I am so glad we chose to visit Mexico in the winter, or at least I was until Jacq reminded me we are visiting Egypt in the summer. It is hotter here in Winter than back in the NZ in summer (and just as muggy as Auckland at its worst), but at least you don't seem to be able to get a hotel room that doesn't come with a ceiling fan or A/C. Not that our first hotel room didn't have its ceiling fan wobbling away at exactly 6'4" just to really perturb me.

Actually thinking back the first night here was pretty rough, not only was the ceiling fan set at an inappropriate height but it seemed intent to fall off if we set it moving past the lowest setting (Not that great when you want to leave it running all night and it is set directly above your bed). And the quiet hotel we had picked off the main street turned out to be across the road from a dusk till dawn house party with the music set to 10 all night (it really did shut down almost exactly at dawn).

So that was our first night in Cancun, new Mexican money sink for North Americas heavily laden. We were staying in town while the afore mentioned yankees, canucks and even a good number of mexicanos were ensconced in one of what must be about thirty five star resort hotels built along a narrow strip of land enclosing the lagoon and facing out into the open Caribbean ocean. We visited the strip (aka Zona Hoteleria) on one of our first days and found our way to one of the few public access ways to the beach. The water is perpetually calm and the beach very narrow where we were but you could tell the beaches in front of the big hotels must be fantastic for sun absorption (as long as you like close stacked recliner chairs). We even visited our first Mayan ruin there, pretty lame in our new post-Coba & Chichen Itza world, but we enjoyed the low scattered ruins, especially when we realized that a fairly reasonable percentage of the broken rocks were in fact iguanas lounging in the sun.

Cancun town itself is very different, it's still targeted at tourists but a lot of those tourists are mexican (or at least hispanic, I sure can't tell the difference), and the atmosphere is a bit more down to earth, there is a supermarket, a bus station, and a scattering of restaurants and bars. And street stalls that seem to be in any one place for a couple of hours each day where you can get a simple tasty meal for 5 NZD. Which should lead you to the conclusion that Mexico is just a hair cheaper than NZ. Food is about the same price (barring bottled water which is pretty much necessary), transport is cheap, and accommodation is sort of cheap for what you get but overall I am not feeling the joy of travelling through a developing country.

Which Mexico definitely still seems to be, although no where near to the extent of India, and is much better off than China on some counts which apparently is considered second world. But all I see are the street level indicators. Mexicans mostly drive rationally, there don't seem to be many beggars and the ones there are, are almost all old and/or disabled (unlike Vancouver where they are all junkies), they know how to queue and are extremely polite and honest (although this seems to fade as one climbs the levels of authority as the majority of office holders seem to be considered to be corrupt). So it really is just a bit of economic development they are lacking to pull up the working classes to a better standard of living, and make the place completely unaffordable for tight-wad travellers such as myself.

We've tried a few new foods and haven't even been offered a burrito (apparently an entirely yankee invention). Most of our experimentation comes at the supermarket where we can make a slow decision on whether to chance tamarindo flavoured soft drink (yuck) or jalepeño flavoured chips (yum). Restaurant mexican food is somewhat as you'd expect, lots of corn (and byproducts like tortias), lots of salsa's, acceptable amounts of beans and occaisional outbreaks of steak and chips (but with difficult to pronounce spanish names).

Most of the beer is fine as long as it got a lime in it, the exception being Sol which is just as rubbish as it is back home but much more pervasive. Maybe its the heat but Leon Negra does a fair impression of Monteiths Original.

Beer is pretty popular in the heat especially after a dusty afternoon spent exploring some 'ruins'. We've hit Tulum, Coba, and Chichen Itza with each being somewhat grander than the last. Tulum is built right on the ocean, and a lot of people take a dip mid tour. Unfortunately all of Tulum is roped off so you can't really get amongst it. Coba is a really spread out site set in the so called jungle (looks a lot like classic kiwi bush to me) with a medium and big pyramid, and some carved stele that are far far too weathered to be distinguishable, without the diagram beside them. The big deal at Coba is that you can climb the big pyramid. At 42 meters and what seemed like just over 45 degrees the climb up was fun, and the climb down was a bit unnerving. The view from the top was just a see of trees, broken by the top of the other pyramid and was pretty choice.

Chichen Itza is much more extensive and has the biggest ball court and the best restored pyramid this side of Teotihucan (my next big climb). Again no climbing and lots of roped off areas but the scale and ease of access to the site makes it a great mornings explore (as long as you avoid the endless tour groups). The numbers used in the pyramid are all terribly significant. 4 sides each with 91 steps plus the top platform adds to 365, and by the time they built the current layer of the pyramid onion (they reckon its 5 pyramids built on top of each other in 52 year cycles) the mayans were no longer content with getting the sun to come through a certain window at the solstice and instead decided to worship their snakey god by making a trick snake pattern appear on one of the stairways each solstice.

The ball court was enormous and much longer than it was wide which gave credence to the scholarly position that the game wasn't about sport all but just about finding some likely schmuck to sacrifice. That said it had some cool carvings and amazing acoustics. You could get at least 9 good rapid echoes from a loud hand clap.

While visiting the ruins was pretty enjoyable I can't help but think they could have accomplished more with their 2000 years running the yucatan, guatemala, belize etc. if they'd been a little less concerned with wetting their knives and capturing slaves to carry stones, and done a little investigation into such abstract concepts as the wheel.