is quite unusual to see a protest group with signs in English and advertising that they are broadcasting their meetings live on the web.

Nothing too exciting has been going on recently as my time here winds to a close with a May 4th flight to LA for undisclosed business in Anaheim. Apart from the dead faces and bloodied bodies staring at me from the tabloids every morning, none of the violence which seems to be all people are seeing of Mexico these days outside of the country is in evidence in Mexico City as far as I can tell. As it´s Holy Week everything is closed right now and as it´s spring I´ve ended up with hay fever while sweltering through 30 degrees days as I´m sure everyone back home is preparing to head into the cold of winter. I´ll try and get something up before I leave. If not, hasta la vista and all that!

Happy birthday, Benito! Though not as grand an affair as it once was, the commemoration of the birth of Benito Juárez is one of those markers of the beginning of spring and a public holiday. While I knew it was a holiday and the date of his birth, I must admit that I was surprised when I woke up on the Monday before his birthday (which fell on a Saturday this year) to find everything closed for Juárez day.

2009-02-09T16:28:00.001-08:00

Boxes Ticked Continued...

The trek group at Machu Picchu

We´re off Easter Island with its infernally slow internet connection and now in Mendoza, Argentina so I guess I can finally finish the last entry.

Our roasted guinea pig dinner in Cuzco. You may have to click on it for the full effect.

Not really much meat on the poor little thing

In Cusco after the trek was all over and done with we all ticked off the final thing you really have to do as a tourist in Lima with a guinea pig dinner. The last time I had guinea pig it was presented in a far more appetising manner than at this place where it basically looked like a baked and very angry hairless rat. There´s not much meat on them and they seem a bit tough, but I guess if you´re living high up in the Andes you don´t have many sources of meat apart from alpacas and guinea pigs.

Chinatown in Lima

Our final day in Peru was spent in a warm and bustling Lima. As Josie has been quite sick with a cold since the Lares Trek, Boheme and I made our way out of the main tourist strip and over to Lima´s lively Chinatown for a Chinese feast and some wandering around the shops selling all kinds of odds and ends and through the booths offering tarot readings and various other fortune-telling and clensing rituals. Unlike Mexico City´s Chinatown, Lima´s does show some evidence of the large local Chinese population beyond the mere presence of Chinese lantens and restaurants filled with the locals as there are many hundreds of thousands of Peruvians of Chinese descent who arrived mainly in the second half of the 19th century and apparently integrated quite quickly into Peruvian society. Everywhere in Peru there are Chinese restaurants (called Chifas) and the main supermarket chain in Lima is called Wong which presumably is an outgrowth of all the Chinese supermarkets that used to be located in each neighbourhood of the city. Peruvians still called the corner store the ¨Chinese person on the corner¨ in fact!

Not only did I find out that I was born in the year of the rooster but also that it is sponsored by Inca Kola

As the national Pisco Sour day celebrations were in full-swing, we ended up stumbling upon booths serving up delicious and cheap pisco drinks (pisco is a Peruvian licor made from grapes which is mixed with egg white and lemon juice to make the pisco sour... I think) while a woman sang her little heart out on a stage in the Alameda Chabuca Granda and the crowds enjoyed their drinks accompanied by various Peruvian dishes.

Which pisco to choose?

We were staying at the Gran Hotel Bolívar, a grand old hotel from 1924 on the Plaza San Martín which was once at the centre of the Limeño social scene but now is a bit of a creaking cross between the Tower of Terror at Disney World and the hotel from The Shinning. It is still famous for its pisco sours, however, which meant we also got to enjoy the celebrations and another fine example of Peru´s national drink down in the hotel bar.

Saturday evening in the Plaza San Martín with the Hotel Bolívar in the background

Yet another trip to Peru and enjoyable day in Lima ended with a wander around the packed streets during the evening and a bus ride up to the lookout on the Cerro San Cristóbal hill that rises up behind the historic centre. As Fran and James are now working in a school in northern Peru, I guess it will be back to Lima yet again in a few weeks for the fifth time. That city seems to keep pulling me back for some reason!

From Peru it was on to Easter Island... Ah, Easter Island! While visiting Easter Island seemed like a great idea at the time, it didn´t take long for it to dawn on us that there´s nothing else to do but look at giant stone heads and that it is very hot and muggy. The heat would have been ok if it wasn´t for the complete lack of air conditioning on the island except in the pharmacy which meant there was never any relief. There may have also been more to do if everything wasn´t insanely expensive.

I´m actually in this photo if you click on it!

For a day or so Easter Island may be interesting enough and it is always fun to take pictures of giant stone heads, but if it wasn´t for us renting a car for two days so we could tour the island at our own pace and moving from our muggy little hotel room to a house we rented for only a little more per night after a leak in the bathroom flooded the room, I think we may have all gone quite mad.

As well as it being impossible to get even a simple meal of fish or chicken and chips for under $20, there was always something odd and frustrating going on such as the island running out of fish for a few days. As we had a house, we were able to cook a few nights but even this was a little difficult as, for example, sometimes we´d have to wait for the plane with the milk to arrive the next evening.

There was the annual Tapatai Nui festival going on while we were there which meant there was a big parade with Polynesian dancing and a few floats which broke up the monotony for one evening. Still, I would warn people away from spending more than a day or two on Rapa Nui and I wouldn´t say it´s worth going out of your way to see. Unless giant stone heads absolutely fascinate you.

Once we escaped Easter Island we spent a fairly uneventful day in Santiago and are now in the very pleasant Argentine city of Mendoza. The big trip is slowly wrapping up and I think we´re all a little fatigued at this point. In a few days we´ll have carnival in Rio which I suppose should be fun. We shall see!

2009-02-09T13:40:00.000-08:00

Boxes ticked: Machu Picchu, Llamas, Guinea Pig and Pisco Sour

Plaza de Armas, Cuzco. Viva el Perú!

We´re now sweltering away in Easter Island after finally getting this dreaded Lares Trek to Machu Picchu over and done with. We did all survive surprisingly well what amounted to a four day trek to Machu Picchu through the Andes with a group of eight people who, apart from a British couple and one tall, pale Norwegian, ended up being all Australian. Overall I´m happy we did the hike as I had already visited Machu Picchu so this made the whole experience a lot more novel than just catching the train from Cuzco once again and it also proved to be a lot less difficult than I think we had all imagined it would be.

As a testament to Inca stonemasonry, the Spaniards incorporated original Inca walls into some of their new buildings and, despite the lack of mortar of any kind, they remain standing.

Before the trek, we had one day of leisure in Cuzco which involved a lot of hassling from people offering massages and selling their paintings as well a brief trip with Boheme up to the Inca ruins of Saqsaywamán. This was followed by a very pleasant stoll down the mountain from the ruins through the little allyways of the city. Despite the fact the hassling by tourist touts does get very wearing after a while, the old Inca capital and ¨navel of the world¨ is still a beautiful city worth visiting.

Scenery on the first day of the hike

Even though we were initially planning to hike to Machu Picchu before the 1st of February when the main Inca Trail closes for a month, we had always planned to do the Lares Trek ¨alternative Inca Trail¨ instead as it is far more remote and less crowded than the main event and also because it winds through remote little communities up the mountains and thus would provide a something closer to a window into how people in that part of the world still live. The trail did indeed end up winding through very remote communities or past the odd adobe house with thatched roof from which children would emerge along with the occasional adult and it appeared that the form in which people were living had changed little since Spanish conquest almost 500 years ago.

Here we all are after the first hill. When does the next season of Dexter start?

At the first camp a local woman was thoughtful enough to include the fine Peruvian beer Cusqueña among the handicrafts.

What made the experience a little strange was that, as we´d been told to buy crackers or gifts such as small toys or pencils to give to the children we met up in the mountains, there was always a ritual of almost everyone in the group handing over the little gifts and then lining up paparazzi-style to take photos of the kiddies in their traditional costumes. For the most part the children seemed to enjoy posing and seeing themselves on the digital cameras and, as it is a long walk to any kind of town not to mention their obvious lack of financial resources, the gifts seemed much-appreciated. So it does in theory seem like a win-win situation. Still, there was something about a bunch of mostly Australian trekkers lining up to take picturesque pictures of the local children in exchange for small trinkets that seemed just a little unsettling on some level!

I guess they did make for nice photos!

The scenery was indeed quite spectacularly barren along the tail and it is hard to imagine how people (and their hoards of llamas) could live in such a place. The nights were cold as the temperatures dropped below zero, but thankfully the sleeping bags were warm and the gloves and beanies that everyone stocked up on in Cusco did the trick. Another surprise of this trip was that the GAP people put on quite a feast at meal times with a soup, a main and, in the evenings, a dessert with every meal. If anything, I think this trek left me a little fatter than before.

A nice little perk of the Lares trek versus the Inca Trail is that the last night is spent in a hotel in the town of Aguascalientes located in the valley below Machu Picchu instead of in a tent. The town itself is even more of a tourist trap than Cuzco, filled with mostly lousy restaurants with aggressive touts. While I found the Mexican dinner of fajitas of alpaca meat wrapped in pancakes instead of corn tortillas fairly tasty, others in the group seemed less impressed when one person pulled a large rusty nail out of their dinner.

All the happy hikers of our group on the third day.

On the fourth morning we all got up bright an early yet again for the 5am, one and a half hour walk up the steep track to the ruins themselves. Arriving at Machu Picchu at 6:30am from the jungle below as the sun was rising over the Andes and the ruins were relatively uncrowded was an entirely different and more impressive exprience than just taking the train from Cuzco and being greeted by the inevitably-overcast skies of the afternoon and hoards of other tourists as Rob and I did the last time around. So, yes, it was all worthwhile and I´m glad I did it. It did seem odd to me that the far fitter other members of the group seemed to have a tougher time of it all, but I guess the GAP people only planned a day for them all to adjust to the altitude whereas I did organise our trip so that we had plenty of time and hiking at altitude before the trek came up. If anything, I feel a little bad for having pushed Boheme so hard to shape up in the weeks before the walk!

A few of us during the sweaty hike to Machu Picchu.

Finally!

The obligatory shot

View over the Apurímac valley

As this is taking a long time to load the photos, I might have to continue this in the next day or so. I´m not sure there´s much to to here, so I´m sure I´ll find the time!

2009-01-31T12:10:00.000-08:00

Back to Inca Kolaland

Ekeko, the household god of matrial possesions who I mentioned in the last entry about the Alasitas festival

There were no more incidents in Bolivia and we have made it through the rest of our little adventures relatively unscathed to our current resting place of Puno on the Peruvian shores of Lake Titicaca.

View from Chacaltaya

For our last two days in La Paz, Josie and Boheme opted for a 4 hour bike ride down ¨the world´s most dangerous road¨ while I decided that didn´t sound like a recipe for a great time and instead took an excursion to the peak of Chacaltaya and the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon).

Pretty much the extent of the development at the world´s highest developed ski area.

Chacaltaya is purportedly the world´s highest developed ski area at 5395m above sea level, though beyond a small lodge I didn´t see much sign of development, and thanfully it was a relatively short but steep walk up to the top. The tour I was on consisted of 9 Brazilians, a Uruguayan couple and me all crammed into a little minivan, so the main language of the trip was Portuguese and I learned that Brazilians both love to take photos and take their shirts off. It wasn´t too cold up the top, but it was snowing and I guess Brazilians likely see even less snow than the average Australian as they were going crazy having snowball fights and taking off their shirts and taking pictures of themselves lying in the snow.

With a Brazilian guy on the tour who wanted a picture with the only non-South American I guess. He raced right up to the top then vomited due to alitude sickness.

The Valle de la Luna was a bit of a waste of time as it was just some fairly unimpressive erosion that I suppose might somewhat resemble the surface of the moon. The whole day involved lots of driving for little payoff, but then when I heard the tales of injuries, heatstroke, wading through mud and saw the limbs of Josie and Boheme covered with insect bites from their epic bikeride, I began to appreciate the whole experience a lot more.

At the Valle de la Luna one of the odder features was a solitary figure playing the panpipes and a small guitar perched high above the amazing geological formation.

Looking back to La Paz from the Valle de la Luna

As the Inca Trail is rapidly approaching, we´ve been trying to get some hiking in along the way and our last day in La Paz was supposed to involve a 6 hour trek up to the base camp of Huayna Potosí at 5130m above sea level.

Just to prove I made it to the base camp

Again, there was much struggling and eventually the guide suggested that just he and I continue on to the base camp as it was a steep climb and Boheme didn´t think she´d be up to it while Josie also wasn´t feeling well. I think Roger our guide over-estimated my fitness as he proceeded to rush up the rest of the without stopping which almost killed me, though he seemed pleasantly surprised that his estimated one hour to the top had only taken 5 minutes! One nice thing about continuing alone was that it gave me a chance to chat to Roger in Spanish which you don´t get much of a chance to do with people when you´re traveling in a group of mainly English speakers.

Roger and Me

Roger was telling me about the migration to La Paz from the countryside of young people which had resulted in the springing up of a whole new city called El Alto with about 1 million people perched above La Paz and surrounding the airport. His take on it was that there was little to no work in the countryside except in areas where there was a large amount of tourism such as around Lake Titicaca. He also mentioned how he´d like to live in an English-speaking country for a while but the difficulties that Bolivians have as, for example, every time they want to apply for a US visa they are charged a non-refundable fee of $100 US. Anyway, we made it back to the camp in what must have been record time and all up the look took less than half the time it was supposed to.

Getting to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca involves crossing the straits of Tiquina in a little boat while the bus travels seperately on a precarious looking barge

From La Paz we traveled over to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca and caught the boat to the Isla del Sol for two nights. Lake Titicaca and particularly the Isla del Sol is a lovely part of the world and, yet again, this was supposed to involved quite a bit of walking to get us somewhat prepared for the trek to Machu Picchu.

View of the Cordillera Real over Lake Titicaca from our hostel on the Isla del Sol

After a brief walk on the first day to some Incan ruins, we did attempt a larger 6 hour walk to the northern end of the island and back via the coast. Again, I´m not sure all of us will make it through to Machu Picchu without the assistance of a mule or llama, but the scenery was impressive and the walk really wasn´t all that difficult. In fact, the worst part of the whole stay on the Isla del Sol was the nightmarish task of carrying my pack up the steep incline from the boat dock to the hostel up near the top of the island.

Josie and I walking across the island

The island itself is still strongly indigenous, with most of the locals speaking Aymara rather than Spanish to one another while there are also no cars and few links such as TV and internet to the outside world. The main economic activity does seem to be centred around tourism now, though, as seems to be the case in much of this part of the world. Enterprising little kids even set up small stalls on which they place vaguely interesting looking rocks which they attempt to hawk to the passing tourists, most of whom seemed to be from Argentina.

Llamas enjoying a day at the beach

From the Isla del Sol, we left Bolivia behind for this trip and caught the bus over the border to Puno in Peru. We only have one full day here and chose to visit the main tourist attraction, the Uros or Floating Islands.

Uros Islands, Peru

I visited the Uros once before with Rob and they really are a mix of an interesting glimpse into a unique way of life that has persisted over centuries and the ultimate tourist trap in which everything you see is scripted and manicured to give the tourists what they want.

The locals giving a demonstration of how they trade with one another. They did seem to be having a good time and laughing quite a lot at all the ridiculous demonstrations they must have to do several times a day for the tourists.

Each island is built upon a base of totora reeds and the islands are best known for their distinctive reed houses and boats. The tours from Puno take you on the 30minute boat ride out to the island where locals reenact how the trade with one another, explain a little about their history and then try to sell you various handicrafts. It is a fairly fun and interesting experience that you really have to do, but it does make Disneyland look subtle in comparison.

Typical tourists!

Tomorrow we head off to Cuzco where we have one full day before the Lares Trek to Machu Picchu begins. Hopefully we´ll all make it out alive. As today was the beginning of the Virgen de la Candelaria festivities in Puno, I´ll leave you with a few pictures of a parade of people from surrounding villages we happened to stumble across this afternoon.

