The problem with writing a blog (as opposed to emails) is that no one feels compelled to send me emails detailing the minutae of their lives. So umm feel compelled, I care I really do.

We're still in Mexico, and have made our way through Merida, Uxmal, and Campeche, and are now in Palenque. The most surprising thing for us in the last week is that it really does rain in Mexico some times, and it can actually be cold enough to wear jeans and a jumper.

Uxmal and Palenque both have extensive Mayan ruins attached, and are both so different to what we've seen before. Uxmal is quite a small sight but with just the big buildings from the ancient city all packed together, with a lot of building carving present and lots of long galleries, a nicely restored ellipse-amid, and a pyramid that was mostly just a man made hillock.

We went to Palenque ruins today (once the rain had stopped) and it had again something new to offer, The Palenquins (yes I did just invent the word) buried a lot of people inside buildings that they continued to use, so the site has a small tomb you can wander into, and a really well stocked museum full of all kinds of well preserved carvings and some of the paraphenalia of day to day life. All topped with a death-size replica of Pacal I's tomb with giganto sarcophagus and all the walls made out of transparent plastic and us wandering around the outside. Pretty cool setup me thinks.

Back in the Yucatan the have got all these sinkholes in the limestone (you knew the whole Yucatan is a great big flat expanse of linestone that got pushed out of the ocean a few millenia back, right?) called Cenotes. We have been to two, the first (Gran Cenote, Tulum) is the older shape where a river flowing throught the limestone hollows out a great big cavern and then the roof caves in and you've just got this random hole in the ground, although in this case you've also got some extensive caves that they use for training scuba divers, and a really short stretch of underground water that even a Matt can snorkel across between the big hole in the ground and the little hole in the ground.

The second one (Dzitnup, Valladolid) was the less aged configuration and the pool is still underground. Accessed via a stoopy little cave you come out into a cavern about 30 x 20 m filled with an enormous pool criss crossed by ropes as it is really really deep except at the very edge. The pool is filled with fish, from the wee nibblers that will suck away at your feet if you stop moving for twenty seconds, to the bigger ones about 15cm longs that quite like to try and eat the nibblers in mid nibble, which makes for a bit of entertainment. And then are a whole lot of bats flapping and squeking their way around the roof of the cavern and coming and going through the small hole in the ceiling.

When we were in China I gladly reported that the Chinese aren't nearly as short as reported, where as here I think 5'8" must be considered gigantic. The average mexican bloke is short but makes up for it with swagger, and quite often a healty movember offering that would put a lot of aspiring kiwis to shame.

We've gotten used to seeing folk with automatic weaponry or shotguns wandering around. As long as they're in uniform and no one else seems worried, we're down with it. They have 3 seperate branches of police here (Federal, State, and Municipal) and they all get to wander round town with whatever guns seem to be handy, add to that the occaisional army checkpoint on the highway (no idea what they're checking) and the macho hombre's that do all the cash transporting around here and there are a lot of guns on show. My favourite individual was one of our first sightings, a cash dude standing in the local Oxxo (convenience store) bearing a pump-shotgun, and pointing it back over the top of his shoulder so that everyone could clearly see the shiny brass of the round in the breach. The fact that the only people in the store were two staff and four pale turistas trying to work out the contents of the exotic part of the drinks fridge, didn't hinder him at all from exerting an enormous 'not-a-good-place-to-cause-trouble' field.

My Spanish is still very weak, Jacquie is doing much better but my brain seems to shutdown in the vicinity of 15 different ways to conjugate a verb. Luckily most Mexicans are pretty long suffering when it comes to dealing with foreigners that can't handle the español, and I get buy with a whole lot of nouns, some numbers (which I am finally coming to grips with), and a lot of please, thank you and sorry.