Parading the Peruvian flag

2009-01-25T14:59:00.000-08:00

From deepest, darkest Peru to the world´s highest capital

Deserted Streets of La Paz

We´re currently enjoying a very quiet day in La Paz, Bolivia as almost everything is closed due to the referendum being held today on the new constitution proposed by president Evo Morales and his party Movement to Socialism. The city is blanketed with posters and billboards imploring people to vote ¨sí¨ to the proposed constitution and all tv sets and radios around town seem to be tuned into coverage of the vote, which will almost without a doubt be approved in poorer and more indigenous provinces such as La Paz and defeated in wealther eastern provinces such as Santa Cruz. I don´t really know the ins and outs of it, except that land redistribution proposals and limits on how much property can be bequeathed in a person´s will have been two major sticking points for wealthy rural landowners and the urban middle class.

Yes to Evo and the new constitution!

Before arriving in La Paz, we flew down to Lima from Quito for a brief day and a half stay in Peru´s always-interesting capital. The first half day was spent looking around for various things we needed in the many shops of the upmarket Miraflores district and seeing the film Australia. I´m not completely sure, but I think I liked the film enough despite the fact it took corniness to a new level. It was also nice that there were now at least able to say that the Australian government had apologised to the stolen generation even if 2008 seemed just a little late!

Historic centre of Lima

The second day was spent looking around the historic centre with the two girls and going over some of the sights I had visited a few years back with Rob, such as the catacombs of the San Francisco monestary and the Inquisition museum. It was all very pleasant and I did get to see the whole parade of the presidential guard outside the Presidential Palace which was both extremely impressive in scope and a little bizzare in the slow-motion marching that resembled something like a slow-motion version of Basil Fawlty´s Hitler impression.

Presidential Palace

The presidential guards marching around

No stop in Lima is complete without a visit to the Estadio soccer restaurant for Inca Kola and lomo saltado. Josie is suffering from yet another reaction to something and is breaking out in hives or something along those lines. This trip is really making me question how evolution hasn´t completely weeded out redheads by now.

An interesting display in the Spanish Inquisition museum showing methods very similar to the water boarding now used by the US army to elicit confessions.

While Lima is still obviously a city with massive poverty and division between classes despite Peru having on paper probably the most impressive economic performance of any South American country over the past seven years, the historic centre does seem to be seeing some benefits of this growth through increased public works and new investments that have brought a lot more life to the area than Rob and I found on my first visit five or so years ago. The president Alán García is also enjoying an almost unprecedented approval rating for a Peruvian president of 41% despite all the recent corruption scandles surrounding his government, so perhaps some of the growth has also began to make a difference for him too!

Plaza Murillo, La Paz

From Lima we jetted off to La Paz, the world´s highest capital city as a sign at the airport proudly proclaims, just in time for the annual Alasitas festival. The patron of this festival is a cheery little fellow called Ekeko who is the household god responsible for distributing material possessions and on this day people buy miniatures of the items they most desire in the hope the larger versions will materialise during the next year.

Alasitas stalls selling miniature houses, bundles of money, etc.

Or if it is a clothes shop or internet cafe you wish to open, you may be interested in one of these items...

all of which must be blessed, in this case using sugar.

The streets were crowded with people and stalls selling little bundles of cash in Euros, US dollars and Bolivianos alongside miniature suitcases, passports and visas. Other popular items were miniature houses, shops, cars and various university degrees, each of which were blessed at the stalls using substances such as sugar, flower petals or some kind of insense.

Plaza San Francisco crowds

By midday we had made our way through the streets to the Plaza de San Francisco were priests emerged from the San Francisco church to conduct a mass blessing by sprinkling something else again over the throngs of people who were holding their miniatures over their heads in an insane crush of bodies. While the church obviously approves of this festival, I believe it is one of the many that has arised out of a mix of precolombian and Catholic traditions.

Blessing the miniatures outside the Iglesia San Francisco

When we finally emerged from the crush after being pushed in all different directions with literally no space between people, Josie notices a big slash across her bag through which some enterprising little thief had managed to extract her digital camera. In retrospect we should probably be grateful that we weren´t all robbed blind in that crowd where it was close to impossible to keep track of your possessions, but it was all definitely frustrating and led to a long day of chasing up the tourist police and the insurance company. The tourist police are located far away from the main tourist areas, thus requiring us to take a cab over and then search around for what ended up being an unassuming set of doors with a black and white A4 print-out that said ¨Tourist Police¨ stuck to the glass. It turned out that the person who took down statements was out to lunch until 3pm, so we had to catch a cab back into town and return a few hours later. When we returned there was a queue of three seperate groups of Argentine tourists who had their pockets picked or backpacks stolen and one woman on a typewriter typing out statements one at a time. It took quite a while to get the statement which is only really useful for insurance purposes, meanwhile yet another Argentine came in who had his backpack stolen at the bus station, an Australian couple who had a wallet stolen and another Australian guy who had his backpack snatched by a little kid from between his legs while he was buying something. For some reason La Paz seems to be full of Argentine and Australian tourists and I don´t think we´ve heard a single American accent yet. Anyway, it was all eventually sorted out and the lady taking down the statements made a comment that they´d need to have more police on the streets for the festival next year due to the number of thefts. My impression, though, was that the Bolivian government doesn´t consider coddling tourists to be much of a priority.

The damage

The next few days will hopefully be spent doing a few excursions and hikes around La Paz and then we´re off to the Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca for 2 nights before returning to Peru for the Lares Trek to Machu Picchu. I´m quite sure that hike will kill us all.

Wacky wiring in La Paz

2009-01-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

Guten Tag Galapagos!

Galapagos hawk

Well, now I can tick the Galapagos Islands off the list of places to see before I die. We all just completed 4 nights of sailing around the Galapagos Islands and looking at all the different creatures, pondering the wonders of evolution and trying to psych ourselves up for getting reading twice a day for snorkeling excursions. As we booked it all through an agency, the whole thing ran quite smoothly and even the boat was ok despite the cabins being a little hot and stuffy at all times and sleeping often impossible due to the noise of the engine which was quite loud in our cabins which were all located below deck. Again, I don´t have much time so my apologies if this is a bit rushed and if I´m taking time to get back to emails.

Oyster catcher

Frigatebird

The Galapagos Islands really are quite an amazing place due to the sheer amount of wildlife you encounter along the way, none of which seems the least bit intimidated by human beings. Every island also seems to look quite different which further helps to keep it all interesting. The main animals we saw were land and marine iguanas which seemed to be everywhere, followed by sea lions and fur seals who would lounge around and waddle up to us all on the beach as Pablo gave his long explanations of the ecology of the islands in the baking sun. Thankfully I manage to do the usual last minute purchase of a cap when arriving at a tourist location and realizing that I´m likely to be burnt to a cinder if I don´t have some kind of hat so now I have a Galapagos cap featuring an image of the ubiquitous blue footed booby. It did take me a while to find one that didn´t say ¨I love boobies¨ on it, however.

Blue footed boobies

Our guide Pablo watching the fur seals

The snorkeling was all good as we did manage to swim with an amazing number of green sea turtles in one location, while on other islands we would end up swimming with sea lions, sharks, manta rays and penguins. After a while I think everyone became a little complacent about all the wildlife you seemed to be tripping over all the time as it even became difficult at times to make sure you weren´t stepping on iguanas or sitting on a sea lion as there seemed to be animals hidden all over the place.

Sea lions and marine iguanas

Marine Iguana

Land iguana

The group we had were all good, with one interesting quirk being that German seemed to be the main language on board despite the fact only one person actually came from Germany. My cabin mate was a guy called Marcus who was the only authentic German onboard who was also quite amazed that everyone was speaking German most of the time. Marcus and I seemed to be the only people at the bar every night as most people seemed to head off to bed fairly early, though on the last night we arrived at Puerto Arroyo and one of the crew decided to take us to shore along with another passenger to a local club which ended up being full of Ecuadorian tourists from the mainland. What was supposed to be a brief journey into town turned into a kind of waking nightmare as Carlos the crew member kept insisting we could go back after the current beers were finished but, sure enough, more beers kept arriving despite the fact only he and Marcus were drinking them. It became clear this was his night out and he wanted to keep drinking until the place closed. After I eventually got him and everyone out of the bloody place at about 3am before a 6:30am start in the morning and off to a water taxi, Carlos proceeded to criticise the manner in which the taxi driver asked him which boat we were going to as lacking respect which in turn led to a verbal confrontation with another younger local guy working on another tourist boat which escalated when Carlos told him to go do something unpleasant to his mother. How they didn´t go overboard I´ll never know, but the younger guy launched into Carlos (who I guess would probably be in his late forties) and they tumbled down into the front of the small boat in a shower of punches until Marcus and I eventually managed to pull them apart and the younger guy got off at his boat.

Galapagos Penguin

The only regret I really have about the whole Galapagos experience is that we never got to see the tortoises in the wild, but the islands were definitely worth seeing and I think the five or so days we spent cruising around was probably enough for one go. Tomorrow morning we leave yet another country as we have an early morning flight to the always colourful city of Lima for a few brief days before heading into Bolivia and then back into Peru heading for Cuzco and then the Lares Trek to Machu Picchu.

Our boat

Sea Lions

2009-01-15T13:15:00.000-08:00

The Black Sheep Inn

View from outside our cabin at the Black Sheep

We´re all now back in Quito for one night before heading off to the Galapagos Islands in the morning. The past few days have been very exhausting as they´ve been spent hiking and horse riding through the rain about 4 hours south of Quito high in the Andes at the Black Sheep Inn eco-lodge near the town of Chugchilán. The Black Sheep Inn is a little farm/lodge in which everything from the toilets to the vegetarian dinners are designed to be ecologically friendly and made a nice change from the big cities we´ve been visiting so far. Unfortunately the weather didn´t really cooperate and it rained every single day we were there.

Boheme and I with some amiguitos horse riding for some reason

Why people go horse riding for pleasure I will never really understand. These holidays are all about compromise, though, and as Josie loves horse riding the fact Boheme and I loath it was overruled and off we went on a 6 hour horse ride through the rain on our first day down into the canyon, up the other side to a little market and then back again. How the horses made it up the narrow, steep and slippery paths at all I will never know, but there was some slipping and I was thrown backwards off the horse at one point and had to spring up very quickly as it kept slipping backwards toward me. Boheme was also thrown off at one point and the whole thing left us sore for days. Again, why do people do that for fun? The descent back from the town into the canyon which only I and the guide attempted as the two girls walked was one of the most terrifying experiences I think I´ve ever had as the horses slipped and slided down an incredibly steep path.

The market itself in the small town of Guantualo was good to see, though, as the town is a tiny place that doesn´t see too many gringos and everyone was very friendly. It was also a nice change from the same artworks and hard sell that you find in the bigger markets frequented by the tourists. In general we found that people in that part of the world were always smiling and greeting us with a buenas días or buenas tardes as we walked along, with the children being particularly friendly. While the horse riding itself was horrible, our guide Humberto was more than capable and it would have perhaps been even more hellish to walk up and down those steep paths in the rain.

Small church where we sheltered to eat some lunch on the way to the cheese factory

The second day meant a hike up through the mountains for a few hours to a small cheese factory apparently established as part of some Swiss aid program. Again, the weather was not great and it appears that this part of the world spends a lot of its time shrouded in mist and rain. We did make it to the cheese factory, though, and bought enough cheese to make sure that any good done by all this exercise would be quickly undone when we got back to the lodge to eat it all along with a box of wine, beer or a gin and tonic... or a combination of all three.

The road to Quilotoa

One of the bigger tourist attractions of this part of the world is the Laguna Quilotoa which is really just a big lake inside an even bigger volcano crater. So, of course, on our final day we took a truck up the lagoon and completed the 5 hour hike back to the Black Sheep along with a Canadian mother and son we met at the lodge. The rain had obviously taken its toll on the roads which were completely washed away at some points and in terrible condition until finally we reached a small land slide which necessitated changing to a different truck on the other side.

Laguna Quilotoa

The walk itself was nice, but by this stage it all seemed like a bit of a trudge despite the landscape we should have been enjoying a little more. Thankfully it only rained for the first 3 or 4 hours and then at the very end, so we did get a bit of a dry spell.

Potato harvest along the trail from Quilatoa to Chugchilán

It seems like a very harsh part of the world in which to live, with a little bit of tourism supplementing subsistence agriculture and some commercial agriculture as the basis of the economy. A lot of the houses were fairly simple constructions of mudbrick with thatch roofs which would have to be good to keep out the biting cold of the evenings. Perhaps it´s no wonder, then, that the local guides took down almost all the guideposts installed by the Black Sheep Inn along the trail which thus necessitates you to hire a guide if you don´t want to get hopelessly lost. Our guide was again quite friendly and was telling me that it was a slow time of year for him as he only gets one group a week and his family gets by growing potatoes and corn for their own consumption.

Small homes and farm along the trail

All in all it was an exhausting few days, but definitely worth all the effort and hopefully it will help prepare us a little bit for the Lares Trek to Machu Picchu in a few weeks. There has been a lot of toing and froing on that front as Boheme has struggled quite a lot with the altitude and the hiking, but today it was confirmed they keep each of our $1100 if we cancel so it will be onward and upward!

My apologies to anyone whose emails I haven´t responded to as I haven´t had much time online over the past few weeks and won´t have it at all for the next 5 or 6 days in the Galapagos. Hopefully it lives up to all the hype and we don´t get tired of looking at giant tortoises, iguanas and sea lions after a day or two!

Boheme and I enjoying cheese and wine outside our cabin at the Black Sheep Inn

2009-01-10T18:12:00.000-08:00

The middle of the earth

Looking towards the Basilica del Voto Nacional in the historic centre of Quito

From Colombia we have headed to the very pleasant city of Quito which is, for those who don´t know their geography, the capital of Ecuador. Quito has marked an interesting change from the cities we´ve visited so far in that it is obviously very well set up for tourists... and full of them! The historic centre is beautifully restored, well-lit with spotlights of various colours at night and well-populated with security guards. While this may lead to a certain Disney World-type effect, the city itself also seems quite laid back and manages something that no other Latin American capital I´ve visited so far has managed by being a large capital city that seems almost like a small rural centre. It is ringed by mountains not covered in the houses of recent settlers to the city but tall eucalypt forests.

On the first day we visited the basilica del Voto Nacional and, after a tour by a local guide who conned us into paying to hear that the basilica was built of volcanic rock multiple times, we climbed a series of stairs and ladders to the top of the bell tower.

The whole system was quite rickety and exposed, but the views over the historic centre of Quito where very impressive and well worth risking life and limb. Poor old Boheme did make it right to the top, though the tears were barely contained!

Another interesting feature of the Basilica was that instead of featuring the traditional gargoyles it featured the wildlife of the Galapagos such as sea birds, iguanas and turtles.

Plaza Grande

Another activity we seem to have spent our time on is talking to nuns through wooden rotating doors. The first time we went to one convent because the girls wanted to buy various lotions and creams for the skin and by the end of the day we were at another convent where I was talking through the wooden door to the Mother Superior about an order of de-soured lemon treats for my travelling companions that it turned out had to be ordered by the hundred and thus we went without. Still, it was an interesting experience as I didn´t realise there were still so many convents in which nuns were forbidden to so much as be seen by the outside world. I guess they spend their days praying, making beauty products and producing sweet lemon treats for all the sinners outside the convent walls.

Convento de San Francisco

On our second day in Quito we ventured out to the ´Mitad del Mundo´ or equator. The whole thing is quite the tourist trap of souvenir stores, photo oportunities and a museum dealing with the various indigenous cultures of Ecuador.

Fecking tourists getting their photos on either side of the equator line!

The Lonely Plant claims the real equator is actually a few hundred metres away where there is another museum, though we went to another museum where it was explained to us that that other museum was ´gringolandia´ and the real equator was elsewhere. Who hell knows, but it probably doesn´t really matter.

A tasteful photo opportunity of Josie and I at the Equator

On our final day in Quito we chose to take the TeleferiQo cable cars up a nearby mountain with spectacular views at then hike to the top of the top of the Rucu Pichincha.

View from the top of the TeleferiQo

The peak is 4618m above sea level and the cable cars take you up to 4100m so it may not seem like much of a distance, but the altitude made for an interesting hike. So too did a Canadian girl we met who had done the hike a week before and insisted she knew the correct way to climb up to the summit. I´m not entirely sure what we were expecting this hike to be, but none of us brought cold weather gear or so much as a fun size Snickers to eat for lunch so we were all fairly freezing and hungry by the time we eventually reached the summit.

The three of us in hiking gear along the trail

Boheme didn´t quite make it to the summit and the altitude seemed to be wreaking havock with everyone once we got going, but perhaps the past 6 months and a few thousand metres lower had prepared me as I didn´t really feel the altitude at all thankfully and so it wasn´t so tough.

Our Canadian friend and her British friend climbing down through the rocks from the summit

Unfortunately once we got to the summit there was no view as we were completely enveloped in clouds, but there was a certain sense of achievement after all the scrambling through the rocks that we´d actually reached the summit even if it was no longer possible to feel our fingers. As you would expect, we met another Australian guy on the trail to the top dressed in shorts and a t-shirt who had also misjudged the hike. Not surprisingly, he left the summit early.

At the peak with our new Canadian and British friends and the cloud view in the background.

Josie and I on the return trip

Tomorrow we head off to an organic farm about four hours south of Quito also high up in the Andes with fine vegetarian food, hiking and other outdoor recreation opportunities. There has been much discussion about how the alternative Inca Trail (Lares Trek) hike is going to go in a little under a month´s time. We shall see! Thankfully my confidence has been a little restored after today´s hike, but I would lightly note that there was a lot of time spent waiting around on the track and it ended up taking about 7 hours return when it should have been about 6 hours.

View over Quito from the trail

2009-01-06T17:46:00.000-08:00

Into the land of Pablo Escobar

First off, here are some left over photos of us all from Christmas Day at Epcot:

Dusk over World Showcase in Epcot

Josie and I enjoying dinner at the Rose & Crown Pub at (Disneys) England. The food wasnt great, but the view was quite nice!

Back to Colombia...

As this is an all-too-quick trip through South America, we are unbelievably leaving Colombia for Ecuador tomorrow after such a short stay. After being left with mixed impressions of Bogotá, I have really found Medellín where we are now a really nice city with a great feel and energy to it and Im very sorry to be leaving the country without having even scratched the surface. Oh well, I guess theres always next time!

As I dont have much time, Ill just give some brief impressions and put up the photos.

After Bogotá (and a side trip to the small town of Villa de Leyva), we travelled north to the Caribbean resort town of Cartagena for 4 days over New Years. The tropical climate was a nice change from the cold nights of Bogotá (though our shower in Bogotá at least had some hot water unlike in Cartagena which was all cold!), though I did find the city a bit surprisingly filthy for Colombias main tourist destination. It was also very much a tourist trap in the sense that there were people hawking goods to you on the streets everywhere. New Years itself was nice enough, with beer flowing on the streets and an impressive fireworks show. We did unwittingly stumble into a bar full of single girls dancing in front of mirrors, though.

I didnt love Cartagena, but it was a pleasant few days and the side excursions to the mud volcano and nearby Islas de Rosario were all good and it was a change of pace from what weve seen or likely will be seeing for the rest of the trip. Well, here are the photos:

On our last day in Bogotá we visited Villa de Leya, a lovely small traditional town which was unfortunately a 4 hour bus ride away.

It all comprised of pretty much this type of architecture and cobble stone streets.

View over the town

Colourful streets of Cartagena which was a nice short plane flight away.

A nice thing about the city was that there was lots of music and dancing going on all through the night.

The only photographic evidence of our passing through the working ladies bar. Just imagine a dimly lit room, pounding music and a line of women with their handbags on the table dancing alone each in front of seperate mirrors off to one side.

Up the mud volcano El totumo near Cartagena.

We all seem very chipper.

Being tormented. The mud itself was oddly lukewarm and creamy and as there was no bottom to the volcano it was very difficult not to have your legs float up and be left lying on your back... though the fact it was packed so tight did help!

The next day we took a side trip out to the Islas de Rosario which involved lying in hammocks and drinking cocktails in the shade which was nice.

Medellín

Medellín was up until recently one of the most violent parts of Colombia with a perfect storm of guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug cartels. Since the death of Pablo Escobar and recent successful attempts to reign in the FARC guerrillas, the city seems to be really blossoming into a vibrant and modern city that I have found a lot more pleasant than Bogotá which seemed oddly deserted (though that probably had to do with the fact we were there between Christmas and New Years). The 14 hour bus ride from Cartagena wasnt so wonderful I must add!

Our guide today out to surrounding towns aand the El Peñol area was describing how just 3 years ago the city was hell and his family were planning to leave due to the violence and the gruelling 2 years his brother had spent as a captive of the guerrillas. He was full of praise for the current president Uribe who has led efforts against the FARC and credited him for a rebirth of the region and a cornering of the guerrillas in jungle regions near the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian borders.

Our first day was spent wandering around and visiting the excellent Museo de Antoquía which features an extensive collection of local son Boteros paintings and sculptures. Today we visited some beautiful country areas around here through what is called the Eastern Circuit. Again, we were told that a few years ago this simply wouldnt have been possible due to the guerrilla presence but all is well now. There were still soldiers stationed along the roads and signs reassuring people of the army´s presence along the roads, but there seemed to be many locals out and about enjoying the scenery.

I have definitely enjoyed my time in this part of the world the most so far and, as I mentioned earlier, really wish I could keep heading south. I am looking forward to getting to Quito and Ecuador for the first time tomorrow, but hopefully Ill get back here sometime in the not too distant future. Colombia still doesnt seem to receive too many tourists and the infrastructure for tourism generally isnt that great compared to other Latin American countries Ive visited, but as long as things keep improving it could well end up being one of the highlights of South America.

Ok, more photos I guess!

Local son (and now Miami resident like much of Latin Americas well-to-do) Fernando Botero and his art depicting rather rotund figures looms large in this town.

Botero statues in the Plaza de las Esculturas

Dark photo of the Plaza San Antonio

Statues of the bird of peace by Botero in the Plaza San Antonio. The first was all but destroyed in a bomb blast back in 1995 which killed scores of people whose names are listed on a plaque until the blown-apart original. Next to it stands a new version of the statue.

Streets of central Medellín

El Peñon a few hours outside of Medellín

Rickety 639 steps up to the top

We did eventually make it to the top, though, and were greeted with very impressive views.

Town of Guadape on the banks of the lake which was occupied by the guerrillas in the not too many years ago but now seems to be thriving off the local tourist trade as the area seems a popular getaway for paísas (people from the state of Antoquía where Medellín and this area are located).

For those who remember the late great El Dorado Colombian restaurant from Flinders Street, you can compare the Bandeja Paísa from paísa country that I enjoyed in Guadape with the old favourite from El Dorado.

Josie and I talking to the local merchants in the town of Maranilla.

Colourful local transport trucks called Chivas in Maranilla.

Unfortunately its now adios Colombia but more fortunately hola Ecuador tomorrow... provided Aero Galapagos is better than it sounds!

2008-12-31T12:01:00.001-08:00

From the happiest place on earth to Colombia

This will be a fairly short entry to let you all know that I made it through Disney World and Bogotá and am now in Cartagena, Colombia waiting for the evening´s new years festivities.

Disney World was a blast as always, though very tiring as four full days spread between four parks during the busiest time of year makes for long days during which much time is spent in long queues. Our hotel, the Wilderness Lodge, was quite nice as it was nestled into the woods on a large lake and so it was a very pleasant boat ride over to the Magic Kingdom and back. Overall the parks weren´t unbearably crowded, but it was a tiring four days and next time I think I´ll try and plan for a bit more of a leisurely pace! US customs were a dream to pass through as always, leaving me running for my connecting flight from Houston to Orlando as it took 1 hour and 40 minutes to get through security. When I arrived at the gate the attendant was announcing that there was one more free space for the standby passengers, then looked at me and asked if I was Sheppard and informed the stanby people the sadly there were no more places let.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Disney World

Bad photo of the Wilderness Lodge

Space Mountain and the castle looming in the distance on the boat over to the Magic Kingdom

Christmas fireworks show which was also visible through the trees from our hotel room which was a nice little perk

Christmas lights

Christmas day was spent at Epcot and here we all are with Mickey at the beginning of the day

A short spot of drinking around the world began in France...

... continued on to Morocco where we had some sangria...

... then paused for a little while after saki with lunch in Japan

The new version of the Spaceship Earth ride also uses little photos of you to create a little animated movie of your future at the end and this is Josie and I in the later 21st century I guess!

Very early the next morning it was off to Disney´s Hollywood Studios for such classics as the Tower of Terror

And the new 3D interactive Toy Story Midway Mania ride

We did also have a champagne Christmas evening back at the room one night before staying until 3am for the Extra Magic Hours at the Magic Kingdom. As you may be able to tell, I had enjoyed far too much champagne to be riding the Tea Cups!

Finally on the last day we all made it to Disney´s Animal Kindom which is probably the best of all the parks right now. Here we are with the Baloo and King Louie from The Jungle Book

Bogota

Plaza Bolívar

From Disney World we jetted off to Bogotá in Colombia and spent the first day seeing the main sights around the city. My overall impression of the city is that it was quite picturesque in parts but still not quite cleaned and dressed up for the tourists who didn´t really seem present in any great numbers anyway. We were also staying in the old part of town which seemed strangely deserted at all times, particularly by around 5pm. It is also a city that reinforces the same surprise I had coming to Peru for the first time after having visited only Mexico in Latin America the year before. Whereas Mexico does have crushing poverty, it´s also quite obvious that it has some kind of middle class and some very wealthy sections of society (even if they´re relatively small). In Bogotá, the poverty is obvious and I suspect you have to go looking for the more well to do. The city was definitely worth seeing and we probably would have got a lot more out of it with more time and exploring, but it is not one of Latin America´s most immediately appealing cities from what I saw.

Well, here are just a couple of pictures from the first day. I´ll post some more of our travels as I get time to upload them as so far I have one more day in the part of the world and just arrived in Cartagena for New Years this morning. On that note, happy new years!

Streets of Bogotá

We took the cable car up the Cerro Monserrate for very impressive views of the city and a hearty lunch of Colombian food!

Mountains surrounding Bogotá, one of the nicest aspects of the city

2008-12-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

Feliz navidad y hasta pronto

As I'm heading off to Disney World in the early hours of the morning for what I'm sure would be called something along the lines of a Magical Holidays Celebration and probably won't have a chance to update this for a while, I figured I should let people know and wish everyone a very feliz navidad and perhaps a happy new year if I don't get to a computer before New Years in Colombia.

As I'm flying Continental from Mexico City to Orlando via Houston, here's hoping they've got all of this skidding off runways and bursting into flames out of their system!

2008-12-14T20:09:00.000-08:00

Saturday in Tepoztlán

Market stalls was set up around the church and main plaza in Tepoztlán

When I first got to Mexico City I decided I should try and head off on the weekend to all the many small towns and other sights that are easily accessible by bus from the giant urban monster that is Mexico City. Unfortunately I only ever got as far as Tula so I figured as I only had a little more than a week left before heading off on the excellent adventure through South America I should attempt another day trip this weekend. The destination I settled on was Tepoztlán about an hour south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos which is Emiliano Zapata’s old stomping ground. I'll have to leave my planned Zapata weekend retracing his steps for when I get back unfortunately!

The Ex-convento Dominico de la Natividad

The town is a bit of a hot spot for hippies and new age tourism and as such has more vegetarian Indian restaurants, organic food stores and massage therapists that your average Mexican town, but retains the feel of a small Mexican town to a much greater extent than I'd imagined it would. There was a busy market set up around the main plaza and church and overall the place was bustling with Mexican tourists and locals. The setting is quite spectacular as the town is nestled between mountains on one side and tall limestone cliffs on the other, while the vegetation in the town is quite lush and I guess subtropical.

Leading into the grounds of the church and ex-convent is an arch featuring depictions of the evangelising work of the early missionaries amongst Aztec god and traditions.

After a hearty lunch of a chile stuffed with chorizo and smothered in cheese, I decided to climb the impossibly steep path up to the little pyramid El Tepozteco perched high on a cliff above the town. While the path is only about 2km long, the steepness cannot be overstated but, while it nearly killed me, it was well worth the effort as the views were stunning.

This is the pyramid dedicated to the Aztec god of fertility, Tepoztécatl, whom, you may have guessed, also lent his name to the town.

There is a little hut selling drinks at the top of the trail patrolled by a very forward pack of coatis. One poor girl who bought a bad of peanuts had a coati jump up onto her chest as she opened the bag.

While it was hazy, the view over Tepoztlán and the surrounding state of Morelos was quite spectacular.

Heading back down the trail as the music from the evening's festivities wafted up from the town!

Safely back in Tepoztlán looking back up at El Tepozteco. It's hard to make out in the photo, but going from the left the mountains slope down until there's a dip and steep rise. Just across from the rise you can see a little light pyramid-like shape which is indeed the pyramid silhouetted against the sky. That might give you an idea of how steep the path was!

Looking in different directions around town.

La Santisima church

Christmas decorations

Who said Taco Bill's wasn't authentic?

Unfortunately the nighttime pictures didn't come out very well, but the town was looking very festive as all the Christmas decorations were lit up. There were even random fireworks going off and I found myself regretting the fact I didn't book a room for the night as I had considered doing. Instead I ended up catching the last bus back to Mexico City at 8pm which meant walking back up a lonely path up a hill on the other side of town in the dark to the bus terminal.

'Twas a fine way to spend a Saturday! A few weeks ago I noticed I was getting hay fever-type symptoms with itchy, watery eyes and an equally watery nose which I thought was a little odd considering Mexico is heading into winter instead of spring until I looked out one evening from the national library and saw the thick brown layer of pollution hanging over the city. Unfortunately the cold air keeps the pollution hanging over Mexico City and the air quality is notably worse, with the mountains disappearing into the smog. From the library you get an interesting view of all of this as it's right at the end of the city and slightly elevated so you see the thick layer of pollution and then emerging above it quite dramatically the snow-covered peaks of the surrounding mountains that are completely invisible below. The difference in air quality was immediately noticeable in Tepoztlan and, at least for a day, the hay fever miraculously disappeared!

Around Mexico City

It seems that the Mexico City government is trying to encourage a change in the attitude of drivers by having people come out holding signs reminding people to buckle up, keep to the speed limit, respect pedestrians, obey traffic lights, etc. While I think it's generally a positive initiative considering how people drive here (for example, I frequently see people put their car in reverse and step on the accelerator if they've missed a turn or change their mind about which way they want to go), if you come back an hour later you're just as likely to see police officers out directing people against the traffic lights if they judge that traffic going in one direction is busy enough to warrant disregarding them. The messages thus seem somewhat mixed.

I did finally go up to the viewing platform for the ice skating rink, but it seemed to have melted so they were re-freezing it

Make your own snowman

Christmas gardens by the cathedral

2008-11-30T21:23:00.000-08:00

Invierno en la Capital

This way to the ice skating rink! As a point of reference, that reddish building you can see a few buildings up behind the sign is my apartment building, who were nice enough to give everyone a big potted poinsettia the other day to celebrate Christmas so I look forward to coming back to a big dead poinsettia come March.

Mexico City’s Christmas celebrations, dubbed “Winter in the Capital”, kicked off last night with the head of the Mexico City Government, Marcelo Ebrard, heading up a televised extravaganza with fireworks and various other displays. As there hasn’t been any update in quite some time, I figured a little photo tour of the Christmas festivities in the Zócalo would be in order. Anyone who reads this blog must be becoming even more familiar with the Mexico City Zócalo than most Mexicans probably are, but it all happens in the Zócalo! It’s also only a few blocks from where I live, so I am there quite a bit...

This was fairly late on a Sunday night and people were streaming in to the Zócalo to enjoy all the free offerings.

I couldn’t get a good picture of the ice skating rink as the queue for the viewing platform was longer than I was prepared to endure so I might go back and try to get a better look during the week. They claim it’s the biggest ice skating rink in the world and, while it’s big, I am a little surprised it’s apparently the biggest. Either way, it seems to be a massive success with the Chilangos (which is Mexican slang for Mexico City residents).

There was even an authentic Mexican bagpipe troupe.

I did take a couple of self-photos which I guess I will post as a proof of life.

The decorations, as always, are very impressive

They’ve also set up a toboggan for the kiddies with “real snow” according to the signs.

Of course, there is a Christmas tree and this one is topped and decorated with little outlines of the Ángel de la Independencia as seen in a previous instalment of this blog!

For your enjoyment, another far too close self-picture!

Nothing else too exciting has been going on. The time-consuming task of concluding the planning for the epic journey from the wilds of Walt Disney World down to Colombia and down into Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Brazil, including detours to the Galapagos Islands, Inca Trail, Easter Island and Carnival in Rio, is almost done which is good. I am mightily looking forward to heading off again for some more travelling beginning December 23rd and leaving the National Library behind for a few months. The ladies who work on the front desk at the library are lovely, though, and I like the greeting every morning of “Ah, Don Sheppard!” which is nice as “Don” is a very dignified title in Spanish! I did also go to an old barbershop for a much needed haircut as I hadn't had one since my last day in Panama City. Hopefully this one gets me through South America!

2008-11-03T18:22:00.000-08:00

Hanal Pixan in Merida

Casa de Montejo on the Plaza Principal, built in 1549 and prominently features Spaniards dominating barbarians who are apparently not literally supposed to represent the local Mayans but seem to be pretty clearly alluding to them.

As I mentioned in the last entry, Mérida isn’t really one of the key places tourists visit to see the Día de los Muertos festivities but as the hotspots were booked and I felt like a weekend of warm Caribbean breezes instead of the chilly Mexico City autumn evenings so I headed off to the Yucatán to see exactly what they did. Mérida is quite a beautiful colonial city that I think resembles what most people would think of when they envision Mexico back in Australia due to its well-preserved Spanish colonial architecture and hot sunny weather.

The Día de los Muertos in that part of the world is called Hanal Pixan in the Mayan language and when I arrived on Friday afternoon they had little thatched huts set up in the Plaza Grande where locals and people from surrounding villages had set up alters to deceased loved ones featuring little offerings of food, drink, cigars and other things they may have liked under their photo. I didn't realise they would all be dismantled by nightfall so sadly there are no pictures, but this seemed to be the most significant part of the city’s Day of the Dead festivities.

Anyway, I think I’ll move onto the many photos I did take with some explanations. After this I won’t have to update this thing for months!

Friday

After arriving Friday afternoon and getting conned into buying a Panama hat (bah!), I wandered up to the Paseo de Montejo which is the city’s main boulevard built as a Mérida equivalent of the Paseo de la Reforma here in Mexico City. It is lined with some shops and restaurants, but most interestingly some old mansions in different states of repair.

This area experienced a boom in the late 19th century based around henequen due to, if my memory serves me correctly, the development of the combine harvester and US demand for string made out of henequen (or sisal) fibre. As henequen required large tracts of land and was labour intensive, large haciendas were established around the Yucatán onto which the local population was coerced and held by various means until the land redistribution that followed the Mexican Revolution in 1910. The hacendados thus built large mansions in Mérida where they would live most of the time, venturing out to their properties from time to time to keep an eye on things.

Here is the “alter to the patria” on the Paseo de Montejo which gives a good idea of how Mexican governments have gone about constructing a unifying nationalism in what was an ethnically and linguistically diverse country.

Here in the foreground is the eagle with the serpent which obviously relates to the Aztec legend of the founding of Tenochtitlán – Mexico City, while in the background the tree of life which was central to Mayan cosmetology is represented. Mexican nationalists have generally mixed and matched motifs from different monumental pre-Colombian civilizations to create a general “Mexican” motif.

The monument also narrates Mexican history from the independence struggle through to the Revolution around the outside. Here you can see the final stages of the representation, including a mention of the oil expropriation of 1938 which helps to explain why reforms aimed at privatising the state oil company hit such a nationalist nerve this year.

The University of the Yucatán

They did have a bit of a parade and a show on Friday night in front of the Cathedral which featured little skeleton children, more drag Catrinas and a little play that seemed to be a big hit with the crowds.

Skeleton children!

Mariachis!

Saturday – Izamal

On Saturday I decided to catch the bus to the little town of Izamal which is mainly known for its giant old yellow monastery.

The monastery was finished in 1561 and was one of the first in the western hemisphere.

One of its main claims to fame is that Pope John Paul II held a mass here back in 1993.

The town has two nicknames, one of which is “the city of the three cultures” due to the presence of Spanish, Mexican and, as you see, Mayan architecture.

The view from the top of the pyramid shows the flatness of the landscape of the Yucatán Peninsula.

… looking back toward town.

The town is also nicknamed the “yellow city” for obvious reasons!

The town was setting up its Hanal Pixan fiesta carnival and announcements were playing all through the afternoon on the loudspeaker beginning with the opening bars and ending with the Vincent Price laughter from Thriller to announce the evening’s festivities. I never got to see Flash Gordon work their DJ magic unfortunately, but as I was leaving a procession got underway to the church featuring a little band, people carrying little banners and letting off little fireworks which I assume was for the Day of the Dead celebrations.

It slipped my mind that you have to hold the camera horizontally for the video to come out in the right direction, but if you want to tilt your head you can see the little fireworks explosions they always use at these small town festivals and Mexico City protest marches.

While it takes quite a while to travel relatively short distances, one of the good things about catching the local buses around these parts of the world is that you get to see some of the smaller towns off the tourist trail and they all, again, looked little very colourful dusty colonial towns with Mayan names like Tixkokob. In a few of those little towns on the way back there were groups of people dressed similarly to those in Izamal congregating around the churches as people got ready for the evening’s festivities.

Saturday - Mérida

In Mérida, there was surprisingly little to no reference to the Day of the Dead on Saturday night. I did, however, get a Pan de Muertos and a coffee and sit out in the Plaza Grande for a while watching the world go by which was very pleasant indeed! Interestingly enough, the city government has installed wireless internet in some parks such as this one so you see rows of people sitting out with their laptops in the areas that obviously get the best reception.

A nice thing about Mérida is that at about 9pm on Saturday nights they close off most of the streets in the historic centre and have bands playing with people dancing along.

Sunday

On Sunday they keep the streets closed for "Mérida en Domingo" (Mérida on Sunday) which essentially involves outdoor markets and live entertainment.

They had the kiddies out dancing.

Taking it up a notch by dancing with a beer bottle on their heads...

... then moving up to a whole tray.

To amuse myself I wandered around the outskirts of the central area and found that Mérida is the only city of any size to retain some of the original entry archways from the colonial period with three still standing. Well, I found that interesting to see!

Typical design of the churches in the city, many of which were built with the stones of Mayan temples.

Yes, I found the third arch!

As night fell, the dancing displays gave way to a band and people dancing on the streets.

Overall, 'twas a fine weekend in Mérida and a nice change of scenery from Mexico City. I also thought that people were generally a little friendlier in the sense that they seemed to make way on the sidewalk rather than seemingly trying to run you into walls or cut in front of you while pretending not to see you as in Mexico City.

One thing I would say is that it is quite a touristy city which has given rise to that old stereotype of the pushy Mexican trying to con you into buying crap. That was the one thing that really began to wear thin on me by the end of the weekend as it seemed everyone who started talking to me would eventually swing the conversation around to buying panama hats, guayabera shirts or hammocks. For that last item, the local merchants have even come up with a booklet called the Hamaca Sutra (Hamaca is the word for Hammock in Spanish) as a sales tool and additional item you can purchase along with your hammock in order to get the full use out of it.

As you can probably see in the photos above, as you walk out of the centre of town, though, you increasingly find there are less tourists around and things quickly change from the brightly-painted and perfectly-restored colonial buildings from the centre of town and it is definitely worth. Izamal was also a great place to visit and it would be nice to go back and spend some more time exploring the surrounding area. If the election wasn't tomorrow and the main reason I got cable was to watch the results come in, I probably would have kept heading down to Guatemala as I plan to get there by bus through the Yucatan at some point before I leave Mexico!

Pancho Villa

2008-10-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

Día de los Muertos in Mexico City

The building’s administration has set up a little Day of the Dead alter behind the cow in the entrance to the building.

I finally decided last night I would head somewhere for the Day of the Dead weekend, but the main hotspots of Pátzcuaro and Oaxaca were pretty much all booked up so instead I’m heading off to Mérida on the Yucatán peninsula for the weekend to get a Mayan spin on the festivities. I have very fond memories of Mérida from my first trip, so should be fun!

Anyway, here are some pictures of the Día de los Muertos happenings around Mexico City.

On the Paseo de la Reforma there are now displays set up by different Delegaciones (local governments), institutions and businesses. This is set up by the museum of revolutionary Venustiano Carranza’s house (didn’t know there was one!) and features him in skeleton form riding on horseback. While he was so corrupt he spawned a new verb at the time (Carrancear meaning “to steal”) and ordered the assassination of Emiliano Zapata, he did oversee the drafting of the 1917 Constitution which is still more or less in effect. Then he was killed in 1920 by followers of one-time revolutionary ally Álvaro Obregón who went on to become president… and then be assassinated in 1928.

The government of my old stomping ground of Coyoacán has put together a display featuring who else but Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Delegación Azcapotzalco has gone with an Aztec theme. As you may have noticed, marigolds are the traditional flowers used during the Dia de los Muertos celebrations.

The Calavera Catrina based on the creation of engraver José Guadalupe Posada as featured in this Diego Rivera mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central in the background has become one of then main symbols of the Día de los Muertos. In the mural she is holding hands with Rivera as a child while JoséGuadalupe Posada is the man in the bowler hat standing next to her.

Here is a recreation of one of Posada’s famous calavera prints featuring scenes populated by skeleton characters that were generally satirical comments on Mexican politics and society around the turn of the twentieth century.

In the Zócalo there is an entire Día de los Muertos extravaganza going on featuring more calavera scenes, lucha libra, plays and loads of other activities. This is from the cinema chain Cinemex.

There are, of course, giant Catrinas here too.

They’ve set up a demonstration area where the sweet Pan de los muertos (Bread of the dead) which is an integral part of the celebration is made.

The general motif seems to be Mayan this year (perhaps I didn’t need to spend all that money to go to Mérida after all…), and here is a Mayan image made with Pan de los muertos.

A scene from the classic Mexican film “Los Olvidados” (The Forgotten).

Another Mayan image, this time made out of different grains!

Why not get your picture taken with a guy dressed up as Catrina?

I returned later this evening to see what it all looked like at night and it was crazily packed.

Los Olvidados again!

Just liked this photo looking down Avenida Juárez toward the Monument to the Revolution and the mountains beyond around sunset. The weather is quite unpredictable, but it’s beginning to get a little chilly and the past week the air has been remarkably clear so you can see the giant mountains looming over Mexico City in the distance in every direction.

2008-10-18T22:53:00.000-07:00

Nothing Much to Say

As it has been a long time between updates, I figured I should let people know I was still alive and maybe post a few pictures from the past few weeks which will no doubt illustrate that nothing too exciting has been happening

Tlatelolco 1968 anniversary

On 2 October 1968, the Mexican government decided to put an end to a growing student protest movement by massacring a still unknown number of student protesters in the Tlatelolco plaza here in Mexico City a few weeks out from the Olympic games. In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the student movement, on the 2 of October there were marches from Tlatelolco plaza and down the Paseo de la Reforma to the Zocalo. As no-one quite knew what would happen, most of the shops and restaurants around here in the centre closed and pulled down their metal blinds during the march. It ended up being relatively peaceful apart from some graffiti and minor clashes with the police.

An effigy of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz who was president at the time.

Stalin still has some fans.

Paseo de la Reforma

As I walk down it almost every day, I figured I'd take a few pictures along the main boulevard in Mexico City, the Paseo de la Reforma. Here is the fountain of Diana.

This is perhaps the city's most famous landmark, the Angel of Independence. These monuments date back to around the turn of the century when the Porfirio Diaz government began a furious program of monument construction as part of their (quite successful) efforts to create a strong Mexican nationalism. This monument was built to commemorate the centenary of the Independence struggle and was dedicated by Diaz in 1910. Within a few months he was off France to live out the rest of his life in exile due to the victory of the Mexican Revolution

Here they are both enjoying a good book in celebration of the annual Mexico City Book Fair which is currently taking place in the Zocalo.

The Paseo is the main commercial district of the city and this is the Mexican Stock Exchange.
There is a mythical commercial district elsewhere called Santa Fe which I have never been to, but the idea was apparently to create a Mexican Manhattan and so the government filled in an old garbage dump and built a shiny new city of sky scrapers somewhat cut off from the rest of Mexico City as public transport isn't great and the Metro has never been extended thus the huddled masses are kept at bay. I'll find a way there some day!

The Paseo is also lined with sculptures and an eclectic collection of benches designed by different artists alongside turn of the century sculptures, seating and sleeping people.

Christopher Columbus monument.

The old art deco National Lottery build overlooks crazy Mexico City traffic.

And once again...

Lopez Obrador called an emergency meeting on Wednesday at the Juarez Hemiciclo (also christened by Porfirio Diaz in 1910) as it looks like reforms privatising the state oil company Pemex will come up for a vote in the next few days. If so, he is preparing to take over the floor of the Senate again to prevent it being voted in and rallying his followers to take to the streets in protest.

Now just count yourselves lucky that there are no pictures of the almost daily naked protest on the Paseo against the government's agricultural policy.

2008-09-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

Un pandita que ha robado el corazon de todos

A patriotic little Mexican

As nothing particularly interesting has been happening, this is just a brief message to let people know that I am still alive and no fingers or ears should be arriving in the post with a ransom note attached during the next few days at least. All I’ve been up to recently is reading through old newspapers and magazines at the national library and trying to decide whether to head up to Guanajuato for the Cervantino cultural festival in a few weeks or somewhere else for the Day of the Dead at the end of the month. I think I will at least head off somewhere for the Day of the Dead, but in the meantime I am very much enjoying the little chocolate skulls that Sanborns are now selling.

Part of the problem with spending my time flipping through old newspapers is that it is not the most exciting thing in the world and I’m also very easily distracted by things that are of absolutely no value to my thesis. For example, I end up reading the Woody Allen comic strip that was included in the Sunday papers featuring a little cartoon Woody Allen in all kinds of socially awkward situations or seeing what movies were out at the time. One movie that did spark my interest was El Pequeño Panda de Chapultepec about Tohui (“a pandita that has stolen everyone’s heart”) that was born in the zoo at Chapultepec and featuring the Mexican singing sensation Yuri as I did visit the pandas at the zoo a month or so back and now go for a morning stroll through Bosque de Chapultepec when it isn't closed due to the visit of the Prince and Princess of Asturias as it was this morning. I have no connection to Yuri, but Apparently she became a born again Christian some years ago and renounced singing.

As this panda excitement was happening in 1982 while Mexico’s economy collapsed, I suspect the birth of the little panda was probably one of the few bright spots of the year for Mexicans… and perhaps as a source of national pride I can slip in a chapter about the birth of Tohui and how this event was used to stoke Mexican nationalism at a time of economic and political crisis. Unfortunately I have a feeling that would not go down too well with my supervisors, but I have so far encountered a strange silence in the academic literature about this little panda. Tohui was the first of many baby pandas for the Chapultepec zoo which for some reason no-one quite knows has the most successful panda breeding program outside of China.

Unfortunately Tohui moved on to the big bamboo thicket in the sky back in 1993, but he lives on through the magic of YouTube where you can see Yuri and all the niños singing about how proud they are that a little Panda was born in the Bosque de Chapultepec right here in Mexico City.

If that doesn't work and you really want to see Yuri and Tohui, it should work here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-w6jlW8e7w

I have just realised how much of a testament to how easily distracted I am this entry has turned out to be!

2008-09-16T01:58:00.000-07:00

A Zócalo divided… ¡Viva México!

Welcome to a night of dodging umbrellas and giant hats

The customary Independence Day festivities all went off without a hitch this year as always, though the weather was about the worst I’ve seen since I’ve been there. Normally there’s a brief shower in the afternoon that lasts about an hour, but tonight it rained and rained from the late afternoon until about 11pm and it was also quite chilly. While this probably made crowds more manageable, it also meant that the Zócalo was a sea of umbrellas which is far worse than the sea of sombreros I had anticipated. Before I get to that, though, I must mention that a new level of gruesomeness was achieved by one Mexican newspaper today which decided to celebrate the big day by dedicating their entire front page to a close-up colour photograph of a decapitated head lying on the ground.

Entertainment provided by the federal government...

...and by the Mexico City government. The Mexico City Government's set-up was a little less impressive but they did have acrobats.

Mexican Independence Day celebrations traditionally take the form of the president emerging on the balcony of the Palacio Nacional and re-enacting the “grito” of Miguel Hidalgo who in 1910 on this date rang the church bells in the town of Dolores and issuing his cry (grito in Spanish) for independence from the Spaniards. This ritual began in the 1890s during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz who ruled Mexico from 1876 until 1911 when he was overthrown by the initial phase of the revolution. During what is known as the Porfiriato, the government paid a lot of attention to crafting a unifying Mexican nationalism that ran from the Aztecs to the Porfiriato through the war of independence and the liberal reform, constructing statues and creating public rituals such as El Grito. The post-revolutionary government more or less left the Porfirian historical nationalist narrative intact, simply removing the Porfiriato and inserting the Revolution as the final stage in Mexico’s long journey toward independence and nationhood. So El Grito remained along with the statues of Cuauhtémoc and Benito Juárez.

Like Cinderella's castle at Disney World, the Cathedral changed colours through the evening.

The controversy over the 2006 election results have thrown a bit of a spanner in the works, however, with Vicente Fox becoming the first president since the Revolution forced to conduct El Grito outside of Mexico City as López Obrador’s supporters had camped in the Zócalo demanding a vote recount. Last year an alternative grito “of the free” was given by Rosario Ibarra who is a long-time social activist, most notably on behalf of the disappeared in Mexico (including her son), and member of the López Obrador movement. This year López Obrador decided he would issue a “grito” in the Zócalo which caused all kinds of nonsensical speculation in the papers he was trying to provoke violence or even his movement’s first martyr. What it did mean was that for most of the night there were two competing shows going on: one on a stage put up by the federal government at one end of the Zócalo and another at the other end put up by the Mexico City Government and used by López Obrador and friends.

López Obrador looks over the true believers

At the end of the day it was all fairly calm and orderly. At around 9:30pm, the musical acts stopped on both stages and López Obrador gave his speech followed by a marathon Grito that included vivas to every group imaginable before handing over to some school children to give the official grito of the free and ring the bell. To be honest, I was surprised that so many people seemed to have turned out specifically to see him and for the first part of the evening it seemed like almost everyone in the Zócalo was joining in the pro-López Obrador chants. I've just read an article on the website of El Universal, one of Mexico's most important and more centrist newspapers, saying exactly the opposite as apparently few people turned out to hear him, so maybe it was all a mirage... or maybe the frustrating reality is that you're better off ignoring most of what you read in the Mexican press or see on the news. Most of López Obrador’s followers left following his Grito as a form of protest, but it turned out that plenty of people did stay for Calderón’s official Grito. That doesn’t take place until 11pm, though, and by then I and I’m sure most of the crowd was cold and wet so the mood seemed a little subdued.

Part of the Zocalo turned into a little lake

The set-up for the whole ceremony is quite impressive and I suppose part of the aim is to inspire respect and awe for the president as the tens of thousands of people down below in the Zócalo are left staring up at the balcony waiting for the president to appear as the band strikes up stirring renditions of traditional Mexican favourites, including La Cucaracha this time around. On that note, I thought it was an interesting choice to prominently feature a song about a cockroach in the build-up to the president’s appearance. It really is the kind of ritual that would only work in a presidentialist system that grants such a potent symbolism to the office of the presidency and I can’t imagine Kevin Rudd emerging from on high to lead a similar multitude in cries of “long live Australia!”

Waiting for Calderón

President Calderón did emerge and give what seemed to me a briefer Grito than usual, offering traditional vivas to national heroes, independence and then Mexico a few times. He then went back inside and emerged with his wife and young child to wave to the crowds. What greeted him were chants of “culero” (which more or less means ‘arsehole’ with a hint of 'coward' thrown in) running through the crowd and to be honest I felt a little sorry for him bringing his child out to crowds chanting arsehole at him. He probably couldn’t hear it from up on high, though. Either way, it seemed to be yet another sign that Mexicans have become increasingly open in their cynicism of the presidency and perhaps some of these rituals are in need of revision.

The Grito. It's back to crappy Youtube videos as Flickr won't let me upload much in the way of videos I'm afraid!

The Grito was followed by quite a spectacular fireworks show and thankfully the rain finally stopped about the time Calderón emerged on the balcony. Overall, Independence Day is quite a spectacle that seems to do the job of getting people excited about being Mexican. In fact, a front page story on one newspaper today featured not a decapitated head or a bloody corpse lying on the pavement but a poll showing that 87% of Mexicans like being Mexican. Still, I think it might be time to have the president recede into the background and have someone at whom the crowd is less likely to chant arsehole to lead the ceremony.

After I finished typing this out and was waiting for the pictures to upload, I read the news that there were a few explosions during the Independence Day celebrations in Michoacan, a state not too far north from Mexico City, as the Governor began ringing the bell during the local Grito ceremony. The early reports say there are at least eight people were killed. Tonight as I was going through the metal detectors to get into the Zócalo I was going through in my mind what possible threats would exist other than random violence and the best I could come up with was that drug trafficking syndicates trying to destabilise the government by letting off bombs and Michoacan has been the scene of a lot of drug related violence since Calderón chose the state to began his military offensive against drug traffickers back in 2006. Mexico has become a fairly violent country in recent times, but this is a new one.

2008-09-14T20:50:00.000-07:00

'Twas the night before El Grito

Just a small post today as tomorrow is the big Mexican independence day fiesta and it seems that the night before is also a massive night here in the Centro Historico. I just posted the video above so you could see how crowded the Zocalo is at 10pm on a Sunday even though Tuesday is the public holiday not Monday.

Get your authentic Mexican moustaches... Diez pesos! Diez pesos!

2008-09-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

Back in Mexico... eventually

Back onto the school bus!

The last few days in Panama were fairly uneventful as all that they really involved were catching the old school bus down from Boquete to David and then the plane back to Panama City for one final night before flying back to Mexico City. I opted for a city hotel as there is almost nowhere to stay in Casco Viejo, but I must say that it was a lovely hotel and the nearby Peruvian restaurant was indeed very good! I did somehow manage to miss my flight, though.

View of Panama City from my hotel room in the lovely Torres de Alba

The TACA people print out the times for each leg of the trip on the itinerary and as I wasn't paying much attention and knew it was some time in the evening, I ended up glancing at the last departure time on the 6th to Mexico City and headed out trying to figure out how to kill the time until my 7pm flight. What I didn't realise was that I had a 7pm flight from San Salvador to Mexico City which required that I catch an earlier 5pm flight from Panama City to San Salvador. I did pick up this slight error on my part before catching the cab to the airport, but I figured I was all packed with nowhere to stay so I might as well head to the airport and see what could be done. Not much it turned out. When I arrived a little before 5pm, the TACA people had all packed up and headed home and the only airline with a flight to Mexico City for the evening was Copa which was already overbooked. Panama City international airport is not exactly a major hub so the only person I could talk to was the lady at the information desk, but she turned out to be very helpful anyway and ended up calling TACA so I rebooked for the following day with no hassles. Her husband was a taxi driver and they seemed to work in cahoots, so she called him and he took me to a decent hotel in the middle of nowhere for the night. Danilo the taxi driver was a very talkative man who spoke at length about the value of curiosity and spending your life learning new things. He seemed to take his job quite seriously and spent a lot of his time researching and brushing up on Panama's history so as to be prepared for all the the questions tourists might ask him. Danilo didn't know too much about Australia except for Steve Irwin, of course, but he was definitely a very friendly sort!

The following night I finally got back to a Mexico City in full Independence Day mode. The Independence Day celebrations take place on the 15th when the president emerges from the Palacio Nacional to re-enact Miguel Hidalgo ringing the church bell, which was moved and now hangs over the balcony of the palacio, and issuing his cry of independence which is known as "el grito". Then he offers a few "vivas" to various national heroes and other things such as democracy to which the crowd answers "Viva!" until he ends with a few rounds of "Viva Mexico!" Should be fun. Apparently this year his old nemesis Lopez Obrador has managed to get the Mexico City government to set up a separate stage for him in the Zocalo so he will deliver a message to the crowds just prior to the president's big moment which is more than a little unprecedented! On that front, perhaps predictably President Felipe Calderon has said he thinks John McCain would be a better president for Mexico's interests while Lopez Obrador has backed Obama.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of how Mexico City is gearing up for its great annual orgy of nationalism:

These stands selling all kinds of flags, sombreros, decorations, keychains, etc are on virtually every street corner

Why not also buy a cake featuring a dancing chile with a moustache wearing cowboy boots for your Mexican Independence Day party?

The Zocalo is all decked out with various patriotic decorations, including these giant light-up portraits of independence heroes Miguel Hidalgo and Jose Maria Morelos

I know I should, but I have no idea who this is

This is something a little new, but I thought I'd put up a video of the decorations to give a better sense of how they come together. I've put it up through Youtube so the quality isn't great but I think you'll get the idea!

2008-09-03T14:47:00.000-07:00

Sendero sin quetzales

Perfect Boquete weather

My time at the Hotel Marparaíso ended in fine form with a call at 3:40am informing that someone had come into the lobby asking for me. After a sleepy and confused response from me, the lady on the other end said a man had come in mentioning my name, had a brief conversation someone who was down there with her, came back to say ¨perdón¨ and hung up. The TV later turned itself on at 7am which wasn´t entirely surprising as the TV had a habit of turning itself on in the middle of the night and sometimes turning itself off when I was in the room but nowhere near the controller. Thankfully this time it turned on roughly when I had to get up anyway, so there was no scrambling around in the dark trying to find where I´d left the controller to turn it off. So, when in Panama City try the Marparaíso for an unforgettable time.

After a pleasant enough flight I made in up to David, Panama´s second-largest city with a population of around 160,000, and then to Boquete up in the mountains of Chiriquí province. It is a quiet little town with a healthy tourist population that has also apparently become one of the world´s top destinations for retirees from the US and Europe who want to stretch their savings a little further. Gated communities of large houses and golf courses thus dot the road into town and the real estate business generally seems to be booming. There is also a wide range of culinary options in town to cater to all of this, with the Europeans presumably contributing the German bakery and the Americans the Shalom Bagelry where a mighty fine sandwhich bagel and coffee will set you back only $2.90. Everything here is amazingly cheap, with a cup of coffee costing around 35-60 cents and a beer 70cents to $1. It does rain here almost constantly, though. Every morning there are a few hours of sunlight and then it pours.

Beginning of the Sendero de los Quetzales from Cerro Punta

The two things I was most interested in doing here were the Sendero de los Quetzales and Volcán Barú hikes. I decided to do the Quetzales walk first and then consider the fesibility of hiking up the volcano in the rain and darkness as you need to leave in the very early morning to get up there for sunrise before the clouds move in. The Quetzales trail runs for 9.6km between the town of Cerro Punta and Boquete, with Cerro Punta being the best place to start as it´s 1000m higher than Boquete and thus mostly downhill. It is a long journey over to Cerro Punta, though, as there is no direct road between the two towns so you have to take one of the old yellow US school buses they use here to David (about 1 hour) and then a minivan to Cerro Punta (close to 3 hours). Adding in waiting for the raid to clear in Cerro Punta and delays between buses, a 6:30am start meant that I didn´t begin walking until 12:30... when it promptly started pouring rain, of course.

Looking back down at Cerro Punta

The trail itself took about 3 1/2 hours and was quite a nice walk through cloud forest and tropical rain forest. It appears that no-one else figured a long walk in the rain was a recipe for a good time as I didn´t encounter anyone else along the trail. The rain wasn´t so bad once I got deeper into the forest as the canopy seemed to block the worst of it, though my new shoes were thoroughly tested as the track had for the most part turned into a long stream that emptied out periodically into small swamps and so my shoes were completely submerged in mud and water for a lot of the time. My dashing bright ¨pistachio¨ coloured rain jacked also worked well. The idea of the trail is that it is supposed to be the best place in the world to see the famous quetzal bird that gave its name to the aztec feathered serpent god Quetzalcóatl and the Guatemalan currency as they are apparently difficult if not impossible to keep in captivity. I didn´t see anything, but to be honest I wasn´t expecting that much would be venturing out in the rain. I could hear the howls of what I assume were monkeys off in the distance, though.

The trail continues...

According to the Lonely Planet it should have been another 8km from the end of the trail to Boquete, but it is apparently in reality about 12km. At any rate, I set off along the deserted road with my only company for the first few kms being a lone man carrying two very nasty looking machetes. The walk was again quite interesting as it wound up and through the mountains, passing through some small towns that were generally no more than 2 or 3 houses scattered around the road.

Walking through the clouds

At the top of one hill I came across a young boy of maybe 5 or 6 with a look of panic on his face turning and saying something to his mother, who was wearing the traditional colourful indigenous dress of the region and optomistically hanging out the washing during one of the few dry spells. She looked at me then looked down at him and said something with an annoyed look on her face to the child. Whatever it was, it didn´t seem to satisfy his doubts as he just stood their staring with a confused and slightly worried look on his face. I did wave and say ¨hola¨, but I may as well have been an elephant in a top hat and a monacle wandering past his home and offering a friendly greeting as he just stood there bewildered, slowly raising his arm and bending his fingers in a cautious little wave. As the road curved around the house and back down the hill I did turn back and he was still standing there staring with a look of concern and bewilderment on his face.

Wet and pistachio coloured

Thankfully it only rained intermittedly on the way back and it was an interesting look at the mountains of northern Panama, but it does get dark around 6pm here and a heavy fog was setting in so I wasn´t wild about the idea of wandering along a windy one-lane mountain road even though there wasn´t much traffic. The fog ceased to be an issue as the road moved further down the mountains, but it did beging to get quite dark considering the clouds were blocking the moonlight and there was pretty thick and tall jungle on either side. Suddenly I did see a little light flickering ahead of me which was quite confusing until it rounded the corner and slowly drifted past along the road. Almost immediately, little spots of light started appearing everywhere along the roadside and in the surrounding vegetation as all the other fireflies began to wake up. What was amazing to see was how bright they were as you could see flashes of light quite clearly in the forests on the surrounding mountains from a very long distance.

Icy, icy cold stream running over the track

Accompanied by the fireflies, I did eventually reach the edge of town where the street lights took over. I eventually made it back to my hotel almost exactly 7 1/2 hours after setting off from Cerro Punta without taking a break or sitting down at all in that time so my feet were a little sore! My hotel in Boquete is a lot nicer than the Marparaíso thankfully and, wonder of wonders, there is an excellent Peruvian restaurant just a few metres away. So, after a shower and changing into dry clothes, I hobbled over for some Pisco sours which did indeed hit the spot.

Lonely road back to Boquete

After all of this, I have decided that scrambling up a volcano in the dark and rain is probably not the wisest thing I could do nor the most enjoyable way to spend my time. Considering that I imagine doing the Sendero de los Quetzales uphill from Boquete in the rain would have been a waking nightmare, I can only imagine what the track up the volcano would be like in the dark.

Ave Maria... the lights of Boquete finally appear in the distance

Boquete is Panama´s top coffee producing region despite the fact that many people are getting out of the business as it has become so lucritive to sell their land to comparatively wealthy western retirees. Still, I did take quite an interesting tour of a coffee plantation this morning so I guess I should include a few pictures and try to limit the amount of words I add to this entry!

Coffee tree

The coffee circle of life from fruit to seed to shoot

Drying the coffee beans which obviously takes quite some time in Boquete

Sorting the coffee beans... and I think I´ll leave the coffee tour at that!

View over Boquete:

2008-08-31T20:54:00.000-07:00

Panamania08 Continues

Yesterday I did make it to the Panama canal which is, of course, the country´s main claim to fame and perhaps the only reason it is not still part of Colombia. I booked a partial transit through a travel agency here which involved taking a bus town to the small port of Gamboa and sailing back up and out through the mouth of the canal. It was a little pricey but probably a nicer way of seeing the canal than the usual day trip to the Miraflores locks to the visitors centre and lookout. The trip was fairly straight forward and the locks that raise the ships up and down along the route worked on the almost disappointingly simple process of just opening the valves on one end of the sealed lock to either let water in to raise the ship up or let it out (as was the case for us) to lower it down. They were also busy at work widening it and building new locks for the much talked about (on that boat trip anyway) post-Panamax ships which basically means those that can´t currently fit through the canal. As you can tell, I learnt many fascinating things and it was worthwhile!

Ship coming out of the San Pedro locks

The other people who had booked through the same agency turned out to be two Spanish guys and two American couples that both involved lawyers. It became quite obvious that the Americans were doing Panama a lot better than I am when the conversation turned to places to shop and fine dinning around their hotels which turned out to be the Marriot and Hotel Panama, the latter apparently so nice they have a man with a machine gun stationed at the entrance to keep the rabble from rushing in. As I was picked up and dropped off last, it did sink in when we got back to my hotel that the area I´m in looks like a bit of a seedy slum compared to the far nicer Panama City the Americans are enjoying. God only knows what they thought when they ended up outside the stately Marparaíso Hotel to pick me up!

Puente de las Americas at the entrance to the canal

In all honesty, the area isn´t that bad, though there is absolutely nothing nearby and it feels a little too dicey to wander too far at night. There is a Turkish American guy staying here who keeps going on to me about how ¨shit¨ the hotel is but, apart from the fact everything is damp, it isn´t too terrible and it is only $28 a night. What I don´t understand is that he apparently was looking at staying at the Marriot but thought $290 a night was a bit much and so went for a $28 a night hotel as his second choice. Surely there are plenty of options in between.

Panama City is an incredibly multicultural city and now I can say that I have seen a mosque in two Latin American cities! Not quite as big as the one in Foz de Iguazu, Brazil, though, so the Muslim Panameños have some catching up to do.

The hotel does have satellite TV which I have been considering getting for the apartment as it is only about $10 a month in Mexico and Mexican TV is generally pretty bad unless you´re into cheesy soap operas. After staying awake hours longer than I wanted to in order to watch Barack Obama´s speech at the Democratic convention the other night and then hanging around half the following morning waiting for John McCain´s vice presidential nominee to emerge I am rethinking the wisdom of satellite TV, however. I´ve so far wasted far too much mental energy thinking about Sarah Palin than any individual should (and obviously more than John McCain did) and I´m thinking going cold turkey with the election coverage may be best.

View from old church tower of Panama Viejo ruins

I will confess that I did head off in the afternoon to do some shopping as I needed new hiking shoes and outdoor shops do not seem to exist in Mexico. Everything is actually remarkably cheap here and the shoes did end up being less than half of what they were charging in Melbourne which, now that I think about it, more than covers the cost of my damp hotel room all by itself! A very nice young guy called Ramiro also struck up a conversation in the mall as I guess he wanted to practice his English and apparently doesn´t get much of a chance to do that in Panama. As generally happens, it quickly turned into a bilingual conversation that slips between English and Spanish to the point where it gets difficult to remember what language you´re speaking in or listening to, but it was nice and probably the longest English language conversation I´ve had in months!

Panama Viejo

Today I spent a lot of the morning organising a plane ticket up north to David and accommodation in Boquete where I will hopefully be spending the next 4 nights. After that I headed off to the original site of Panama City, known as Panama Viejo. The city ended up being moved to what is now the Casco Viejo after Captain Henry Morgan and his band of pirates sacked and burned the city to the ground in 1671. The ruins haven´t been well cared for over the years and are scattered among soccer fields, roads and housing, but it does look as though they have been trying to rectify that in recent years and serious restoration work has begun including stairs and platforms up through the old church bell tower. Overall not a bad way to spend a few hours.

Sunset from Casco viejo

The heat did eventually get to me, though, so I decided to take a cab over to the Casco Viejo to sip mojitos in the shade for the rest of the afternoon. It was a good choice and I think I´ll try to stay in that part of town for my last night in Panama. I wouldn´t mind a taste of the good life, though, and there is a Peruvian restaurant in the nicer part of town that I really would like to try...

2008-08-29T20:09:00.000-07:00

O Panama

I don´t believe it!

Perhaps out of nostalgia for my last trip through Latin America, I managed to lose my KeyCard just as I was preparing to head off to Panama in yet another incident connected to paying the rent for my cursed apartment. They weren´t willing to try the international money transfer again even though the problem is all figured out and now have me withdrawing obsene amounts of cash to deposit in their account. I managed to leave the card in an ATM machine after withdrawing another $800 wad of cash and someone wandered off with it to try their luck, so I´m sure they´ll be understanding!

The buses of Panama City.

Having to be at the airport at 4:30am is never good and I didn´t get much sleep, but the flight on TACA wasn´t too bad and I did get to Panama in one piece. There was a brief stop in San Salvador, El Salvador´s capital, and from the plane the country looked quite incredible. There were lush green fields and jungles stretching off to huge volcanos towering off in the distance and if they weren´t so keen on shooting people I´m sure it would be an amazing place to visit. One thing that did strike me as odd was that flying in and out I saw nothing that even remotely resembled a city. Just fields, jungles and the odd road stretching through it all witha few houses scattered around it here and there. Perhaps San Salvador is a mythic city like Atlantis only with an international airport, but one day I´ll have to make it there to investigate. Due to the early start I didn´t get much done in Panama City once I arrived but the overall impression it gives is that of quite a booming city of towering skyscrapers and billboards for the latest luxury Donald Trump resort complex, for example. I did get to a good Colombian restaurant for dinner which was a nice way to pay tribute to the late El Dorado Colombian restaurant on Flinders St. Why that ever closed I´ll never know!

Casco Viejo

Today was more active, and I spent the morning exploring the old town of Panama known as Casco Viejo. It provided a welcome contrast to the concrete towers that mark the rest of the city and reminded me of a more run-down version of Havana Vieja and Trinidad in Cuba that is still very much in a work-in-progress phase of the restoration process. The Panameño president has his residence here in the Casa de las Garzas (House of the Herons) and there was also quite an interesting museum about the canal. Everything always comes back to the canal.

Casco Viejo

In the afternoon I headed over to the Parque Nacional Metropolitano which is a large patch of tropical jungle on the edge of Panama City with a few walking trails. It is apparently full of all kinds of wild animals, though I didn´t see anything more exciting than a woodpecker. As I got there fairly late in the afternoon the park ranger advised me it was too late to do the 4 linking trails that I had planned to do as it would take me about 3 hours. This pretty much lined up with the times given on the park information signs, but in general those signs ended up making those at Wilson´s Prom seem overly optomistic as to the fitness of the average bushwalker. The first ¨1 hour¨ walk ended up taking only 15 minutes and I did manage to get all of them done in about an hour. The point, I guess, was to make it up to a look-out with views over the city which was indeed impressive, though the scenery generally was quite nice and it didn´t rain despite seeming to continually threaten to do so which was nice.

View north (I think!) from the lookout at the Parque Nacional Metropolitano. I suspect this photo didn´t come out, but this computer is so crappy I can´t really tell.

After leaving the trail I ended up chatting to a very friendly park ranger who seemed to have a good job in that it could be done lying in a hammock in the shade. He was very talkative and was talking about all the monkeys that are usually around but that I missed despite even making the effort to walk a trail called the tití monkey trail. As I hear a certain cousin is a big fan of political talk on this blog, I would be remiss not to mention that he did talk quite a bit about the rising costs of food in Panama, the current government and the US invasion to oust General Noriega back in 1989. He had a fairly positive opinion of the US invadors who apparently took great care to treat the general population quite well and even brought cart loads of cheap food to make sure there were no food shortages. There is also a presidential primary coming up for a party that is even called the PRD, so look for a special entry on that soon!

As people are beginning to have preminitions of me being stabbed and I guess no-one who knows me has seen even an image of me in months, I did try my hand at the always-good self photo while I was in the national park and I was sure no-one else could see!

Being in Panama has meant getting used to a distinctly different type of Spanish after a few months in Mexico. For one thing, the word güero doesn´t exist here and so I get called caballero (sir) which is nice. I did also get called papá by one guy today which seems to be a common way people refer to each other. What makes things difficult, though, is that panameños share a fairly common trait of Caribbean Spanish that I remember from Cuba and also hear from the Dominicans on the Miami-based daytime chat show ¿Quién tiene la razón? (Who is right?) that I sometimes catch on Mexican TV when I sleep in and which features Miami´s melting-pot of Spanish-speaking people. The most distinctive thing about Caribbean Spanish is that people only partially pronounce their words and generally omit certain letters (particularly S) completely. I suppose it is hot and who can be bothered, but for me it is quite challenging making sense of what often seems like small fragments of words all strung together.

Tomorrow I have a ¨partial transit¨ of the canal to look forward to. Unfortunately the full transit wasn´t running while I was hear, but I´m sure after a few hours I´ll have a good idea of what a canal looks like.

Panama City from Casco Viejo

2008-08-23T18:46:00.000-07:00

Adios Colin, la ballena jorobada

The Centro Histórico was a bit crazy today because of a skating extravaganza being held in the Zócalo.

As always, I figure I should write something so you don’t all think I’ve been kidnapped. Also as always, not too much has been going on lately. The apartment payment saga continues as the Mexican bank returned the money (minus the conversion fee of about $20, of course) when I paid for it to be traced without giving any explanation. I emailed and then rang the lady at the building administration who knew the reason and was going to email me with all the details I asked for and explaining the bank’s problem with the transfer. Of course she hasn’t sent the email yet, but it can wait until I get back from Panama for all I care. During the week I also saw the film Wanted which I thought was quite terrible.

They've been putting the decorations up all week for Mexico's Independence Day celebrations on September 15th.

The only other little development was that I’ve been happily snapping away digital photos of old magazine articles for weeks now at the National Library as part of the research for my thesis as was suggested by my supervisor. It has worked quite well as they don’t allow photocopying or scanning and it acts as a bit of a safeguard against running out of time as it means I at least have copies of the articles even if I don’t get to them all while I’m here. I did wonder why no-one else was doing this, though, and on Thursday I found out as the man behind the desk came over to ask if I had the appropriate permission to take photos. Of course I had no such thing, which meant going and speaking to someone downstairs who informed me that I would have to write a letter to the library’s director who would then approve my request without any real problem then come back down to him to fill out a form and then receive the permission slip. Unfortunately there was also a fee. Turns out that you have to do this and pay the equivalent of over $10 to take photos for each volume you intend to use. In the case of a weekly magazine, for example, a volume tends to be about 3 months worth of issues whereas for a newspaper it may be a month or two. Unfortunately my cunning plan has thus been thwarted as all of this would end up costing me hundreds of dollars for the period 1982-2008. I guess it’s now back to carrying the laptop out to the library and spending hours taking notes.

Demand Security!

In terms of what’s going on generally in Mexico, the big issue at the moment is once again the ever-growing problem of crime. What has detonated the recent wave of public outrage was the kidnapping of prominent businessman Alejandro Martí's 14 year-old son whose body turned up once the ransom had been paid. The response on the part of the Calderón government and the PRI has been to propose legislation that increases the penalty for kidnapping, with some even suggesting the death penalty. López Obrador, on the other hand, has used the situation to highlight Mexico’s endemic poverty as the cause of its crime problems. While I think López Obrador has a decent general point, the problem of kidnapping seems more one of a dysfunctional justice system than poverty. Considering that policemen or ex-policemen are involved in a lot of these kidnappings and that in a more general sense 98% of crimes go unpunished in Mexico, it appears that simply increasing the penalties won’t serve any purpose as they can’t even enforce those that are currently on the books. At any rate, on the 30th of August there will be a march against crime through Mexico City while I am in Panama but which will no doubt be quite massive.

“Now I come not to kill myself for you, but to judge the living and the dead!” Part of a student art exhibition in the Centro Medico Metro station showing Jesus coming back to judge corrupt clergymen.

The only other issue that comes to mind is the Catholic Church’s response to recent concern surrounding sexual assaults, particularly on public transport. The Mexico City government has made cracking down on this problem a priority and the Metro is thus filled with announcements directed at women informing them of their rights and giving them numbers to call. In some stations special offices have been set up to attend to complaints. Last week the Archdiocese of Mexico City caused a bit of a storm when it published an article by a priest in its weekly newsletter dealing with the issue that advised women to avoid wearing clothes that provoke sexual assaults, singling out the dreaded mini-skirt (yes, for some mini-skirts are still controversial it appears), and suggesting, well, no, saying that women are prostituting themselves by wearing such clothing. The response was a mini- protest during mass last Sunday in which a group of women’s rights activists, dressed in mini-skirts of course, stood up and chanted slogans about a woman’s right to dress however she pleases and expressing outrage over what appears to be a position that gives an alibi to those who are “provoked” into sexually assaulting a woman. Mexico generally is an interesting mix of ultra-conservatism and social progressiveness, but this is particularly true of Mexico City as probably comes across in a few of the recent entries on here!

The only Australian news I’ve seen on TV and in the papers over here since I arrived has been about the tragic plight of the now-deceased Colin the whale. I have been following with interest Brendan Nelson’s plight and the endless speculation about what Peter Costello was going to do. Don’t know why, but I found this cartoon from The Age about the Costello's continuing indecisiveness quite amusing:

2008-08-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

Todo arreglado

View from the Universidad Metro just outsite the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

Today has not been very productive in terms of study, but I did decide that I should make an effort to organise a few things that have been hanging over my head for a while so it was fairly productive in that sense. As well as trying to sort out a whole lot of the usual formalities with uni, I ventured out to the TACA office on the Paseo de la Reforma to change my flight to Managua, Nicaragua which was schedualed for the 20th of this month. The idea of going to Nicaragua was slowly beginning to loose its appeal as I was having trouble figuring out what exactly there was that I wanted to do there so I figured a short trip to Guatemala would both satisfy the US visa waver requirements that I leave North America within 90 days and give me something more interesting to see. At the last minute I decided against changing the ticket to Flores, Guatemala because it was actually one of their more expensive fares by a wide margin and instead went with Panama from the 28th until the 5th of September. I hear there is a canal there and presumably other things, so it should give me enough to do to fill in a week.

The rehabilitation works for the Centro Historico are now continuing on to the east side of the Zocalo

Not too much else has been happening. There was a little bit of excitement Friday as I realised I had lost my passport, most likely at the National Library the day before where foreigners are supposed to present a passport for identification. After a few calls back and forth it turned out that someone had very kindly found it and handed it in to Rodrigo at the front desk who recognised me and put it aside.

You can never have too many Mexican flags

The international transfer still hadn’t made it through to the apartment people as of this morning and my old pal Laura the estate agent came around and was friendly as always. She seemed a lot less panicked about it than the other Laura from the building’s administration and more or less just said it’ll probably arrive in the next few days and if not we’ll do a trace on the money. One thing I don’t understand is why I have to keep sending them a copy of the receipt. Today was about the fifth time I’ve had to send them a copy. After skipping the last fiesta for Hector’s 30th I felt a little bad for skipping another party they very kindly invited me to this past Friday. The trek out to the edge of town to pick up the passport ended up meaning I didn’t get back to the apartment until about 7:30pm and it was a costume party with the theme “pornographic Olympics” which I wasn’t too sure quite how to approach. For all I know, they just told me that was the theme so I’d dress up in some bizarre porn/sporting outfit and set out through the suburbs of Mexico City only to arrive and find everyone else dressed completely normally. At any rate, another apology email will have to be sent out I guess!

Calle Moneda beyond the rehabilitation works and what I think is a statue of Saint Jude

On Saturday I did visit the interactive economic museum MIDE which I wasn’t wildly enamoured with, but the end section “how is Mexico doing?” section was interesting as it compared various countries and how they fared on different indexes of economic and social wellbeing such as GDP per person, life expectance, literacy and education. Australia ended up having the highest Personal Development Index of all the countries displayed, though the representation of an how an average Australian family eats during a week would leave you wondering just how that could be. Another thing I learnt about our fair country during the visit is that Australia is the fourth largest international market for Mexican beer.

Australian diet according to the MIDE: Lots of red meat, soft drink, fish fingers, McDonalds and cigarettes.

Mexican diet: Gallons of Coke, lots of fruit and vegetables and very little meat it seems.

Cuban diet: A little fruit and vegetables, some beer, a tiny amount of meat and bread.

Sunday I headed over to the Bosque de Chapultepec which is apparently the largest urban park in all of Latin America which makes sense as it is quite huge. The name Chapultepec is an Aztec word meaning something along the lines of “grasshopper hill” and back in their heyday it was connected to Tenochtitlán by a long causeway, with the poet emperor Nezahualcóyotl building his palace that became a royal retreat for the Aztec emperors. This was eventually demolished by the Spaniards to build the Chapultepec castle which following Mexico’s independence became a military academy. It was also home to the Emperor Maximilian of Hapsburg who was installed by the French and their local conservative allies (those conservatives are always up to no good!) to rule Mexico for a brief period in the 1860s along his wife Carlotta. He was eventually defeated by the liberal armies and executed by firing squad and she went quite mad. It is most famous in Mexican history, though, for being the site where young Mexican army cadets dubbled the Niños Heroes (child heroes) fought to the death against the advance of the American invasion, with the final soldier left standing wrapping himself in the Mexican flag and plunging to his death rather than surrender to the pinche gringos. Those Americans also always seem to be up to no good!

Monumento a los Niños Heroes with the Castillo de Chapultepec in the background

I’ve already visited the national history museum that’s now housed in the Castillo de Chapultepec as well as the massive National Anthropology museum, but there are loads of trails and little monuments scattered around the place which made for a pleasant Sunday afternoon. The park is absolutely packed with people on a Sunday, though, so the main trail through the park is crowded both by people and vendors yelling out whatever they’re selling. One thing I did see was a little duck paddling around in one of the lakes until these little kids started yelling out “pato!” (duck in Spanish in case you couldn’t guess) quite excitedly at which point it literally bolted out of the water up the bank and towards the kids.

After wandering around for a bit and looking at all the panda plush toys for sale I decided to see check out the zoo. It turned out to be free which was a big deciding factor, but I did find it a little depressing. Most of the enclosures were fine (although there were no animals to be seen), but the first one I came across was a poor spectacled bear in a tiny concrete room with grass and a few bare branches to climb on which was a little depressing. Around the corner were the pandas which are the main attraction and that was not much better. They had quite a lot of room, but really just a large patch of grass which some playground equipment and not much in the way of shelter. While I’m sure they are well cared for, they also looked a little agitated and just paced back and forth around the gate at the back of the enclosure for the entire time I was there. The zoo was also packed and, though the closing time is supposed to be 5, they really start closing it off at 4:30 and make everyone trudge to the exit at the opposite end of the zoo from the entrance. So it was a loooong walk through the museum in which every was packed in tight and shuffling along, with those who had left things in the lockers out the front then having to walk around the perimeter of the zoo back to the entrance to collect them.

Anyway, I’ll leave it at that. Now I must figure out what there is to do in Panama!

Everyone heading home from the Bosque de Chapultepec

2008-08-04T23:08:00.000-07:00

A Quick Recap

Celebration of the founding of Tenochtitlan-Mexico City

As I can't really be bothered writing long discriptions of everything that's been going on over the past few weeks and I'm sure you can't be bothered reading them, I figured I'd just put up a few images with a couple of descriptions, including a few of the inside of the new apartment.

2008 is not just the 40th anniversary of the Mexico City Olympic games, but also of brutal government repression of student protesters in the months and weeks leading up to the games, culminating in the Tlatelolco massacre. Thus there are a lot of radical political events going on around Mexico City these days.

The word "pueblo" in Spanish has two possible translations: town and people. Unfortunately whoever created this sign came out on the wrong side of the 50/50 possibility of choosing the right one. Still, a nice message!
Unfortunately the blog cuts off the sides of the images, so if you want to know what the American town is supposed to do with the Cuban town you may have to click on it.

The Mexico City Government finally held its referendum on planned privatising reforms to the state-owned oil company Pemex. Not surprisingly, people voted overwhelmingly against the reforms.

This replica of the Angel of Independence was on show in the Zocalo before being shipped off to Beijing to promote tourism to Mexico City during the Olympics.

Quite a nice find while wandering through the streets of Mexico City: a monument to the Triple Alliance between the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan (Tacuba) from 1427 onwards. Each bronze relief represents the ruler of one of those cities at the time the alliance was formed. Again, poor old Totoquihuatzin of Tlacopan is cut off by blogspot!

This past Saturday, like every other Saturday it seems, included a march against homophobia and discrimination. Here is a particularly Mexican drag act.

The next day while I was buying some DVDs I happened to catch this march for affordable AIDS medications going past. The reason for all of this is that the World AIDS Conference is currently taking place in Mexico City. People were handing out rolls and rolls of condoms to people on the street, and it was an unusual sight to see mums and dads standing with their kids wandering around Mexico City on a Sunday afternoon each holding long rolls of condoms.

I took this because I thought the Quetzocoatl (Aztec plumed serpant) AIDS ribbon logo for the conference looked quite cool, but unfortunately the guy's t-shirt just above the logo translates to "everybody has..." If you haven't seen Team America that may mean nothing to you, though, and this can remain a small gesture of solidarity with those fighting against discrimination and for affordable antiretrovirals rather than a cheap little joke!

Here's the main living area of the apartment with Elaine Benice on the TV.

Little kitchen area.

The Bedroom.

The view from my little balcony of Calle Bolivar at 11:30 on a Monday night.

2008-08-02T22:14:00.000-07:00

Purgatory

The apartment building, Bolivar 23

This blog has gone without update for quite some time as the process of moving into the new apartment has taken up most of my time and sapped most of my emotional strength over the past week or so. The whole process has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. After the initial two weeks or so of incorrect email addresses, people on holiday and long gaps in communication, all seemed to come together when I confirmed I would rent the apartment after making a visit with the estate agent Laura, finding out the rates and filling in the first forms. There did seem an odd silence in response to any mention I made of it being ready by the first of August in subsequent emails, however. I had managed to get over all the requirements generally required to rent an apartment in Mexico by offering to pay up front, but once again that was just agreed to by the estate agent and it was never really made clear how this was supposed to happen as I don’t think the people I was talking to knew what the building’s administrator’s were able to accept.

On my final visit to the apartment the day before I was due to move in I was asked by the lovely Laura on what date I wanted to move in. I was kind of taken aback by this and again mentioned that I needed it the next day to which she said it would be physically ready and the building’s owner was happy for me to move in, but the fact the building’s owner had been on holidays and initially gave me the wrong contact email address for her had caused delays and thus the building’s administration didn’t want me to move in until the fourth. She then made a call and arranged a meeting for the next morning, the day my contract for an apartment ran out in Coyoacán leaving me without anywhere to stay I may add, at the administration’s office to plead my case. She gave me about a 30% chance of being able to move in.

I finally arrived at the office building the next morning only to find that I had to call the office in which I was having the meeting through the intercom to get into the building. The problem was that I wasn’t told which office to buzz up to and none were obviously estate agents. I ended up getting the administration to let me in and then wandered around for a while trying to find which floor I was supposed to be on by asking around. The phrase “fucking idiots” was gently bouncing around in my head by this stage after having spent the past day mightily annoyed and somewhat anxious about what I was going to do. The idea of transporting my piles of books, general household items and other luggage from Coyoacán to some hotel and then across to the apartment a few days later did not appeal. I would also have to find a hotel first. The estate agents Laura and another guy called Hector who I hadn’t met before were there and they were quite pleasant to chat with, even inviting me to Hector’s thirtieth today which I’m afraid I didn’t get to. It turned out the woman I had to negotiate with from the building’s administration was a little mad but seemed quite cool (or muy buena onda in Mexican speak). She decided to accept my three months of rent in cash and, once I emailed a receipt for the international money transfer (which easily could have been done days or weeks earlier), confirm that she had received it and ring through to the building so I could finally move in. So, problem solved.

I return to Coyoacán, sort all the issues out with the Commonwealth Bank over the phone and email her the receipt within the hour. There is no response. An hour goes by and still nothing, so I email again and ring the office. No response. A few more hours go by of unanswered phone calls and it appears as soon as we left her office she took my money and hopped on the first flight to Switzerland to start a new life. Or it is possible that all those bottles of whisky, rum and tequila she was pulling out from under her desk for one her assistants to put in her car weren’t really for a sixtieth birthday party she was going to as she claimed but rather her Friday afternoon ritual of drinking until she passed out. It got to 4:30pm and I decided just to head to the building and see what they say. I was let in and shown to the apartment, but the person there didn’t seem to know exactly what was going on and had just been told I was going to arrive that afternoon and so let me in and gave me the keys. The apartment itself seemed semi-ready and apparently I should have been given a card to let me in the front door of the building that they were quite surprised I didn’t have. The people on duty were very friendly and helpful but generally seemed a bit unsure of what was going on. For example, they had no idea whether the building had wireless Internet so just advised me just to see if it did on my laptop and when it didn’t they went off and came back with a cable that connects into a socket behind the TV but doesn’t extend very far away, meaning that I have to sit virtually up against the television to receive the Internet. While there are a few lamps in the apartment, none of the lights on the roof had been installed yet. The TV also wasn’t hooked up (which they took care of) and, as I found out when I decided to have a shower this morning, there was no hot water.

Overall, I don’t think I’m actually supposed to be in here yet as that call was obviously never made and the apartment was never fully readied. Either way, by Monday when they figure all of this out back at the office everything should have sorted itself out. The whole day was spent running around so I didn’t get to eat anything after having some yoghurt for breakfast at about 7:30am until around 10pm by which point all the restaurants around here had stopped serving food so I had to buy some pasta at a convenience store to cook up. So a very tiring day indeed! On the bright side, it has also probably greatly improved my negotiating skills in Spanish. Fucking idiots, though.

The apartment is lovely, though, and completely cricket free. I am still going through bouts of annoyance, but every time I step out the front door into the middle of Mexico City I’m reminded again of why I persisted with this one rather than taking any of the offers from more helpful landlords. As I don’t appear to have cable tv (who knows if I’m supposed to or not), I splashed out and bought a DVD player for about $40 this evening so now I have to start buying DVDs I guess. So far all I’ve collected is temporada 1 of the British The Office and Ratatouille. The tissues I bought yesterday happened to come in a Ratatouille box and the subliminal marketing worked surprisingly well as looking at that box every time I come into the apartment and the little Ratatouille logos and fleur de lis on the tissues themselves got me thinking about how much I enjoyed that film to the point that I decided that I must see it again! Today generally was taken up with buying things for the apartment which was a little hard as there appear to be no supermarkets in this part of town. I did find a mini-supermarket that sold things like detergent and more interesting food, but the painting on the wall featuring López Obrador holding a pitchfork with “666” tattooed on his head has made me question whether I should keep going there! I was going to go to Hector’s party at 3pm, but by that time I was still running around trying to find shops beyond 7-11s and similar small convenience stories to buy basic things. The only person I’ve chatted to (briefly) in the building so far works in the Mexican Congress so I’ll have to get him to give me all the dirt at some point.

Anyway, I’ll get some pictures of the interior of the apartment when they finally illuminate the place and put some of the other pictures up of the past week or so in the next couple of days. Still quite tired!

2008-07-22T20:48:00.000-07:00

¡Éste es el pueblo de López Obrador! ¿Cuál es el tuyo, espurio Calderón?

Another little church in Coyoacán

I happened to stop to listen to a guy giving (quite a good) speech on behalf of the anti-oil privatisation crowd in the Zócalo the other day and the spontaneous chants of this entry’s title (“These are the people of López Obrador! Who are yours, illegitimate Calderón?” hmm, these things just don’t translate well) have been stuck in my head ever since. It does give me a good rhythm for marching through the streets of Mexico City, though its hypnotic qualities make me think I scoffed a little too soon at the epithet used by some that takes López Obrador’s nickname of “El Peje” to characterise his followers as “Pejezombies”.

Obregón monument

Not too much to report really. Last week I wandered down to the Monument to Álvaro Obregón as I discovered that he was assassinated eighty years ago at that very spot and figured they’d have some kind of commemoration. Sure enough, the local government did have a ceremony with a police band, representatives of Obregón’s family, the head of the local government and an historian from the National Institute for Historical Studies of the Mexican Revolutions (or the INEHRM as the kids call it). It was all quite nice and in the middle of the annual San Ángel Flower Show which made for a very pretty commemoration!

Corner store, Coyoacán

The search for an apartment continues. So far it has been a little frustrating and at times weird. One of the stranger responses I’ve received from my enquiries was from some Americans offering an apartment that was supposedly fairly central and near the Monument to the Revolution and walking distance to various other sights of Mexico City. The email response I received gave a very long spiel about how the couple had to move back to Texas and were sorry to leave the apartment, but that it was in a nice part of Prague and the rent would be 9,800 Czech Koruny which does seem quite reasonable. Not sure quite how to explain the slight geographical confusion there, but whatever the case I think these Czech Texans might go into the CrAzY Paco basket of people not to wire any money to or meet in a secluded location.

Monumento a la Revolución

I did visit a decent place yesterday off the main Reforma avenue also near the Monument to the Revolution. Yesterday was a beautiful summer’s day in Mexico City and wandering around that area made realise again that wherever I end up I don’t want it to be another quiet suburb like Coyoacán. While Coyoacán is quite nice, I have discovered through extensive travelling that I am very much a city person and after a while a quiet suburb like this, however nice the architecture is and however many squirrels it has, gets a little boring.

It has been a long and frustrating task to try and get onto the people who rent apartments in the building I’ve had my eye on in the Centro Historico as the owner is out of town and managed to give me the incorrect contact details for the person who is currently in charge. Thankfully this has finally been sorted out after about a week, so tomorrow I get the tour which should be interesting. What concerns me somewhat about this is that no-one has responded to my repeated questions about what the rent will be! I may well end up getting there, finding the rent is astronomical and have to go through the rest of the visit in H.E. Pennypacker fashion pretending that I’m interested in renting the apartment while I build my railroad through Mexico. Still, will be nice to finally have that sorted. It will also be nice to eventually live in a place that doesn't have a kitchen full of crickets. How they keep getting in I don't know, but they're noisy little buggers and by now I've given up trying to get rid of them as they just keep coming back so I go to sleep to the sound of crickets chirping every night!

In the background, the yellow El Cabillito statue sits rusting away along the Paseo de la Reforma. It was installed after the statue of Carlos IV of Spain was finally moved to a more secluded location in 1979 after centuries of controversy as many patriotic Mexicans found it distasteful to have a statue of a Spanish king so prominently displayed. It has long been one of Mexico City's most recognisable landmarks but no-one seems to be able to find the money for maintenance unfortunately. In front is a monument called the Puerta 1808 installed early this year to commemorate the centenary of an early (unsuccessful) conspiracy in Mexico City against the Spanish crown. This time they wisely went with a colour that won't show the rust.

I’ve been planning to head down to Oaxaca for the Guelaguetza festival this weekend, but all the apartment business has me thinking I should sort that out before heading off for a weekend away. Hotels have also been very slow to get back me, mainly because most seem to be full and thus they don’t really care whether I get annoyed with their slackness. I really must go down to the Telcel office and set up a Mexican mobile phone account so I’m not so reliant on email!

Keeping the peace in Mexico City.

2008-07-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

Anahuacalli

Anahuacalli

On Sunday I decided to stroll down to Anahuacalli, a fortress-like building designed by Diego Rivera to house his collection of pre-Hispanic art that incorporates indigenous design elements and is built out of volcanic rock. As often happens, Diego died before the building was completed so never actually got to see it or use the studio space.

According to the Lonely Planet, the museum is only 3.5 km south of Coyoacán and it was a nice day so I figured I’d walk down rather than catching the Metro and light rail. I’m not entirely sure that was something I was supposed to do as a lot of the walk was along deserted footpaths next to the busy Avenida División del Norte through what looked like a bit of a barren urban wasteland, but nothing happened I guess!

They make you take a tour through the place and as there was half an hour to go until the next tour I was directed over to a piano recital that was going on in a side building. It was quite nice and Señor Cuauhtémoc Trejo Ortiz was indeed quite a talented man, but one thing I did find odd was that as this was held in a gallery space the ritual wandering into the wings and then wandering back out to acknowledge the sustained applause was impossible. Instead, he would stand up at the end of a piece and acknowledge the applause of the crowd, wander over to the stairs going down to the lower level of the gallery where he’d stand for a few seconds in full view of everyone, then wander back again into the centre of the room to take another bow. It seemed just a little unnecessary.

Inside the museum is an eclectic but impressive collection of pre-Hispanic artefacts of all shapes and sizes along with a few plans for Rivera murals. In reality it’s the design of the building that is the most impressive aspect of the whole experience and the reason why you’d go there I guess. The lower levels are particularly interesting, featuring onyx windows and triangular doorways typical of Mayan architecture from the Yucatan peninsula. There’s also a nice terrace on the roof which affords views of the vast urban sprawl of Mexico City. Despite the fact it is in the middle of nowhere, the museum was definitely worth a visit.

I decided to take the light rail-Metro approach to get back to Coyoacán which worked quite well. Though, once again, I was left sitting on an absolutely deserted light rail station in the middle of a busy freeway waiting for the light rail to arrive. The rest of the very pleasant Sunday afternoon was spent drinking coffee and reading all about the fascinating world of the FARC of Colombia in the always interesting Letras Libres magazine. There was an interview with Melbournian Peter Singer in last month's interesting issue of Letras Libre on the rights of animals (which provoked several hours of commitment to vegetarianism on my part. This interview did actually prompt quite an angry letter from a reader this month who does not like Mr Singer one bit for his views on abortion and euthanasia and did not think he should be given a forum.

In terms of the apartment issue, I did get a response from one guy who is offering apartments a little further out in Copilco near the university. Unfortunately Paco of Copilco comes across as quite crazy in his email, typing most of his words all in capitals with some in lower-case for no explicable reason, adding smiley faces around his name and attaching photos not of the apartment but of the UNAM university and a few random Metro station logos to the email. I don’t think I will take up that offer.

Wherever I am, it would be nice to have television once again. I spend most of my days reading so that doesn't really work as a relaxing activity in the evenings unfortunately. Thankfully I've been able to download The Daily Show and Colbert Report as well as watching repeats of 30 Rock and other classics from the ipod collection, but I can't even watch the evening news at the moment which is kind of frustrating.

2008-07-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

Busco departamento amueblado

Mayan art deco in Centro Historico

Once again, Mexico City wasn’t quite the city of gun fights and craziness that people might imagine this week so I guess I’ll put up a couple of photos from around the place along with a few random thoughts mainly to amuse myself yet again!

Model of Mexico City before 1521 in the Zócalo Metro station

Mexico City, 1821

Mexico City, 1900

It does look like I’ll have to find a new apartment at the end of the month as this one is being turned into an office apparently. I guess I’ll look around this area as it’s muy tranquilo and well connected to transport, but to be honest I would love to be somewhere a little more action-packed… in a good way.

The anti-oil privatisation crew had thus guy out in the Zócalo this week singing traditional Mexican songs to an appreciative crowd. “Yo”, by the way, means “I” in Spanish, as in “I decide”… as in they will hold a referendum on the oil privatisation in Mexico City.

Wandering around the Centro Historico today I did find some apartments in what would be pretty much the ultimate location for my fantasies of morning strolls through the Zócalo, coffee in hand, greeting the organ grinders with a friendly buenos días as I head off to the Metro station past the odd lone mariachi heading home after a long night of serenading the drunken crowds in the nearby Plaza Garabaldi. It will likely end up being either too expensive or unavailable, but I’ve fired off an email so hopefully I’ll hear back from them soon and I get the impession no-one else actually wants to live in that part of town which might work in my favour. What might not is that these are the only apartments I’ve managed to locate in the Centro Historico which might mean there is some demand for the few that exist. Oh well, we shall see I guess!

Around Coyoacán

Frida Kahlo statue, Coyoacán

Church on the Plaza de la Conchita

Colonial buildings around the Plaza de la Conchita, Coyoacán. All in all, quite a scenic walk to the supermarket!

I think the combination of the altitude and pollution is beginning to take a bit of a toll on me as, while I haven’t really got sick, I have been getting headaches quite a bit while walking around the streets. This time of year is actually a little better for pollution than the winter as the evening showers seem to have a slight cleansing effect such that you can actually see the surrounding mountains quite clearly from the centre of town which was new to me after 3 prior trips in winter! As for the rain, it has been wet and a little chilly in the evenings but all the flooding seems to be in surrounding states so I guess President Calderón didn’t get his wish.

Coyoacán’s churro district

The only other thing that has really been on my mind has been this trip to Nicaragua I somewhat rashly booked when learning that US Visa regulations meant I had to leave North America within 90 days of transiting through New York to avoid problems when re-entering the country as apparently a US visa includes Mexico. Apparently the Mexican authorities don’t know this as I had to get a separate Mexican visa, and Mexicans still have to go through quite a long process that involves a non-refundable fee of $131 to even apply for a visa followed by half a day queuing up at the embassy for an interview with a US official everytime they wish to visit Disneyland, but there you have it. It turns out upon further investigation that there isn’t really much in Nicaragua, so I’m thinking a bus from Chetumal on the Yucatan near the border with Belize to Flores in Guatemala via Belize City so I can visit the Tikal ruins might be a better option. Now I have to try and convince Taca to refund my airfare, or maybe fold it into a new airfare for Flores.

So that crime doesn’t catch you by surprise, do kick-boxing

2008-07-05T21:49:00.000-07:00

An Evening’s Entertainment

It has been another fairly quiet week so I don’t have much to say, but as I don’t have television I might as well put something up if only amuse myself!

I managed to find two cinemas in Mexico City showing the latest Disney/Pixar extravaganza Wall-E in English and one ended up being about a 25 minute walk from where I live which is great as now I know there’s a cinema about a 25 minute walk from where I live. The movie itself was a bit of a chilling vision of things to come as the future it depicts is one in which the earth has become a giant uninhabitable trash heap, every aspect of life has been taken over by one large corporation whose CEO is also the president and people have become fat blobs who have lost the ability to stand up, spending their days floating around on deckchairs, communicating with one another through video screens and sipping their food out of a cup on a giant space station. The credits are quite brilliantly done and do finally give it a bit of an upbeat note on which to end. All very good!

I’m sure it must seem that I spend my days wandering around taking photos but I swear I don’t… still, I did take some photos this week which I might as well put up!

The Mexico City Government

The centre-left PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution), the party of López Obrador of last week fame, has been in power in the Federal District (DF) in which Mexico City is located since the government was made independent from the Executive branch in 1997. Like all governments in Mexico, it is a big fan of advertising and thus the Metro is covered in competing advertisements from the Mexico City and federal governments. The slogans of each give some idea of how they pitch themselves to the public, with the PRD in Mexico City going with “People are what count” (Las personas son las que cuentan) and the conservative PAN federal government going with “Live Better” (Vivir Mejor).

One of the big initiatives of the Mexico City government at the moment is a referendum on the planned oil reform, hence this massive banner telling citizens that in Mexico City their opinion counts…

… and this area set up in the Zócalo where you can watch the congressional hearings on the planned reforms if that takes your fancy…

… just across from tents set up by the governing PRD to promote the referendum on 27 July while López Obrador's looks over the proceedings from a banner hung on one of the surrounding buildings. Of course, the referendum will carry absolutely no legal weight but I guess will make it a little more politically difficult for president Calderon and any party that chooses to support the reforms in the Congress.

Apparently the surest route to popularity for a Mexico City government (and perhaps any government) is the construction of big infrastructure projects that you can point to if people accuse you of doing nothing for them. The Mexico City government has even taken a page out of Jeff Kennett’s book and given the city the slogan “Capital en movimiento” or “Capital On The Move”. Here they’ve installed a vehicle from a new tram system they intend to install in Mexico City and people do indeed queue up for a chance to sit inside.

Around Coyoácan

The large Viveros park is full of people feeding squirrels with little bags of peanuts that they sell outside, though some obviously prefer to avoid having to act friendly to the kids in order for a peanut.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the owners of various stalls in central Coyoacán are protesting being kicked out of the central plazas for refurbishment works after which they will have to relocate elsewhere. These are a few pictures of the protest hung on the wire fences around the plazas.

Yes, they do sell beer by the metre.

The latest news

Mexico City newsstands are both quite gory and pornographic. I didn’t take any pictures of the porn, but here is a typical front page showing someone who was stabbed 34 times for his shoes, mobile phone and 300 pesos (around $30). Other headlines of the day include someone shot while eating a hamburger and the decapitation of three people.

So, what else is going on in Mexico today…

Mexico City and the Blustery Day

In touristy areas like the Alameda Central and Bosque de Chapultepec they make the police dress up in these dashing outfits, ride around on horses and pose for photos.

Every day at around 6 the skies in Mexico City darken and everyone is left running for cover…

It has been particularly stormy for the past few days and apparently lots of rain is on the way. So much in fact that some seem to be calling for a pre-emptive declaration of a state of emergency. A recurrent criticism of the Mexico City government has been that it favours visible public works projects while ignoring more urgent but less visible infrastructure problems such as Mexico City’s poor drainage system. As head of the Mexico City government Marcelo Ebrard refuses to meet with President Calderón because he feels he was fraudulently elected, Calderón has talked a lot about Mexico City’s drainage problems and, like the late John Howard, has likely been praying for rain. Well, apparently it’s coming so I guess we’ll see if the city does get swallowed up by Lake Texcoco once again.

Shouts of “paraguas” ("umbrellas") are the soundtrack to the evening showers in the city, but the rain is generally so heavy that they don’t do much good. The streets also become rivers so if a car happens to pass you’re quite likely to get soaked. I’m not sure if it comes across here, but the Metro gets swamped and Bellas Artes was impossible to get into this afternoon.

2008-06-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

El presidente legítimo de México.

On Sunday I ended up attending a rally of supporters of left-wing politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the Zócalo that was essentially called to outline a strategy to combat the plans of the federal government to allow private investment in the state-owned oil company Pemex. The background to all of this is quite extensive, but the nationalisation of Mexico’s oil resources in 1938 by president Lázaro Cárdenas has been a rallying cry for the left and a source of great national pride for Mexicans generally ever since. While the government is not proposing the wholesale privatisation of the company but the participation of private companies in the operation of pipelines, refineries and things of that nature, this is viewed (with some reason) as opening the door to a de facto privatisation of the company. The usual path has been followed during the past few governments of under-investing in the company and then pointing to this under-investment and the resulting inefficiency and poor general performance as proof that they can’t run it and thus it should be privatised and turned from a public to private monopoly.

Unfortunately oil has become a very profitable business in recent years, so the federal government has simply not been recording extra revenue from price increases above prior (conservative) projections. The response to repeated requests for information on where this extra revenue has gone has just been to say that it was eaten up by extra costs which, of course, they also haven’t outlined.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Beyond that, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, nicknamed “El Peje” for a small fish from his native state of Tabasco (and remember the “J” is pronounced as an “H” en Español!) of the centre-left PRD party went into the 2006 presidential campaign after leading the Mexico City Government (2000-2005) with a massive lead in the polls and ended up losing by 0.56% in a result he and his supporters claimed was fraud. They called for a recount which was denied by the electoral court, and Felipe Calderón of the conservative PAN was sworn in as president in December 2006. The response of López Obrador was to declare himself the “legitimate president” of Mexico and he has since spent his time touring the country in support of his “alternative national project” and directing the legislative coalition that formed around his candidacy in 2006 (“the Broad Progressive Front”). Perhaps the most controversial move of this group was taking control of the congress earlier this year to prevent the fast-track approval of the government’s planed reforms to Pemex as had been agreed between both the PAN and PRI political parties. As a hint of what delightful souls Mexican conservatives are, I might as well attach a TV commercial one conservative group associated with the PAN released at the time (you don’t really need to understand the Spanish):

The rally itself begun with a musical group from the state of Veracruz who sang a whole bunch of songs about oil, including Guantanamera with the words changed to refer to Mexico’s oil nationalisation. Beyond that, there is a distinct embrace of indigenous motifs within the López Obrador movement, and clothing based on indigenous Mexican designs was present as well as the kinds of fireworks you find at small town rural fiestas that are shot in the air to produce just a loud bang and puff of smoke were also being fired off.

López Obrador’s speech was actually quite good, detailing a series of referendums his movement and party plan to hold around the country on the planned reforms. The result is pretty much a foregone conclusion, but it’s not a bad political tactic to highlight the lack of consultation by the government on such an important issue to many Mexicans. Apparently he's rustled up 200,000 “brigadistas” around Mexico to door knock and explain the referendum and the movement’s position on the proposed reforms. The roughly 30 minute speech also touched on broader issues of poverty and the attendant costs and all in all presented a convincing diagnostic of Mexico’s current condition.

The singing of the national anthem at the end of the rally

Wandering around afterwards, it was all a bit of a Peje fiesta as the multitudes seemed in a good mood and everyone was wandering around in their López Obrador or “Presidente Legítimo” t-shirts or with their posters and banners as music played in the background. All the little stalls seemed to be doing a brisk trade in t-shirts, books, DVDs, etc which I guess funds his giant video screens! A lot of people travel quite a long way from the different states of Mexico for these rallies (he seems to hold 3 or 4 a year) and you have to admire both the dedication and sheer perserverence that characterises this movement. To some extent I suppose it testifies to the strengths of a political movement centered around a charismatic leadership, however out of step that is with “modern” political thought and whatever the drawbacks. Critics have compared these rallies to those held by the PRI at the peak of its power and used this comparison to imply clientelism as a cornerstone of Lopez Obrador's politics, but perhaps a more important connection between the two is that the decimation of old collective interest groups such as trade labour movements and peasant organisations along with the dismantling of the old corporatist system of incorporation via these groups that existed in Mexico prior to neoliberalism has also likely left a vacuum for some sense of collective identity and purpose that this movement fills. There is also the simple fact that neoliberal economic reform and free trade have brought nothing but perpetual poverty for many Mexicans and at least Lopez Obrador is offering something different.

For all your López Obrador needs

The López Obrador movement (along with the left generally) gets mostly bad press in Mexico, most notably from the television duopoly of Televisa/TV Azteca and a whole host of neoliberal intellectuals who brand him and his style of politics anachronistic, authoritarian and generally the opposite of what “modern” and “civilized” democratic politics should be. There is truth to some of this to the extent that López Obrador does support greater connections between the nation and the state in a form not exactly like but not entirely dissimilar to the corporatist system that existed under the PRI prior to the so-called "transition to democracy" in 2000. He does also have an openly populist political style that privileges public rallies to legislative debates and legal proceedings, also frequently appealing to an official nationalist historical legacy and the differences between rich and poor in Mexico.

"Now it's up to you to defend what is ours": (left to right) José María Morelos (Independence), Pancho Villa (Revolution), Lázaro Cárdenas (In the "I want you!" pose the movement is using), López Obrador, Emiliano Zapata (Mexican Revolution) and Benito Juárez (Liberal Reform).

All that said, the simple fact is that those who oppose him are for their part supporting a political and economic system that has served to create one of the world’s largest populations of billionaires while leaving the population as a whole in a far worse position in terms of wages and standard of living that it was prior to the 1982 debt crisis and more or less treading water for the past 25 years. Appeals to legality and the institutions of the state are also plainly cynical as these are obviously deployed with great selectivity in openly political fashion. For example, under Calderón the PRI governors of Puebla (involved in covering up a paedophile ring) and Oaxaca (openly corrupt and violent) have not only been allowed to remain in office with complete impunity, but Calderón himself has seen fit to venture down to those states to have his photo taken with both of them. Finally, to finish this rant, the modern neoliberal politicians fairly openly trade favours with powerful business leaders, the media and powerful union and local political bosses, but as the role of the state is apparently to create a favourable business environment then as long as people such as Calderon are friendly to business interests a blind eye is turned by champions of democracy in Mexico and abroad. So, all things considered, if this is the modern and democratic state that López Obrador is a danger to, then I think his is the side to pick as at least he isn't a complete bastard!

I’m quite positive no one read through all of that!